La Rochefoucauld Quotes
The evil that we do does not attract to us so much persecution and hatred as our good qualities.
Neither love nor fire can subsist without perpetual motion; both cease to live so soon as they cease to hope, or to fear.
What renders us so changeable in our friendship is, that it is difficult to know the qualities of the soul, but easy to know those of the mind.
Too great cleverness is but deceptive delicacy, true delicacy is the most substantial cleverness.
There is real love just as there are real ghosts; every person speaks of it, few persons have seen it.
The largest ambition has the least appearance of ambition when it meets with an absolute impossibility in compassing its object.
Absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones, as the wind blows out the candle and fans the bonfire.
True love is like ghosts, which everybody talks about and few have seen.
There is only one kind of love, but there are a thousand different versions.
Passion often makes a madman of the cleverest man, and renders the greatest fools clever.
Almost always we are bored by people to whom we ourselves are boring.
We forgive so long as we love.
Everyone complains of his memory, and no one complains of his judgment.
It is much easier to extinguish a first desire than to satisfy all of those that follow it.
It is with true love as with ghosts. Every one talks of it but few have seen it.
Nobody deserves to be praised for goodness unless he is strong enough to be bad, for any other goodness is usually merely inertia or lack of will-power
Nobody deserves to be praised for goodness unless he is strong enough to be bad.
If we had no faults we should not take so much pleasure in noting those of others.
Hypocrisy is a tribute that vice pays to virtue.
The truest way to be deceived is to think oneself more knowing than others.
Absence diminishes little passions and increases great ones just as the wind blows out a candle and fans a fire.
Old men are fond of giving good advice to console themselves for being no longer in a position to give bad examples.
How is it that we remember the least triviality that happens to us and yet not remember how often we have recounted it to the same person?
The confidence which we have in ourselves gives birth to much of that which we have in others.
Perfect courage means doing unwitnessed what we would be capable of with the world looking on.
He who imagines he can do without the world deceives himself much but he who fancies the world cannot do without him is still more mistaken.
The reason why lovers are never wary of one another is this - they are always talking of themselves.
True eloquence consists in saying all that is necessary and nothing but what is necessary.
If we resist our passions it is more from their weakness than from our strength.
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.
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.
A true friend is the greatest of all blessings and that which we take the least care of all to acquire.