"We seldom find any person of good sense, except those who share our opinions"
About this Quote
A compliment that lands like a slap: La Rochefoucauld turns “good sense” into a mirror we hold up to ourselves. The line is engineered to expose a quiet vanity most people prefer to dress up as discernment. We tell ourselves we’re judging arguments on their merits, but our real metric is comfort: agreement feels like intelligence because it flatters our identity and spares us the labor of doubt.
The phrasing is surgical. “Seldom” gives the claim a veneer of measured observation, as if he’s merely reporting social weather, not accusing the reader of narcissism. “Any person of good sense” sounds like a neutral standard, yet it immediately collapses into a partisan definition: good sense is whoever validates us. The joke is that the standard was never objective; it was always tribal. La Rochefoucauld’s wit works by letting the reader nod along for half a second before realizing they’re the target.
Context matters. Writing in the pressure-cooker world of 17th-century French salons and court politics, he understood that “reason” often functioned as social weaponry: a way to crown one’s circle as lucid and the rival camp as ridiculous. His maxim isn’t cynical for sport; it’s a warning about how quickly conversation becomes self-justification, how easily moral and intellectual language gets recruited to defend status.
The subtext is bleakly modern: our certainty is often just consensus with a flattering label. If you want to find “good sense,” the quote suggests, look first at what you instinctively dismiss.
The phrasing is surgical. “Seldom” gives the claim a veneer of measured observation, as if he’s merely reporting social weather, not accusing the reader of narcissism. “Any person of good sense” sounds like a neutral standard, yet it immediately collapses into a partisan definition: good sense is whoever validates us. The joke is that the standard was never objective; it was always tribal. La Rochefoucauld’s wit works by letting the reader nod along for half a second before realizing they’re the target.
Context matters. Writing in the pressure-cooker world of 17th-century French salons and court politics, he understood that “reason” often functioned as social weaponry: a way to crown one’s circle as lucid and the rival camp as ridiculous. His maxim isn’t cynical for sport; it’s a warning about how quickly conversation becomes self-justification, how easily moral and intellectual language gets recruited to defend status.
The subtext is bleakly modern: our certainty is often just consensus with a flattering label. If you want to find “good sense,” the quote suggests, look first at what you instinctively dismiss.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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