Enjoy The Road

Maxims

François de La Rochefoucauld

The ideas

30 ideas. Scroll sideways for the next one.

The book in short

What it is

A French duke, after losing a war and his place at court, spent years in a Paris salon writing one-sentence truths about why people do what they do. His 504 maxims keep asking what is hiding under our good actions, and they keep finding the voice in us that is always on our own side.

Who it’s for

Anyone from about 13 up who has ever caught themselves showing off while pretending not to. It reads best a few sayings at a time, and it reads differently at 15, 30, and 60.

The big ideas

Things to try

Handle with care

The Duke’s main claim, that most goodness is self-interest in disguise, has been argued against from his own time on. Many thinkers hold that caring about other people is a real motive of its own. He also wrote a set of sayings about women that are old-fashioned and are left out here. The famous English wording of some maxims comes from translations that change their meaning in places.

If you want more

The full collection has hundreds more sayings, many about love, pride, and envy, plus a long, honest essay about facing death and seven short essays on conversation, trust, and being natural. A good way in is the 1871 translation by Willis Bund and Friswell, or any modern one, read a page a day.

In plain words

Someone tells you your drawing is really good. You shrug and say nah, it’s not that good. And then you wait. Part of you is hoping they’ll say it again, louder.

A French duke noticed that move more than 350 years ago. He wrote it down in one sentence: turning down praise is often just a way to get praised twice.

Saying no to a compliment

Picture a warm room in Paris around the year 1660. Candles, soft chairs, a few friends talking late. One of them is a duke in his late forties. We’ll call him the Duke. He has fought in a civil war and lost. He was hit in the head in a battle, and for a while he couldn’t see. His days as a soldier and a player at court are over.

So he plays a different game. The woman who runs this room, Madame de Sablé, loves it. Each guest tries to write one true sentence about why people really do what they do. Then they pass the sentences around. They fix them. They cut every extra word. A good one is short, sharp, and a little uncomfortable.

The Duke is the best at this game. He keeps at it for years. In 1665 he prints a small book of his sentences, called maxims. By the time he is old, there are 504 of them.

Almost all of them chase one question. When people do something good, what is really going on underneath?

The voice that always takes your side

The Duke’s answer starts with something he called self-love. He didn’t mean liking yourself in a healthy way. He meant the voice inside you that is always on your side. It wants you to come out ahead. And it wants you to look good, especially to yourself.

He said this voice is the best flatterer in the world. A flatterer is someone who says nice things to you so you’ll like them. Other people’s flattery can be good. But nobody flatters you as well as you flatter yourself.

The tricky part is that this voice hides. So when you do something nice, the reason you can see is not always the reason doing the work.

Think about saying thank you. The Duke noticed that people love paying back small favors. Big favors are different. A big favor can make you feel like you owe someone, and owing feels like a leash. And a lot of thankfulness is really hope. You thank people nicely so they’ll help you again.

Or think about feeling sorry for someone. You see a kid get in trouble, and you feel bad for them. Part of that feeling is real. Part of it, the Duke said, is you picturing the same thing happening to you. When you help, you are also making sure someone will help you later.

This could sound like he thought everyone was fake. He didn’t. Look closely at his sayings and they almost always say often, or usually. They almost never say always. His point was smaller and harder to escape. Good actions usually come mixed. Some of the good is real. Some of it is the voice on your side, dressed up nicely.

Why other people’s mistakes are so easy to see

Here is something you can test at school tomorrow. Notice which mistakes of other people bug you the most.

The Duke said that if we had no faults of our own, we wouldn’t enjoy spotting other people’s so much. Think of a kid who hates it when someone brags. Often that kid is a bit of a bragger. It’s the same with bossy people: the ones who can’t stand them are often bossy themselves. Your own fault rubs against theirs, and that’s the part that stings.

When we do admit a fault, we pick carefully. The Duke noticed that people own up to small faults so everyone will think they don’t have big ones. Saying you’re bad at remembering birthdays is an easy thing to confess. Saying you only think about yourself is not.

He also noticed who is wrong the most. It’s the people who never let themselves be wrong.

When the mask won’t come off

Now the Duke goes one step further, and this is the step that matters most.

It’s one thing to put on a face for other people. You act cool when you’re nervous. You act like you don’t care when you do. Everyone does that.

