Success Quote by Jean de La Bruyère

Friendship, La Bruyere suggests, doesn’t usually explode; it erodes. The danger isn’t betrayal or ideology but the daily grit of proximity: lateness, vanity, needless correction, the tiny self-centered habits that show up only once you’re close enough to be annoyed. By narrowing his focus to "little failings", he punctures the romantic fantasy that strong bonds are maintained by grand loyalty alone. What keeps two people together is less dramatic: the steady decision not to turn every irritation into a moral verdict.

The line is built like a warning disguised as etiquette. "Cannot long" carries a cool, sociological pessimism - an assumption that time naturally accumulates grievances unless something intervenes. That intervention is "forgive", a word with religious weight in a secular social observation. Forgiveness here isn’t sainthood; it’s a practical technology for living alongside imperfect people without constantly renegotiating the relationship.

Context matters: La Bruyere wrote in the world of Louis XIV, where salons and court life ran on reputation, manners, and microscopic slights. In that environment, refusing to forgive small faults isn’t principled, it’s socially suicidal. The subtext is sharp: if you demand flawlessness from friends, you’re really demanding distance. And if you can’t forgive, you may not be protecting your standards so much as protecting your ego - turning friendship into a stage where you are always the reasonable one.

It works because it reframes "tolerance" as the true intimacy test: not whether you admire someone, but whether you can keep liking them after you’ve noticed everything.