A Quote by Francois de La Rochefoucauld
If vanity does not entirely overthrow the virtues, at least it makes them all totter.
Related Quotes
It is very natural that every one who makes anything inside themselves that is makes it entirely out of what is in them does naturally have to have two civilizations. They have to have the civilization that makes them and the civilization that has nothing to do with them.
Strength, Courage, Mastery, and Honor are the alpha virtues of men all over the world. They are the fundamental virtues of men because without them, no 'higher' virtues can be entertained. You need to be alive to philosophize. You can add to these virtues and you can create rules and moral codes to govern them, but if you remove them from the equation altogether you aren't just leaving behind the virtues that are specific to men, you are abandoning the virtues that make civilization possible.
God alone is entirely exempt from all want of human virtues, that which needs least is the most absolute and divine.
Vanity, in a fairy tale, will make you evil. Vanity in the real world will drive you nuts. Vanity makes you say things like “I deserved a better life than this.
Affectation proceeds from one of these two causes,--vanity or hypocrisy; for as vanity puts us on affecting false characters, in order to purchase applause; so hypocrisy sets us on an endeavor to avoid censure, by concealing our vices under an appearance of their opposite virtues.
Someone may ask, 'How is justice greater than all the other virtues?' The other virtues gratify the one who possesses them; justice does not give pleasure to the one possessing it, but instead pleases others.
No, see the slide’s too high. He could fall and get a concussion. (Wulf) Forget that. He could rack himself on the teeter-totter. (Chris) Teeter-totter nothing. The swings are a choking hazard. Whose idea was it for him to have this? (Urian)
Education makes life self-reliant. It inspires man to live with dignity in the society. It is the foremost requisite of a teacher to identify his own virtues. He needs to live supported by his inherent virtues-and must continue to uphold them.
Memory is a wonderfully useful tool, and without it judgement does its work with difficulty; it is entirely lacking in me.... Now,the more I distrust my memory, the more confused it becomes. It serves me better by chance encounter; I have to solicit it nonchalantly. For if I press it, it is stunned; and once it has begun to totter, the more I probe it, the more it gets mixed up and embarrassed. It serves me at its own time, not at mine.
Fortune makes our virtues and vices visible, just as light does the objects of sight.
Those possest of the greatest Virtues are always least pleas'd with the repetition of them.
Children demand that their heroes should be freckle less, and easily believe them so: perhaps a first discovery to the contrary is less revolutionary shock to a passionate child than the threatened downfall of habitual beliefs which makes the world seem to totter for us in maturer life.
Pride and vanity have built more hospitals than all the virtues together.
Nothing so soothes our vanity as a display of greater vanity in others; it makes us vain, in fact, of our modesty.
If there is a single quality that is shared by all great men, it is vanity. But I mean by vanity only that they appreciate their own worth. Without this kind of vanity they would not be great. And with vanity alone, of course, a man is nothing.
Maybe it’s not, in the end, the virtues of others that so wrenches our hearts as it is the sense of almost unbearably poignant recognition when we see them at their most base, in their sorrow and gluttony and foolishness. You need the virtues, too—some sort of virtues—but we don’t care about Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina or Raskolnikov because they’re good. We care about them because they’re not admirable, because they’re us, and because great writers have forgiven them for it.
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