Daily Inspiration Quote by Pierre Corneille

Corneille delivers this like a stage direction disguised as a proverb: if everyone hates you, the plot will move quickly toward your exit. The line isn’t moral philosophy so much as dramatic physics. In a world run on patronage, honor, and public reputation, universal hatred isn’t an interior feeling; it’s a social verdict. You don’t simply lose friends. You lose protection, access, and the thin layer of custom that keeps violence from becoming policy.

The intent is bluntly strategic. Corneille’s tragedies are crowded with men who mistake power for invulnerability and confuse fear with loyalty. The sentence warns that enmity, when it becomes unanimous, turns into coordination. One enemy is bad luck. A roomful is a coalition. “Can not expect” is the knife: it frames survival as something you’re not entitled to once you’ve made yourself collectively intolerable. The audience is invited to feel the inevitability, not the outrage.

The subtext is about the fragile contract between the individual and the crowd. Corneille wrote under the tightening order of 17th-century France, where court favor, public perception, and political danger were braided together. Being “hated by all” reads less like a personality problem than a failure to perform legitimacy. The line flatters the audience’s sense of worldly realism: justice may be abstract, but consequences are not. In Corneille’s theater, the moral universe doesn’t always punish evil; the social universe punishes isolation.