1,221 Quotes by François de La Rochefoucauld

The passions often engender their contraries.

Weak people cannot be sincere.

We love everything on our own account; we even follow our own taste and inclination when we prefer our friends to ourselves; and yet it is this preference alone that constitutes true and perfect friendship.

We exaggerate the glory of some men in order to detract from that of others.

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.

We are never so happy, nor so unhappy, as we suppose ourselves to be.

People always complain about their memories, never about their minds.

We frequently do good in order to enable us to do evil later with impunity exemption of punishment.

Weakness is more opposed to virtue than is vice.