"Esteem must be founded on preference: to hold everyone in high esteem is to esteem nothing"
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Moliere lands this like a stage punchline: esteem that flatters everyone is just applause with no audience. The line turns a moral posture into a logical absurdity. If esteem is meant to signal discernment, then distributing it universally doesn’t make you generous; it makes you unserious. Preference isn’t pettiness here, it’s the mechanism that gives praise its meaning. Without choice, esteem becomes a decorative word, not a judgment.
The subtext is classic Moliere: a jab at the social performance of virtue. Seventeenth-century France ran on salons, court etiquette, and reputations polished like silver. Public admiration could be currency, strategy, or camouflage. In that world, “holding everyone in high esteem” reads as a kind of hypocrisy dressed up as magnanimity, the person who compliments indiscriminately because it costs nothing and buys access. Moliere’s comedies repeatedly expose that: the pious fraud, the pompous doctor, the status-obsessed bourgeois. This line belongs to the same anatomy lesson, slicing open a seemingly noble sentiment to reveal self-interest and laziness underneath.
What makes it work is the paradox: to esteem everything is to value nothing. It’s a compression of how language inflates under social pressure, how words like “respect” and “admiration” get overused until they turn weightless. Moliere isn’t advocating cruelty or elitism; he’s insisting that judgment is part of sincerity. Esteem, like laughter in his theater, has to be earned or it becomes noise.
The subtext is classic Moliere: a jab at the social performance of virtue. Seventeenth-century France ran on salons, court etiquette, and reputations polished like silver. Public admiration could be currency, strategy, or camouflage. In that world, “holding everyone in high esteem” reads as a kind of hypocrisy dressed up as magnanimity, the person who compliments indiscriminately because it costs nothing and buys access. Moliere’s comedies repeatedly expose that: the pious fraud, the pompous doctor, the status-obsessed bourgeois. This line belongs to the same anatomy lesson, slicing open a seemingly noble sentiment to reveal self-interest and laziness underneath.
What makes it work is the paradox: to esteem everything is to value nothing. It’s a compression of how language inflates under social pressure, how words like “respect” and “admiration” get overused until they turn weightless. Moliere isn’t advocating cruelty or elitism; he’s insisting that judgment is part of sincerity. Esteem, like laughter in his theater, has to be earned or it becomes noise.
Quote Details
| Topic | Respect |
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