Daily Inspiration Quote by Pierre Corneille

Lying, Corneille suggests, is less a moral lapse than a logistical nightmare. The line flatters truth by making it seem effortless: reality has continuity built in, while fabrication requires a private archive, a meticulous spreadsheet of contradictions to be reconciled in real time. It’s a neatly barbed observation from a dramatist who understood that plot only holds if the writer remembers what everyone has already said. In that sense, the quote doubles as a craft note: the same mental discipline that sustains a believable play is what a liar must counterfeit in life.

The subtext is cynically practical. Corneille isn’t preaching virtue so much as pointing out the hidden tax of deception: vigilance. A lie is never singular; it’s a franchise. Each new scene demands callbacks, consistency, and damage control, because the audience (friends, lovers, courts, kings) keeps receipts. The “good memory” is almost a backhanded compliment, implying that successful dishonesty is a kind of talent, but also a self-imposed treadmill. Forget once, and the whole construction collapses into farce.

Context matters: Corneille wrote in 17th-century France, where honor, reputation, and court politics turned speech into currency and missteps into peril. His tragedies revolve around public image and private motive, characters trapped by what they’ve claimed to be. The line lands because it turns ethics into mechanics: truth is stable; deception is high maintenance, and eventually, it asks for more cognitive labor than it’s worth.