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
No matter how much care we put into hiding our passions under the appearances of devotion and honor, they can always be seen to peer out through these covers.
Whilst weakness and timidity keep us to our duty, virtue has often all the honor.
What makes us so often discontented with those who transact business for us is that they almost always abandon the interest of their friends for the interest of the business, because they wish to have the honor of succeeding in that which they have undertaken.
Funeral pomp is more for the vanity of the living than for the honor of the dead.
Great men's honor ought always to be measured by the methods they made use of in attaining it.
One honor won is a surety for more.
Those whom the world has delighted to honor have oftener been influenced in their doings by ambition and vanity than by patriotism.
Most men expose themselves in battle enough to save their honor, few wish to do so more than sufficiently, or than is necessary to make the design for which they expose themselves succeed.
In most of mankind gratitude is merely a secret hope of further favors.
You can find women who have never had an affair, but it is hard to find a woman who has had just one.
We often pardon those that annoy us, but we cannot pardon those we annoy.
How is it that we remember the least triviality that happens to us, and yet not remember how often we have recounted it to the same person?
The word virtue is as useful to self-interest as the vices.
A man is sometimes as different from himself as he is from others.