Love Quote by Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Self-praise has to dress itself up, and La Rochefoucauld knows the safest costume is virtue. To speak well of your own heart is to claim warm intentions: generosity, loyalty, sincerity. It’s socially flattering because it reassures everyone that you play by the moral rules. The “heart” is a credential anyone can flash without sounding like a threat.

The mind is different. To speak well of your own mind is to claim superiority, and superiority creates enemies. In a courtly world where reputation is currency and envy is a sport, announcing your intelligence is less confession than provocation. So people learn to be coy: they imply cleverness through irony, understatement, or the elegant put-down, while letting others do the praising. Humility becomes less a virtue than a strategy for survival.

The subtext is even sharper: we lie most convincingly when we talk about our motives. The heart is where we stash our self-image, the clean narrative of why we did what we did. The mind, by contrast, leaves evidence. It can be tested, contradicted, made ridiculous. Claiming a “good heart” is unfalsifiable; claiming a “good mind” invites comparison, and comparison is brutal.

As a moralist steeped in salon culture, La Rochefoucauld isn’t just lamenting vanity. He’s mapping a social physics: moral talk functions as camouflage, intellectual talk as a weapon. People will brag about goodness because it costs little and buys trust. They won’t brag about brains because it costs too much and buys conflict.