Rochefoucauld Quotes

#1. When you talk yourself, you think how witty, how original, how acute you are; but when another does so, you are very apt to think only - What a crib from Rochefoucauld!

Ouida

#2. Absence diminishes minor passions and inflames great ones, as the wind douses a candle and fans a fire. La Rochefoucauld, 1613-1680 OBSERVANCE

Robert Greene

#3. Turning Wearily, as one would turn to nod goodbye to Rochefoucauld, If the street were time and he as the end of the street.

T. S. Eliot

#4. Yes, well, let me tell you that if nobody had ever learned to quote, very few people would be in love with La Rochefoucauld. I bet you I don't know ten souls who read him without a middleman.

Dorothy Parker

#5. How many of us have been first attracted to reason, first learned to think, to draw conclusions, to extract a moral from the follies of life, by some dazzling aphorism from Rochefoucauld or La Bruyere.

Bill Vaughan

#6. Poor people know poor people, and rich people know rich people. It is one of the few things La Rochefoucauld did not say, but then La Rochefoucauld never lived in the Bronx.

Moss Hart

#7. Unlike the majority of the writers of his age, La Rochefoucauld was an aristocrat; and this fact gives a peculiar tone to his work.

Lytton Strachey

#8. Civility is a desire to receive civilities, and to be accounted well-bred.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#9. The sicknesses of the soul have their ups and downs like those of the body; what we take to be a cure is most often merely a respite or change of disease.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

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

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#11. The old begin to complain of the conduct of the young when they themselves are no longer able to set a bad example.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#12. Novelty is to love like bloom to fruit; it gives a luster which is easily effaced, but never returns.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#13. If we judge love by most of its effects, it resembles rather hatred than affection.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#14. There are no accidents so unlucky but the prudent may draw some advantage from them.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#15. Nothing is so catching as example.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#16. A man does not please long when he has only species of wit.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#17. Tastes in young people are changed by natural impetuosity, and in the aged are preserved by habit.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#18. We sometimes imagine we hate flattery, but we only hate the way we are flattered.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#19. Love of glory, fear of shame, greed for fortune, the desire to make life agreeable and comfortable, and the wish to depreciate others - all of these are often the causes of the bravery that is spoken so highly of by men.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#20. Innocence does not find near so much protection as guilt.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

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

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

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

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#23. Some weak people are so sensible of their weakness as to be able to make a good use of it.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#24. We torment ourselves rather to make it appear that we are happy than to become so.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#25. ["Ambition has been so strong as to make very miserable men take comfort that they were supreme in misery;

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

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

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#27. However we may conceal our passions under the veil ... there is always some place where they peep out.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#28. What is perfectly true is perfectly witty.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#29. The first lover is kept a long while, when no offer is made of a second.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#30. 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.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

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

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#32. We often bore others when we think we cannot possibly bore them.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#33. Those who are overreached by our cunning are far from appearing to us as ridiculous as we appear to ourselves when the cunning of others has overreached us.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

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

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#35. It often happens that things come into the mind in a more finished form than could have been achieved after much study.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#36. Folly pursues us at all periods of our lives. If someone seems wise it is only because his follies are proportionate to his age and fortune.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#37. Old fools are greater fools than young ones.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#38. Love, all agreeable as it is, charms more by the fashion in which it displays itself, than by its own true merit.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#39. The world is full of pots jeering at kettles.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#40. We do not lack strength so much as the will to use it; and very often our imagining that things are impossible is nothing but an excuse of our own contriving, to reconcile ourselves to our own idleness.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#41. 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.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#42. We frequently are troublesome to others, when we think it impossible for us ever to be so.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#43. Gratitude is merely the secret hope of further favors.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#44. It is with certain good qualities as with the senses; those who have them not can neither appreciate nor comprehend them in others.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#45. It is easier to appear worthy of a position one does not hold, than of the office which one fills.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#46. We often boast that we are never bored; but yet we are so conceited that we do not perceive how often we bore others.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#47. We always like those who admire us.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#48. True bravery means doing alone that which one could do if all the world were by.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

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

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#50. What we cut off from our other faults is very often but so much added to our pride.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#51. Hope and fear are inseparable.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#52. It is a kind of happiness to know just how unhappy we could be.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#53. Quarrels would not last long if the fault was only on one side.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

