Daily Inspiration Quote by Jean de La Bruyère

Power doesn’t create character so much as it turns the lights up. La Bruyere’s line has the cool cruelty of a court observer who’s watched reputations inflate and collapse in real time: eminence is a magnifying glass, not a makeover. In a world where status was granted by proximity to the king, “greatness” and “smallness” weren’t abstract virtues; they were social facts, tested daily in salons and corridors. Give someone rank and you don’t discover a new person, you discover what was already there, now impossible to hide.

The subtext is an attack on the comforting myth that prestige ennobles. La Bruyere suggests the opposite: elevation intensifies. The generous become more generous because they can afford to be; they have resources, visibility, and the freedom to take risks for others. The petty become pettier because the same visibility rewards their worst instincts - vanity, cruelty, paranoia - and surrounds them with flatterers who turn minor flaws into policy. Eminence also removes friction: fewer people say no, fewer consequences arrive on time, so “smallness” can scale.

There’s a second, quieter jab aimed at the audience. If you admire the great, ask whether you’re seeing virtue or just amplification. If you fear the powerful, ask whether you’re witnessing monstrous transformation or simply the private self made public. Written in the moralist tradition of 17th-century France, the sentence lands like a diagnosis: status is a stress test, and it rarely improves the specimen.