Daily Inspiration Quote by Tristan Bernard

Happiness, Bernard suggests, isn’t built on grand ideals about people; it’s built on accurate expectations. The line has the clean, cutting efficiency of a playwright who’s watched too many social scenes derail over a single mismatch between what someone wanted and what someone was ever equipped to offer. “Ask of them only what they can give” isn’t a call to lower your standards so much as it’s a demand for realism: stop treating friends, lovers, colleagues like vending machines that owe you the item you selected.

The intent feels quietly corrective. Bernard isn’t flattering human nature; he’s managing it. In a society where politeness and performance often masquerade as generosity, he’s warning that the quickest way to poison a relationship is to demand a version of someone they can’t sustainably perform. The subtext is almost tactical: if you want peace, study people the way you study a role - their range, their tells, their limits - and write your requests accordingly.

As a French playwright working through the Third Republic into the interwar years, Bernard lived amid shifting social hierarchies, new urban pressures, and the brittle etiquette of modern life. Comedy, in that moment, often functioned as a survival tool: it named the small delusions that cause big misery. The wit here lies in its anti-romantic bluntness. Instead of promising that others will rise to meet you, it implies you’ll stay saner if you stop auditioning them for parts they were never cast to play.