Francois de La Rochefoucauld Quotes

The largest ambition has the least appearance of ambition when it meets with an absolute impossibility in compassing its object.

Youth is a continual intoxication; it is the fever of reason.

None deserve praise for being good who have not the spirit to be bad: goodness, for the most part, is nothing but indolence or weakness of will.

If there be a love pure and free from the admixture of our other passions, it is that which lies hidden in the bottom of our heart, and which we know not ourselves.

Idleness is more an infirmity of the mind than of the body.

Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms inside your head, and people in them, acting. People you know, yet can't quite name.

Not all those who know their minds know their hearts as well.

In growing old, we become more foolish - and more wise.

Truth does not do as much good in the world as its imitations do harm.

True eloquence consists in saying all that should be said, and that only.

It is almost always a fault of one who loves not to realize when he ceases to be loved.

Esteem never makes ingrates.

Ideas often flash across our minds more complete than we could make them after much labor.

The passions are the only orators that always persuade: they are, as it were, a natural art, the rules of which are infallible; and the simplest man with passion is more persuasive than the most eloquent without it.

Those only are despicable who fear to be despised.

Things often offer themselves to our mind in a more finished form in the very first thought, than we might have made them by muchart and study.

A person well satisfied with themselves is seldom satisfied with others, and others, rarely are with them.

Only the great can afford to have great defects.

Nothing is so capable of diminishing self-love as the observation that we disapprove at one time what we approve at another.

The only good imitations are those that poke fun at bad originals.

One is never as happy or as unhappy as one thinks.

The thing that makes our friendships so short and changeable is that the qualities and dispositions of the soul are very hard to know, and those of the understanding and wit very easy.

It is praiseworthy even to attempt a great action.

As great minds have the faculty of saying a great deal in a few words, so lesser minds have a talent of talking much, and saying nothing.

Some crimes get honor and renown by being committed with more pomp, by a greater number, and in a higher degree of wickedness thanothers. Hence it is that public robberies, plunderings, and sackings have been looked upon as excellencies and noble achievements, and the seizing of whole countries, however unjustly and barbarously, is dignified with the glorious name of gaining conquests.

The confidence which we have in ourselves give birth to much of that, which we have in others.

The truest comparison we can make of love is to liken it to a fever; we have no more power over the one than the other, either as to its violence or duration.

Women do not know all their powers of flirtation.

There are few things we should keenly desire if we really knew what we wanted.

We always love those who admire us, but we do not always love those whom we admire.

Fortune mends more faults in us than ever reason would be able to do.

Women can more easily conquer their passion than their coquetterie.

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.

Many men are contemptuous of riches; few can give them away.

Our greediness so often troubles us, making us run after so many things at the same time, that while we too eagerly look after the least we miss the greatest.

The passions often engender their contraries.

Indolence, languid as it is, often masters both passions and virtues.

To establish oneself in the world, one does all one can to seem established there already.

We are very far from always knowing our own wishes.

In all professions each affects a look and an exterior to appear what he wishes the world to believe that he is. Thus we may say that the whole world is made up of appearances.

There are a great many simpletons who know themselves to be so, and who make a very cunning use of their own simplicity.

Preserving health by too severe a rule is a worrisome malady.

Before we set our hearts too much upon anything, let us examine how happy they are, who already possess it.

Taste may change, but inclination never.

We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of others.

Men never desire anything very eagerly which they desire only by the dictates of reason.

Thinkers think and doers do. But until the thinkers do and the doers think, progress will be just another word in the already overburdened vocabulary by sense.

In the human heart there is a ceaseless birth of passions, so that the destruction of one is almost always the establishment of another.