But the Duke saw what happens if you do it long enough. The Duke wrote it this way:

“We become so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others that at last we are disguised to ourselves.”

To be accustomed to something means to be used to it. A disguise is a costume that hides who you are. So after a while the costume doesn’t just fool your friends. It fools you.

He gave a small example you can check anywhere. Everyone complains about their memory. People say they forgot their homework, or that they have the worst memory ever. But almost nobody ever says they have bad judgment. Judgment is how well you decide things. A bad memory is easy to admit, because it doesn’t say much about who you are. Bad judgment would.

Here’s the uncomfortable end of this idea. The Duke thought the people who don’t like you often see you more clearly than you see yourself. They aren’t blinded by the voice on your side. It’s much easier to be wise about other people than about yourself.

Feelings keep their own clock

If the voice on your side is one thing running you, feelings are another. The Duke said we can’t choose how long a feeling lasts, any more than we can choose how long we live.

You know this already. You decide to stop being mad at your sister. Then she says one thing and you’re mad again. You decide you’re over a crush. Then they walk into the room.

The Duke thought you believe your reasons are steering, but your heart often chose where to go first. Then your head makes up the reasons afterward. He said the head is always being fooled by the heart.

He also said a person who really feels something will win an argument against someone who speaks better but doesn’t care. Feeling is more convincing than skill. That’s exactly why you should be careful when your feelings seem most sure.

Jealousy was one feeling he watched closely. He said it lives on doubt. As long as you’re not sure, it keeps growing. Once you know for certain, it either stops or turns into rage. And it arrives with love, but it doesn’t always leave when love does.

He had one picture for how feelings behave when someone goes away. The Duke wrote it this way:

“Absence extinguishes small passions and increases great ones, as the wind will blow out a candle, and blow in a fire.”

To extinguish means to put out. A passion is a strong feeling. Think of a friend who moves to another city. If the friendship was small, time apart blows it out like a candle. If it was big, time apart makes it burn harder, the way wind makes a campfire roar.

Luck and a bad mood

Feelings aren’t the only thing we don’t control. The Duke said luck and mood rule the world.

He noticed that when people do something big, they explain it later as a plan. Someone makes the team and says they always knew they would. Often it was luck, or a bad mood that made them try harder that day. The plan gets added afterward, when people tell the story.

Mood also changes how big things feel. The same grade can feel fine on Monday and terrible on Friday, depending on your day. The Duke put it this way in one of his sayings: we are never as happy, or as unhappy, as we think we are.

That one is worth remembering. When something feels like the worst thing ever, it is usually smaller than it feels. When something feels like the best thing ever, that feeling won’t last at the same size either.

His advice about luck was simple. Treat it like your health. Enjoy it when it’s good. Be patient when it’s bad. Save big, risky fixes for real emergencies.

Can you stare at the sun?

Here’s a test of all that calm. It’s easy to feel wise about a trouble that’s already over. It’s also easy to feel brave about a trouble that might come someday. The trouble that’s happening right now is different. The Duke said that one beats our calm almost every time.

You’ve seen this. You tell a friend exactly how to handle a fight with their parents. Then you have the same fight and you forget every word.

He had one image for the hardest trouble of all. You can’t look straight at the sun, and you can’t look straight at death. You have to squint and look away.

He wasn’t trying to scare anyone. He had been in battles and been badly hurt, and he was being honest about what he’d seen. People who talk bravely about death when it’s far away often feel very different when it’s close. The wisest people, he thought, don’t pretend they can look straight at it. They find good things to look at instead.

The friend who tells you the truth

After all this, you might think the Duke didn’t believe in friendship. He was tough on it. He said a lot of what people call friendship is really a trade. I help you, you help me, and each side hopes to come out a little ahead.

He also admitted something most people won’t say out loud. When a close friend has bad luck, some small part of us may notice something that isn’t all bad for us. Maybe we get the chance to show how kind we are. He wasn’t saying this is good. He was saying it’s there.

But then he asked a lot of friendship. He said it’s more shameful to never trust your friends than to get fooled by them now and then. And he said the hardest thing a friend can do is not admitting their own faults to you. It’s showing you yours.

Think about who does that for you. Most people just agree with you. A real friend tells you when you’re being unfair.

The Duke said true love is rare, and true friendship is even rarer. That’s a big compliment from someone who doubted almost everything. Rare means it exists. It’s just hard to find, and worth a lot when you do.

