Book: Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims

Overview
François de La Rochefoucauld’s Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665) is a collection of aphorisms born of aristocratic experience, civil war, and salon culture in the age of Louis XIV. Composed and refined across successive editions, the book gathers hundreds of brief, polished observations on human motives and behavior. Its center of gravity is a stark analysis of amour-propre, self-love, as the hidden spring that moves nearly all our actions, including those we call noble. Far from a systematic treatise, it offers flashes of insight in sentences that balance elegance and severity, producing a portrait of human nature that is at once disenchanted and exact.

Form and Style
The maxims are short, epigrammatic, and densely constructed, often built on antithesis and paradox. This compression allows each sentence to do analytical and rhetorical work at once: it cuts through cant, exposes contradictions, and leaves an aftertaste of ambiguity. The method resembles a moral microscope. Instead of arguing discursively, the author isolates a pattern, names it with cool lucidity, and moves on. He revised relentlessly, pruning verbiage and sharpening rhythm; the resulting style is lapidary, urbane, and merciless.

Core Themes
Amour-propre is the keystone. Self-love disguises itself as virtue, generosity, and courage; it thrives on interest, pride, and vanity, and is quick to recruit reason as its advocate. Hence the famous claim that our virtues are often only vices in disguise. Hypocrisy is treated not as an aberration but as social lubricant, “the homage that vice pays to virtue”, a concession that shows how public standards matter even when privately flouted. Lucidity about motives does not abolish virtue so much as demystify it, measuring moral claims against the currencies of reputation, fear, and desire.

The maxims return to constancy, inconstancy, and self-knowledge. Human beings shift with circumstance; we confuse weakness for goodness and luck for merit. Gratitude frequently conceals a hope for further favors. Pity is mingled with a subtle love of superiority. We bear the misfortunes of others with a fortitude we cannot muster for our own. Such observations repeat with variations, testing the same few truths against different situations until they feel inescapable.

Love, Friendship, and the Social Theater
Court society supplies both material and metaphor. Love is analyzed as a drama directed by vanity as much as by passion; it lives by attention and dies of familiarity. Friendship is possible, but it is never pure: interest, esteem, and habit entangle. Conversation and manners become moral phenomena, since self-presentation is a means of power. La Rochefoucauld treats dissimulation not simply as deceit but as a technique for inhabiting a world where visibility and judgment are permanent facts.

Fortune, Politics, and Conduct
A veteran of the Fronde, he is alert to the role of fortune. Success often follows timing and temperament more than intention; prudence lies in recognizing constraints and managing appearances. Political and military virtues, courage, clemency, magnanimity, are read as strategic, their purity less important than their effects. Yet the book does not recommend cynicism as a creed. It implies a discipline of seeing without consolations, of lowering one’s moral voice to match what human beings can actually do. Lucidity, tact, and moderation emerge as the only reliable ethics in a world ruled by chance and self-love.

Influence and Legacy
The Maxims helped found the French tradition of the moralistes, alongside Pascal and La Bruyère, and later shaped writers from Chamfort and Stendhal to Nietzsche and Proust. Its cool psychology, compactness, and irony made it a touchstone for modern skepticism about motives. Readers have accused it by turns of misanthropy and of hard-won clarity. Either way, its sentences endure because they feel like instruments, finely made tools for prying open the distance between what we profess and what we are.