"Our virtues are often, in reality, no better than vices disguised"
About this Quote
Polite society loves a flattering story about itself: that virtue is a stable inner quality, earned through moral labor. La Rochefoucauld punctures that narrative with a needle, not a hammer. “Often” is the crucial word. He’s not declaring humanity irredeemable; he’s saying the moral self-portrait we present is frequently a retouched image, with selfish motives carefully airbrushed into noble poses.
The line works because it shifts the battleground from actions to incentives. Charity can be a hunger for applause; courage can be vanity with better lighting; humility can be an ambition to be seen as unambitious. The subtext is less “people are bad” than “people are strategic.” We want to look good, feel good, and be treated as good, and we’ll recruit the language of virtue to do it. “Disguised” implies costume and performance, a social theater where moral labels function like fashion: signals meant to be read.
Context matters. Writing from the 17th-century French court, La Rochefoucauld had a front-row seat to a world where reputation was currency and sincerity was risky. His Maxims emerge from an environment that rewarded appearances, punished candor, and trained people to convert private desire into public principle. That’s why the sentence lands with cool cynicism: it’s observational, not sermonizing. It invites a suspicious kind of self-knowledge, the uncomfortable audit of our “good” deeds: not just what we did, but what we got out of being the kind of person who does it.
The line works because it shifts the battleground from actions to incentives. Charity can be a hunger for applause; courage can be vanity with better lighting; humility can be an ambition to be seen as unambitious. The subtext is less “people are bad” than “people are strategic.” We want to look good, feel good, and be treated as good, and we’ll recruit the language of virtue to do it. “Disguised” implies costume and performance, a social theater where moral labels function like fashion: signals meant to be read.
Context matters. Writing from the 17th-century French court, La Rochefoucauld had a front-row seat to a world where reputation was currency and sincerity was risky. His Maxims emerge from an environment that rewarded appearances, punished candor, and trained people to convert private desire into public principle. That’s why the sentence lands with cool cynicism: it’s observational, not sermonizing. It invites a suspicious kind of self-knowledge, the uncomfortable audit of our “good” deeds: not just what we did, but what we got out of being the kind of person who does it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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