Quotes from Francois de La Rochefoucauld

All women seem by nature to be coquettes.

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

The smallest fault of women who give themselves up to love is to love.

It is not always for virtue's sake that women are virtuous.

It is not always from valor or from chastity that men are brave, and women chaste.

There are few good women who do not tire of their role.

Moral severity in women is only a dress or paint which they use to set off their beauty.

Women can more easily conquer their passion than their coquetterie.

We are much mistaken if we think that men are always brave from a principle of valor, or women chaste from a principle of modesty.

The courage of a great many men, and the virtue of a great many women, are the effect of vanity, shame, and especially a suitabletemperament.

Those who occupy their minds with small matters, generally become incapable of greatness.

A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.

The height of cleverness is to be able to conceal it.

Though nature be ever so generous, yet can she not make a hero alone. Fortune must contribute her part too; and till both concur, the work cannot be perfected.

The first lover is kept a long while, when no offer is made of a second.

The surest way to be deceived is to consider oneself cleverer than others.

We seldom find any person of good sense, except those who share our opinions.

Our actions seem to have their lucky and unlucky stars, to which a great part of that blame and that commendation is due which is given to the actions themselves.

Selfishness is the grand moving principle of nine-tenths of our actions.

We judge so superficially of things, that common words and actions spoke and done in an agreeable manner, with some knowledge of what passes in the world, often succeed beyond the greatest ability.

Our actions are like blank rhymes, to which everyone applies what sense he pleases.

The old begin to complain of the conduct of the young when they themselves are no longer able to set a bad example.

Old age is a tyrant, who forbids, under pain of death, the pleasures of youth.

The older a fool is, the worse he is.