Daily Inspiration Quote by Pierre Corneille

A lie is never a single act in Corneille; it is a continuing performance with a brutal technical requirement: continuity. "One ought to have a good memory when he has told a lie" lands like a wry stage direction, the kind a dramatist would smuggle into moral philosophy. The bite isn’t that lying is wrong (everyone in polite society already nods at that); it’s that lying is labor. You don’t just invent a falsehood, you maintain its internal logic across time, audience, and circumstance. Forget a detail and the whole set collapses.

Corneille wrote in a 17th-century France obsessed with honor, reputation, and the choreography of courtly life, where a person’s public story could matter as much as their private truth. In that world, "memory" becomes a proxy for social competence: the skilled liar is the one who can track what they’ve said to whom, anticipating the cross-examination of everyday conversation. The line has the cool cynicism of someone who understands that society often punishes inconsistency more swiftly than deceit.

As subtext, it’s also a warning about self-entrapment. The lie forces the liar to become an archivist of their own fabrication, mentally filing away invented facts, managing contradictions, living with the anxiety of retrieval. Corneille’s theater is packed with characters whose identities hinge on what can be convincingly sustained; here he reduces that entire dramatic machinery to one sentence. The moral isn’t delivered as sermon. It’s delivered as logistics: if you choose fiction, prepare to rehearse.