War & Peace Quote by Francois de La Rochefoucauld

La Rochefoucauld delivers serenity as a scalpel, not a scented candle. “If we have not peace within ourselves” sets the terms with chilly precision: the problem is not the world’s noise, but our own internal mismanagement. The second clause turns the blade: “it is in vain to seek it from outward sources.” “Vain” is doing double duty. It means futile, yes, but it also sniffs out vanity - the ego’s favorite hobby of outsourcing its distress to circumstances, lovers, status, or approval. The line isn’t comforting; it’s accusatory in that elegant, aristocratic way: stop pleading with reality to fix what you refuse to face.

The subtext is classic La Rochefoucauld moral psychology. He’s writing in a 17th-century France of courtly performance, where peace is often treated as a social accessory: the right marriage, the right patron, the right reputation. His maxim punctures that theater. External “sources” are not just material goods; they’re the entire apparatus of distraction - the court, the salon, the endless negotiation of appearances. If your interior life is ruled by envy, pride, and restless comparison, the outside world can only amplify it.

What makes the sentence work is its tight, almost mathematical structure: condition, diagnosis, verdict. No poetry, no escape hatch. It reads like a private note from someone who has watched people try every fashionable remedy and still carry the same agitation from room to room. Peace, he suggests, is less a place you reach than a stance you cultivate - and the refusal to do that work is the real “vain” pursuit.