Daily Inspiration Quote by Jean de La Bruyère

The line lands like a neat piece of 17th-century sabotage: you think youre choosing freely, and then La Bruyere reminds you the real puppeteers are boredom and comfort. Habits and novelty look like opposites, but he treats them as twin forms of bias, equally capable of hijacking judgment. One seduces by familiarity: the mind stops examining what it repeats. The other intoxicates by freshness: the mind stops examining what it desires to experience next.

The intent isnt to moralize against routine or curiosity; its to expose how both can masquerade as reason. Habit makes us call the usual "natural" and the inherited "true". Novelty makes us call the new "progress" and the surprising "important". In both cases, the evaluation comes after the attachment. That reversal is the subtext: we like to imagine our intellect drives our preferences, when often our preferences recruit intellect as a press secretary.

Context matters. La Bruyere writes in the classical French tradition of moralistes, where the point is not system-building but social x-ray: aphorisms that diagnose vanity, fashion, and self-deception at court and in salons. Under Louis XIV, status depended on mastering conventions while chasing the latest signal of distinction. The quote catches that cultural rhythm: people cling to rules until rules become stale, then chase the next shine. His wit is in the symmetry. By pairing habit and novelty, he denies the reader an easy escape hatch. You cant congratulate yourself for being traditional or avant-garde; both can be just another way of being led.