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
A lofty mind always thinks nobly, it easily creates vivid, agreeable, and natural fancies, places them in their best light, clothes them with all appropriate adornments, studies others' tastes, and clears away from its own thoughts all that is useless and disagreeable.
Many young persons believe themselves natural when they are only impolite and coarse.
There are several remedies which will cure love, but there are no infallible ones.
Jealousy is not love, but self-love.
One honor won is a surety for more.
All who know their own minds know not their own hearts.
Those whom the world has delighted to honor have oftener been influenced in their doings by ambition and vanity than by patriotism.
Great men should not have great faults.
We love everything on our own account; we even follow our own taste and inclination when we prefer our friends to ourselves; and yet it is this preference alone that constitutes true and perfect friendship.
Friendship is a traffic wherein self-love always proposes to be the gainer.
The generality of friends puts us out of conceit with friendship; just as the generality of religious people puts us out of conceit with religion.
Self-love increases or diminishes for us the good qualities of our friends, in proportion to the satisfaction we feel with them; and we judge of their merit by the manner in which they act towards us.
The good or the bad fortune of men depends not less upon their own dispositions than upon fortune.
Our probity is not less at the mercy of fortune than our property.