"Avoid lawsuits beyond all things; they pervert your conscience, impair your health, and dissipate your property"
About this Quote
La Bruyere isn’t warning you about legal fees so much as about what litigation does to a person’s inner weather. “Beyond all things” is the tell: lawsuits aren’t merely inconvenient in his view; they’re a moral solvent. Once you enter a courtroom fight, the incentives shift from being right to winning, from truth to leverage. The line about conscience gets at a subtle corruption: you start rehearsing your story like a performance, trimming nuance, justifying small distortions because the other side “deserves it.” The law becomes a machine that trains ordinary people to think like adversaries.
Then he pivots to the body. “Impair your health” reads almost quaint until you remember the 17th-century world he inhabited, where stress was understood less as psychology and more as sickness - sleeplessness, nerves, digestion, fatigue. Litigation is protracted uncertainty, and uncertainty is physically expensive. His point is pragmatic: the law doesn’t just adjudicate conflict; it amplifies it, keeping it alive long enough to colonize your daily life.
“Dissipate your property” lands as both punchline and diagnosis. In La Bruyere’s France, justice was slow, status-soaked, and often functioned as a tax on anyone unlucky enough to need it. The deeper subtext is social satire: the system rewards professionals and parasites, not clarity or fairness. The quote works because it’s a three-part anatomy of ruin - ethical, bodily, financial - a compact indictment of how institutions can deform character while claiming to correct it.
Then he pivots to the body. “Impair your health” reads almost quaint until you remember the 17th-century world he inhabited, where stress was understood less as psychology and more as sickness - sleeplessness, nerves, digestion, fatigue. Litigation is protracted uncertainty, and uncertainty is physically expensive. His point is pragmatic: the law doesn’t just adjudicate conflict; it amplifies it, keeping it alive long enough to colonize your daily life.
“Dissipate your property” lands as both punchline and diagnosis. In La Bruyere’s France, justice was slow, status-soaked, and often functioned as a tax on anyone unlucky enough to need it. The deeper subtext is social satire: the system rewards professionals and parasites, not clarity or fairness. The quote works because it’s a three-part anatomy of ruin - ethical, bodily, financial - a compact indictment of how institutions can deform character while claiming to correct it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
|---|---|
| Source | Jean de La Bruyère, Les Caractères (The Characters), 1688 — source of the aphorism commonly translated as "Avoid lawsuits beyond all things; they pervert your conscience, impair your health, and dissipate your property." |
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