Daily Inspiration Quote by Jean de La Bruyère

Vanity, La Bruyere implies, is not a personality quirk but an aesthetic disability: the worse the mind, the grander its self-appraisal. The line slices with a moralist's calm cruelty. "Mediocre" and "divinely" are set in deliberate collision, exposing how mediocrity reaches for the highest possible adjective precisely because it lacks the internal meter to measure itself. When talent is thin, confidence becomes baroque.

The sharper jab lands in the second clause. A "good mind" doesn't claim transcendence; it settles for "reasonably" - a word that sounds like modesty but is really evidence of competence. La Bruyere is pointing at the paradox of craft: the more you understand writing (its failures, its revisions, its distance from perfection), the less you confuse effort with revelation. Self-doubt, here, isn't neurosis; it's calibration.

Context matters. La Bruyere wrote in the courtly, status-soaked world of Louis XIV, where wit was currency and reputation could be manufactured through salons, patronage, and performance. In that ecosystem, bad writing could still be socially rewarded, which makes the quote a quiet counterattack: it relocates judgment from social applause to internal standards. It's also a pre-modern diagnosis of what we'd now call the Dunning-Kruger effect, delivered without the lab coat. The subtext is not just "be humble", but "if you feel divinely gifted, check whether it's talent or simply the absence of taste."