Francois de La Rochefoucauld Quotes

A man seldom finds people unthankful, as long as he remains in a condition of benefiting them further.

There are reproaches which praise, and praises which defame.

It is only persons of firmness that can have real gentleness. Those who appear gentle are, in general, only a weak character, which easily changes into asperity.

There are few people who are more often in the wrong than those who cannot endure to be so.

Renewed friendships require more care than those that have never been broken.

Idiots and lunatics see only their own wit.

Most people know no other way of judging men's worth but by the vogue they are in, or the fortunes they have met with.

Usually we praise only to be praised.

Preserving the serious health condition is usually painful.

Some reproaches praise; some praises reproach.

Few things are needed to make a wise man happy; nothing can make a fool content; that is why most men are miserable.

It is from a weakness and smallness of mind that men are opinionated; and we are very loath to believe what we are not able to comprehend.

Great souls are not those who have fewer passions and more virtues than others, but only those who have greater designs.

Nothing is so contagious as example; never was there any considerable good or ill done that does not produce its like. We imitate good actions through emulation, and had ones through a malignity in our nature, which shame conceals, and example sets at liberty.

Time's chariot-wheels make their carriage-road in the fairest face.

The hate of favourites is only a love of favour. The envy of NOT possessing it, consoles and softens its regrets by the contempt it evinces for those who possess it, and we refuse them our homage, not being able to detract from them what attracts that of the rest of the world.

Heat of blood makes young people change their inclinations often, and habit makes old ones keep to theirs a great while.

It is much better to learn to deal with the ills we have now than to speculate on those that may befall us.

We cannot possibly imagine the variety of contradictions in every heart.

Sometimes in life situations develop that only the half-crazy can get out of.

The mind is always the patsy of the heart.

The great interests of man: air and light, the joy of having a body, the voluptuousness of looking.

We easily forgive our friends those faults that do no affect us ourselves.

It is as common for tastes to change as it is uncommon for traits of character.

In infants, levity is a prettiness; in men a shameful defect; but in old age, a monstrous folly.

A certain harmony should be kept between actions and ideas if we want to fully develop the effects they can produce.

Moderation is caused by the fear of exciting the envy and contempt which those merit who are intoxicated with their good fortune; it is a vain display of our strength of mind, and in short the moderation of men at their greatest height is only a desire to appear greater than their fortune.

Decency is the least of all laws, but yet it is the law which is most strictly observed.

Men's happiness and misery depends altogether as much upon their own humor as it does upon fortune.

Numberless arts appear foolish whose secret motives are most wise and weighty.

No persons are more frequently wrong, than those who will not admit they are wrong.

The grace of novelty and the length of habit, though so very opposite to one another, yet agree in this, that they both alike keepus from discovering the faults of our friends.

Avarice is more opposite to economy than liberality.

How deceitful hope may be, yet she carries us on pleasantly to the end of life.

Jealousy is bred in doubts. When those doubts change into certainties, then the passion either ceases or turns absolute madness.

There are very few things impossible in themselves; and we do not want means to conquer difficulties so much as application and resolution in the use of means.

The violence we do to ourselves in order to remain faithful to the one we love is hardly better than an act of infidelity.

There is only one kind of love, but there are a thousand imitations.

Praise is flattery, artful, hidden, delicate, which gratifies differently him who praises and him who is praised. The one takes it as the reward of merit, the other bestows it to show his impartiality and knowledge.

Wisdom is the mind what health is to the body.

Nature 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.

It is a mistake to imagine, that the violent passions only, such as ambition and love, can triumph over the rest. Idleness, languid as it is, often masters them all; she influences all our designs and actions, and insensibly consumes and destroys both passions and virtues.

Fortune makes our virtues and vices visible, just as light does the objects of sight.

We own up to minor failings, but only so as to convince others that we have no major ones.

The heart of man ever finds a constant succession of passions, so that the destroying and pulling down of one proves generally tobe nothing else but the production and the setting up of another.

Cunning and treachery are the offspring of incapacity.

The passions of youth are not more dangerous to health than is the lukewarmness of old age.

The vivacity that augments with years is not far from folly.