La Rochefoucauld Quotes

It's easier to know people in general than one person in particular

We pardon as long as we love.

We often credit ourselves with vices the reverse of what we have, thus when weak we boast of our obstinacy.

Nothing ought more to humiliate men who have merited great praise than the care they still take to boast of little things.

Perfect courage and utter cowardice are two extremes which rarely occur.

Fortunate persons hardly ever amend their ways: they always imagine that they are in the right when fortune upholds their bad conduct.

Fortune never appears so blind as to those to whom she does no good.

The greater part of mankind judge of men only by their fashionableness or their fortune.

Friendship is only a reciprocal conciliation of interests, and an exchange of good offices; it is a species of commerce out of which self-love always expects to gain something.

We are better pleased to see those on whom we confer benefits than those from whom we receive them.

However great the advantages given us by nature, it is not she alone, but fortune with her, which makes heroes.

Happy people rarely correct their faults; they consider themselves vindicated, since fortune endorses their evil ways.

In love deceit nearly always goes further than mistrust.

Great names abase, instead of elevating, those who do not know how to bear them.

Men would not live in society long if they were not each others dupes.

In the human heart there is a ceaseless birth of passions, so that the destruction of one is almost always the establishment of another.

The duration of our passions is no more dependent on ourselves than the duration of our lives.

We often pride ourselves on even the most criminal passions, but envy is a timid and shamefaced passion we never dare to acknowledge.

There is merit without rank, but there is no rank without some merit.

The only security is courage.

Affected simplicity is an elegant imposture.

We feel good and ill only in proportion to our self-love.

However evil men may be they dare not be openly hostile to virtue, and so when they want to attack it they pretend to find it spurious , or impute crimes to it.

Penetration has an air of divination; it pleases our vanity more than any other quality of the mind.

The contempt of riches in the philosophers was a concealed desire of revenging on fortune the injustice done to their merit, by despising the good she denied them.

The generality of friends puts us out of conceit with friendship; just as the generality of religious people puts us out of conceit with religion.

Friendship is a traffic wherein self-love always proposes to be the gainer.

Great men should not have great faults.

Those whom the world has delighted to honor have oftener been influenced in their doings by ambition and vanity than by patriotism.

All who know their own minds know not their own hearts.

One honor won is a surety for more.

There are several remedies which will cure love, but there are no infallible ones.

In misfortune we often mistake dejection for constancy; we bear it without daring to look on it; like cowards, who suffer themselves to be murdered without resistance.

Prudence and love are inconsistent; in proportion as the last increases, the other decreases.

Nothing is so capable of diminishing self-love as the observation that we disapprove at one time what we approve at another.

Self-love, as it happens to be well or ill conducted, constitutes virtue and vice.

Whatever discoveries we may have made in the regions of self-love, there still remain many unknown lands.

As long as we love, we can forgive.

The grace of novelty and the length of habit, though so very opposite to one another, yet agree in this, that they both alike keepus from discovering the faults of our friends.

The boldest stroke and best act of friendship is not to disclose our own failings to a friend, but to show him his own.

As uncommon a thing as true love is, it is yet easier to find than true friendship.

The reason we do not let our friends see the very bottom of our hearts is not so much distrust of them as distrust of ourselves.

Truth has scarce done so much good in the world as the false appearances of it have done hurt.

We should desire very few things passionately if we did but perfectly know the nature of the things we desire.

It is necessary, in order to know things well, to know the particulars of them; and these, being infinite, make our knowledge eversuperficial and imperfect.

Some follies are caught, like contagious diseases.

Our self-love can less bear to have our tastes than our opinions condemned.

Women can more easily conquer their passion than their coquetterie.

That man, we may be sure, is a person of true worth, whom those who envy him most are yet forced to praise.

Very few people are acquainted with death. They undergo it, commonly, not so much out of resolution as custom and insensitivity; and most men die because they cannot help it.