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
We often persuade ourselves to love people who are more powerful than we are, yet interest alone produces our friendship; we do not give our hearts away for the good we wish to do, but for that we expect to receive.
Sometimes we lose friends for whose loss our regret is greater than our grief, and others for whom our grief is greater than our regret.
As we grow older we grow both more foolish and wiser at the same time.
There is a kind of love, the excess of which forbids jealousy.
There are more defects in temperament than in the mind.
Our distrust of another justifies his deceit.
Happiness is in the taste, and not in the things themselves; we are happy from possessing what we like, not from possessing what others like.
We do not wish ardently for what we desire only through reason.
What men call friendship is no more than a partnership, a mutual care of interests, an exchange of favors - in a word, it is a sort of traffic, in which self-love ever proposes to be the gainer.
Boredom ... causes us to neglect more duties than does interest.
Everyone blames his memory, no one blames his judgment.
There is a form of eminence which does not depend on fate; it is an air which sets us apart and seems to prtend great things; it is the value which we unconsciously attach to ourselves; it is the quality which wins us deference of others; more than birth, position, or ability, it gives us ascendance.
Passion very often makes the wisest men fools, and very often too inspires the greatest fools with wit.
The moderation of fortunate people comes from the calm which good fortune gives to their tempers.