Wit & Attitude Quote by Michel de Montaigne

Montaigne’s line lands like a shrug sharpened into a blade: if wisdom won’t take, the world will hand out luck instead. He personifies Fortune as a pragmatic, faintly bored administrator of human affairs, confronted with an immovable fact of life in the 16th century and now: many people will not be improved. So Fortune “solves” the problem by rewarding them anyway. The joke carries a sting. It’s not only that fools get lucky; it’s that luck becomes a kind of counterfeit wisdom, a social credential that lets incompetence pass as merit.

The subtext is classic Montaigne skepticism. He distrusts grand moral accounting, the comforting fantasy that outcomes reliably reflect virtue or intellect. In an era of religious wars, courtly patronage, and sudden reversals of status, “deserving” often looked like a story people told after the fact. His wit punctures the moral vanity of the successful and the self-congratulating narratives of power: if you’re on top, don’t be too sure you earned it; if you’re watching a fool rise, don’t be too surprised.

There’s also a quieter target: the human need to believe the world is legible. Montaigne doesn’t offer reform or revenge, just clarity. By blaming Fortune for making fools lucky, he exposes how randomness irritates us into inventing explanations. The line works because it makes cynicism elegant: a single sentence that flatters nobody, least of all the reader who wants to feel immune.