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François de La Rochefoucauld
Find the best quotes, maxims and aphorisms of François de La Rochefoucauld
Biography : French moralist, author of maxims and memoirs.
Born: 1613 - Died: 1680
Period:
17th century
Place of birth: France
France
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François de La Rochefoucauld - Quotes



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





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.
François de La Rochefoucauld





Hope, deceiving as it is, serves at least to lead us to the end of our lives by an agreeable route.
François de La Rochefoucauld





The generality of virtuous women are like hidden treasures, they are safe only because nobody has sought after them.
François 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.
François de La Rochefoucauld





We only acknowledge small faults in order to make it appear that we are free from great ones.
François de La Rochefoucauld





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.
François de La Rochefoucauld





It is with true love as it is with ghosts everyone talks about it, but few have seen it.
François de La Rochefoucauld





We always love those who admire us, but we do not always love those whom we admire.
François de La Rochefoucauld





It is a great act of cleverness to be able to conceal one's being clever.
François de La Rochefoucauld





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





Those who are incapable of committing great crimes do not readily suspect them in others.
François de La Rochefoucauld





Repentance is not so much remorse for what we have done as the fear of the consequences.
François de La Rochefoucauld





Many men are contemptuous of riches few can give them away.
François de La Rochefoucauld





Taste may change, but inclination never.
François de La Rochefoucauld





We come altogether fresh and raw into the several stages of life, and often find ourselves without experience, despite our years.
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





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





Jealousy lives upon doubts. It becomes madness or ceases entirely as soon as we pass from doubt to certainty.
François de La Rochefoucauld





What seems to be generosity is often no more than disguised ambition, which overlooks a small interest in order to secure a great one.
François de La Rochefoucauld





We are nearer loving those who hate us than those who love us more than we wish.
François de La Rochefoucauld





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.
François de La Rochefoucauld





Mediocre minds usually dismiss anything which reaches beyond their own understanding.
François de La Rochefoucauld - Reflections, or Sentences and Moral Maxims / 





Nothing so much prevents us from being natural as the desire to appear so.
François de La Rochefoucauld - Reflections, or Sentences and Moral Maxims / 





Those who are condemned to death affect sometimes a constancy and contempt for death which is only the fear of facing it; so that one may say that this constancy and contempt are to their mind what the bandage is to their eyes.
François de La Rochefoucauld - Reflections, or Sentences and Moral Maxims / 





Men are not only prone to forget benefits and injuries; they even hate those who have obliged them, and cease to hate those who have injured them. The necessity of revenging an injury or of recompensing a benefit seems a slavery to which they are unwilling to submit.
François de La Rochefoucauld - Reflections, or Sentences and Moral Maxims / 





In most of mankind gratitude is merely a secret hope of further favors.
François de La Rochefoucauld





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