All Quotes by Francois de La Rochefoucauld
“Gratitude is merely the secret hope of further favors.”
“One forgives to the degree that one loves.”
“Though men are apt to flatter and exalt themselves with their great achievements, yet these are, in truth, very often owing not so much to design as chance.”
“Hope, deceiving as it is, serves at least to lead us to the end of our lives by an agreeable route.”
“If we are to judge of love by its consequences, it more nearly resembles hatred than friendship.”
“The defects of the mind, like those of the face, grow worse with age.”
“A true friend is the greatest of all blessings, and that which we take the least care of all to acquire.”
“Though men are apt to flatter and exalt themselves with their great achievements, yet these are, in truth, very often owing not so much to design as chance.”
“The art of using moderate abilities to advantage wins praise, and often acquires more reputation than actual brilliancy.”
“Old age is a tyrant, who forbids, under pain of death, the pleasures of youth.”
“However rare true love may be, it is less so than true friendship.”
“We should not be upset that others hide the truth from us, when we hide it so often from ourselves.”
“Men give away nothing so liberally as their advice.”
“Repentance is not so much remorse for what we have done as the fear of the consequences.”
“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.”
“Good advice is something a man gives when he is too old to set a bad example.”
“Too great haste to repay an obligation is a kind of ingratitude.”
“Jealousy contains more of self-love than of love.”
“Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and fans fires.”
“Jealousy is bred in doubts. When those doubts change into certainties, then the passion either ceases or turns absolute madness.”
“Jealousy lives upon doubts. It becomes madness or ceases entirely as soon as we pass from doubt to certainty.”
“There is no disguise which can hide love for long where it exists, or simulate it where it does not.”
“One is never fortunate or as unfortunate as one imagines.”
“True love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about and few have seen.”
“Though nature be ever so generous, yet can she not make a hero alone. Fortune must contribute her part too; and till both concur, the work cannot be perfected.”
“Nothing is so contagious as example; and we never do any great good or evil which does not produce its like.”
“We often forgive those who bore us, but we cannot forgive those whom we bore.”
“No man deserves to be praised for his goodness, who has it not in his power to be wicked. Goodness without that power is generally nothing more than sloth, or an impotence of will.”
“Passion makes idiots of the cleverest men, and makes the biggest idiots clever.”
“What makes the pain we feel from shame and jealousy so cutting is that vanity can give us no assistance in bearing them.”
“In friendship as well as love, ignorance very often contributes more to our happiness than knowledge.”
“Taste may change, but inclination never.”
“However rare true love may be, it is less so than true friendship.”
“No persons are more frequently wrong, than those who will not admit they are wrong.”