Is anyone actually listening?

In that warm room in Paris, the Duke watched people talk for years. He noticed something you can see at any lunch table.

Most people aren’t really listening. They’re waiting for their turn to talk. Even polite people only look like they’re listening. You can see it in their eyes. They’re already planning what they’ll say next.

He also noticed how much we love talking about ourselves. And he said that should be a warning. The fun we have telling our story is not shared by the person stuck hearing it.

So he wrote down some rules. Let people finish, even when what they say isn’t very smart. Don’t interrupt. Talk about things the other person cares about. Never use big words to sound important. And his safest rule of all: listen a lot, talk a little, and don’t say anything you’ll wish you hadn’t.

He thought listening well and answering well made people like you more than being clever ever could.

Being what you look like

The Duke had a famous saying about hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is pretending to be good when you’re not. He said hypocrisy is the way bad behavior shows respect to good behavior.

That sounds strange at first. But think about what people pretend when a teacher or a parent is watching. They pretend to be kind, or honest, or hardworking. Even the fakers are copying goodness. So goodness must be the thing everyone knows is worth having.

He also said the whole world is a bit like actors on a stage. Everyone plays a part to look like what they want to be.

Against all that acting, he gave one plain piece of advice. You’ll do better letting people see what you really are than trying to look like something you’re not.

He noticed that little kids are usually easy to like. It’s because they’re just being themselves. They don’t know any other way yet. Kids get less charming when they start copying other people and can’t quite do it right. He said there are no good copies.

And he explained why some people with lots of talent are hard to like, while others with less are easy to be around. The first kind keep trying to seem like something they’re not. The second kind just are what they look like.

People got angry at the Duke’s sayings. They said he was too harsh about human nature. He had an answer for that too. We complain so much about sayings that show what’s inside people’s hearts because we’re afraid of what they’d show inside our own.

The long read

Paris, around 1660. A duke in his late forties sits in a woman’s drawing room with a few friends and a pile of paper. He fought in the civil wars called the Fronde, backed the losing side, and took a wound to the head that for a while left him blind. His public career is over. Now he plays a game the salon of Madame de Sablé loves: write one sentence about why people do what they do, pass it around, and sharpen it until nothing can be cut. The letters go back and forth between 1659 and 1663. In 1665 the sentences come out as a small book of 316 maxims, and he keeps revising it until the fifth edition of 1678 holds 504.

François de La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims has no chapters and no story. They are short claims, most one sentence long, circling one suspicion from hundreds of angles, and his wording is most of their force.

The disguise. Starting with the 1675 edition he put one line above all the others, before the first number:

“Our virtues are most frequently but vices disguised.” (epigraph)

Everything else unpacks it. The first numbered maxim says what we call virtue is often “a mass of various actions and divers interests” that luck or effort happens to arrange well, and that people are not always brave from courage or chaste from chastity (M.1). The word to keep your eye on is most frequently. La Rochefoucauld hedges almost every hard claim with often, usually, almost always. Readers remember the verdict and drop the hedge. The hedge is part of the claim.

The engine behind the disguise is self-love, his amour-propre. It doesn’t mean self-esteem or a healthy regard for yourself, which is what the English phrase suggests now. It means the self’s constant, mostly hidden pull toward its own advantage and its own flattering picture of itself. “Self-love is the greatest of flatterers” (M.2). It is “more cunning than the most cunning man in the world” (M.4). And it has not been fully mapped: “Whatever discoveries have been made in the region of self-love, there remain many unexplored territories there” (M.3).

The first edition opened with a long portrait of self-love that he later cut. It shows the picture he was working from. Self-love never rests in itself and only lights on other things “as a bee upon flowers, to extract from them its proper food.” It is hidden even from itself, yet it sees everything outside itself clearly. It wants things less for their beauty than because wanting is its own pleasure, “that it is itself the game it pursues.” It will even join the people attacking it and conspire in its own defeat, as long as it survives. The portrait ends on a picture of motion without end: “The sea is its living image” (S1.I). He dropped the portrait after 1665, and the short maxims carry the idea on their own.

A later line folds virtue back into self in one image: “As rivers are lost in the sea so are virtues in self” (M.171). And the other face of the same idea: self-interest can wear any mask, including no mask at all. “Interest speaks all sorts of tongues and plays all sorts of characters; even that of disinterestedness” (M.39). The same interest “blinds some and makes some see” (M.40). He isn’t only accusing. Self-interest, he notes elsewhere, is blamed for all our misdeeds and should sometimes get credit for our good ones (M.305).

