Life & Wisdom Quote by Francois de La Rochefoucauld

A razorblade of a sentence: it flatters virtue only to gut it. La Rochefoucauld treats "virtuous" not as a halo but as a job title, and "trade" is the tell. In one word he drags female chastity out of the realm of ideals and into the marketplace of roles, reputations, and social contracts. Virtue becomes labor performed under surveillance, with rules, repetition, and very little pleasure.

The sting is in "bored". Not scandal, not secret sin, not melodramatic repression; just tedium. He suggests that what society praises in women is also what it makes monotonous: the endless maintenance of propriety, the careful management of appearances, the obligation to say no even when the body says maybe. Boredom is a quietly revolutionary motive because it implies agency and desire without granting the cheap thrill of transgression. It also lets him be cruelly "reasonable": of course a person would tire of a life reduced to restraint.

Context matters. Writing from the salons and court culture of 17th-century France, La Rochefoucauld made a sport of exposing noble ideals as self-interest dressed up in good manners. His target isn't only women; it's the moral economy that turns them into symbols. The line reads like misogyny, and it is, but it's also diagnostic: a society that commodifies female virtue should expect the performer to resent the performance.