François de La Rochefoucauld Quotes

We are never as unhappy as we think, nor as happy has we had hoped

What the Italian poet has said of the virtue of women, namely that it is often simply the art of looking virtuous, can be applied to all our virtues

We have not the strength to follow our reason all the way

People with a high opinion of their own merit make it a point of honor to be unhappy so as to convince others as well as themselves that they are worthy victims of the buffetings of fate

Our actions are like set rhymes: anyone can fit them in to mean what he likes

Readiness to believe the worst without adequate examination comes from pride and laziness: we want to find culprits but cannot be bothered to investigate the crimes

We should often blush at our noblest deeds if the world were to see all their underlying motives

The scorn for riches displayed by the philosophers was a secret desire to recompense their own merit for the injustice of Fortune by scorning those very benefits she had denied them; it was a private way of remaining unsullied by poverty, a devious path towards the high respect they could not command by wealth

It is easier to know man in general than to understand one man in particular

It is as easy to deceive ourselves without noticing it as it is hard to deceive others without their noticing

We pride ourselves on the opposite faults to those we have; when we are weak we boast of being unyielding

From all this one might reasonably conclude that its (self-love) desires are kindled by itself alone rather than by the beauty or value of the things desired, which are given their price and their lustre by its taste alone, and that when it pursues things that are are to its liking it is running after itself

Self-love sees to it that the person who flatters us is never our greatest flatterer

Fashions of thought, as well as the fortunes of the world, come round on the whirligig of time

Man often thinks he is in control when he is being controlled, and while his mind is striving in one direction his heart is imperceptibly drawing him in another