Daily Inspiration Quote by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Rousseau’s line lands like a quiet rebuke to our obsession with scorekeeping life. “We do not know” is doing the real work: it’s not a sentimental shrug, it’s an epistemological warning. The phrase strips the audience of the moral confidence required to label events as “fortune” at all, let alone sort them into good and bad. Rousseau presses on the soft spot of modern self-narration: we treat outcomes as verdicts, and we treat our immediate feelings as evidence.

The subtext is anti-triumphalist and anti-catastrophist at once. What looks like luck can be a trap that drags us deeper into dependency, vanity, or social competition; what looks like disaster can loosen the grip of a corrupting environment. Rousseau’s broader project is a critique of civilization’s counterfeit values - status, luxury, comparison - and of how those values train us to misread our own experience. In that light, “fortune” isn’t just chance; it’s the social machinery that tells you what should count as winning.

Historically, Rousseau is writing in the Enlightenment’s high season, when reason is often marketed as a tool for mastery. He flips that posture. The line argues for humility not as piety but as political and psychological hygiene: if you can’t reliably name what benefits you, you should be wary of institutions that claim to deliver your happiness, and wary of the self that rushes to judge. It’s a small sentence with big consequences: it makes uncertainty a form of freedom.