Life & Wisdom Quote by Jean de La Fontaine

A 17th-century poet praising shortness isn’t just offering a craft tip; he’s throwing a dart at the culture of bloat around him. La Fontaine wrote in a world where literary prestige often arrived dressed in length: sprawling epics, courtly flattery stretched into volumes, and moral instruction delivered with a heavy hand. Against that, “But the shortest works are always the best” lands as a sly provocation. The absolute “always” is doing mischievous work. It’s too sweeping to be a neutral rule, which makes it feel like a poet’s wink: you know the exceptions, I know the exceptions, but let’s pretend the verdict is final so the lazy and the pompous get the message.

The subtext is double-edged. On one side, it’s an aesthetic claim: brevity forces selection, and selection is where style reveals itself. A short piece can’t hide behind digressions; it has to earn every sentence. On the other side, it’s social critique. La Fontaine’s fables are compact precisely because they smuggle in sharp observations about power, vanity, and self-deception without looking like direct attack. In a courtly ecosystem where saying too much could be dangerous or simply tacky, brevity becomes both elegance and camouflage.

He’s also defending a “minor” form as major art. The fable, like the epigram, thrives on compression: set-up, turn, sting. Shortness isn’t a lack of ambition; it’s a bet that intelligence can be concentrated, and that readers deserve the pleasure of being trusted to connect the dots.