Quotes By Francois De La Rochefoucauld

We seldom find people ungrateful so long as it is thought we can serve them.

Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms inside your head, and people in them, acting. People you know, yet can't quite name.

Our virtues are often, in reality, no better than vices disguised.

If we judge love by most of its effects, it resembles rather hatred than affection.

Silence is the safest course for any man to adopt who distrust himself.

A man is sometimes as different from himself as he is from others.

If we have not peace within ourselves, it is in vain to seek it from outward sources.

Funeral pomp is more for the vanity of the living than for the honor of the dead.

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.

Mediocre minds usually dismiss anything which reaches beyond their own understanding.

Men often pass from love to ambition, but they seldom come back again from ambition to love.

The mind cannot long play the heart's role.

Confidence contributes more to conversation than wit.

How can we expect another to keep our secret if we have been unable to keep it ourselves?

There are bad people who would be less dangerous if they were quite devoid of goodness.

The greatest part of intimate confidences proceed from a desire either to be pitied or admired.

A wise man thinks it more advantageous not to join the battle than to win.

Too great haste to repay an obligation is a kind of ingratitude.

Virtue would go far if vanity did not keep it company.

We say little, when vanity does not make us speak.

We may sooner be brought to love them that hate us, than them that love us more than we would have them do.

The passions are the only orators which always persuade.

Many men are contemptuous of riches; few can give them away.

People always complain about their memories, never about their minds.

Our concern for the loss of our friends is not always from a sense of their worth, but rather of our own need of them and that we have lost some who had a good opinion of us.

The only thing that should surprise us is that there are still some things that can surprise us.

One is never fortunate or as unfortunate as one imagines.

Whatever good things people say of us, they tell us nothing new.

We only confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no big ones.

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