129 Quotes By Francois de La Rochefoucauld


We may sooner be brought to love them that hate us, than them that love us more than we would have them do.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld on love

We pardon to the extent that we love.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld on love

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.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld on love

Passion makes idiots of the cleverest men, and makes the biggest idiots clever.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld on men

Men give away nothing so liberally as their advice.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld on men

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.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld on men

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.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld on men

A great many men's gratitude is nothing but a secret desire to hook in more valuable kindnesses hereafter.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld on men

Men often pass from love to ambition, but they seldom come back again from ambition to love.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld on men

There is no better proof of a man's being truly good than his desiring to be constantly under the observation of good men.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld on men

The happiness and misery of men depend no less on temper than fortune.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld on men

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.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld on men

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

There are but very few men clever enough to know all the mischief they do.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld on men

Old men are fond of giving good advice to console themselves for their inability to give bad examples.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld on men

It is easier to know men in general, than men in particular.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld on men

Few things are impracticable in themselves and it is for want of application, rather than of means, that men fail to succeed.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld on men

There are a great many men valued in society who have nothing to recommend them but serviceable vices.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld on men

There is nothing men are so generous of as advice.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld on men

No men are oftener wrong than those that can least bear to be so.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld on men