1,221 Quotes by François de La Rochefoucauld

Youth is a continual intoxication; it is the fever of reason.

The extreme pleasure we take in speaking of ourselves should make us apprehensive that it gives hardly any to those who listen to us.

What we cut off from our other faults is very often but so much added to our pride.

Confidence in conversation has a greater share than wit.

Those who are condemned to death affect sometimes a constancy and contempt for death which is only the fear of facing it; so that one may say that this constancy and contempt are to their mind what the bandage is to their eyes.

Tis a sort of coquetry to boast that we never coquet.

What men have called friendship is only a social arrangement, a mutual adjustment of interests, an interchange of services given and received; it is, in sum, simply a business from which those involved propose to derive a steady profit for their own self-love.

However much we may distrust men's sincerity, we always believe they speak to us more sincerely than to others.

We give advice, but we cannot give the wisdom to profit by it.