Life & Mortality Quote by Jean de La Bruyère

Hatred, La Bruyere implies, doesn’t burn out; it congeals. Calling it a “malady” is the first sly move: hate isn’t framed as a moral stance or a justified outrage but as an illness with its own momentum, stubbornly self-perpetuating. You don’t reason it away, because it’s not primarily rational. You wait for it to run its course, and it rarely does.

Then comes the cold punchline: reconciliation as a symptom of dying. The line works because it flips the usual moral arc. We’re trained to treat forgiveness as growth, wisdom, maturity. La Bruyere treats it as physiological collapse - the body finally too weak to keep producing venom. That inversion exposes a bleak anthropology: people don’t let go because they’ve become better; they let go because they’re exhausted, frightened, or nearing the end. The joke is cruel, but it lands because it recognizes how often reconciliation is less a triumph of virtue than a negotiation with mortality.

Context matters. Writing in the courtly pressure-cooker of Louis XIV’s France, La Bruyere watched reputations live and die on slights, rivalries, and long memory. In a world where grievance is social currency, hatred is not merely personal; it’s a form of status maintenance. Reconciliation threatens the entire economy of pride.

The subtext is almost diagnostic: if someone suddenly wants peace, don’t ask what enlightened them; ask what’s failing. It’s a maxim designed to puncture self-flattering narratives, forcing readers to consider how much of their “principle” is just durable resentment dressed up as character.