Happiness Quote by Jules Renard

Advice is Renard at his most delicately venomous: a social ritual dressed up as generosity, powered by ego. The line snaps because it flips the presumed motive. We like to imagine counsel as altruism, the wise hand on the shoulder. Renard’s joke is that advising others is often a pleasure in itself, a small performance of superiority, taste, or worldly competence. The punch comes from the word "occasionally" - a tiny adverb that detonates the whole moral frame. It implies the usual beneficiary of advice is the adviser: we get to be right in advance, to sculpt someone else’s choices without paying the cost of living them.

The subtext is about control masquerading as care. Advice lets you occupy the authorial position in someone else’s story: you edit their mistakes, correct their posture, pre-empt their embarrassment. Even when offered warmly, it can be a way of asserting hierarchy. Renard, a fin-de-siecle French dramatist with a diarist’s ear for hypocrisy, writes from a culture thick with salon etiquette and polite cruelty, where the sharpest observations arrive wrapped in manners. It’s comedy built on realism: people do nice things for complicated reasons, and the self is rarely absent from its own charity.

Renard also hints at a grim economy: we dispense advice because it’s cheap. It costs less than help, less than listening, less than admitting we don’t know. Sometimes we even do it "in their interest" - as if that’s the rare exception worth noting. That’s not cynicism for its own sake; it’s a warning about how easily virtue becomes self-display.