Time & Perspective Quote by Jean de La Bruyère

La Bruyere lands a small cruelty with the neatness of a moralist: childhood bliss isn’t wisdom, it’s amnesia plus ignorance. The line flatters kids on the surface, then quietly strips them of agency. Children “enjoy the present” not because they’ve mastered mindfulness, but because they’re exempt from the two forces that make adults tense, strategic, and self-conscious: memory and anticipation. He’s not celebrating innocence so much as diagnosing a kind of temporal poverty.

The subtext is sharpened by La Bruyere’s world. Writing in late-17th-century France, in the shadow of court culture and social climbing, he watches adults perform their identities under the pressure of reputation (a past constantly audited) and ambition (a future constantly gamed). His Characters is basically a catalog of people trapped by what they’ve done and what they’re trying to become. Against that, the child is a control case: no record to defend, no plan to sell. That “neither” is doing heavy work, implying that the very tools we treat as maturity - experience and foresight - are also the machinery of anxiety.

It works because it’s both psychological and social critique. “Present” here isn’t a spiritual ideal; it’s a temporary loophole before status, consequence, and narrative kick in. The sting is that adulthood’s supposedly richer time horizon doesn’t automatically deepen life; it can thin it out, turning days into accounting. La Bruyere’s point isn’t “be like children.” It’s “notice what your past and future are doing to you.”