Passions on their own clock. If self-love is the engine, the passions are the weather it runs in, and you don’t control the weather. “The duration of our passions is no more dependant upon us than the duration of our life” (M.5). Passion can make a clever man a fool and a fool clever (M.6). It is the only advocate that always wins, and a simple man who feels something will out-persuade an eloquent one who doesn’t (M.8). So distrust your passions even when they look most trustworthy (M.9). They never run out, either: in the human heart the ruin of one passion is almost always the foundation of the next (M.10), and they flip into their opposites, avarice into waste and waste into avarice, weakness into stubbornness (M.11).

Here the reasoning mind comes off worst. You think you’re leading when you’re being led; the mind aims at one goal while “his heart insensibly drags him towards another” (M.43). “The head is ever the dupe of the heart” (M.102). Knowing your mind is not knowing your heart (M.103). And when you do beat a passion, don’t take the credit: “If we conquer our passions it is more from their weakness than from our strength” (M.122). The split between wish and dread runs through even our word: “We promise according to our hopes; we perform according to our fears” (M.38).

The passion he rates quietest and strongest is idleness, which the translation renders as idleness and which means sloth or laziness. We think ambition and love are the violent passions that rule the rest. They aren’t. Idleness, “languishing as she is,” takes over the plans of a whole life and slowly eats both passions and virtues (M.266). It is also the fault we admit most readily, because we think it only suspends our virtues rather than destroying them (M.398).

The virtues, one at a time. Maxim after maxim takes a named virtue and asks what is under it. The pattern is steady enough that you can predict the turn, and still the individual turns land.

Moderation goes first. The calm of the fortunate comes from the calm good fortune gives their temper (M.17), and restraint at the top is fear of envy plus a wish to look bigger than one’s luck (M.18). Moderation and ambition are never found together, because moderation is “the languor and sloth of the soul” (M.293). It was made a virtue to hold back the great and to console ordinary people for small fortunes (M.308).

The mercy of princes fares no better: it is often policy to win the people (M.15), and it comes from vanity, idleness, or fear, and almost always all three (M.16). Justice gets one line: “The love of justice is simply in the majority of men the fear of suffering injustice” (M.78). So does remorse: “Our repentance is not so much sorrow for the ill we have done as fear of the ill that may happen to us” (M.180).

When we pity someone, we often see our own possible troubles in theirs. We help so we’ll be helped, and the service is a benefit to ourselves paid in advance (M.264). What looks like generosity is often ambition that skips small interests to chase bigger ones (M.246), or the vanity of giving, which we enjoy more than the thing we give (M.263).

Courage gets a whole cluster. Love of glory, fear of shame, the wish for money and comfort, and the wish to run others down all feed the bravery people praise (M.213). Most soldiers expose themselves enough to save their honor and not much more (M.219). Then, from the same man, one of his most admiring lines: “Perfect valour is to do without witnesses what one would do before all the world” (M.216). He knew courage from the inside. His skepticism is about how rarely it comes pure, not about whether it exists.

Gratitude comes off worst. It works like merchants’ credit: we pay not because debts should be paid but so people will lend to us again (M.223). “The gratitude of most men is but a secret desire of receiving greater benefits” (M.298). Nearly everyone repays small debts gladly and is ungrateful for large ones (M.299). Hurrying to discharge an obligation is itself a kind of ingratitude (M.226). And the whole thing fits in five words: “Pride will not owe, self-love will not pay” (M.228).

Humility, the virtue that should be safest, turns out to be pride’s best costume. It is often “a feigned submission which we employ to supplant others,” and pride is never better disguised than when it hides under humility (M.254).

Put the cluster together and you get his most quoted line, which is also his fairest to virtue:

“Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.” (M.218)

It concedes what so many of his other maxims seem to deny. If vice has to pretend, then virtue is the standard everyone is measured against, even the people faking it. “Virtue would not go far did not vanity escort her” (M.200) says the same thing from the other side: the motive is mixed, and the virtue still gets somewhere.

Luck and temper. His second great force is fortune, and its partner is what the translation calls temper, the French humeur: mood, disposition, the body’s settled leaning. In his century the word still carried the old medical idea of bodily fluids, and you can hear it when he says strength and weakness of mind are really the good or bad arrangement of our bodily organs (M.44). The medicine is gone. The point that survives is that the body and the day’s mood do more of our judging than we notice.

