Life & Wisdom Quote by Jean de La Fontaine

A clean little provocation: the “wise man” doesn’t just accept death, he schedules it mentally, keeps his bags packed. Coming from Jean de La Fontaine - a poet who made a career of smuggling hard truths into fables and elegant verse - the line reads less like a pious platitude and more like a moral trap. It flatters the reader’s self-image (“surely I’m the wise one”) while quietly asking an uncomfortable question: if you claim wisdom, where’s your evidence when the one certainty shows up?

The subtext is Stoic, but La Fontaine’s French classicism adds a social edge. Seventeenth-century life was saturated with public religion, courtly performance, and very private fear: plagues, war, high infant mortality, a constant sense that fortune could reverse overnight. “Ready to go” is not mystical; it’s practical. The wise person has already done the accounting - with his conscience, his relationships, his appetites, his ego. Death can’t ambush someone who doesn’t rely on denial as emotional infrastructure.

The sentence also contains an implicit critique of the “surprised” living: people so busy curating status, comfort, and distraction that mortality feels like an insult rather than a fact. La Fontaine makes readiness sound like composure, even dignity, but he’s also warning that most of us will meet death exactly as we live: unprepared, mid-performance, still bargaining for one more scene.