Fatherhood Quote by Jean de La Fontaine

La Fontaine lands the line like a shrug with a dagger inside it. On the surface, it’s a neat bit of social math: public approval is already unmanageable, and family approval is its own impossible economy. Put them together and you get a permanent deficit. But the real bite is in the pairing. “All the world” is obviously too much; “one’s father” should be small, intimate, attainable. By placing them side by side, La Fontaine quietly demotes paternal authority to the same category as fickle crowd opinion: noisy, demanding, irrational, never fully satisfied.

In 17th-century France, “father” isn’t just Dad; it’s hierarchy. It’s the household as a miniature state, with obedience as a virtue and reputation as currency. La Fontaine, a poet who lived by patronage and navigated courtly pressures, knew what it meant to be judged by audiences who wanted different versions of you: moralist, entertainer, loyal subject, respectable man. The aphorism stages a conflict between outward performance and inherited expectation, between the self you sell and the self you owe.

The subtext is permission. If you accept that both the crowd and the patriarch come with moving goalposts, you stop treating their disappointment as proof of your failure. It’s a wry survival strategy: choose your compromises carefully, because someone - possibly the person whose approval is supposed to matter most - will be dissatisfied anyway.