Happiness Quote by Jean de La Bruyère

La Bruyere slips a small dagger into the satin sleeve of good manners: laughter is not dessert, its the ration you take first because the banquet might end abruptly. The line sounds almost like advice, but its really a critique of how people postpone living. Happiness, in his world, is a grand, polished state people promise themselves once the conditions are right: reputation secured, fortune stabilized, grief processed, virtue perfected. Laughter is messier. It happens now, or it doesnt. By ranking it ahead of happiness, he demotes the era's aspirational ideal and elevates a bodily, involuntary release as the more reliable form of human truth.

The subtext is pure 17th-century moralist: the courtly performance of seriousness is a kind of vanity, a wager that you control time. Laughter punctures that illusion. It acknowledges contingency, the speed of mortality, the absurdity of self-importance. Theres also a sly theological aftertaste: if salvation and worldly "happiness" are deferred, laughter becomes the one grace you can claim without credentials.

Context matters. La Bruyere wrote amid Versailles-era rigidity, where status was a choreography and wit could be a weapon or a shield. His maxim flatters no one. It implies that the socially approved pursuit of happiness is often just a delay tactic, a respectable way to avoid the present. Laugh first, he suggests, because death is punctual and our plans are not.