Quotes from Francois de La Rochefoucauld

We should not be much concerned about faults we have the courage to own.

The only security is courage.

Perfect courage means doing unwitnessed what we would be capable of with the world looking on.

Death and the sun are not to be looked at steadily.

Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.

The name and pretense of virtue is as serviceable to self-interest as are real vices.

It is often laziness and timidity that keep us within our duty while virtue gets all the credit.

Virtue would go far if vanity did not keep it company.

The word virtue is as useful to self-interest as the vices.

We do not despise all those who have vices, but we do despise those that have no virtue.

Women's virtue is frequently nothing but a regard to their own quiet and a tenderness for their reputation.

The virtues and vices are all put in motion by interest.

Our virtues are often, in reality, no better than vices disguised.

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

However rare true love may be, it is less so than true friendship.

If we are to judge of love by its consequences, it more nearly resembles hatred than friendship.

What men have called friendship is only a social arrangement, a mutual adjustment of interests, an interchange of services given and received; it is, in sum, simply a business from which those involved propose to derive a steady profit for their own self-love.

We easily forgive our friends those faults that do no affect us ourselves.

We are easily comforted for the misfortunes of our friends, when those misfortunes give us an occasion of expressing our affection and solicitude.

In the misfortunes of our best friends we always find something not altogether displeasing to us.

Our concern for the loss of our friends is not always from a sense of their worth, but rather of our own need of them and that we have lost some who had a good opinion of us.

Chance corrects us of many faults that reason would not know how to correct.

We often pardon those that annoy us, but we cannot pardon those we annoy.

The desire of appearing clever often prevents our becoming so.