If we resist our passions, it is more because of their weakness than because of our strength.

François VI, duc de La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680), wrote in the moralist tradition of 17th‑century France, distilling courtly experience into terse maxims about self-love, virtue, and human motivation. After an active and turbulent public life—military service, involvement in the Fronde, and serious injury—he became associated with Parisian salons (notably that of Madame de Sablé), where epigrammatic observations about character were refined in conversation. This remark belongs to his *Maximes*, first published in 1665 and repeatedly revised, a work shaped by the skeptical, disenchanted perspective of a nobleman who had seen political ambition and personal vanity at close range.

The maxim punctures flattering narratives of self-mastery. What we call “resisting” passion often feels like a triumph of will, but La Rochefoucauld suggests it is frequently a matter of circumstance: the desire has cooled, the temptation has weakened, or competing passions have displaced it. The line fits his broader project of exposing how virtue can be misread as strength when it may be mere lack of appetite, opportunity, or intensity. It invites moral humility—questioning whether our restraint is earned—and psychological realism, emphasizing that human conduct is governed less by heroic reason than by shifting forces within us.