Life & Mortality Quote by Jean de La Fontaine

La Fontaine slips a small existential knife into a line that looks like a party proverb. The order matters: laugh first, happy second. He’s not prescribing cheerfulness as a moral duty; he’s arguing for laughter as a survival reflex, something you can do even when happiness is still out of reach. That inversion is the trick. Happiness is framed as a destination, but laughter is portable - a tool you can deploy in the middle of disappointment, poverty, politics, or grief. It’s less “be positive” than “don’t wait for the universe to get its act together before you grant yourself a release valve.”

The menace in the second clause (“for fear we die”) turns the line into a wager against time. La Fontaine’s era was steeped in precarity: disease, short life expectancy, religious and courtly pressures, a society where public conformity was often safer than candor. In that world, laughter isn’t frivolous; it’s tactical. It lets you metabolize what you can’t change and, just as importantly, it lets you see the absurdity of power without saying the dangerous part out loud.

As a poet of fables, La Fontaine specialized in moral truth smuggled through charm. Here he’s smuggling a harsher lesson: happiness is not guaranteed, not scheduled, not owed. Laughing “before” is a refusal to let fate control the timeline of your inner life - a small act of autonomy staged as lightness.