Wit & Attitude Quote by Jean de La Fontaine

La Fontaine turns luxury into a kind of scar tissue you can read like a headline. The image is sly: “foreheads” suggests both public display and involuntary confession, as if extravagance writes its own receipts on the body. In a single stroke, he flips the usual moral accounting. Fortune doesn’t “give” anything; she “sells.” What looks like a gift is really a transaction with hidden fees, and the buyer is often too dazzled by the packaging to notice the terms.

The phrase “foolish luxury” matters. He isn’t condemning comfort so much as the performative, status-chasing version of it: consumption that advertises insecurity as much as wealth. The subtext is social as much as spiritual. In a courtly world where proximity to power required spectacle, luxury functioned as both armor and leash. It signaled belonging while quietly indebting you to the tastes, whims, and patronage systems that made the lifestyle possible. Fortune “sells” in the sense that she extracts payment in autonomy, judgment, and often reputation; the cost is written on the face because the performance is exhausting and the dependence is visible.

Context sharpens the bite. La Fontaine, writing in Louis XIV’s France, mastered the art of moral critique disguised as elegant observation. Like his fables, this line delivers a lesson without sermonizing: you can spot the people being “rewarded” by fortune because they look like they’re working for it. The wit is that the most enviable lives come with the most legible liabilities.