Daily Inspiration Quote by Jean de La Bruyère

La Bruyere smuggles a revolution into a reassuring sentence: he relocates artistic authority from the academy to the nervous system. If a work “lifts your spirits” and triggers “bold and noble thoughts,” stop auditing it with imported standards. That’s not just an aesthetic preference; it’s a polemic against the 17th-century French machinery of taste, where rules, decorum, and the court’s consensus could harden into a kind of cultural policing.

The cleverness is in the apparent humility. He doesn’t argue for radical subjectivism - he doesn’t say any pleasure equals greatness. He narrows the test to a moral-psychological effect: elevation, courage, nobility. The subtext is that real art changes your posture toward life; it expands what you think you can be. “Master craftsman” sounds like a conservative nod to skill and tradition, but it’s doing double duty. He praises craft while quietly insisting that craft’s proof is experiential, not bureaucratic.

There’s also a social critique hiding in the imperative “do not look.” La Bruyere, writing in a world obsessed with reputation and correct judgment, is skeptical of secondhand taste - the reflex to outsource your reaction to critics, salons, or the prestige of the canon. He’s defending a first-person encounter with art as an ethical event: you emerge more capable of generous, daring thought, and that transformation is the receipt.

In a culture of rules, he offers a destabilizing metric: not conformity to standards, but the work’s power to make you larger.