Life & Wisdom Quote by Luc de Clapiers

Ambition has always needed a little fraud: the deliberate pretending that time isn’t running out. Luc de Clapiers, better known as Vauvenargues, wrote in an era when a “career” could be snuffed by war, infection, or court politics, and his own life was brutally short. That biographical pressure makes the line feel less like motivational wallpaper and more like a dare issued under candlelight.

The sentence works because it flips a common moral lesson on its head. Instead of “remember you will die” (the memento mori tradition that disciplines desire), Vauvenargues proposes a strategic amnesia. Live as though death doesn’t exist, not because death is irrelevant, but because constantly negotiating with it shrinks your radius of action. The subtext is psychological: hesitation is often just mortality wearing a respectable mask. If you’re always calculating risk, reputation, legacy, and the cost of failure, you’ll never do anything large enough to justify the calculation.

There’s also an Enlightenment-era provocation here. Greatness, for Vauvenargues, isn’t chiefly divine favor or inherited rank; it’s a posture, a chosen tempo of life. “As though” matters: he isn’t arguing we can escape death, only that we can refuse to let it set our agenda. The line’s quiet sting is that most people don’t lack talent or opportunity as much as they lack permission. He offers that permission, then snatches away the alibi.