La Rochefoucauld's Maxims

Short, pithy reflections

This is a lighter, simpler post about the maxims of La Rochefoucauld.

I really like the aphoristic style (i.e. a concise, terse, or laconic expression of a general truth or principle) as a palette cleanser between heavier reads/posts; it allows for a mental recharge. I previously covered these expressions with respect to Diogenes of Sinope, the philosopher who told Alexander the Great to stop blocking his sunlight as he lay relaxing on the ground. Other early practitioners were Theognis, Hippocrates, and Seneca. I will be covering Emil Cioran’s, the pessimistic Romanian philosopher of aphorisms whose perspective was often compared to Nietzsche. I attempted some of my own political ones here, which could be improved upon (perhaps I’ll try again).

What do I like about the style? I like it’s directness. I like the disconnectedness between ideas. I like how good ones make you stop and think. It’s nice to be able to pick up a book on aphorisms, read as many or as few as I like and then do something else. Nietzsche is also known for his aphorisms, and it was his praise of the aristocratic French moralist writer La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680) both generally and in his Human, All Too Human (1878) that piqued my interest. They had similar approaches in the sense that La Rochefoucald believed everyone acted from what he referred to as “self-love” while Nietzsche believed that everyone acted from a similar “will to power”. Schopenhauer, who I covered previously in my post on philosophical pessimism, also praised La Rochefoucauld. Voltaire, Marcel Proust, Charles de Gaulle, Balzac, Conan Doyle and Blake were also inspired by him.

Portrait of La Rochefoucauld

La Rochefoucauld called his short, pithy comments maxims instead of aphorisms, and they were shorter than Cioran’s or Diogenes’. They’re basically the same thing, though, except for length.

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A brief history

La Rochefoucauld was a member of a prominent French aristocratic family, participating in military life where he supported the hereditary French aristocracy against both foreign armies and also against the king, who eventually won out against the nobles. La Rochefoucault then retired from public life and eventually published his Reflexions ou Sentences et Maximes morales (Moral Reflections or Sententiae and Maxims), which was revised several times and had a significant impact among the French upper class.

I picked up the Oxford World’s Classics edition La Rochefoucauld: Collected Maxims and Other Reflections (2008) which seemed like a decent translation, although it also includes the French original which was not necessary for my purposes. It also included unpublished longer essays that were stuffy and boring. I’m going to quote some of the maxims that stood out to me below, ignoring the many average and lower quality ones, and hopefully they are interesting and worthy of further consideration. Like from the Collected Maxims, they are not arranged in any particular order.

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The maxims

• We have no more control over the duration of our passions than over the duration of our lives. (V:5)

• Passions are the only orators who always succeed in persuading. They are, so to speak, a natural art, with infallible rules; and the most artless man who is passionate is more persuasive than the most eloquent man who is not. (V:8)

• Passions are unjust and self-interested, which makes it dangerous to follow them; so we should mistrust them even when they seem most reasonable. (V:9)

• It takes greater virtues to bear good fortune than bad. (V:25)

• Neither the sun nor death can be looked at steadily. (V:26)

• The philosophers’ disdain for wealth was a hidden desire to compensate their own merit for the injustices of fortune, by showing contempt for the very possessions that she was keeping from them. It was a secret method of protecting themselves against the degradations of poverty; it was an indirect way of attaining the respect that they could not gain by wealth. (V:54)

• It seems that our deeds have lucky or unlucky stars, to which they owe a large part of the praise or blame that is bestowed on them. (V:58)

• No disguise can long hide love where it exists, or simulate it where it does not exist. (V:70)

• If love is judged by most of its results, it is more like hatred than friendship. (V:72)

• Silence is the safest policy for someone who does not trust himself. (V:79)

• What makes us so inconstant in our friendships is the fact that it is hard to know the qualities of the soul, and easy to know those of the mind. (V:80)

• Men would not live long in social contact unless they were deceived by one another. (V:87)

• Old people like to give good advice, as a consolation for the fact that they can no longer set bad examples. (V:93)

• To know things well, we must know the details; and as they are almost infinite, our knowledge is always superficial and imperfect. (V:106)

• The sure way to be deceived is to think yourself more astute than other people. (V:127)

• It is easier to be wise for other people than for yourself. (V:132)

• We are sometimes as different from ourselves as we are from other people. (V:135)

• The ability to make good use of average talents is an art that extorts respect, and often wins more repute than real merit does. (V:162)

• There are relapses in the soul’s illnesses, just as there are in the body’s. What we take to be a cure is most often merely a respite or a change of illness. (V:193)

• Someone who thinks he can find enough in himself to do without everyone else is greatly deceived; but someone who thinks that other people cannot do without him is still more deceived. (V:201)

• It is a great folly to want to be wise on your own. (V:231)

