Quotes by Francois de La Rochefoucauld

"Old age is a tyrant, who forbids, under pain of death, the pleasures of youth."

"Perfect courage is to do without witnesses what one would be capable of doing with the world looking on."

"On neither the sun, nor death, can a man look fixedly."

"One forgives to the degree that one loves."

"However rare true love may be, it is less so than true friendship."

"What men have called friendship is only a social arrangement, a mutual adjustment of interests, an interchange of services given and received; it is, in sum, simply a business from which those involved propose to derive a steady profit for their own self-love."

"If we are to judge of love by its consequences, it more nearly resembles hatred than friendship."

"No man deserves to be praised for his goodness, who has it not in his power to be wicked. Goodness without that power is generally nothing more than sloth, or an impotence of will."

"Good advice is something a man gives when he is too old to set a bad example."

"Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and fans fires."

"To know how to hide one's ability is great skill."

"Gratitude is merely the secret hope of further favors."

"Jealousy contains more of self-love than of love."

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

"What makes the pain we feel from shame and jealousy so cutting is that vanity can give us no assistance in bearing them."

"True love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about and few have seen."

"There is no disguise which can hide love for long where it exists, or simulate it where it does not."

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

"Passion makes idiots of the cleverest men, and makes the biggest idiots clever."

"Men give away nothing so liberally as their advice."

"It is great folly to wish to be wise all alone."

"Few people have the wisdom to prefer the criticism that would do them good, to the praise that deceives them."

"One can find women who have never had one love affair, but it is rare indeed to find any who have had only one."