Francois La Rochefoucauld Quotes

62 quotes in 418 categories

• The happiness or unhappiness of men depends no less on their dispositions than on their fortunes
• A woman often thinks she regrets the lover, when she only regrets the love
• Absence extinguishes small passions and increases great ones, as the wind blows out a candle, and blows in a fire.
• Love is like the ocean waves, it either has it high or low times and when it's high, it just drowns you all together.
• Few things are impracticable in themselves; and it is for want of application, rather than of means, that men fail of success
• Love, like fire, cannot subsist without constant impulse; it ceases to live from the moment it ceases to hope or to fear
• The pleasure of love is in loving; we are happier in the passion we feel than in the passion we inspire
• Fertility of mind does not furnish us with so many resources on the same matter, as the lack of intelligence makes us hesitate at each…
• The love of glory, the fear of disgrace, the incentive to succeed, the desire to live in comfort, and the instinct to humiliate others are…
• We would often be ashamed of our finest actions if the world understood all the motives which produced them
• The pleasure of love is in loving, and we derive more happiness from the passion that we experience than from the passion we arouse.
• We often pass from love to ambition, but we hardly ever return from ambition to love.
• Old men are fond of giving advice to console themselves for being no longer in a position to give bad examples.
• Old men like to give good advice in order to console themselves for not being any longer able to set bad examples.
• We may give advice, but we can't inspire conduct.
• Few people know death, we only endure it, usually from determination, and even from stupidity and custom; and most men only die because they know…
• Perfect courage means doing unwitnessed what we would be capable of with the world looking on
• Most women do not grieve so much for the death of their lovers for love's-sake, as to show they were worthy of being beloved.
• A true friend is the greatest of all blessings, and the one that we take the least care of all to acquire.
• When our vices quit us, we flatter ourselves with the belief that it is we who quit them

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