• It is more often pride than lack of enlightenment that makes us oppose so stubbornly the generally accepted view of something. We find the front seats already taken on the correct side, and we do not want any of the back ones. (V:234)

• Supreme cleverness lies in knowing the exact value of things. (V:244)

• True eloquence consists of saying all that is needed and only what is needed. (V:250)

• Humility is often merely a pretense of submissiveness, which we use to make other people submit to us. It is an artifice by which pride debases itself in order to exalt itself; and though it can transform itself in thousands of ways, pride is never better disguised and more receptive than when it is hidden behind the mask of humility. (V:254)

• Solemnity is an outward mystification devised to hide inner faults. (V:257)

• We are deceiving ourselves if we think that only the violent passions, such as ambition and love, can conquer the others. Laziness, sluggish though it is, often manages to dominate them; it wrests from us all of life’s plans and deeds, where it imperceptibly destroys and devours the passions and virtues alike. (V:266)

• The body’s humours follow a normal, regular course, which imperceptibly impels and bends our will. They progress together and successively exercise secret dominion over us, so that they play an important part in all our deeds, though we do not know it. (V:297)

• Whatever good is said about us never teaches us anything new. (V:303)

• What usually prevents us from showing the depths of our hearts to our friends is not so much mistrust of them as mistrust of ourselves. (V:315)

• Circumstances reveal our nature to other people, and still more to ourselves. (V:345)

• Injuries done to us by others often cause us less pain than those that we do to ourselves. (V:363)

• Most virtuous women are hidden treasures: they are safe only because they are not sought after. (V:368)

• Nothing should astonish us except the fact that we are still capable of being astonished. (V:384)

• Nobody is more often wrong than someone who cannot bear being wrong. (V:386)

• In the depths of our minds, it seems, nature has hidden away talents and forms of cleverness unknown to us; only the passions have the power of bringing them to light, sometimes giving us surer and more complete insights than art could possibly do. (V:404)

• We may look great in a position that is less than we deserve, but we often look small in a position that is too great or us. (V:419) [or see the Peter Principle]

• Most friends make us lose our taste for friendship, and most pious people make us lose our taste for piety. (V:427)

• We should not judge a man’s merits by his great qualities, but by the use he makes of them. (V:437)

• When fortune catches us by surprise and gives us a position of greatness without having led us to it step by step, and without our having hoped for it, it is almost impossible to fill it well and seem worthy of holding it. (V:449)

• In great matters we should strive less to create favourable circumstances than to profit from those that arise. (V:453)

• We would gain more by showing ourselves as we are than by trying to appear to be what we are not. (V:457)

• Our enemies’ judgments of us are nearer the truth than our own. (V:458)

• All our qualities, good as well as bad, are doubtful and indeterminate, and almost all of them are at the mercy of circumstances. (V:470)

• Imagination could never invent the number of different contradictions that exist innately in each person’s heart. (V:478)

• Nothing is rarer than true kindness: usually, the very people who think they possess it are merely weak or polite. (V:481)

• Young people just entering society should look shamefaced or half-witted; a confident, assured manner usually turns into insolence. (V:495)

• Quarrels would not last long if the fault was only on one side. (V:496)

And some maxims from earlier editions which were deleted in the later ones:

• Everyone objects to something in other people that they object to in him. (I:33)

• Justice is merely an intense fear that our belongings will be taken away from us. That is what leads us to be considerate and respectful for all our neighbour’s interests, and scrupulously diligent never to harm him. This fear keeps man within the limits of the possessions that birth or fortune has given him; and without such fear, he would be constantly making raids on other people. (I:88)

• When we no longer hope to find sense in other people, we have lost it ourselves. (I:103)

• The most refined folly is begotten by the most refined wisdom. (I:134)

• Every kind of human talent, like every kind of tree, has its own unique characteristics and bears its own unique fruits. (I:138)

• You cannot answer for your courage when you have never been in danger. (I:236)

• When you cannot find peace within yourself, it is useless to look for it elsewhere (II:49)

• How can we expect another person to keep our secret, if we cannot keep it ourselves? (IV:87)

• Keeping your health by means of too strict a diet is itself a tiresome illness. (IV:274)

Maxims never published:

• Just as the happiest person in the world is the one who is satisfied with few things, the great and the ambitious are the most wretched in that respect - because they need to accumulate innumerable possessions in order to be happy. (L. 38)

• Physical labour frees people from mental pain; and that is what makes the poor happy. (VIS: 2)

I hope you found these select maxims interesting and worthy of reflection. The pithy and concise statements are different than the longer aphorisms, but in some ways they inspire more thought by the reader. This should be the hope of a good writer, i.e. not to feed you arguments but to help you develop your own.

Thanks for reading.