“Our virtues are most frequently but vices in disguise.”
Nos vertus ne sont, le plus souvent, que de vices déguisés.
Epigraph. Note: "This epigraph, which is the key to the system of La Rochefoucauld, is found in another form as No. 179 of the Maxims of the first edition, 1665; it is omitted from the second and third, and reappears for the first time in the fourth edition at the head of the Reflections". Aime Martin, editor, Bartlett's Quotations, 1919 edition.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)
Original
Nos vertus ne sont, le plus souvent, que des vices déguisés.
Variant: Nos vertus ne sont, le plus souvent, que de vices déguisés.
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François de La Rochefoucauld 156
French author of maxims and memoirs 1613–1680Related quotes
“Our age is an age of moderate virtue
And moderate vice”
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Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
“We are far more liable to catch the vices than the virtues of our associates.”
As quoted in Thesaurus of Epigrams: A New Classified Collection of Witty Remarks, Bon Mots and Toasts (1942) by Edmund Fuller
Source: 'Parliamentary Reform', Quarterly Review, 117, 1865, p. 550
'Parliamentary Reform', Quarterly Review, 117, 1865, p. 550
“But are sailors, frequenters of fiddlers' greens, without vices?”
Source: Billy Budd, the Sailor (1891), Ch. 2
Context: But are sailors, frequenters of fiddlers' greens, without vices? No; but less often than with landsmen do their vices, so called, partake of crookedness of heart, seeming less to proceed from viciousness than exuberance of vitality after long constraint: frank manifestations in accordance with natural law.
“Hypocrisy is a fashionable vice, and all fashionable vices pass for virtue.”