Life & Wisdom Quote by Francois de La Rochefoucauld

A dagger disguised as a maxim: La Rochefoucauld turns “good advice” into a retirement hobby for the morally winded. The line lands because it reverses the usual reverence for elders. Instead of wisdom accruing with age, virtue becomes a coping mechanism - a way to launder lost appetites into public service. “Console themselves” is the tell. Advice isn’t offered primarily to help the young; it’s administered like a sedative to the old, soothing the humiliation of diminished power, diminished desire, diminished access to consequence.

The joke is cruelly observant. “Bad examples” aren’t simply sins; they’re performances. Youth can still scandalize, seduce, squander, take risks and be seen doing it. Old age, in this view, is a kind of social demotion: you’re relegated from actor to commentator. So you pivot. You moralize. You convert what you can no longer do into what others should not do. The sentence is built on that elegant sting: advice as compensation.

Context matters. La Rochefoucauld wrote from the courtly ecosystem of 17th-century France, where reputation was currency and hypocrisy was not an exception but a survival skill. His Maxims anatomize self-interest the way later writers would dissect ideology. The subtext is not “don’t listen to elders,” but “interrogate the motives hiding behind virtue.” Wisdom may be real, but it’s rarely pure; it often arrives wearing the mask of resignation.