"The greatest evil which fortune can inflict on men is to endow them with small talents and great ambition"
About this Quote
There is a special cruelty in being given just enough ability to believe you deserve the world, and not enough to earn it. Vauvenargues (Luc de Clapiers) frames that mismatch as fortune's "greatest evil", a phrase that quietly blames fate for a moral and social malfunction: the production of strivers whose reach is permanently out of sync with their grasp. It's not a romantic lament about unfulfilled dreams; it's a cold diagnosis of a personality type that destabilizes both the self and the room.
The line works because it treats "small talents" and "great ambition" as a volatile compound. Talent here isn't genius; it's competence, the modest skills that create the illusion of inevitability. Ambition isn't aspiration; it's appetite. Combine the two and you get resentment, performance, and the kind of overconfident mediocrity that demands authority before it earns credibility. The subtext is sharp: many public disasters aren't caused by outright villains, but by people who want importance more than they want excellence.
Context matters. Writing in the early Enlightenment, Vauvenargues was orbiting salons and court culture where advancement often depended as much on bravura and patronage as on merit. The aphorism reads like a warning from inside that machinery: status systems reward ambition, and sometimes talent is optional. It's also self-protective in a class-conscious world. By calling this mismatch "fortune", he can criticize the socially ambitious without naming names, turning envy and incompetence into a philosophical hazard rather than a personal attack.
The line works because it treats "small talents" and "great ambition" as a volatile compound. Talent here isn't genius; it's competence, the modest skills that create the illusion of inevitability. Ambition isn't aspiration; it's appetite. Combine the two and you get resentment, performance, and the kind of overconfident mediocrity that demands authority before it earns credibility. The subtext is sharp: many public disasters aren't caused by outright villains, but by people who want importance more than they want excellence.
Context matters. Writing in the early Enlightenment, Vauvenargues was orbiting salons and court culture where advancement often depended as much on bravura and patronage as on merit. The aphorism reads like a warning from inside that machinery: status systems reward ambition, and sometimes talent is optional. It's also self-protective in a class-conscious world. By calling this mismatch "fortune", he can criticize the socially ambitious without naming names, turning envy and incompetence into a philosophical hazard rather than a personal attack.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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