Francois de La Rochefoucauld Quotes

The name and pretense of virtue is as serviceable to self-interest as are real vices.

Virtue must be valuable, if men and women of all degrees pretend to have it.

Our virtues are most frequently but vices disguised.

An ounce of hypocrisy is worth a pound of ambition.

Hypocrisy is not a way of getting back to the moral high ground. Pretending you're moral, saying your moral is not the same as acting morally.

The only vice that cannot be forgiven is hypocrisy. The repentance of a hypocrite is itself hypocrisy.

Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.

In England the only homage which they pay to Virtue - is hypocrisy.

Virtue has a veil, vice a mask.

This age thinks better of a gilded fool Than of a threadbare saint in wisdom's school.

You can be brilliant in some ways and despicable in others. You can be a clean, upright, moral individual in your private life who never swears, treats women with respect, and speaks highly of duty and honor - and go out every day and dedicate yourself to a cause that makes the world worse.

A man given to vice is always an idealist.

For many wish not so much to be, as to seem to be, endowed with real virtue.

Innocence alone dares commit certain acts of audacity. Virtue, when tutored, is as calculating as vice.

Villainy wears many masks; none so dangerous as the mask of virtue.

Virtue sometimes pretends. Vice is always sincere.

The vices of which we are full we carefully hide from others, and we flatter ourselves with the notion that they are small and trivial; we sometimes even embrace them as virtues.

There is some virtue in almost every vice, except hypocrisy; and even that, while it is a mockery of virtue, is at the same time a compliment to it.

Vice deceives us when dressed in the garb of virtue.

Bourgeois morality is largely a system of making cheap virtues a cloak for expensive vices.

How sternly we reproach virtue for its failings, how indulgent we are to the better qualities of vice!

Through tattered clothes, small vices do appear. Robes and furred gowns hide all.

Few are those who wish to be endowed with virtue rather than to seem so.

Hypocrisy is a fashionable vice, and all fashionable vices pass for virtue.

A saint abroad, and a devil at home.