Life & Wisdom Quote by Jean de La Fontaine

Revenge is sweet; righteous revenge is sweeter. La Fontaine’s line, “It is twice the pleasure to deceive the deceiver,” is a neat little moral hand grenade: it legitimizes trickery when it’s aimed upward, at someone who has made manipulation their native language. Coming from a 17th-century fabulist who built a career on animals acting out human vices, the sentence isn’t just a wink at cunning - it’s a social technology for the relatively powerless.

The intent is not to celebrate lying as a lifestyle, but to carve out an exception: deception becomes a kind of countermeasure, a way to rebalance a rigged game. “Twice” matters. It signals compound satisfaction: first, the ordinary pleasure of winning; second, the ethical dopamine hit of watching a self-proclaimed expert get beaten at their own sport. The subtext is sharp: the deceiver depends on asymmetry - information hoarded, rules bent, trust exploited. Turning the tactic back on them doesn’t merely punish; it exposes. The deceiver’s authority collapses because their supposed superiority was never moral, only technical.

Contextually, La Fontaine writes in a France where court politics rewarded performance, flattery, and calculated misdirection. His fables smuggle critique past the decorum police: they teach readers how to read power, not just obey it. The line flatters the audience’s intelligence, suggesting that survival in a world of predators may require claws. The discomfort is the point: once deception can be “just,” morality starts looking less like a commandment and more like strategy.