Wit & Attitude Quote by Charles de Montesquieu

A jab delivered with dry wit, the line exposes the vanity and presumption that can cling to authorship. To be a bore among ones contemporaries is bad enough; to codify that tedium in print and inflict it on posterity is foolishness of a higher order. The complaint does not just target dull prose. It attacks the impulse to publish for the sake of self-importance, to mistake the urge for immortality as sufficient warrant for adding to the worlds stock of words.

Montesquieu wrote at the heart of the French Enlightenment, a culture that prized esprit, clarity, and brevity in the salons where conversation was a fine art and boredom a social sin. His Persian Letters is a satire of European customs, and The Spirit of the Laws is a monument of comparative political analysis, but he also loved the pointed maxim. The aphorism works as self-mockery as well as criticism: a serious thinker acknowledging that even serious books risk tedium if they lack proportion, wit, and a living ear for the reader.

There is also a technological sting. Print gives a tedious mind permanence. What is tiresome in a drawing room fades with the evening; what is tiresome in a book becomes a durable burden, bound and shelved, waiting to bore again. The line thus hints at an ethic of authorship: write only when you have something to say and can say it so that others want to listen, now and later. Horaces old balance of the useful and the delightful surfaces here as common sense for the age of reason.

By calling the author a fool, he reverses the aura of literary prestige. The moral is humility and craft. Test ideas against living conversation. Hone them until they earn a readers attention. Seek posterity not by demanding it, but by writing with such clarity and vitality that future generations invite you back to the table rather than suffer your company.