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

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#55. The passions often engender their contraries.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#56. There are two sorts of constancy in love one arises from continually discovering in the loved person new subjects for love, the other arises from our making a merit of being constant.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#57. It is easier to understand mankind in general than any individual man.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

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

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#59. There are some disguised falsehoods so like truths, that 'twould be to judge ill not to be deceived by them.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#60. It is as commendable to think well of oneself when alone, as it is ridiculous to speak well of oneself among others.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#61. Generosity is the vanity of giving.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#62. It is difficult to define love; all we can say is, that in the soul it is a desire to rule, in the mind it is a sympathy, and in the body it is a hidden and delicate wish to possess what we love-Plus many mysteries.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#63. We are never so generous as when giving advice.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#64. The passions do very often give birth to others of a nature most contrary to their own. Thus avarice sometimes brings forth prodigality, and prodigality avarice; a man's resolution is very often the effect of levity, and his boldness that of cowardice and fear.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#65. The reason why most women have so little sense of friendship is that this is but a cold and flat passion to those that have felt that of love.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#66. We may seem great in an employment below our worth, but we very often look little in one that is too big for us.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

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

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#68. The truest comparison we can make of love is to liken it to a fever; we have no more power over the one than the other, either as to its violence or duration.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#69. Flattery is false money, which would not be current were it not for our vanity.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#70. Of all our faults, the one we avow most easily is idleness; we persuade ourselves that it is allied to all the peaceable virtues,and as for the others, that it does not destroy them utterly, but only suspends the exercise of their functions.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#71. What makes us so often discontented with those who transact business for us is that they almost always abandon the interest of their friends for the interest of the business, because they wish to have the honor of succeeding in that which they have undertaken.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#72. 321. - We are nearer loving those who hate us, than those who love us more than we desire.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#73. Before we passionately desire a thing, we should examine the happiness of its possessor.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#74. We often make use of envenomed praise, that reveals on the rebound, as it were, defects in those praised which we dare not exposeany other way.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#75. Loyalty is in most people only a ruse used by self-interest to attract confidence.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#76. Self-love is more cunning than the most cunning man in the world.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#77. The height of ability in the least able consists in knowing how to submit to the good leadership of others.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#78. The trust that we put in ourselves makes us feel trust in others.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#79. We cannot possibly imagine the variety of contradictions in every heart.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

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

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#81. The common foible of women who have been handsome is to forget that they are no longer so.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#82. 86. - Our distrust of another justifies his deceit.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#83. Whatever ignominy or disgrace we have incurred, it is almost always in our power to reestablish our reputation.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#84. Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#85. We promise in proportion to our hopes, and we deliver in proportion to our fears.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#86. The blindness of men is the most dangerous effect of their pride; it seems to nourish and augment it; it deprives them of knowledge of remedies which can solace their miseries and can cure their faults.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#87. 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

#88. It requires no small degree of ability to know when to conceal one's ability.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#89. If we had no faults, we would not derive so much pleasure from noting those of other people.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#90. A wise man thinks it more advantageous not to join the battle than to win.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#91. The passions possess a certain injustice and self interest which makes it dangerous to follow them, and in reality we should distrust them even when they appear most trustworthy.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#92. There are few people who are more often in the wrong than those who cannot endure to be so.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#93. The defects and faults of the mind are like wounds in the body; after all imaginable care has been taken to heal them up, still there will be a scar left behind, and they are in continual danger of breaking the skin and bursting out again.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#94. It is sometimes necessary to play the fool to avoid being deceived by cunning men.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

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

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#96. Our enemies come nearer the truth in the opinions they form of us than we do in our opinion of ourselves.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#97. We love much better those who endeavor to imitate us, than those who strive to equal us. For imitation is a sign of esteem, but competition of envy.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#98. There are very few things impossible in themselves; and we do not want means to conquer difficulties so much as application and resolution in the use of means.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#99. High fortune makes both our virtues and vices stand out as objects that are brought clearly to view by the light.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#100. Those who have the most cunning affect all their lives to condemn cunning; that they may make use of it on some great occasion, and to some great end.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld