He who breaks a resolution is a weakling; He who makes one is a fool.

The epigram turns the familiar moralizing about “keeping resolutions” into a cynical paradox. If you break a resolution, you display weakness of will; but if you make one in the first place, you are naïve—overconfident that a future self can be bound by a present promise. The sting lies in its double bind: it mocks both failure and the very aspiration to self-reform. Read as social satire, it punctures the piety of public vows (New Year’s resolutions, temperance pledges, moral commitments) by suggesting that human behavior is too changeable for such declarations to be anything but self-deception.