Life & Wisdom Quote by Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Status is the shortcut the lazy mind takes when it doesn’t want the burden of discernment. La Rochefoucauld, the great anatomist of aristocratic self-deception, is needling a social world that flatters itself as refined while operating like a court-side stock ticker: who is up, who is down, who has the king’s ear, who has been ruined. “Vogue” and “fortunes” are not neutral descriptors here; they’re exposures. The first is fashion masquerading as judgment, the second is luck dressed up as merit.

The line works because it’s pitched as an observation about “most people,” but the real target is the reader’s complicity. He’s not merely complaining that people are shallow; he’s revealing how moral appraisal gets outsourced to public consensus and circumstance. If a man is celebrated, we assume he’s worthy. If he’s fallen, we treat the fall as evidence of character rather than volatility in the system. The satire is cool-blooded: worth becomes something you don’t measure, only infer from the crowd’s applause or the roulette wheel of events.

In 17th-century France, this is also a survival manual. Court life turned reputation into currency and misfortune into contagion. La Rochefoucauld, bruised by political failure and intimate with salons where wit was a weapon, understands that “judging” is often just social alignment: praising the safe, dismissing the unlucky, and calling it wisdom. The sting is that it’s still our default metric, only now the court is algorithmic and “vogue” refreshes by the hour.