We are never so happy nor so unhappy as we imagine.

François de La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680), a French aristocrat shaped by court politics and the civil conflicts of the Fronde, distilled his observations of human behavior into brief, skeptical maxims. The line “We are never so happy nor so unhappy as we imagine” reflects the moral-psychological tone of his salon culture: a world attentive to self-love (amour-propre), appearances, and the stories people tell themselves about their feelings. In his Maximes, first published in 1665 and revised in later editions, La Rochefoucauld repeatedly questions the reliability of our self-assessments and the exaggerations produced by pride, fear, and social comparison.

The maxim argues that imagination inflates emotional experience: we dramatize both joy and misery beyond what reality warrants. La Rochefoucauld is not denying that happiness and suffering are real; he is targeting the mind’s tendency to amplify them through expectation, vanity, and narrative. The thought is both deflationary and consoling: triumphs are less absolute than we fantasize, and disasters are rarely as total as we fear. It also implies a critique of self-knowledge—our inner “reports” are biased—encouraging a cooler, more proportionate view of fortune and misfortune, consistent with his broader project of exposing the hidden motives behind human sentiments.

French original commonly given as: « Nous ne sommes jamais ni si heureux ni si malheureux que nous nous imaginons. »