Famous Quotes

Quotes by Francois De La Rochefoucauld

• A great many men's gratitude is nothing but a secret desire to hook in more valuable kindnesses hereafter.
• A true friend is the greatest of all blessings, and that which we take the least care of all to acquire.
• 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.
• Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and fans fires.
• As great minds have the faculty of saying a great deal in a few words, so lesser minds have a talent of talking much, and saying nothing.
• As it is the characteristic of great wits to say much in few words, so small wits seem to have the gift of speaking much and saying nothing.
• Being a blockhead is sometimes the best security against being cheated by a man of wit.
• Few people have the wisdom to prefer the criticism that would do them good, to the praise that deceives them.
• Few things are impracticable in themselves and it is for want of application, rather than of means, that men fail to succeed.
• Flattery is a kind of bad money, to which our vanity gives us currency.
• Good advice is something a man gives when he is too old to set a bad example.
• Gratitude is merely the secret hope of further favors.
• Great souls are not those who have fewer passions and more virtues than others, but only those who have greater designs.
• Heat of blood makes young people change their inclinations often, and habit makes old ones keep to theirs a great while.
• Hope, deceiving as it is, serves at least to lead us to the end of our lives by an agreeable route.
• However glorious an action in itself, it ought not to pass for great if it be not the effect of wisdom and intention.
• However greatly we distrust the sincerity of those we converse with, yet still we think they tell more truth to us than to anyone else.
• However rare true love may be, it is less so than true friendship.
• If we are to judge of love by its consequences, it more nearly resembles hatred than friendship.
• If we have not peace within ourselves, it is in vain to seek it from outward sources.
• If we resist our passions, it is more due to their weakness than our strength.
• In friendship as well as love, ignorance very often contributes more to our happiness than knowledge.
• In most of mankind gratitude is merely a secret hope of further favors.
• In the misfortunes of our best friends we always find something not altogether displeasing to us.
• It is a great act of cleverness to be able to conceal one's being clever.
• It is easier to know men in general, than men in particular.
• It is from a weakness and smallness of mind that men are opinionated and we are very loath to believe what we are not able to comprehend.
• It is great folly to wish to be wise all alone.
• It is not enough to have great qualities We should also have the management of them.
• It is not in the power of even the most crafty dissimulation to conceal love long, where it really is, nor to counterfeit it long where it is not.
• It is with an old love as it is with old age a man lives to all the miseries, but is dead to all the pleasures.
• It is with true love as it is with ghosts everyone talks about it, but few have seen it.
• Jealousy contains more of self-love than of love.
• 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.