Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillacla ʁɔʃfuˈko]; 15 September 1613 – 17 March 1680) was a noted French author of maxims and memoirs. It is said that his world-view was clear-eyed and urbane, and that he neither condemned human conduct nor sentimentally celebrated it. Born in Paris on the Rue des Petits Champs, at a time when the royal court was vacillating between aiding the nobility and threatening it, he was considered an exemplar of the accomplished 17th-century...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth15 September 1613
CountryFrance
When our vices leave us, we like to imagine it is we who are leaving them.
Vices are ingredients of virtues just as poisons are ingredients of remedies. Prudence mixes and tempers them and uses them effectively against life's ills.
Hypocrisy is an homage that vice renders to virtue.
We often credit ourselves with vices the reverse of what we have, thus when weak we boast of our obstinacy.
Weakness is more opposed to virtue than is vice.
When our vices desert us, we flatter ourselves that we are deserting our vices.
Whilst weakness and timidity keep us to our duty, virtue has often all the honor.
Nature seems at each man's birth to have marked out the bounds of his virtues and vices, and to have determined how good or how wicked that man shall be capable of being.
There are a great many men valued in society who have nothing to recommend them but serviceable vices.
Our virtues are often, in reality, no better than vices disguised.
What keeps us from abandoning ourselves entirely to one vice, often, is the fact that we have several.
We do not despise all those who have vices, but we do despise those that have no virtue.
The virtues and vices are all put in motion by interest.
Fortune makes our virtues and vices visible, just as light does the objects of sight.