The generality of virtuous women are like hidden treasures, they are safe only because nobody has sought after them.
Francois De La RochefoucauldRead
Hypocrisy is an homage that vice renders to virtue.
Interpretation
Hypocrisy involves pretending to uphold virtues while actually failing to do so.
This quote expresses the idea that hypocrisy, or the act of presenting oneself as virtuous while acting in vice, is a way that vice acknowledges the existence of virtue. It suggests that those who engage in hypocritical behavior recognize the value of virtue, even if they do not embody it themselves, indicating a complex relationship between morality and human behavior.
In practice
During a discussion about ethics in politics, this quote can highlight the contradiction in politicians who claim to uphold values but act otherwise.
The generality of virtuous women are like hidden treasures, they are safe only because nobody has sought after them.
Old men delight in giving good advice as a consolation for the fact that they can no longer set bad examples.
Some counterfeits reproduce so very well the truth that it would be a flaw of judgment not to be deceived by them.
Conceit causes more conversation than wit.
The defects and faults of the mind are like wounds in the body; after all imaginable care has been taken to heal them up, still there will be a scar left behind, and they are in continual danger of breaking the skin and bursting out again.
To understand matters rightly we should understand their details; and as that knowledge is almost infinite, our knowledge is always superficial and imperfect.
Intelligent discontent is the mainspring of civilization.
The mistake made by all previous systems of ethics has been the failure to recognize that life as such is the mysterious value with which they have to deal. All spiritual life meets us within natural life. Reverence for life, therefore, is applied to natural life and spiritual life alike. In the parable of Jesus, the shepherd saves not merely the soul of the lost sheep but the whole animal. The stronger the reverence for natural life, the stronger grows also that for spiritual life.
There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell.
Not one atom can rest until it finds its freedom.
He who wishes to revenge injuries by reciprocal hatred will live in misery. But he who endeavors to drive away hatred by means of love, fights with pleasure and confidence; he resists equally one or many men, and scarcely needs at all the help of fortune. Those whom he conquers yield joyfully
There are more fools than knaves in the world, else the knaves would not have enough to live upon.
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