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
The evil that we do does not attract to us so much persecution and hatred as our good qualities.
Nothing is so contagious as example; and we never do any great good or evil which does not produce its like.
There are heroes in evil as well as in good.
A man would rather say evil of himself than say nothing.
We frequently do good in order to enable us to do evil later with impunity exemption of punishment.
However evil men may be they dare not be openly hostile to virtue, and so when they want to attack it they pretend to find it spurious , or impute crimes to it.
There is scarcely any man sufficiently clever to appreciate all the evil he does.
Happy people rarely correct their faults; they consider themselves vindicated, since fortune endorses their evil ways.
Jealousy is the greatest of all evils, and the one that arouses the least pity in the person who causes it.
Pity is often a reflection of our own evils in the ills of others. It is a delicate foresight of the troubles into which we may fall.
Philosophy triumphs easily over past evils and future evils, but present evils triumph over it.
We often do shallow good in order to accomplish evil with impunity.
Philosophy finds it an easy matter to vanquish past and future evils, but the present are commonly too hard for it.
Men have written in the most convincing manner to prove that death is no evil, and this opinion has been confirmed on a thousand celebrated occasions by the weakest of men as well as by heroes. Even so I doubt whether any sensible person has ever believed it, and the trouble men take to convince others as well as themselves that they do shows clearly that it is no easy undertaking.