Wealth & Money Quote by Jean de La Fontaine

A 17th-century poet telling you money and status won’t make you happy sounds like a polite fortune cookie, until you remember who’s talking and when. La Fontaine wrote inside the gravitational field of Louis XIV’s France, where “greatness” wasn’t a self-esteem mantra but a public, court-certified condition: titles, proximity to power, the exhausting theater of being seen. In that world, wealth and grandeur weren’t just rewards; they were obligations, costumes you wore until they wore you.

The line works because it refuses the era’s dominant logic without sounding like a sermon. “Neither...nor” is a clean guillotine: two prized idols drop in a single motion. “Render” is the sly verb here. Wealth and greatness don’t create happiness; they try to process you into it, as if joy were a product a system can manufacture. La Fontaine implies the opposite: happiness is not a deliverable of hierarchy. It’s stubbornly noncompliant.

The subtext isn’t anti-ambition so much as anti-confusion. Riches and reputation can purchase comfort, distraction, even insulation, but they also breed anxiety: fear of losing, pressure to perform, dependency on approval. La Fontaine, famous for fables that smuggle moral intelligence into animal stories, aims at readers who know the court’s glitter is partly lacquer. He isn’t denying pleasure; he’s puncturing the prestige fantasy that happiness is waiting at the top of the social ladder, like a prize handed out by the very people who profit from your climb.