1,221 Quotes by François de La Rochefoucauld

We acknowledge that we should not talk of our wives; but we seem not to know that we should talk still less of ourselves.

Humility is often merely feigned submissiveness assumed in order to subject others, an artifice of pride which stoops to conquer, and although pride has a thousand ways of transforming itself it is never so well disguised and able to take people in as when masquerading as humility.

Only great men have great faults.

There are but very few men clever enough to know all the mischief they do.

In their early passions women are in love with the lover, later they are in love with love.

What makes false reckoning, as regards gratitude, is that the pride of the giver and the receiver cannot agree as to the value of the benefit.

Women know not the whole of their coquetry.

Self-love is the greatest of all flatterers.

It is impossible to love a second time what we have really ceased to love.