Francois de La Rochefoucauld Quotes

Morals are an acquirement -- like music, like a foreign language, like piety, poker, paralysis -- no man is born with them.

Education must have two foundations --morality as a support for virtue, prudence as a defense for self against the vices of others. By letting the balance incline to the side of morality, you only make dupes or martyrs; by letting it incline to the other, you make calculating egoists.

We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.

When you rely on incentives, you undermine virtues. Then when you discover that you actually need people who want to do the right thing, those people don't exist because you've crushed anyone's desire to do the right thing with all these incentives.

We do not despise all those who have vices, but we do despise those that have no virtue.

If reason dominates in man, he rises higher than angels. If lust overpowers man, he descends lower than the beast.

Virtuous and vicious every man must be, few in the extreme, but all in the degree.

Man is not equally moral at all hours, this is well known. If his morality is judged to be the capability for great self-sacrificing resolutions and self-denial (which, when continuous and grown habitual, are called holiness)

Over the last few years, I've been focusing on questions having to do with the self, and questions having to do with morality. I'm very interested in why we do good things, or bad things, and where moral judgments come from.

If one is not virtuous he becomes vicious.

We become moral when we are unhappy.

No one can be good for long if goodness is not in demand.

One has only as much morality as one has philosophy and poetry.

I profoundly believe it takes a lot of practice to become a moral slob.

I want people to come away from my book with questions. Questions about virtue and goodness. Not answers.

Were there no desire there would be no virtue, and because one man desires what another does not, who shall say whether the child of his desire be Vice or Virtue?

Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.

I think that unless you can take judgments of right and wrong like an automaton, you must have emotions because that is our only way of moral guidance.

Though ambition itself be a vice, yet it is often times the cause of virtues.

Educate men without religion and you make of them but clever devils.

Conscience is known to be adequate in individuals; in large numbers little is to be expected of it.

Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose.

I don't know how to play evil.

What most men call their conscience is imaginary virtue switching left or right according to self-interest.

To see the line between being good and bad is really thin. It's not easy for anyone, not the manager, the players or the staff.