"All men's misfortunes spring from their hatred of being alone"
About this Quote
La Bruyere lands the blade where polite society least likes to look: not in grand crimes or bad luck, but in the everyday panic of solitude. The line is engineered as a provocation. "All men's misfortunes" is willfully totalizing, the kind of absolutist claim moralists use to force an inventory of the self. He isn't offering a statistic; he's staging a diagnosis.
In late 17th-century France, "being alone" isn't just a mood. It's a social failure, a withdrawal from the courtly ecosystem where attention is currency and survival depends on being seen, favored, included. La Bruyere, writing as a keen observer of manners, targets the engine behind that bustle: not love of company, but hatred of one's own unaccompanied mind. The subtext is almost cruelly modern: people will choose bad marriages, corrupt patrons, noisy entertainments, and performative friendships over the discomfort of meeting themselves without witnesses.
The brilliance is the reversal. Misfortune usually sounds external - war, disease, betrayal. He shifts causality inward, implying that a great share of suffering is self-inflicted, produced by compulsive attachment. "Hatred" sharpens it further: solitude isn't merely feared; it's resented, as if it were an insult. That emotional heat explains the catastrophes that follow: when aloneness feels intolerable, any distraction becomes rational, any crowd becomes a refuge, and the most dangerous decisions start to look like relief.
In late 17th-century France, "being alone" isn't just a mood. It's a social failure, a withdrawal from the courtly ecosystem where attention is currency and survival depends on being seen, favored, included. La Bruyere, writing as a keen observer of manners, targets the engine behind that bustle: not love of company, but hatred of one's own unaccompanied mind. The subtext is almost cruelly modern: people will choose bad marriages, corrupt patrons, noisy entertainments, and performative friendships over the discomfort of meeting themselves without witnesses.
The brilliance is the reversal. Misfortune usually sounds external - war, disease, betrayal. He shifts causality inward, implying that a great share of suffering is self-inflicted, produced by compulsive attachment. "Hatred" sharpens it further: solitude isn't merely feared; it's resented, as if it were an insult. That emotional heat explains the catastrophes that follow: when aloneness feels intolerable, any distraction becomes rational, any crowd becomes a refuge, and the most dangerous decisions start to look like relief.
Quote Details
| Topic | Loneliness |
|---|---|
| Source | Les Caractères, ou les mœurs de ce siècle (1688) — aphorism commonly translated as "All men's misfortunes spring from their hatred of being alone". |
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