In his 1878 book Human, All Too Human, Friedrich Nietzsche compared François de La Rochefoucauld to a “good marksman” who repeatedly hit “the bull’s-eye of human nature.”
La Rochefoucauld was a seventeenth century essayist, memoirist, and perhaps the greatest maxim writer of France. He had a distinguished military and political career.
By all accounts, he was an honorable man. One reason for this is that he was aware of humanity’s talent for self-deception, and worked hard to overcome it in himself.
In referencing his compendium of penetrating insights into human nature, La Rochefoucauld once said:
“The reason why we argue so much against the maxims that expose the human heart, is that we ourselves are afraid of being exposed by them.”
I first discovered his work from the essays of the great Theodore Dalrymple, who has characterized La Rochefoucauld as a “master of the discomfiting aphorism.”
You can read my previous collections of his penetrating maxims here and here.
Below are 18 more of my favorite quotes from La Rochefoucauld:
1. “We confess our small faults only to convince people that we have no greater ones.”
2. “Humility is often merely a pretence 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 deceptive than when it is hidden behind the mask of humility.”
Reminds me of when upper-middle-class people endlessly lament their privilege. One gets the sense that they get a perverse sense of pride from expressing their high social rank.
Or white privilege. Affluent and educated whites are the most enthusiastic about the idea of white privilege, yet they are the least likely to incur any costs for promoting that belief. Rather, they raise their social standing by talking about their privilege. In other words, upper-class whites gain status by talking about their high status.
3. “The approval we give to those who are just entering society often arises from secret envy of those who are already established there.”
Obviously there are noble motives involved in supporting promising young people. La Rochefoucauld suggests that a hidden and less flattering motive is the thrill people get from supplanting people who are currently in positions of power; seeing them get knocked down a peg.
4. “Moderation has been turned into a virtue to limit the ambition of great men, and to comfort average people for their lack of fortune and lack of merit.”
Both Machiavelli and Nietzsche would agree with this.
5. “To be a great man, you must know how to take advantage of every turn of fortune.”
6. “Most women mourn the death of their lovers less because they loved them than to seem worthy of being loved.”
La Rochefoucauld wrote this in the seventeenth century. An era when lots of women would see their sons and husbands go off to war and die. Interestingly, an evolutionary theory of grief backs up his maxim (not just for women, but for humans in general). The theory posits that the reason humans experience grief in response to the loss of a loved one is in order to signal to social allies and romantic partners that we are loyal. If your best friend or your spouse died and you just shrugged and moved on, other people in your social circle would view you with suspicion. But if you exhibit grief, people then infer that you are a committed and invested social partner who they can trust. Intense mourning is an honest, hard-to-fake social signal that you care about those around you and would therefore be a good ally or romantic partner. High grievers are rated as nicer, more loyal, and more trustworthy than low grievers.
Of course, it’s important to be careful not to confuse the evolutionary motivation with the psychological motivation. From the standpoint of evolution, we eat to sustain our bodies and have sex to pass on our genes. But these are not the personal psychological reason we do these things. They just come naturally to us because evolution instilled in our ancestors feelings and behaviors that, on average, allowed them to survive and reproduce.
7. “However we may mistrust the sincerity of those who talk to us, we always think they are more truthful with us than with other people.”
If someone you know regularly badmouths other people when speaking privately with you, it is a 100% certainty that he or she is badmouthing you when speaking privately to others.
8. “We would often be ashamed of our finest deeds, if people could see all the motives that produced them.”
9. “Nearly all of our faults are more forgivable than the means we use to hide them.”
10. “We should not judge a man’s merit by his great qualities, but by the use he makes of them.”
11. “We would have passionate desires for very few things if we fully understood what we were desiring.”
The psychologist Roy Baumeister and his co-authors have suggested that sexual attraction hijacks our rational mind, leading us to believe our romantic partners are better than they really are. This is a necessary evolutionary adaptation that promotes pair bonding, but it also might lead us to ignore flaws that become more apparent once you transition out of the “honeymoon phase” of a relationship.
12. “In friendship, as in love, we are often happier in what we do not know than in what we do know.”
13. “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.”
You can see this with people who were selected for important positions or admitted to elite institutions not because of their abilities but because they mouthed the right slogans or ticked the right boxes.
14. “Our enemies’ judgements of us are nearer the truth than our own.”
Relatedly, from Tolstoy: “Your enemies can be more useful to you than your friends, because your friends can often pardon your weaknesses, but your enemies notice them and attract your attention to them. Do not neglect the opinion of your enemies.”
Your enemies can be good at identifying your shortcomings and blunders. Friends and allies often have incentives to flatter you or skirt the truth, but your adversaries are in a unique position to pinpoint your flaws.
15. “The same pride that makes us criticize the faults we think we do not have, also leads us to feel disdain for the good qualities we do not have.”
16. “There is often more pride than kindness in our pity for our enemies’ misfortunes; we show them signs of compassion in order to make them feel how superior to them we are.”
17. “However rare true love may be, true friendship is even rarer.”
18. “Our envy always lasts longer than the good fortune of those we envy.”
The contemporary expression of #2 is the "humble brag."
Too much of a downer in this Sunday morning. Is it me or do others detect some self loathing here?