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The most brilliant fortunes are often not worth the littleness required to gain them.
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
Brilliant
Gains
Fortune
Worth
Wealth
Littleness
Often
Fortunes
Required
Gain
More quotes by Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Raillery is more insupportable than wrong because we have a right to resent injuries, but are ridiculous in being angry at a jest.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
We sometimes think that we hate flattery, but we only hate the manner in which it is done. [Fr., On croit quelquefoir hair la flatterie maid on ne hait que a maniere de flatter.]
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
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.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
To know oneself is not necessarily to improve oneself
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
The mind is always the patsy of the heart.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
The intellect of the generality of women serves more to fortify their folly than their reason.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Constancy in love is a perpetual inconstancy which fixes our hearts successively to all the qualities of the person loved--sometimes admiring one and sometimes another above all the rest--so that this constancy roves as far as it can, and is no better than inconstancy, confined within the compass of one person.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Love often leads on to ambition, but seldom does one return from ambition to love.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Happy people rarely correct their faults they consider themselves vindicated, since fortune endorses their evil ways.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
The vivacity that augments with years is not far from folly.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
In every walk of life each man puts on a personality and outward appearance so as to look what he wants to be thought in fact you might say that society is entirely made up of assumed personalities.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
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.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
The good or the bad fortune of men depends not less upon their own dispositions than upon fortune.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
As it is the characteristic of great wits to say much in few words, so small wits seem to have the gift of speaking much and saying nothing.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
The name and pretense of virtue is as serviceable to self-interest as are real vices.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
There is scarcely any man sufficiently clever to appreciate all the evil he does.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
There are no circumstances, however unfortunate, that clever people do not extract some advantage from.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Satire is at once the most agreeable and most dangerous of mental qualities. It always pleases when it is refined, but we always fear those who use it too much yet satire should be allowed when unmixed with spite, and when the person satirized can join in the satire.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Time's chariot-wheels make their carriage-road in the fairest face.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
The cunningest dissimulation is when a man pretends to be caught in the traps others set for him and a man is never so easily over-reached as when he is contriving to over-reach others.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
