Daily Inspiration Quote by Jean de La Bruyère

Perfection gets punctured here with the cool precision of a court moralist. La Bruyere’s line pretends to flatter - some men seem so indispensable that their absence should be unbearable - then quietly flips the blade: even the most “necessary” person leaves behind reasons to miss him less. The jab isn’t at friendship; it’s at self-importance, and at the social myth that any individual can be irreplaceable.

The sentence works by nesting an insult inside a compliment. “So perfect, so necessary” sets up an ideal type, a man who imagines himself the load-bearing column of his circle. La Bruyere then adds the devastatingly small clause “as to give them no cause,” implying that in ordinary life we constantly supply our friends with minor grievances: vanity, demands, control, the exhausting performance of being “needed.” Absence doesn’t just produce longing; it produces relief. That’s the subtext: affection and irritation are not opposites but cohabitants, and time apart rebalances the ledger.

Context matters: La Bruyere wrote in the late 17th-century world of salons and courtly hierarchies where reputation was currency and dependence was a social strategy. In that environment, “necessity” is often cultivated, not earned. The quote reads like an antidote to those games, reminding readers that friendship is healthiest when it can breathe without one person policing the oxygen. It’s not nihilism; it’s a bracing realism about how even good people become easier to love when they stop taking up so much space.