The generality of virtuous women are like hidden treasures, they are safe only because nobody has sought after them.
Francois De La RochefoucauldRead
Weakness is more opposed to virtue than is vice.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Weakness hinders moral excellence more than wrongdoing does.
This quote suggests that a lack of strength or resolve is a greater barrier to achieving virtue than outright immoral actions. It implies that those who are weak often fail to uphold moral standards, thereby posing a more significant challenge to virtue compared to those who might knowingly commit vices despite possibly having the strength to choose better.
Themes
WeaknessVirtueMoralStrengthCharacter
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about personal development, you could use this quote to emphasize the importance of building inner strength.
More from Francois De La Rochefoucauld
All quotes βOld men delight in giving good advice as a consolation for the fact that they can no longer set bad examples.
Francois De La RochefoucauldRead
Some counterfeits reproduce so very well the truth that it would be a flaw of judgment not to be deceived by them.
Francois De La RochefoucauldRead
Conceit causes more conversation than wit.
Francois De La RochefoucauldRead
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.
Francois De La RochefoucauldRead
To understand matters rightly we should understand their details; and as that knowledge is almost infinite, our knowledge is always superficial and imperfect.
Francois De La RochefoucauldRead
Similar quotes
It is not clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value.
Stephen HawkingRead
For forty years, I have devoted myself to the cause of the people's revolution with but one aim in view - the elevation of China to a position of freedom and equality among the nations.
Sun Yat-SenRead
What of it? If I die, I die. It will be no great loss to the world, and I am thoroughly bored with life. I am like a man yawning at a ball; the only reason he does not go home to bed is that his carriage has not arrived yet.
Mikhail LermontovRead
I felt, as I became a later and later bloomer, alienated not just from my own recalcitrant glabrous little body but in a way from the whole elemental exterior I'd come to see as my co-conspirator.
David Foster WallaceRead
But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say can be reduced to signs that constitute faith? Then the whole system becomes weightless, it is no longer anything but a gigantic simulacrum - not unreal, but simulacrum, that is to say never exchanged for the real, but exchanged for itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference.
Jean BaudrillardRead
Racism was not a problem on the Discworld, because - what with trolls and dwarfs and so on - speciesism was more interesting. Black and white lived in perfect harmony and ganged up on green.
Terry PratchettRead