Maxims

by François de La Rochefoucauld

Book Overview

The philosophy of La Rochefoucauld, which influenced French intellectuals as diverse as Voltaire and the Jansenists, is captured here in more than 600 penetrating and pithy aphorisms.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 014044095X
• ISBN13: 9780140440959
• Release Date: January 1982
• Publisher: Penguin Group
• Length: 128 Pages
• Weight: 0.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.0" x 7.8"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Enduring Wisdom Direct from the Court of Louis XIV

La Rochefoucauld isn't for everyone. Let's excuse those who are going to be offended right away. Do you insist your movies be in color and have a happy endings? You're excused. Do you believe man is perfectable through his institutions? You're excused. Do you believe that love remains bright, eternal and unchanging? You're excused. Do you believe you know yourself completely and thoroughly? Then I'll see you around. Have a nice day. Now, for the rest of us, realists rather than idealists, La Rochefoucauld is a Godsend. A nobleman from the highest levels of the French aristrocracy pulls up a chair and starts talking to us, telling us deep and profound things, giving us insights so quickly and so accurately that we erupt over and over again with deep, raucous laughter. He tells us the essential, conceptual problems with love. He tells us that the sexes are not the same and cannot act identically, and says this profoundly and without dismissing or mocking either men or women. He warns us about vanity, resentment, envy and jealousy. Most especially, he convinces us that these qualities are dominent in human affairs. He tells us why a dismissive attitude about death is not genuine. He warns us of the great dangers brought about through laziness. The art of using the minimum words to convey a subtle truth was in its highest form in Paris at this time. The Maxims were shared and honed in a salon. La Rochefoucauld's life of warfare and court intrigue and betrayal and unrequited love allowed him to bring deep wisdom into the emotions and moods he describes. Particularly, his rivalry with a self-aggrandizing courtier informs his writing. Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz, was a pompous and annoying hypocrite who was extremely successful in some aspects of his life. Retz once received eight votes for election to the Papacy. Yet La Rochefoucauld both saw through him and came to understand why so many others did not pierce the veil of the cardinal's reputation. The salon and rivalry with Retz are an important introduction Tancock gives us to the Maxims. That material should be read thoroughly and introspectively, especially the cardinal's written description of La Rochefoucauld and the duke's written description of the cardinal. In the actual body of the Maxims and Reflections, La Rochefoucauld tells us of the dominent human characteristic, an impulse for self-preservation so strong that affection for oneself, pride, and vanity about one's reputation become included in it. It's called "amour-propre," for which self-love is only a glib translation. The essay on self-love, the longest and most stunning of the writings, is more than a maxim. It resists being broken down into pithy sayings. Sturdily written, it was so shocking to the French aristocracy that it was excluded from later editions of the Maxims. But La Rochefoucauld's description of amour-propre is a masterpiece, a work of genius and modern psychology, three hundred year

The 'Maxims' as a Classic of 'Crooked Wisdom.'

The famous Indian classic, Kautilya's 'Arthasastra,' a treatise which deals with the attainment of worldly ends, distinguishes between two kinds of wisdom - Straight and Crooked. To the former belong (to use Western examples) such works as 'The Imitation of Christ' by Thomas a Kempis, a work which teaches how, ideally, the virtuous should live, while overlooking the fact that often it would be extremely impractical and socially disastrous to live in such a way.The second class of books, those which teach the art of 'Crooked Wisdom,' is exemplified in the East by Kautilya's 'Arthasastra' itself, and in the West by such works as Balthasar Gracian's 'The Art of Worldly Wisdom,' Francesco Guicciardini's 'Maxims and Reflections of a Renaissance Statesman' (Ricordi), and by the present collection of Maxims by La Rochefoucauld.These books are both highly realistic and extremely practical, for they depict, not man as he is supposed to be, but man as he is with all his selfishness, stupidity, ambition, arrogance, malice, laziness and other imperfections, and they teach the art of how, not merely to survive, but even to thrive in the midst of our far from perfect fellow men and women. And, certainly in the case of La Rochefoucauld, this teaching is done with great precision and wit.'Crooked Wisdom,' then, should not be understood as the product of a crooked mind, but as the clear-sighted wisdom one needs to survive in a world teeming with such minds, a world, as Tancock says, involved in a "sordid struggle of self-interests, a scramble for power, position, and influence in which the foulest motives and methods [are] decked with labels such as duty, honor, patriotism, and glory."La Rochefoucauld seems to provoke two very different kinds of reaction. Fully paid up members of the rose-tinted spectacles club, are shocked and horrified by his portrait of man and society, and they tend to dislike both the man and his book. The more realistically inclined, however, will savor his bite and wit and will readily acknowledge the self-evident truth of much if not all of what he says. The man was undoubtedly brilliant, not only in terms of the many profound insights he gave us - particularly those having to do with 'amour propre' or self-love - but also in terms of the skill with which he translated those insights into pithy and memorable maxims. Tancock defines the maxim as the expression of "some thought about human motives or behavior in a form containing the maximum of clarity and TRUTH with the minimum of words arranged in the most striking and memorable order" (my caps). La Rochefoucauld's aim, in short, was simply to tell the truth, and to tell it for our benefit.The maxim as a literary genre was cultivated in his milieu, and La Rochefoucauld's were polished to a high state of perfection, for they had to satisfy a critical and sophisticated audience. Seven years were devoted to refining them, during which the circle of his aristocratic

The Truth Hurts

These maxims, though brief, speak volumes about their author and the human condition. Francois duc do La Rouchefoucauld was cursed with a double nature which led him in his career as a courtier to, as Leonard Tanner puts it in his introduction "romantic self-dedication followed by bitter disillusion." After the fighting in Paris of 1652 he retired to a quiet life of contemplation and the society of such friends as Mme de Sevigne, who's letters give us such a vibrant window upon that age. It was during the many meetings he had with these friends that the first maxims evolved, and which he would continue to compose and perfect until his death in 1680. Nothing quite like them had ever existed before in European literature, and their precision and bleak though biting wit would shape the style of French letters for centuries to come. Essential reading for the student of the school of hard knocks.

World class aphorisms

Be warned! La Rochefoucauld is not a very edifying writer. He doesn't believe in making people better. Instead he says: "Virtue wouldn't go very far if it were not for vanity keeping it company." The Maxims offer one of the most disillusioned views of human nature in world literature. What really recommends them, however, is their clarity and elegance. Again and again they have been compared to diamonds. La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680) is the most famous of the French moralists who dissected human behaviour in razor-sharp aphorisms. Get this volume to discover a tradition of thinking which is largely alien to English literature, with the notable exception of Oscar Wilde. "Most young people feel they are just being natural when they are nothing but gross."

The Duke is on to us!

La Rochefoucauld predicates his system of aphorisms on the observation which heads the first section of his book, to wit, that our virtues are merely our vices in disguise. If you are offended by this notion, that is precisely why you ought to read this book, which prefigures at least one of the central doctrines of pscyhoanalysis, viz., that the meaning of much of what we do is effectively hidden from us by that "most effective of all flatterers, self-love." La Rochefoucauld means by the word "vice" an unavowable, usually ego-flexing impulse of a kind that is for him the font and origin of our emotional lives, a behavior-generator so indecipherable and compelling that it can be dealt with only provided that we first identify and acknowledge it. This 17th-Century masterpiece is among the greatest investigations of why we are the way we are, easily more more durable (not to mention wittier and better written) than anything that has since been fobbed off of credulous readers under the banner of "science." Buy it, read it, be helped by it.