Life & Wisdom Quote by Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Self-knowledge, La Rochefoucauld suggests, is less an inner light than a flattering story we tell ourselves after the fact. “We are very far from always knowing our own wishes” lands with the cool efficiency of a court observer who has watched people confuse appetite with principle, impulse with destiny. The line isn’t mystical; it’s diagnostic. It implies that desire often arrives disguised - as virtue, as duty, as reason - and that the mind’s most practiced skill is laundering motives until they look respectable.

That “very far” matters. It’s not a gentle reminder that humans are complicated; it’s a measured insult. We don’t merely misjudge ourselves occasionally, we routinely miss the plot. In the salon-and-court world of 17th-century France, where advancement depended on performance, alliances, and reputation, wishes were dangerous to name plainly. You learned to want indirectly: to call ambition “service,” jealousy “concern,” vanity “honor.” Under those conditions, ignorance of one’s wishes isn’t a personal quirk; it’s a social adaptation.

The subtext is darker: if you don’t know what you want, you’re easier to steer - by fashion, by power, by the expectations you’ve internalized. La Rochefoucauld’s genius is to make that steering feel like self-direction. His maxim reads like a small sentence, but it’s really a theory of human behavior: we are not sovereign consumers of desire, we are its PR team, drafting rationales for cravings we barely recognize.