Jean de La Fontaine Quotes
Nothing is more dangerous than a friend without discretion; even a prudent enemy is preferable.
La Fontaine, Jean de. "L'Ours et l'Amateur des jardins." Fables, 1678.
This Quatrain amazingly preceded Tennyson’s expression of the same idea by almost 1000 years. See {620306}. At the time this was written Islam was entering the flower of its intellectual height where one could express doubt and be a religious dissident and not be murdered or even censored in many Muslim communities. At that time Islamic science, mathematics, philosophy, and literature was well in advance of Christian Europe. However, a hundred years later, the Islamic world went through a “Closing” where all new ideas became suspect and the religion and culture became stultified and Europe advanced while the Islamic world ceased its creative intellectual development.
Jean de La Fontaine was a French fabulist and one of the most widely read French poets of the 17th century. He is known above all for his Fables, which provided a model for subsequent fabulists across Europe and numerous alternative versions in France, as well as in French regional languages.
