Quotes from Francois de La Rochefoucauld

When a man is in love, he doubts, very often, what he most firmly believes.

It is with an old love as it is with old age a man lives to all the miseries, but is dead to all the pleasures.

It is easier to know men in general, than men in particular.

Nature seems at each man's birth to have marked out the bounds of his virtues and vices, and to have determined how good or how wicked that man shall be capable of being.

A clever man should handle his interests so that each will fall in suitable order of their value.

Men's happiness and misery depends altogether as much upon their own humor as it does upon fortune.

A man seldom finds people unthankful, as long as he remains in a condition of benefiting them further.

Nothing ought more to humiliate men who have merited great praise than the care they still take to boast of little things.

The greater part of mankind judge of men only by their fashionableness or their fortune.

Men would not live in society long if they were not each others dupes.

That man, we may be sure, is a person of true worth, whom those who envy him most are yet forced to praise.

Very few people are acquainted with death. They undergo it, commonly, not so much out of resolution as custom and insensitivity; and most men die because they cannot help it.

Men never desire anything very eagerly which they desire only by the dictates of reason.

The heart of man ever finds a constant succession of passions, so that the destroying and pulling down of one proves generally tobe nothing else but the production and the setting up of another.

The cunningest dissimulation is when a man pretends to be caught in the traps others set for him; and a man is never so easily over-reached as when he is contriving to over-reach others.

The most ingenious men continually pretend to condemn tricking--but this is often done that they may use it more conveniently themselves, when some great occasion or interest offers itself to them.

Self-love is the love of a man's own self, and of everything else for his own sake. It makes people idolaters to themselves, and tyrants to all the world besides.

Some men are like ballads, that are in everyone's mouth a little while.

The accent of a man's native country remains in his mind and his heart, as it does in his speech.

There is nothing men are so generous of as advice.

Men and things have each their proper perspective; to judge rightly of some it is necessary to see them near, of others we can never judge rightly but at a distance.

A man for whom accident discovers sense, is not a rational being. A man only is so who understands, who distinguishes, who tests it.

Flattery is false money, which would not be current were it not for our vanity.

Kings do with men as with pieces of money; they give them what value they please, and we are obliged to receive them at their current and not at their real value.