Famous Quotes

Quotes by Francois De La Rochefoucauld

• Love can no more continue without a constant motion than fire can and when once you take hope and fear away, you take from it its very life and being.
• Many men are contemptuous of riches few can give them away.
• Men give away nothing so liberally as their advice.
• Men often pass from love to ambition, but they seldom come back again from ambition to love.
• Most people know no other way of judging men's worth but by the vogue they are in, or the fortunes they have met with.
• Nature seems at each man's birth to have marked out the bounds of his virtues and vices, and to have determined how good or how wicked that man shall be capable of being.
• Neither the sun nor death can be looked at with a steady eye.
• 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.
• No men are oftener wrong than those that can least bear to be so.
• Nothing is so contagious as example and we never do any great good or evil which does not produce its like.
• Old age is a tyrant, who forbids, under pain of death, the pleasures of youth.
• Old men are fond of giving good advice to console themselves for their inability to give bad examples.
• On neither the sun, nor death, can a man look fixedly.
• One can find women who have never had one love affair, but it is rare indeed to find any who have had only one.
• One forgives to the degree that one loves.
• One is never fortunate or as unfortunate as one imagines.
• Only the contemptible fear contempt.
• Our actions seem to have their lucky and unlucky stars, to which a great part of that blame and that commendation is due which is given to the actions themselves.
• Our aversion to lying is commonly a secret ambition to make what we say considerable, and have every word received with a religious respect.
• Passion makes idiots of the cleverest men, and makes the biggest idiots clever.
• Perfect courage is to do without witnesses what one would be capable of doing with the world looking on.
• Philosophy finds it an easy matter to vanquish past and future evils, but the present are commonly too hard for it.
• Repentance is not so much remorse for what we have done as the fear of the consequences.
• Some counterfeits reproduce so very well the truth that it would be a flaw of judgment not to be deceived by them.
• Taste may change, but inclination never.
• The defects of the mind, like those of the face, grow worse with age.
• The generality of virtuous women are like hidden treasures, they are safe only because nobody has sought after them.
• The happiness and misery of men depend no less on temper than fortune.
• There are a great many men valued in society who have nothing to recommend them but serviceable vices.
• There are but very few men clever enough to know all the mischief they do.
• There are few virtuous women who are not bored with their trade.
• There is a kind of elevation which does not depend on fortune it is a certain air which distinguishes us, and seems to destine us for great things it is a price which we imperceptibly set upon ourselves.
• There is no better proof of a man's being truly good than his desiring to be constantly under the observation of good men.
• There is no disguise which can hide love for long where it exists, or simulate it where it does not.
• There is nothing men are so generous of as advice.
• There is only one kind of love, but there are a thousand imitations.
• They that apply themselves to trifling matters commonly become incapable of great ones.
• Those that have had great passions esteem themselves for the rest of their lives fortunate and unfortunate in being cured of them.
• Those who are incapable of committing great crimes do not readily suspect them in others.
• 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.