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
There are certain defects which, well-mounted, glitter like virtue itself.
Idleness and fear keeps us in the path of duty, but our virtue often gets the praise.
We endeavor to make a virtue of the faults we are unwilling to correct.
Hypocrisy is an homage that vice renders to virtue.
To praise princes for virtues they do not possess is to insult them without fear of consequences.
If vanity does not entirely overthrow the virtues, at least it makes them all totter.
What we take for virtue is often nothing but an assemblage of different actions, and of different interests, that fortune or our industry knows how to arrange.
It requires greater virtues to support good fortune than bad.
Weakness is more opposed to virtue than is vice.
When we exaggerate our friends' tenderness towards us, it is often less from gratitude than from a desire to exhibit our own virtue.
Women's virtue is frequently nothing but a regard to their own quiet and a tenderness for their reputation.
Our virtues are often, in reality, no better than vices disguised.
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.