Life & Wisdom Quote by Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Luck is doing a lot of moral laundering here, and La Rochefoucauld knows it. In one clean sentence he slides the knife under a comforting fiction: that praise and blame belong neatly to individual virtue. Instead, actions trail “lucky and unlucky stars” like private weather systems, and society’s verdicts follow the forecast. If it goes well, we call it character; if it goes badly, we call it failure. The sting is that he doesn’t deny agency outright; he just demotes it. “A great part” of the credit and guilt we assign is misattributed, siphoned off by circumstance.

The intent is less philosophical than diagnostic. La Rochefoucauld, the master anatomist of self-regard, is sketching how reputations are manufactured. Outcomes become retroactive evidence of moral worth. Success is treated as proof of prudence; disaster is treated as proof of vice. He’s pointing at the social habit of confusing what happened with what someone deserved - a confusion that keeps status hierarchies looking like justice.

Context matters: a 17th-century court culture obsessed with appearance, patronage, and intrigue, where a career could turn on a royal mood, a duel, a rumor. In that world, “stars” aren’t mystical so much as shorthand for the invisible machinery of power and chance. The subtext is cynical but clarifying: moral judgment is often just storytelling after the fact, with fortune playing editor. His brilliance is how he forces the reader to feel the instability of virtue in public life - and to suspect their own verdicts are partly superstition dressed up as ethics.