François De La Rochefoucauld Quotes

Absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones, as the wind blows out the candle and fans the bonfire.

~ François De La Rochefoucauld

No persons are more frequently wrong, than those who will not admit they are wrong.

~ François De La Rochefoucauld

True love is like ghosts, which everybody talks about and few have seen.

~ François De La Rochefoucauld

Neither the sun nor death can be looked at steadily.

~ François De La Rochefoucauld

There is only one kind of love, but there are a thousand different versions.

~ François De La Rochefoucauld

We promise according to our hopes and perform according to our fears.

~ François De La Rochefoucauld

How rare true love maybe, it is less so than true friendship.

~ François De La Rochefoucauld

Passion often makes a madman of the cleverest man, and renders the greatest fools clever.

~ François De La Rochefoucauld

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.

~ François De La Rochefoucauld

One cannot answer for his courage when he has never been in danger.

~ François De La Rochefoucauld

Passion often makes fools of the wisest men and gives the silliest wisdom.

~ François De La Rochefoucauld

Almost always we are bored by people to whom we ourselves are boring.

~ François De La Rochefoucauld

A weakling is incapable of sincerity.

~ François De La Rochefoucauld

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

~ François De La Rochefoucauld

True love is like ghosts which many believe in, but few have seen.

~ François De La Rochefoucauld

We forgive so long as we love.

~ François De La Rochefoucauld

Everyone complains of his memory, and no one complains of his judgment.

~ François De La Rochefoucauld

There are few things we should keenly desire if we really knew what we wanted.

~ François De La Rochefoucauld

He who lives without folly is not as wise as he may think.

~ François De La Rochefoucauld

To eat is a necessity, but to eat intelligently is an art.

~ François De La Rochefoucauld

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.

~ François De La Rochefoucauld

In love we often doubt what we most believe.

~ François De La Rochefoucauld

If we had no faults we should not take so much pleasure in noting those of others.

~ François De La Rochefoucauld

Hypocrisy is a tribute that vice pays to virtue.

~ François De La Rochefoucauld

Our envy always lasts longer than the happiness of those we envy.

~ François De La Rochefoucauld

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

~ François De La Rochefoucauld

87.—Men would not live long in society were they not the dupes of each other. [A maxim, adds Aimé Martin, Which may enter into the code of a vulgar rogue, but one is astonished to find it in a moral treatise. Yet we have scriptural authority for it: Deceiving and being deceived.—2 TIM. iii. 13.]

~ François De La Rochefoucauld

We are almost always bored by just those whom we must not find boring.

~ François De La Rochefoucauld

Extreme boredom provides its own antidote.

~ François De La Rochefoucauld

Boredom ... causes us to neglect more duties than does interest.

~ François De La Rochefoucauld

We often forgive those who bore us but can't forgive those whom we bore.

~ François De La Rochefoucauld

When we are unable to find tranquility within ourselves it is useless to seek it elsewhere.

~ François De La Rochefoucauld

Nothing is so infectious as example.

~ François De La Rochefoucauld

It is as proper to have pride in oneself as it is ridiculous to show it to others.

~ François De La Rochefoucauld

The confidence which we have in ourselves gives birth to much of that which we have in others.

~ François De La Rochefoucauld

A man who finds no satisfaction in himself seeks for it in vain elsewhere.

~ François De La Rochefoucauld

I always say to myself what is the most important thing we can think about at this extraordinary moment.

~ François De La Rochefoucauld

True love is like ghosts which everybody talks about and few have seen.

~ François De La Rochefoucauld

True love is like ghosts which everybody talks about and few have seen.

~ François De La Rochefoucauld

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.

~ François De La Rochefoucauld