Life & Wisdom Quote by Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Gratitude, La Rochefoucauld suggests, is often just good manners with a business model. The line lands because it refuses the comforting story that thankfulness is a stable moral trait. Instead, it frames “gratitude” as a social strategy: people are warm, attentive, even admiring right up until the moment your usefulness expires. The sting is in the conditional logic. “So long as” makes gratitude sound less like virtue than a lease agreement.

The subtext is classic La Rochefoucauld: the polished cynicism of a court observer who watched reputation, favors, and alliances behave like currency. In 17th-century aristocratic France, survival depended on patronage networks and proximity to power; sentiments were performed in public and audited in private. Within that economy, ingratitude isn’t a shocking deviation, it’s the natural end of a transaction. He doesn’t accuse people of being openly malicious. He implies something colder: they may genuinely believe they’re grateful while they’re still benefiting. Self-interest can dress itself as sincerity.

The sentence also flatters the reader’s intelligence by implicating them without naming them. “We” turns the blade inward, making it less a complaint about other people and more a diagnosis of a system everyone participates in. The quote works because it’s not just bleak; it’s observationally precise. It makes you replay your own relationships like a ledger: who calls when they need something, who disappears when the account runs dry, and how often “thanks” is really a down payment on future service.