Life & Wisdom Quote by Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Good advice is cheap; the talent is converting it into leverage. La Rochefoucauld’s line lands with the cool precision of a salon skeptic who has watched smart people collect counsel the way others collect perfume: for display, not for use. He’s not praising mentorship. He’s puncturing the comforting myth that listening is the humble alternative to agency. In his view, taking advice well is its own act of power, requiring judgment, self-knowledge, and a willingness to accept the social consequences of acting on it.

The subtext is classic La Rochefoucauld: our failures aren’t mostly due to ignorance, but to vanity, inertia, and self-deception. “Good advice” often arrives wrapped in ego games - the adviser proving superiority, the listener performing openness. Profiting by it means sorting signal from status theater. It also means admitting that an outsider might see your blind spots more clearly than you do, which is a direct hit to aristocratic pride and, frankly, to modern individualism too.

Context matters. Writing in 17th-century France, he was steeped in court life where survival depended on reading motives, not just words. Advice at court wasn’t neutral; it was a currency, a trap, a test of loyalty. His point: the same faculties you need to steer yourself - discernment, courage, timing - are required to extract value from someone else’s guidance. Otherwise “good advice” becomes another ornament: admired, repeated, and ultimately unused.