"If you suppress grief too much, it can well redouble"
About this Quote
Moliere slips a warning into a sentence that sounds almost like folk wisdom, then sharpens it into social critique. "Suppress" is doing heavy work here: it implies not just private restraint but a public performance, the kind demanded by polite society and courtly life where decorum is a costume you wear even when it pinches. Grief, in that world, is inconvenient. It disrupts schedules, inheritance schemes, marriages, reputations. So people tuck it away, call it strength, and keep smiling.
The twist is "redouble" - not simply return, but come back with interest. Moliere understands emotion as something physical and accumulative, like pressure in a sealed vessel. The line carries the playwright's favorite suspicion: that hypocrisy, even when it looks refined, is a form of violence against the self. What gets repressed doesn't disappear; it metastasizes into tantrum, illness, cruelty, or farce. The comedy is never just comedy. His stage is full of characters who mistake control for virtue and end up ridiculous, not because grief is funny, but because denial is.
There's also a sly moral economy at play. Suppression is often rewarded socially; it reads as maturity. Moliere punctures that reward system by framing it as self-sabotage. The sentence urges an unglamorous kind of honesty: feel it now, or pay for it later. In an era that prized reason, restraint, and appearances, he’s arguing for emotional realism - not sentimental indulgence, but the practical intelligence of acknowledging what you're carrying before it carries you.
The twist is "redouble" - not simply return, but come back with interest. Moliere understands emotion as something physical and accumulative, like pressure in a sealed vessel. The line carries the playwright's favorite suspicion: that hypocrisy, even when it looks refined, is a form of violence against the self. What gets repressed doesn't disappear; it metastasizes into tantrum, illness, cruelty, or farce. The comedy is never just comedy. His stage is full of characters who mistake control for virtue and end up ridiculous, not because grief is funny, but because denial is.
There's also a sly moral economy at play. Suppression is often rewarded socially; it reads as maturity. Moliere punctures that reward system by framing it as self-sabotage. The sentence urges an unglamorous kind of honesty: feel it now, or pay for it later. In an era that prized reason, restraint, and appearances, he’s arguing for emotional realism - not sentimental indulgence, but the practical intelligence of acknowledging what you're carrying before it carries you.
Quote Details
| Topic | Sadness |
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