Quotes By Francois De La Rochefoucauld

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.

Some people displease with merit, and others' very faults and defects are pleasing.

In friendship as well as love, ignorance very often contributes more to our happiness than knowledge.

Politeness is a desire to be treated politely, and to be esteemed polite oneself.

If it were not for the company of fools, a witty man would often be greatly at a loss.

What we call generosity is for the most part only the vanity of giving; and we exercise it because we are more fond of that vanity than of the thing we give.

We are nearer loving those who hate us than those who love us more than we wish.

Flattery is a kind of bad money, to which our vanity gives us currency.

There are crimes which become innocent and even glorious through their splendor, number and excess.

Few things are impracticable in themselves; and it is for want of application, rather than of means, that men fail to succeed.

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

Pride does not wish to owe and vanity does not wish to pay.

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.

To achieve greatness one should live as if they will never die.

Nothing hinders a thing from being natural so much as the straining ourselves to make it seem so.

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

Most of our faults are more pardonable than the means we use to conceal them.

Perfect Valor is to do, without a witness, all that we could do before the whole world.

We seldom praise anyone in good earnest, except such as admire us.

Old age is a tyrant, who forbids, under pain of death, the pleasures of youth.

We are more often treacherous through weakness than through calculation.

A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.

Everyone complains of his memory, and nobody complains of his judgment.

Decency is the least of all laws, but yet it is the law which is most strictly observed.

Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.

When we are in love we often doubt that which we most believe.

It is great folly to wish to be wise all alone.

When our vices leave us, we like to imagine it is we who are leaving them.

We are sometimes as different from ourselves as we are from others.

What makes the pain we feel from shame and jealousy so cutting is that vanity can give us no assistance in bearing them.