Daily Inspiration Quote by Jean de La Bruyère

A lot of moral posturing hides behind the alibi of being “reasonable,” and La Bruyere is too elegant to let it slide. In one line, he splits the Enlightenment-era virtue of good sense (sound judgment, prudence, logic) from good taste (discernment, tact, the cultivated instinct for what fits). The sting is that we tend to treat taste as decorative and sense as fundamental. He flips that hierarchy: taste is not the frill; it’s the consequence. If your judgment is genuinely good, it will show up downstream in your choices, your style, your restraint, your ability to land a point without bruising the room.

The cause-and-effect framing is crucial because it’s not just moral instruction; it’s diagnostic. You can claim good sense all day, but if what you produce is clumsy, cruel, gauche, or self-indulgent, La Bruyere implies your “sense” was never the cause at all. Taste becomes evidence. That’s a brutal metric in a courtly culture where reputation is made of small signals and social errors are permanently on the record.

Context matters: La Bruyere wrote from within the Louis XIV world, a civilization of manners where power traveled through salons, patronage, and performance. In that environment, “taste” isn’t mere aesthetic preference; it’s a survival skill and a moral technology. The subtext is conservative and quietly radical at once: cultivate your mind, yes, but also submit your mind to form. The modern echo is uncomfortable: our hottest takes may be “good sense” in our heads, but their effects - tone, timing, proportion - reveal what we actually know.