"We always get bored with those whom we bore"
About this Quote
Boredom, in La Rochefoucauld's hands, isn’t a mood so much as a moral diagnosis. "We always get bored with those whom we bore" flips the usual complaint - other people are dull - into a more humiliating symmetry: if you can’t hold someone’s attention, you’ll end up losing interest in them, too. The line is engineered like a trapdoor. It starts as an observation about social fatigue, then drops you into the uncomfortable realization that boredom is rarely passive. It’s something we manufacture, then blame on the room.
The intent is classic La Rochefoucauld: puncture self-flattery with a needle thin enough to look elegant. The subtext is that relationships are sustained less by affection than by vanity management. When we bore someone, we’re forced to confront our own dwindling charm, relevance, or power. That recognition curdles into resentment, and boredom becomes a defense: if you decide they’re uninteresting, you don’t have to admit you failed to interest them. It’s preemptive dismissal as self-preservation.
Context matters. Writing in the orbit of the French court and salon culture, La Rochefoucauld understood conversation as currency and attention as status. To bore was to slide down the social ladder; to be bored was to signal superiority. The aphorism captures the petty cruelty of that economy, where even intimacy can be reduced to a performance review. Its modern punch is how easily it maps onto contemporary attention markets: when engagement falters, we don’t just scroll away; we retroactively decide the content - or the person - was never worth our time.
The intent is classic La Rochefoucauld: puncture self-flattery with a needle thin enough to look elegant. The subtext is that relationships are sustained less by affection than by vanity management. When we bore someone, we’re forced to confront our own dwindling charm, relevance, or power. That recognition curdles into resentment, and boredom becomes a defense: if you decide they’re uninteresting, you don’t have to admit you failed to interest them. It’s preemptive dismissal as self-preservation.
Context matters. Writing in the orbit of the French court and salon culture, La Rochefoucauld understood conversation as currency and attention as status. To bore was to slide down the social ladder; to be bored was to signal superiority. The aphorism captures the petty cruelty of that economy, where even intimacy can be reduced to a performance review. Its modern punch is how easily it maps onto contemporary attention markets: when engagement falters, we don’t just scroll away; we retroactively decide the content - or the person - was never worth our time.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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