Love Quote by Jean de La Bruyère

Embarrassment becomes a barometer of feeling, revealing both the birth and the fading of love. When affection first stirs, self-consciousness swells. Two people left alone suddenly notice their gestures, their words, the unsaid desires humming beneath the surface. The awkward pause is not emptiness but an overfull moment, crowded with possibilities, vulnerability, and fear of misstep. Later, when love cools, a different awkwardness arrives. Silence no longer holds promise; it exposes distance. What was once shared understanding becomes a strained politeness. The body senses the gap before words admit it, and embarrassment arises again, this time as a cover for indifference, disappointment, or resignation.

Jean de La Bruyere, the 17th-century French moralist known for terse psychological insights in Les Caracteres, drills into how social behavior betrays inner states. In the salons and courtly settings of Louis XIV, where conversation and poise were arts, people learned to mask desire and conflict. Yet the crucible of being alone together pierced these conventions, making subtle truth legible. There, the ease or unease between two people measured the state of the bond more reliably than declarations could.

The observation also implies a middle condition of love: a seasoned ease where embarrassment recedes. Mature intimacy tames self-consciousness without erasing mystery. Words and silences both feel inhabited, not empty or overfull. By contrast, the thresholds at the beginning and the end sharpen awareness; at both edges one becomes a spectator to oneself, anxious either to impress or to avoid harm.

Perception, not analysis, is the instrument here. Lovers do not deduce their situation; they feel it. A catch in conversation, the clumsy placement of hands, the relief or dread when a door closes and leaves only two — such inflections diagnose transitions. La Bruyere captures an entire arc of love within a single symptom: the changing meaning of a shared silence.