Even the most disinterested love is, after all, but a kind of bargain, in which self-love always proposes to be the gainer one wayor another.
Francois de La RochefoucauldSome good qualities are like the senses: Those who are entirely deprived of them can have no notion of them.
Francois de La RochefoucauldNature seems at each man's birth to have marked out the bounds of his virtues and vices, and to have determined how good or how wicked that man shall be capable of being.
Francois de La RochefoucauldThere is a form of eminence which does not depend on fate; it is an air which sets us apart and seems to prtend great things; it is the value which we unconsciously attach to ourselves; it is the quality which wins us deference of others; more than birth, position, or ability, it gives us ascendance.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld