François de La Rochefoucauld Quotes

Nothing is so infectious as example.

How rare true love maybe, it is less so than true friendship.

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

One cannot answer for his courage when he has never been in danger.

We are more interested in making others believe we are happy than in trying to be happy ourselves.

If we have not peace within ourselves it is in vain to seek it from outward sources.

The intellect is always fooled by the heart.

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

It is much easier to extinguish a first desire than to satisfy all of those that follow it.

We are never so happy or so unhappy as we think.

In great affairs we ought to apply ourselves less to creating chances than to profiting from those that are offered.

The truest way to be deceived is to think oneself more knowing than others.

If we resist our passions it is more from their weakness than from our strength.

Almost always we are bored by people to whom we ourselves are boring.

We do not wish ardently for what we desire only through reason.

It is with true love as with ghosts. Every one talks of it but few have seen it.

I always say to myself what is the most important thing we can think about at this extraordinary moment.

In love we often doubt what we most believe.

Extreme boredom provides its own antidote.

It is more shameful to distrust our friends than to be deceived by them.

The passions are the only orators which always persuade.

We forgive so long as we love.

If we had no faults we should not take so much pleasure in noting those of others.

We are often more treacherous through weakness than calculation

There are more defects in temperament than in the mind.

To eat is a necessity, but to eat intelligently is an art.

Those who most obstinately oppose the most widely-held opinions more often do so because of pride than lack of intelligence. They find the best places in the right set already taken, and they do not want back seats.

It is easier to be wise for others than for ourselves.

Though men pride themselves on their great actions often they are not the result of any great design but of chance.

We should scarcely desire things ardently if we were perfectly acquainted with what we desire.

Boredom ... causes us to neglect more duties than does interest.

True love is like ghosts which many believe in, but few have seen.

We are almost always bored by just those whom we must not find boring.

To establish oneself in the world one has to do all one can to appear established.

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

Perfect courage means doing unwitnessed what we would be capable of with the world looking on.

Friendship is only a reciprocal conciliation of interests.

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

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

In jealousy there is more of self-love than love.

We are much harder on people who betray us in small ways than on people who betray others in great ones.

In all aspects of life, we take on a part and an appearance to seem to be what we wish to be--and thus the world is merely composed of actors.

Interest speaks all sorts of tongues and plays all sorts of parts even that of disinterestedness.

In jealousy there is more of self-love than love

Nobody deserves to be praised for goodness unless he is strong enough to be bad.

What causes us to like new acquaintances is not so much weariness of our old ones or the pleasure of change as disgust at not being sufficiently admired by those who know us too well and the hope of being admired more by those who do not know so much about us.

What men call friendship is no more than a partnership a mutual care of interests an exchange of favors - in a word it is a sort of traffic in which self-love ever proposes to be the gainer.

The virtues and the vices are all put in motion by interest.

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

Absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones, as the wind blows out the candle and fans the bonfire.

It is as proper to have pride in oneself as it is ridiculous to show it to others.

Hypocrisy is a tribute that vice pays to virtue.

We promise according to our hopes and perform according to our fears.

There are no accidents so unlucky from which clever people are not able to reap some advantage and none so lucky that the foolish are not able to turn them to their own disadvantage.

No persons are more frequently wrong, than those who will not admit they are wrong.

He who lives without folly is not as wise as he may think.

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

87.—Men would not live long in society were they not the dupes of each other. [A maxim, adds Aimé Martin, "Which may enter into the code of a vulgar rogue, but one is astonished to find it in a moral treatise." Yet we have scriptural authority for it: "Deceiving and being deceived."—2 TIM. iii. 13.]

Neither the sun nor death can be looked at steadily.

The prospect of being pleased tomorrow will never console me for the boredom of today.