Quotes from Francois de La Rochefoucauld

The passions of youth are not more dangerous to health than is the lukewarmness of old age.

Virtue is to the soul what health is tot he body.

Preserving the serious health condition is usually painful.

It is often hard to determine whether a clear, open, and honorable proceeding is the result of goodness or of cunning.

Funeral pomp is more for the vanity of the living than for the honor of the dead.

No matter how much care we put into hiding our passions under the appearances of devotion and honor, they can always be seen to peer out through these covers.

Whilst weakness and timidity keep us to our duty, virtue has often all the honor.

One honor won is a surety for more.

Hope is the last thing that dies in man.

The whimsicalness of our own humor is a thousand times more fickle and unaccountable than what we blame so much in fortune.

We are never either so fortunate or so misfortunate as we imagine.

Imagination does not enable us to invent as many different contradictions as there are by nature in every heart.

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

We would frequently be ashamed of our good deeds if people saw all of the motives that produced them.

We only acknowledge small faults in order to make it appear that we are free from great ones.

We are sometimes as different from ourselves as we are from others.

Not all those who know their minds know their hearts as well.

Perfect valour consists in doing without witnesses that which we would be capable of doing before everyone.

It is not enough to have great qualities; We should also have the management of them.

We should often feel ashamed of our best actions if the world could see all the motives which produced them.

In growing old, we become more foolish - and more wise.

Nothing is impossible; there are ways that lead to everything, and if we had sufficient will we should always have sufficient means. It is often merely for an excuse that we say things are impossible.

We give advice, but we cannot give the wisdom to profit by it.

Some people displease with merit, and others' very faults and defects are pleasing.