Life & Mortality Quote by Jean de La Bruyère

Silence becomes the only honest posture when power enters the room. La Bruyere, writing from inside Louis XIV's France, isn’t offering a timid etiquette lesson; he’s mapping the social physics of absolutism, where speech is never neutral and praise is rarely clean. To speak well of rulers, he suggests, is already to participate in the court economy of favor. Compliment becomes currency. Even sincerity, in that marketplace, reads as self-interest.

The sharper barb lands on criticism. Attacking the powerful while they live is "dangerous" not because truth is impolite, but because regimes can make consequences immediate: exile, censorship, lost patronage, worse. Yet La Bruyere refuses to romanticize the late-arriving critic, too. Speaking ill of the dead is "cowardly" because it costs nothing. The risk has expired; the moral courage arrives conveniently after the threat is gone. He’s puncturing a familiar pose: the brave dissenter who only finds his voice once the guards have left.

What makes the line work is its trap-like structure. Every option is compromised: praise flatters, critique risks punishment, posthumous critique performs virtue without stakes. That bleak symmetry is the point. La Bruyere isn’t advocating disengagement so much as indicting a culture that forces citizens into complicity or silence. The subtext is political: a society where truthful speech about leaders cannot exist in real time is already confessing its own corruption.