Quotes by
La Rochefoucauld |
François de La Rochefoucauld, 1613-1680 , French writer
François VI, duc de La Rochefoucauld, also called Prince de Marcillac, was a French classical author who had been one of the most active rebels of the Fronde (civil wars in France during the minority of Louis XIV) before he became the leading exponent of the maxime, a French literary form of epigram that expresses a harsh or paradoxical truth with brevity.His remarkable political and military career is overshadowed by his towering stature in French literature. His literary work consists of three parts—his Memoirs, the Maximes, and his letters.
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Quotations
| • | Nobody deserves to be praised for goodness unless he is strong enough to be bad, for any other goodness is usually merely inertia or lack of will-power. 13 |
| • | Hypocrisy is an homage that vice pays to virtue. 10 |
| • | Marriage is the only war in which you sleep with the enemy. 10 |
| • | Old men delight in giving good advice as a consolation for the fact that they can no longer provide bad examples. 9 |
| • | Neither the sun nor death can be looked at steadily. 8 |
| • | The truest way to be deceived is to think oneself more smart than others. 8 |
| • | Mediocre minds usually dismiss anything which reaches beyond their own understanding. 8 |
| • | One kind of flirtation is to boast we never flirt. 8 |
| • | Our virtues are most frequently but vices in disguise. 7 |
| • | The love of justice is simply in the majority of men the fear of suffering injustice. 7 |
| • | The desire to appear clever often prevents one from being so. 7 |
| • | Those who apply themselves too much to little things often become incapable of great ones. 6 |
| • | We confess to little faults only to persuade ourselves we have no great ones. 6 |
| • | We hardly find any persons of good sense save those who agree with us. 6 |
| • | Nothing prevents us being natural so much as the desire to appear so. 6 |
| • | The sure mark of one born with noble qualities is being born without envy. 6 |
| • | One can find women who have never had one love affair, but it is rare indeed to find any who have had only one. 6 |
| • | One is never so happy or so unhappy as one fancies. 5 |
| • | True love is like the appearance of ghosts: everyone talks about it but few have seen it. 5 |
| • | If we conquer our passions, it is more from their weakness than from our strength. 5 |
| • | Absence extinguishes the minor passions and increases the great ones, as the wind blows out a candle and fans a fire. 5 |
| • | The happiness and misery of men depend no less on temper than fortune. 4 |
| • | Everyone speaks well of his heart; no one dares speak well of his mind. 4 |
| • | Too great a hurry to be discharged of an obligation is a kind of ingratitude. 4 |
| • | Gratitude is the lively expectation of favours yet to come. 4 |
| • | Luck must be dealt with like health: enjoy it when it is good, be patient when it is bad. 4 |
| • | How can we expect others to keep our secrets if we cannot keep them ourselves? 4 |
| • | The reason that there are so few good conversationalists is that most people are thinking about what they are going to say and not about what the others are saying. 4 |
| • | When our vices leave us, we like to imagine it is we who are leaving them. 4 |
| • | The hell of women is old age. 4 |
| • | Passion often renders the most clever man a fool, and even sometimes renders the most foolish man clever. 3 |
| • | In the adversity of our best friends we often find something that is not exactly displeasing. 3 |
| • | The mind is always the dupe of the heart. 3 |
| • | The refusal of praise is only the wish to be praised twice. 3 |
| • | It is a great folly to wish to be wise alone. 3 |
| • | We always like those who admire us; we do not always like those whom we admire. 3 |
| • | We try to make virtues out of the faults we have no wish to correct. 3 |
| • | One must listen if one wishes to be listened to. 3 |
| • | We are more interested in making others believe we are happy than in trying to be happy ourselves. 3 |
| • | If we had no faults, we should not take so much pleasure in noting those of others. 2 |
| • | We promise according to our hopes; we fulfil according to our fears. 2 |
| • | We say little when vanity does not make us speak. 2 |
| • | Usually we only praise to be praised. 2 |
| • | What often prevents us from abandoning ourselves to one vice is that we have several. 2 |
| • | Some people's faults are becoming to them; others are disgraced by their own good traits. 2 |
| • | We often forgive those who bore us, but we cannot forgive those whom we bore. 2 |
| • | In jealousy there is more of self-love than love. 2 |
| • | What makes the vanity of others insufferable to us is that it wounds our own. 2 |
| • | It is harder to hide the feelings we have than to feign the ones we do not have. 2 |
| • | There are some who never would have loved if they never had heard it spoken of. 2 |
| • | There are some persons who only disgust with their abilities, there are persons who please even with their faults. 2 |
| • | Self-interest makes some people blind, and others sharp-sighted. 2 |
