Quotes from Francois de La Rochefoucauld

What makes the pain we feel from shame and jealousy so cutting is that vanity can give us no assistance in bearing them.

Passion makes idiots of the cleverest men, and makes the biggest idiots clever.

In the human heart new passions are forever being born; the overthrow of one almost always means the rise of another.

We have no patience with other people's vanity because it is offensive to our own.

Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms inside your head, and people in them, acting. People you know, yet can't quite name.

Self-interest makes some people blind, and others sharp-sighted.

Neither the sun nor death can be looked at with a steady eye.

On neither the sun, nor death, can a man look fixedly.

We confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no large ones.

We only confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no big ones.

Few things are needful to make the wise man happy, but nothing satisfies the fool; - and this is the reason why so many of mankind are miserable.

A man of understanding finds less difficulty in submitting to a wrong-headed fellow, than in attempting to set him right.

A man cannot please long who has only one kind of wit.

Gratitude, in most men, is only a strong and secret hope of greater favors.

Most men expose themselves in battle enough to save their honor, few wish to do so more than sufficiently, or than is necessary to make the design for which they expose themselves succeed.

No man can love a second time the person whom he has once truly ceased to love.

There are no events so disastrous that adroit men do not draw some advantage from them, nor any so fortunate that the imprudent cannot turn to their own prejudice.

In infants, levity is a prettiness; in men a shameful defect; but in old age, a monstrous folly.

None but great men are capable of having great flaws.

The measure of great men should always be measured by the means they have used to acquire it.

Man only blames himself in order that he may be praised.

To be a great man it is necessary to turn to account all opportunities.

The great interests of man: air and light, the joy of having a body, the voluptuousness of looking.

A man often thinks he rules himself, when all the while he is ruled and managed; and while his understanding directs one design, his affections imperceptibly draw him into another.