I always do the first line well, but I have trouble doing the others.
Don't appear so scholarly, pray. Humanize your talk, and speak to be understood.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote emphasizes the importance of clear communication and making complex ideas accessible to everyone.
Moliere's quote encourages individuals, especially those in positions of knowledge or authority, to avoid using overly complex or scholarly language when communicating. The essence is to humanize dialogue in a way that fosters understanding and connection, rather than creating distance through pretentiousness. It serves as a reminder that effective communication involves simplifying complex ideas to ensure that one's audience can grasp and relate to the message being conveyed.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
During a lecture, a professor could use this quote to remind students of the importance of approachable language.
More from Moliere
All quotes →Beauty without intelligence is like a hook without bait.
Betrayed and wronged in everything, I’ll flee this bitter world where vice is king, And seek some spot unpeopled and apart Where I’ll be free to have an honest heart. - Molière, The Misanthrope
Long is the road from conception to completion.
Oh, I may be devout, but I am human all the same.
Hypocrisy is a fashionable vice, and all fashionable vices pass for virtue.
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Fortune always will confer an aura of worth, unworthily; and in this world The lucky person passes for a genius.
Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace. No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for those are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history.
So long as you can sweeten another's pain, life is not in vain.