Quote of the Day: Francois de La Rochefoucauld on Life & Wisdom

At Louis XIV’s glittering court, a single rumor could undo a career, and yet one observer kept writing with unnerving clarity, even after being wounded in civil war and watching allies pivot with the wind. He learned that the quickest way to shrink your life is to treat time like a dwindling ration. So he offered a daring prescription: “To achieve greatness one should live as if they will never die.”

Read it literally and it sounds like denial. Read it as strategy and it becomes liberating: act from a horizon so wide that fear can’t crowd out your best judgment. When you stop counting down, you stop bargaining with yourself. You take the hard conversation, the long apprenticeship, the patient rebuilding, because you’re no longer demanding immediate payoff to prove it was “worth it.” That’s the beginning of courage.

Living “as if” immortal doesn’t mean recklessness; it means refusing panic. Scarcity thinking makes us hoard effort, flatter the wrong people, and choose safety over principle. A longer time horizon restores steadiness: you can say no without drama, wait without resentment, and keep showing up when the spotlight moves on. Greatness, in this sense, is not loud success, it’s amplitude of soul, the capacity to hold big aims without being ruled by the clock.

That counsel carries weight because Francois de La Rochefoucauld distilled a lifetime of observation into the razor-clean Maximes and his Memoires, shaping moral psychology for centuries with lines that still expose our motives and strengthen our leadership.

Today, pick one “someday” action and give it a 30-minute appointment on your calendar: outline the plan, send the message, start the first page. Do it with the calm confidence of someone building for decades, may your pace lengthen, and your life enlarge.