“Luck and temper rule the world” (M.435). Great actions that politicians present as the fruit of great designs usually come from temper and passion; he suggests the war between Augustus and Antony was probably jealousy (M.7). Our great actions come less often from a plan than from chance (M.57). “Nature makes merit but fortune sets it to work” (M.153), and fortune shows our virtues and vices the way light shows objects (M.380). “All our qualities are uncertain and doubtful, both the good as well as the bad, and nearly all are creatures of opportunities” (M.470).

Mood sets the price of whatever fortune hands us (M.47). Happiness sits in the taste, not in the thing: we’re happy having what we like, not what others like (M.48). And one of his few consoling lines, which is also a warning against self-pity: “We are never so happy or so unhappy as we suppose” (M.49). Skilled people draw some advantage from any bad accident, and foolish people turn any good one to their harm (M.59). Peace of mind, he adds, turns less on the big events than on how well the little daily things are arranged: “The calm or disturbance of our mind does not depend so much on what we regard as the more important things of life, as in a judicious or injudicious arrangement of the little things of daily occurrence” (M.488). The prescription, when he gives one, is practical: manage fortune like your health, enjoy it when it’s good, be patient when it’s bad, and use strong remedies only in extremity (M.392).

Your faults in other people. Self-love’s favorite trick is to make other people’s flaws vivid and your own invisible. “If we had no faults we should not take so much pleasure in noting those of others” (M.31). If we had no pride we wouldn’t complain of other people’s (M.34). Pride is the same in everyone; only the way of showing it differs (M.35). When we scold someone, pride does more of the talking than kindness, and the real aim is to show we’re free of the fault ourselves (M.37).

The confessions don’t escape either. “We own to small faults to persuade others that we have not great ones” (M.327). We admit faults to repair, through sincerity, the damage we did to how people see us (M.184). Most of our faults are more excusable than the means we use to hide them (M.411). We don’t quite dare say we have no faults and our enemies have no good qualities, but we’re not far from believing it (M.397). And the stubbornest error: “No people are more often wrong than those who will not allow themselves to be wrong” (M.386).

The disguise turns inward. This is where La Rochefoucauld goes past cynicism about other people. The masks work on the wearer. “We become so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others that at last we are disguised to ourselves” (M.119). It is as easy to fool yourself without noticing as to fool others (M.115). We sometimes differ more from ourselves than from other people (M.135).

Two small observations carry the diagnosis. “Everyone blames his memory, no one blames his judgment” (M.89), and everyone praises his heart while nobody dares praise his understanding (M.98). We’re furious at being deceived by enemies and betrayed by friends, and often content to be treated the same way by ourselves (M.114). “It is far easier to be wise for others than to be so for oneself” (M.132), and “It is far easier to know men than to know man” (M.436). The uncomfortable conclusion: “Our enemies come nearer the truth in the opinions they form of us than we do in our opinion of ourselves” (M.458).

The deepest version of this is also the one to sit with longest:

“We should often be ashamed of our very best actions if the world only saw the motives which caused them.” (M.409)

Note what it doesn’t say. It doesn’t say the actions weren’t good. It says the motives wouldn’t survive being seen.

Love. He writes about love more than about any other single subject, and with the most variety. It is hard to define: in the soul a wish to rule, in the mind a sympathy, in the body a hidden wish to possess (M.68). If pure love exists, it’s the kind hidden so deep that we don’t know it ourselves (M.69). You can’t hide love long where it exists or fake it long where it doesn’t (M.70). Judged by most of its effects, love looks more like hatred than friendship (M.72). There is only one kind of love, but a thousand copies of it (M.74).

Two lines set the tone. “There is real love just as there are real ghosts; every person speaks of it, few persons have seen it” (M.76). And “There are some who never would have loved if they never had heard it spoken of” (M.136). Much of what people feel is learned from the talk around them.

