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
Self-love makes our friends appear more or less deserving in proportion to the delight we take in them, and the measures by whichwe judge of their worth depend upon the manner of their conversing with us.
As long as we love, we can forgive.
If one judges love according to the greatest part of the effects it produces, it would appear to resemble rather hatred than kindness.
What we take for virtue is often but an assemblage of various ambitions and activities that chance, or our own astuteness, have arranged in a certain manner; and it is not always out of courage or purity that men are brave, and women chaste.
Men's happiness and misery depends altogether as much upon their own humor as it does upon fortune.
Happiness does not consist in things themselves but in the relish we have of them; and a man has attained it when he enjoys what he loves and desires himself, and not what other people think lovely and desirable.
There is an excess both in happiness and misery above our power of sensation.
Our wisdom lies as much at the mercy of fortune as our possessions do.
As we grow older, we increase in folly--and in wisdom.
The desire to be thought clever often prevents a man from becoming so.
To think to be wise alone is a very great folly.
Moral severity in women is only a dress or paint which they use to set off their beauty.
Nothing is more ridiculous in old people that were once good-looking, than to forget that they are not so still.
Youth is a continual intoxication; it is the fever of reason.