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What we take for virtue is often nothing but an assemblage of different actions, and of different interests, that fortune or our industry knows how to arrange.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

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Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Age: 66 †
Born: 1613
Born: September 15
Died: 1680
Died: March 17
Memoirist
Military Personnel
Writer
Paris
France
François VI
Duc de La Rochefoucauld
Prince de Marcillac
François
Duc de La Rochefoucauld
Nothing
Interests
Take
Actions
Different
Fortune
Industry
Virtue
Interest
Often
Assemblage
Action
Arrange

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Nothing should lessen our satisfaction with ourselves as much as when we notice that we disapprove of something at one time that we approve of at another time.
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Moderation resembles temperance. We are not so unwilling to eat more, as afraid of doing ourselves harm by it.
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Truth does less good in the world than its appearances do harm.
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A man seldom finds people unthankful, as long as he remains in a condition of benefiting them further.
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Politeness of mind consists in thinking chaste and refined thoughts.
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Fortune cures us of many faults that reason could not.
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The desire of appearing clever often prevents our becoming so.
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Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.
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In the human heart new passions are forever being born the overthrow of one almost always means the rise of another.
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True bravery means doing alone that which one could do if all the world were by.
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As great minds have the faculty of saying a great deal in a few words, so lesser minds have a talent of talking much, and saying nothing.
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To awaken a man who is deceived as to his own merit is to do him as bad a turn as that done to the Athenian madman who was happy in believing that all the ships touching at the port belonged to him.
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Humility is the sure evidence of Christian virtues. Without it, we retain all our faults still, and they are only covered over with pride, which hides them from other men's observation, and sometimes from our own too.
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The distempers of the soul have their relapses, as many and as dangerous as those of the body and what we take for a perfect cureis generally either an abatement of the same disease or the changing of that for another.
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A wise man should order his interests, and set them all in their proper places. This order is often troubled by greed, which putsus upon pursuing so many things at once that, in eagerness for matters of less consideration, we grasp at trifles, and let go things of greater value.
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Absence abates a moderate passion and intensifies a great one - as the wind blows out a candle but fans fire into flame.
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We acknowledge that we should not talk of our wives but we seem not to know that we should talk still less of ourselves.
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We like to read others but we do not like to be read.
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One of the greatest and also the commonest of faults is for men to believe that, because they never hear their shortcomings spoken of, or read about them in cold print, others can have no knowledge of them. GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG, The Reflections of Lichtenberg We are often more agreeable through our faults than our good qualities.
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The whimsicalness of our own humor is a thousand times more fickle and unaccountable than what we blame so much in fortune.
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