Love needs motion. Like fire, it dies once it stops hoping or fearing (M.75). The image that gets quoted most turns on the same fire:

“Absence extinguishes small passions and increases great ones, as the wind will blow out a candle, and blow in a fire.” (M.276)

“The pleasure of love is in loving”; we’re happier in the passion we feel than in the one we inspire (M.259). Self-love rules love more than any other passion, and a lover will sooner sacrifice the beloved’s peace than his own (M.262). There is more self-love than love in jealousy (M.324). Jealousy lives on doubt and ends, or becomes fury, once doubt becomes certainty (M.32); it “is always born with love, but does not always die with it” (M.361). Lovers never tire of each other because they always talk about themselves (M.312). “We often go from love to ambition, but we never return from ambition to love” (M.490).

A run of these maxims is about women specifically: women’s coldness as an ornament added to beauty (M.204), flirtation as “at the bottom of woman’s nature” (M.241), women’s wit strengthening their folly more than their reason (M.340). They are a salon duke’s generalizations about the women of his class and time, and they read as that now. The observations about love that hold up are the ones addressed to everyone.

Friendship and trust. Friendship gets less romance than love and, in the end, more respect. What most people call friendship is “a partnership with a collection of reciprocal interests, and an exchange of favours” in which self-love always expects a profit (M.83). We’re fickle in friendship because qualities of the soul are hard to know and qualities of the mind easy (M.80). Reconciliation with enemies is usually tiredness of war and fear of bad luck (M.82).

The most notorious friendship maxim is one he published once and then withdrew: “In the adversity of our best friends we always find something which is not wholly displeasing to us” (S1.XV). It appeared only in the first edition of 1665, and Swift later built a poem on it. Its main-body cousin stayed in every edition:

“We have all sufficient strength to support the misfortunes of others.” (M.19)

A gentler version of the same insight also stayed: we’re easily consoled for our friends’ misfortunes when they give us a chance to show our tenderness (M.235).

And yet the standards he sets for friendship are high. “It is more disgraceful to distrust than to be deceived by our friends” (M.84). Our distrust of someone justifies his deceiving us (M.86). “The greatest effort of friendship is not to show our faults to a friend, but to show him his own” (M.410). If a friend deceives you, you owe the tokens of his friendship only indifference, but you still owe his misfortunes pity (M.434). And the ranking: “However rare true love is, true friendship is rarer” (M.473). From a writer this sparing with praise, rare is a compliment. It means the thing exists.

Underneath, there’s a harder line about society at large: “Men would not live long in society were they not the dupes of each other” (M.87). Social life, on this view, runs partly on mutual, useful blindness.

Advice, praise, flattery. “Nothing is given so profusely as advice” (M.110), and nothing is less sincere than the way it’s asked for and given. The person asking wants approval and someone to share responsibility; the person giving it is looking after his own reputation (M.116). You can give advice but you can’t give the conduct to use it (M.378). His funniest line belongs here:

“Old men delight in giving good advice as a consolation for the fact that they can no longer set bad examples.” (M.93)

Praise is a trade. We don’t like to praise and never praise without a motive (M.144); we usually praise to be praised (M.146). Few people are wise enough to prefer useful blame to treacherous praise (M.147). “The refusal of praise is only the wish to be praised twice” (M.149). The direction of liking follows the same current: “We always like those who admire us, we do not always like those whom we admire” (M.294). Flattery is false coin that only our vanity makes spendable (M.158), and it could not hurt us if we didn’t flatter ourselves first (M.152). He does allow praise one real use: the wish to deserve it strengthens our good qualities (M.150).

Talk and company. The social maxims are where you can hear the salon. The reason so few people are pleasant to talk to is that nearly everyone is thinking about what they want to say rather than answering what was said; even polite people only seem to listen, and their eyes give them away. To listen well and answer well are among the greatest charms we can have (M.139). Great minds say much in few words, and small minds use many words to say nothing (M.142). A man would rather speak badly of himself than not speak of himself (M.138). “The extreme delight we take in talking of ourselves should warn us that it is not shared by those who listen” (M.314). “We may forgive those who bore us, we cannot forgive those whom we bore” (M.304). And the small cruelty of memory: good enough to keep the least thing that happened to us, not good enough to remember how often we’ve told it to the same person (M.313).

Behind the maxims sit seven short essays he left in manuscript, published after his death as Reflections on Various Subjects, and they show a warmer, more practical man. On conversation he lays out rules: let people finish, even when they talk nonsense; don’t contradict or interrupt; talk about what interests them; never let the words be grander than the matter. His safest rule is the plainest: “the safest we are able to give is to listen much, to speak little, and to say nothing that will ever give ground for regret” (R.V). On society he says good company needs each person to keep their freedom, and that we should stand at a certain distance to see society well, since hardly anyone lets himself be seen exactly as he is (R.IV). On confidences he warns against half-confidences, which embarrass the teller and dissatisfy the hearer (R.I).

