Life & Wisdom Quote by Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Friendship, Rochefoucauld insists, is a polite costume draped over the naked machinery of self-interest. The line works because it refuses the modern craving to treat intimacy as morally pure; it drags the cherished word "friendship" into the ledger book. Each clause narrows the definition with almost legal patience: "social arrangement", then "mutual adjustment", then "interchange of services", until the final turn of the screw: "profit for their own self-love". The cumulative effect is surgical, not merely sour. He is not describing a few bad friends; he is indicting the category.

The subtext is courtly. Writing from the orbit of 17th-century French aristocratic life, Rochefoucauld watched alliances masquerade as affection and favors circulate like currency. In that world, survival depended on reading motives correctly, and the highest naivete was taking proclaimed virtue at face value. His cynicism is less a tantrum than a defensive intelligence: if you assume "friendship" is disinterested, you become easy prey for people who understand it as strategy.

What makes the provocation endure is how neatly it anticipates contemporary social life. Networking culture, parasocial bonds, even the soft transactionalism of "let's grab coffee" can feel like proof of his thesis. Yet the nastiest sting is in "self-love": the profit is not only practical advantage but the ego-salve of being chosen, seen, affirmed. Rochefoucauld isn't saying friendship never exists; he's warning that even our tenderness often comes with an invoice we pretend not to notice.