Life & Wisdom Quote by Jean de La Fontaine

Habit is La Fontaine's real villain here, not morality. "Everyone has his faults" sounds like a shrug toward human messiness, but the line tightens into something colder: our worst traits are not isolated mistakes, they're loops. The sting is in "continually repeats" - a diagnosis of character as repetition compulsion, long before the language of psychology made it fashionable. La Fontaine isn't offering absolution; he's stripping away the comforting myth that a sharp scare or a flush of embarrassment will reliably reform us.

The pairing of "fear" and "shame" is surgical. Fear is the external lever (punishment, threat, loss), shame the internal one (reputation, conscience, social disgust). Between them, you have the two classic engines of social control. La Fontaine says neither one "can cure" a repeated fault, framing vice almost as a chronic condition rather than a crime. "Cure" pushes the thought further: correction isn't a pep talk or a penalty; it would require a deeper change in temperament, desire, or self-knowledge.

Context matters. As a 17th-century fabulist moving through court culture, La Fontaine wrote in a world obsessed with decorum and punishment, where shame was currency and fear was policy. His fables often stage animals acting out human foibles precisely because those foibles are predictable. The subtext is quietly subversive: societies that govern by intimidation and humiliation are congratulating themselves for effects they don't actually produce. You'll get compliance, maybe; you won't get transformation.