A Quote by Francois de La Rochefoucauld

We often act treacherously more from weakness than from a fixed motive.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Quote Topics

Act Fixed More Motive Often Than Weakness

Quote Author

Francois de La Rochefoucauld
French - Writer
September 15, 1613 - March 17, 1680

Know that all sins and all evils can be summed up in that one word, weakness. It is weakness that is the motive power in all evil doing; it is weakness that makes men injure others; it is weakness that makes them manifest what they are not in reality. Let them know what they really are.

Swami Vivekananda

I see myself as having this innate weakness that a lot of times will get confused with kindness, but I know that it's often more weakness than kindness.

Takashi Miike

As a motive for terror, religion has more often than not required a good deal of lubrication by lucre.

Margaret Thatcher

Love is an alchemist that can transmute poison into food--and a spaniel, that prefers even punishment from one hand to caresses from another. But it is in love as in war, we are often more indebted for our success to the weakness of the defence than to the energy of the attack; for mere idleness has ruined more women than passion; vanity more than idleness, and credulity more than either.

Charles Caleb Colton

More often than not, anger is actually an indication of weakness rather than of strength.

Dalai Lama

If you choose not to act, you have little chance of success. What’s more, when you choose to act, you’re able to succeed more frequently than you think. How often in life do we avoid doing something because we think we’ll fail? Is failure really worse than doing nothing? And how often might we actually have triumphed if we had just decided to give it a try?

Katty Kay

To kill someone, even treacherously is more manly than to wound a friend by betraying his confidence.

Italo Svevo

Treachery is more often the effect of weakness than of a formed design.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

It is often more important to act than to understand... there are times... when two conflicting opinions, though one happens to be right, are more perilous than one opinion which is wrong.

John Grierson

Self-projection is, more often than not, the move of the minor craftsman, of the tactics of the hour whose inherent weakness is, precisely, that of originality.

George Steiner

If we would induce others to act virtuously, it will prove more effectual to show them their capacities than to expose their weakness--to attract them by a fairer ideal than to terrify them by pictures of misery and shame.

Edwin Hubbel Chapin

We are more often treacherous through weakness than through calculation.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Watch your motive before God; have no other motive in prayer than to know Him.

Oswald Chambers

People act on what they want more often than what they need.

Mark Goulston

Literature more often tells the story of impulses we don't act on than of ones we do. I could joke about the Cain and Abel story with my brother without expecting him to be worried, though it's always possible he was more anxious than he let on.