Francois De La Rochefoucauld Quotes

The desire of appearing clever often prevents our becoming so.

Only great men have great faults.

The intention of cheating no one lays us open to being cheated ourselves.

The truest mark of being born with great qualities is to be born without envy.

Eloquence: saying the proper thing and stopping.

Jealousy is not love, but self-love.

Jealousy springs more from love of self than from love of another.

Old fools are greater fools than young ones.

Love is the smallest part of gallantry.

To establish yourself in the world a person must do all they can to appear already established.

Virtue would go far if vanity did not keep it company.

Every one speaks well of his own heart, but no one dares speak well of his own mind.

We only acknowledge small faults in order to make it appear that we are free from great ones.

Reason alone is insufficient to make us enthusiastic in any matter.

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

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

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

Flattery is a kind of bad money, to which our vanity gives us currency.

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

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

The passions are the only orators which always persuade.

Jealousy contains more of self-love than of love.

When love becomes labored we welcome an act of infidelity towards ourselves to free us from fidelity.

As it is the characteristic of great wits to say much in few words, so small wits seem to have the gift of speaking much and saying nothing.

It is as easy to unknowingly deceive yourself as it is to deceive others.

There are good marriages, but there are no delightful ones.

Humility is the worst form of conceit.

Few people know death, we only endure it, usually from determination, and even from stupidity and custom; and most men only die because they know not how to prevent dying.

The aversion to lying is often a hidden ambition to render our words credible and weighty, and to attach a religious aspect to our conversation.

We often pay our debts not because it is only fair that we should, but to make future loans easier.

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

Ordinary men commonly condemn what is beyond them.

That which makes the vanity of others unbearable to us is that which wounds our own.

Some accidents there are in life that a little folly is necessary to help us out of.

There are very few people who are not ashamed of having been in love when they no longer love each other.

It is a wearisome disease to preserve health by too strict a regimen.

We may say of agreeableness, as distinct from beauty, that it is a symmetry whose rules are unknown.

Why can we remember the tiniest detail that has happened to us, and not remember how many times we have told it to the same person.

The reason why so few people are agreeable in conversation is that each is thinking more about what he intends to say than others are saying.

It is much easier to seem fitted for posts we do not fill than for those we do.

A man convinced of his own merit will accept misfortune as an honor, for thus can he persuade others, as well as himself, that he is a worthy target for the arrows of fate.

It is a species of coquetry to make a parade of never practising it.

We often do shallow good in order to accomplish evil with impunity.

Ridicule dishonors a man more than dishonor does.

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

It's the height of folly to want to be the only wise one.

The extreme pleasure we take in speaking of ourselves should make us apprehensive that it gives hardly any to those who listen to us.

He that would be a great man must learn to turn every accident to some advantage.

There are some good marriages, but practically no delightful ones.

The tranquility or agitation of our temper does not depend so much on the big things which happen to us in life, as on the pleasant or unpleasant arrangements of the little things which happen daily.