Francois de La Rochefoucauld Quotes

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

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

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

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Neither the sun nor death can be looked at with a steady eye.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

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

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

We often forgive those who bore us, but we cannot forgive those whom we bore.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

One forgives to the degree that one loves.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

A true friend is the greatest of all blessings, and that which we take the least care of all to acquire.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

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

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

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.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

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

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

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.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

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

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

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

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

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

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Gratitude is merely the secret hope of further favors.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

One is never fortunate or as unfortunate as one imagines.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Jealousy lives upon doubts. It becomes madness or ceases entirely as soon as we pass from doubt to certainty.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Jealousy contains more of self-love than of love.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

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

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

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

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

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

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

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

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

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

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

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

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Men give away nothing so liberally as their advice.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

We have no patience with other people's vanity because it is offensive to our own.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

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

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

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

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

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

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

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

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

There are few virtuous women who are not bored with their trade.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

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

Francois de La Rochefoucauld