"We give advice, but we cannot give the wisdom to profit by it"
About this Quote
Advice is cheap because it flatters the giver: it lets you sound lucid without having to live lucidly. La Rochefoucauld, the grande dame of French moral skepticism in a powdered wig, frames that vanity with surgical brevity. The line lands like a shrug at a salon: yes, we dispense counsel constantly, but the thing that makes counsel usable - wisdom - cannot be handed over like a note across a table.
The intent is less self-help than quiet indictment. Advice is portable, repeatable, even elegant; wisdom is experiential, humiliating, slow. It has to be earned in the body: through bad timing, bruised pride, consequences that finally stick. When he says we "cannot give the wisdom to profit by it", he is pointing to the moral economy that keeps society buzzing with prescriptions while people stay stubbornly themselves. The subtext is that advice often functions as performance or control: a way to manage other people's choices, to launder our own preferences as objectivity, to enjoy the authority of insight without the cost of transformation.
Context matters. Writing in an aristocratic culture obsessed with appearances and maneuvering, La Rochefoucauld watched self-interest masquerade as virtue. His maxims are built to puncture that masquerade. Here, he punctures the comforting fiction that information equals improvement. You can offer someone a map, but you cannot donate the will to walk, the appetite for discomfort, or the capacity to recognize themselves in the warning. That gap between knowing and doing is where his cynicism lives - and where the quote still stings.
The intent is less self-help than quiet indictment. Advice is portable, repeatable, even elegant; wisdom is experiential, humiliating, slow. It has to be earned in the body: through bad timing, bruised pride, consequences that finally stick. When he says we "cannot give the wisdom to profit by it", he is pointing to the moral economy that keeps society buzzing with prescriptions while people stay stubbornly themselves. The subtext is that advice often functions as performance or control: a way to manage other people's choices, to launder our own preferences as objectivity, to enjoy the authority of insight without the cost of transformation.
Context matters. Writing in an aristocratic culture obsessed with appearances and maneuvering, La Rochefoucauld watched self-interest masquerade as virtue. His maxims are built to puncture that masquerade. Here, he punctures the comforting fiction that information equals improvement. You can offer someone a map, but you cannot donate the will to walk, the appetite for discomfort, or the capacity to recognize themselves in the warning. That gap between knowing and doing is where his cynicism lives - and where the quote still stings.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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