Life & Wisdom Quote by Francois de La Rochefoucauld

A razor blade of a sentence, sharpened to cut through the flattering story we tell ourselves about our motives. La Rochefoucauld isn’t warning that people are secretly monstrous; he’s claiming something colder and more durable: moral harm is often an untracked byproduct of self-regard. “Clever” is the tell. Intelligence, in his view, doesn’t rescue you from wrongdoing; it can actually become the instrument that disguises it, rationalizes it, and turns it into a private virtue. The smartest person in the room is still too blind to inventory the collateral damage of their choices, because the accounting would require a kind of honesty that’s psychologically expensive.

The line lands because it flips a common fantasy. We like to imagine evil as a conscious decision made by obvious villains. La Rochefoucauld drags it back into ordinary life, where harm blooms from vanity, ambition, politeness, and even generosity. Not “I meant to hurt you,” but “I meant to win,” “to be admired,” “to feel right,” and the hurt arrives as a side effect no one wants to claim. The phrase “all the evil” is also a stylistic trap: it suggests an endless remainder, a moral dark matter that can’t be fully observed.

Context matters. Writing in the orbit of Louis XIV’s court, La Rochefoucauld watched status games turn ethics into performance: favors that buy loyalty, sincerity that becomes currency, piety that masks competition. His maxim reads like a field note from a society obsessed with appearances, where self-knowledge is the one luxury nobody can afford.