1,221 Quotes by François de La Rochefoucauld

In friendship as well as love, ignorance very often contributes more to our happiness than knowledge.

Sometimes, occasions occur in life which demand you to be a little foolish in order to skillfully extricate yourself.

What men call friendship is no more than a partnership, a mutual care of interests, an exchange of favors - in a word, it is a sort of traffic, in which self-love ever proposes to be the gainer.

Familiarity is a suspension of almost all the laws of civility, which libertinism has introduced into society under the notion of ease.

A man's happiness or unhappiness depends as much on his temperament as on his destiny.

Imagination could never invent the number of different contradictions that exist innately in each person's heart.

There are few people who are more often in the wrong than those who cannot endure to be so.

The passions do very often give birth to others of a nature most contrary to their own. Thus avarice sometimes brings forth prodigality, and prodigality avarice; a man's resolution is very often the effect of levity, and his boldness that of cowardice and fear.

Beautiful coquettes are quacks of love.