Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillacla ʁɔʃfuˈko]; 15 September 1613 – 17 March 1680) was a noted French author of maxims and memoirs. It is said that his world-view was clear-eyed and urbane, and that he neither condemned human conduct nor sentimentally celebrated it. Born in Paris on the Rue des Petits Champs, at a time when the royal court was vacillating between aiding the nobility and threatening it, he was considered an exemplar of the accomplished 17th-century...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth15 September 1613
CountryFrance
Fortune mends more faults in us than ever reason would be able to do.
The whimsicalness of our own humor is a thousand times more fickle and unaccountable than what we blame so much in fortune.
Our good qualities expose us more to hatred and persecution than all the ill we do.
It is easier for a man to be thought fit for an employment that he has not, than for one he stands already possessed of, and is exercising.
The appearances of goodness and merit often meet with a greater reward from the world than goodness and merit themselves.
Men frequently do good only to give themselves opportunity of doing ill with impunity.
The older a fool is, the worse he is.
Of all our faults, the one we avow most easily is idleness; we persuade ourselves that it is allied to all the peaceable virtues,and as for the others, that it does not destroy them utterly, but only suspends the exercise of their functions.
Some people are so extremely whiffling and inconsiderable that they are as far from any real faults as from substantial virtues.
Virtues lose themselves in self-interest, as rivers in the sea.
Virtue would not make such advances if there were not a little vanity to keep it company.
Fortune makes our virtues and vices visible, just as light does the objects of sight.
Whatever pretended causes we may blame our afflictions upon, it is often nothing but self-interest and vanity that produce them.
None but great men are capable of having great flaws.