Art & Creativity Quote by Jean de La Bruyère

Mediocrity, for La Bruyere, isn’t a harmless middle - it’s an offense that becomes most visible precisely where society pretends refinement matters. By singling out poetry, music, painting, and public speaking, he draws a bright line around the performative arts: public acts of taste that demand an audience and therefore invite judgment. In these arenas, “good enough” doesn’t just fail quietly; it clutters the commons. A mediocre accountant can still balance the books. A mediocre orator wastes everyone’s time and, worse, dulls the civic ear.

The bite is in the moral framing. “Not to be endured” turns aesthetic disappointment into a question of tolerance, almost hygiene. La Bruyere is writing from the salon culture of 17th-century France, where art and rhetoric weren’t side hobbies but social currency and political instrument. Public speaking especially isn’t an accidental inclusion; in an age of courtly persuasion and pulpit power, rhetoric shaped reputations, policy, and piety. Bad speech isn’t just ugly - it’s misrule in miniature.

The subtext is classed, even if he doesn’t say so. This is a gatekeeping sentence disguised as a standard: an argument that certain cultural spaces must remain curated, protected from the democratizing creep of the merely competent. Yet it also contains a bracing defense of attention. La Bruyere assumes our time is finite, our senses educable, and our shared culture worth defending against the tyranny of the bland.