Robert Brault Biography Quotes 41 Report mistakes

Early Life and Background
Robert Brault was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1938, into a mid-20th-century New England that prized steadiness, privacy, and plain speech. That regional temperament - modest, wry, and quietly moral - would later surface in his aphorisms, which tend to sound like a neighbor speaking from the next porch rather than a lecturer from a podium. He grew up as America moved from wartime memory into postwar confidence, then into the more anxious self-examination of the 1960s and 1970s. Brault, however, gravitated less to manifesto than to observation: a habit of watching ordinary life closely enough that its ethical contours became visible.

He remained rooted in Connecticut as an adult, presenting himself not as a public intellectual with a platform but as a working writer with an address and an inbox (email address in blog) and a clear boundary between art and commerce. In his own introduction he identifies as a free-lance writer who contributed to magazines and newspapers in the USA for over 50 years, and he frames his blog as "personal observations intended for entertainment only". The phrasing is revealing: it protects playfulness while also signaling responsibility, especially in his invitation to quote non-commercially and to request permission for commercial use. It is the posture of a craftsman who respects both the reader and the work.

Education and Formative Influences
Brault's formative influences are legible in his declared bookshelf and screen: the reflective solitude of Thoreau, the moral subtlety of Henry James, and the pared-down sentence ethics of Hemingway; Faulkner and Salinger for inwardness and fracture; and films like Casablanca, The Third Man, Being There, and The Godfather for their study of loyalty, performance, and the hidden cost of charisma. Classical and popular music sit together in his listening - Beethoven and Brahms beside Gershwin, Kristofferson, and Jimmy Webb - suggesting a sensibility that does not rank emotions by genre. That blend helps explain his signature tone: philosophical without piety, literary without ornament, and accessible without being thin.

Career, Major Works, and Turning Points
Brault is best described as an American aphorist and freelance essayist whose career unfolded across print and, later, digital venues: decades of contributing to magazines and newspapers, then a blog that gathered his short reflections into a recognizable public voice. The turning point was not a single prize or institution but the accretion of trust - the way a sentence that rings true can be carried from reader to reader, detached from its original column and reattached to someone else's life. In an era when public discourse often rewards certainty and spectacle, Brault built a body of work that resists both, favoring compact moral inquiry and the kind of wisdom that fits in the pocket and survives the wash.

Philosophy, Style, and Themes
Brault's philosophy begins with scale: the small moment is not a distraction from meaning but one of its primary habitats. "Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things". The psychology behind that line is not merely nostalgic; it is defensive against the modern habit of postponing life until life becomes un-postponable. His work repeatedly implies that attention is an ethical act - to notice what is near, to name it plainly, to grant it its due before it becomes memory. This is also why his writing often feels companionable rather than declarative: the reader is not being instructed so much as reoriented.

At the same time, Brault is willing to admit that moral life is lived under imperfect information. "Today I bent the truth to be kind, and I have no regret, for I am far surer of what is kind than I am of what is true". That sentence points to a mind suspicious of purity tests, including the purity of "truth" when it is wielded as a weapon. His humor, when it turns toward childhood, does not sentimentalize so much as diagnose: "There is a child in every one of us who is still a trick-or-treater looking for a brightly-lit front porch". The image captures his recurring theme that adulthood is partly the management of longing - for welcome, for safety, for a door opened without interrogation - and that civilization is measured by how often we become that porch for someone else.

Legacy and Influence
Brault's influence is most visible in the way his lines circulate as shared language: quoted in personal letters, speeches, and online posts where readers borrow his phrasing to articulate feelings they could not otherwise compress. His legacy is not a school or system but a method - to treat everyday experience as a legitimate site of philosophy and to write with a rigor that can hide inside gentleness. Rooted in Connecticut yet broadly American in cadence, he stands as a quiet counterweight to the loudness of his age, proving that a writer can be durable without being domineering, and that a single well-made sentence can outlast the page it first appeared on.

Our collection contains 41 quotes who is written by Robert, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Motivational - Wisdom - Art - Love.

• Robert Brault Enjoy the little things: He urges: enjoy little things, they often turn out to be the big things in life.
• Robert Brault pronunciation: Robert Brault is pronounced as 'ROB-ert BRAWLT'.
• Robert Brault philosopher: Robert Brault is a writer known for his philosophical and insightful quotes.

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