Life & Wisdom Quote by Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Praise, in La Rochefoucauld's hands, isn’t a moral virtue; it’s a transactional mirror. The line lands because it flatters the reader’s self-image as a realist while quietly accusing them of the same vanity they claim to despise. “Seldom” does important work: he’s not preaching an absolute, he’s offering a cool probability judgment about human behavior. That makes the cynicism feel empirical, almost scientific, the way a good insult sounds like data.

The subtext is court politics distilled to a single barb. La Rochefoucauld wrote in a 17th-century France where reputation was currency and speech was a form of maneuvering. Compliments weren’t free-floating expressions of goodwill; they were tools for alliance, insurance against insult, and bids for status. If you praise someone who admires you, you’re not just being kind, you’re stabilizing a feedback loop that keeps your own social value inflated. Praise becomes less about the praised and more about the praiser securing an audience.

“Good earnest” sharpens the knife. He’s not denying that praise happens; he’s denying its sincerity. The wit comes from reversing the usual moral hierarchy: we like to imagine admiration flows outward toward merit, but he frames it as inward, toward reflected glory. It’s a one-sentence exposure of how even our supposedly generous gestures are contaminated by self-interest, especially in public life where every compliment is also a small performance of taste, belonging, and power.