Life & Mortality Quote by Luc de Clapiers

Aphorisms like this one land because they do what the Enlightenment loved best: flatten human complexity into a clean, cruel geometry. Vauvenargues is not describing a quirky moral decline so much as indicting the social machine that manufactures it. “Born sincere” isn’t sentimental; it’s clinical. Children speak directly because they haven’t learned the price of truth. The sting is in the second half: “die deceivers” suggests not a few bad actors but a near-total conversion. Deception becomes the default language of adulthood.

The line’s elegance is also its trap. By making deceit feel inevitable, it smuggles in a bleak philosophy of socialization: to live among others is to edit yourself into acceptability. Courtly France - where reputation operated like currency and survival depended on tact, flattery, and strategic silence - sits in the background. Even outside Versailles, the 18th-century public sphere prized polish. You learned to speak in masks, and the mask eventually spoke for you.

“Deceivers” is harsher than “liars.” It implies not isolated falsehoods but an ongoing practice: performance as identity. The quote’s subtext is less “people get worse” than “society trains us to be legible, and legibility is a kind of fraud.” It’s a writer’s complaint, but also a psychological observation: sincerity isn’t merely lost; it’s traded away, one small concession at a time, until the self that started out blunt and whole becomes a diplomat of its own desires.