Enter The Mind
Master of motive and venerator of vanity
Francois de La Rochefoucauld was born into one of France's great noble families and spent much of his early life amid court intrigue, military service, and the aristocratic rebellions of the Fronde. Those experiences left him suspicious of public virtue and acutely aware of the hidden calculations behind social life. After political disappointment and injury, he turned toward salon culture and literary reflection, producing the Maxims that made his name. In compact aphorisms he dissected vanity, self-love, ambition, and the disguises of moral language.
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Anchor Work
La Rochefoucauld's Maxims is a collection of aphorisms born out of aristocratic life, political disappointment, and salon culture in seventeenth-century France. In compressed form it strips away moral pretense to reveal vanity, self-interest, and the subtle mechanisms of social behavior.
Maxims
We are deceived if we think that mind and judgment are two different matters: judgment is but the extent of the light of the mind. This light penetrates to the bottom of matters; it remarks all that can be remarked, and...
Maxims
What we term virtue is often but a mass of various actions and divers interests, which fortune, or our own industry, manage to arrange; and it is not always from valour or from chastity that men are brave, and women...
Maxims
The contempt of riches in philosophers was only a hidden desire to avenge their merit upon the injustice of fortune, by despising the very goods of which fortune had deprived them; it was a secret to guard themselves...
Works
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1665 / 499 excerpts
La Rochefoucauld's Maxims is a collection of aphorisms born out of aristocratic life, political disappointment, and salon culture in seventeenth-century France. In compressed form it strips away moral pretense to reveal vanity, self-interest, and the subtle mechanisms of social behavior.
Highlights
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The author contends that major political and historical events are more often the result of personal passions and petty jealousies than grand, calculated designs.
Great and striking actions which dazzle the eyes are represented by politicians as the effect of great designs, instead of which they are commonly caused by the temper and the passions. Thus the war between Augustus and Anthony, which is set down to the...
Pity is characterized as a self-interested emotion where we assist others primarily to secure future help for ourselves, viewing their misfortunes as a preview of our own potential troubles.
Pity is often a reflection of our own evils in the ills of others. It is a delicate foresight of the troubles into which we may fall. We help others that on like occasions we may be helped ourselves, and these services which we render, are in reality benefits...
The author suggests that self-love provides individuals with a keen awareness of their own faults, allowing them to skillfully suppress or disguise any behavior that might invite criticism.
What makes us see that men know their faults better than we imagine, is that they are never wrong when they speak of their conduct; the same self-love that usually blinds them enlightens them, and gives them such true views as to make them suppress or disguise...
Moderation is presented as a calculated display of mental strength intended to avoid envy and project an image of being superior to one's own good fortune.
Moderation is caused by the fear of exciting the envy and contempt which those merit who are intoxicated with their good fortune; it is a vain display of our strength of mind, and in short the moderation of men at their greatest height is only a desire to...
Signature Themes
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Related Authors
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