Wit & Attitude Quote by Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Aphorisms like this don’t comfort; they expose. La Rochefoucauld’s line turns the usual moral of aging on its head by refusing to let “wisdom” stand as a clean upgrade. Yes, time teaches you patterns: how people posture, how desire dresses itself up as principle, how reputations are engineered. But the same time also deepens your investment in your own story, making you easier to fool in a very specific way: by yourself.

The bite is in the pairing. “Wiser and more foolish” isn’t a paradox for paradox’s sake; it’s a portrait of the adult mind accumulating evidence while losing elasticity. You gain situational intelligence and social fluency, then you calcify. Habit becomes a substitute for judgment. Cynicism starts to feel like clarity. Pride starts to feel like experience. The older self can spot other people’s illusions faster while clinging harder to its own, because admitting error grows more expensive when your identity has years of sunk cost.

Context matters: La Rochefoucauld wrote from inside the courtly machine of 17th-century France, where power depended on reading motives and managing appearances. In that world, “wisdom” meant psychological acuity, not saintly virtue. His Maximes are basically field notes on self-interest, and this one suggests a grim trade: the better you get at decoding the game, the more likely you are to believe you’re above it. Aging, for him, doesn’t redeem. It refines perception and enlarges self-deception in the same breath.