Wit & Attitude Quote by Pierre Corneille

Corneille’s line cuts with the clean efficiency of a playwright who understands that language is action, not decoration. “A liar is always lavish of oaths” isn’t moral advice so much as stage direction: when someone starts swearing on everything in sight, the audience should lean forward, because credibility has become performance. The “lavish” matters. Truth, in Corneille’s world, doesn’t need ornament. Lying does. It pads itself with ceremony.

The intent is diagnostic. Oaths are meant to be rare and binding, a public stake driven into private speech. A liar, lacking the ballast of reality, compensates by escalating the rhetoric: bigger promises, louder guarantees, sacred names invoked like props. The subtext is darker than a simple “don’t trust liars.” It’s about insecurity and control. The liar tries to seize the terms of belief by flooding the room with solemnity, converting doubt into bad manners. If you question them, you’re not just skeptical; you’re disrespecting the oath.

Contextually, Corneille writes in a 17th-century France obsessed with honor, reputation, and the theater of virtue. His dramas turn on characters who manage appearances as aggressively as they manage armies. In that culture, an oath is social currency. Spend it too freely and you reveal you’re bankrupt.

The line still plays because it describes a familiar modern tactic: over-certainty as camouflage. When speech becomes “I swear to God”-level insistence, it can be less a bridge to truth than a barricade against scrutiny. Corneille nails the tell: sincerity is measured; deceit is verbose.