Envy, the passion nobody admits. People are vain of their passions, even the worst, but envy is so timid and ashamed that nobody owns up to it (M.27). Jealousy at least guards something we have or think we have; envy is “a fury which cannot endure the happiness of others” (M.28). Envy is harder to reconcile than hatred (M.328). True friendship destroys it (M.376). The surest sign of great qualities is to be born without it (M.433). It outlasts its reason: “Our envy always lasts longer than the happiness of those we envy” (M.476). And it is more common than self-love itself: more people exist without self-love than without envy (M.486).

Weakness and firmness. The one fault he treats as worse than vice is weakness. “Weakness is the only fault which cannot be cured” (M.130). It is more hostile to virtue than vice is (M.445). “Weak persons cannot be sincere” (M.316), because sincerity needs the strength to bear what it costs. We betray more often from weakness than from any fixed plan (M.120). “It is only people who possess firmness who can possess true gentleness” (M.479); in people who merely seem gentle, it’s usually weakness, and it turns to harshness easily. And a line against excuses: “We have more strength than will; and it is often merely for an excuse we say things are impossible” (M.30).

Age. Youth changes its tastes from the heat of the blood, and age keeps them from habit (M.109). The flaws of the mind grow with age like those of the face (M.112). In growing old we get more foolish and more wise (M.210). The most dangerous folly of older people who were once lovable is forgetting that they no longer are (M.408). Age is a tyrant that forbids the pleasures of youth on pain of death (M.461). And three words that stand as a whole maxim: “Few know how to be old” (M.423). He kept revising the maxims from his late forties into his sixties, and his last years were spent in pain from old wounds and gout. The age maxims read like someone taking notes on it.

Death. Here he writes his one long piece of prose among the maxims. The short maxims set it up. “Philosophy triumphs easily over past evils and future evils; but present evils triumph over it” (M.22). Few people know death; we only endure it, from resolve or dullness or habit (M.23). And the line that stays: “Neither the sun nor death can be looked at without winking” (M.26).

The 504th and last maxim is a page-long essay on the contempt of death. His claim: meeting death with courage is common, but truly despising it is always feigned. Everything has been written to persuade us death is no evil, and no one of good sense has believed it. People who scorned death while it was far off dread it when it comes close. The wisest and bravest are the ones who find the best ways not to look at it; the most reason can do is persuade us to turn our eyes to something else. Cato and Brutus chose noble things to look at. “A lackey sometime ago contented himself by dancing on the scaffold” before being broken on the wheel. A peer and a peasant can face death with the same calm, but for different reasons: in the peer it is love of glory that hides death from him, and in the peasant it is his limited view (M.504). It is a bleak essay and an honest one, and it offers no consolation.

Seeming and being. The thread under all of it, the gap between what we are and what we show, gets its own positive program at the edges. “To establish ourselves in the world we do everything to appear as if we were established” (M.56). In every profession we play a part to seem what we want to be: “Thus the world is merely composed of actors” (M.256). We are never as ridiculous from the habits we have as from those we pretend to have (M.134). “Nothing prevents our being unaffected so much as our desire to seem so” (M.431).

Against all this he sets one piece of advice, stated plainly: “We should gain more by letting the world see what we are than by trying to seem what we are not” (M.457). The essay on air and manner (R.VII) develops it. Children please because they are wrapped in the manner nature gave them and know no other; they spoil when they start imitating. Everyone wants to be different and greater than they are, and “there are no good copies.” His last sentence on the subject explains why some people with good qualities are unpleasant and some with less are pleasing: “Because the first wish to appear to be what they are not, the second are what they appear.”

The heart laid bare. Among his manuscript maxims is one that answers the obvious complaint, that all this is too harsh on human nature:

“Why we cry out so much against maxims which lay bare the heart of man, is because we fear that our own heart shall be laid bare.” (S2.LXVII)

One real line. “We become so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others that at last we are disguised to ourselves.” — La Rochefoucauld, Maxims.

What didn’t hold. These are the places later readers push back. They aren’t failed experiments.

For the little ones

This book as stories to read aloud, each with a note for the grown-up.