Quotes from La Rochefoucauld

We are often more agreeable through our faults than our good qualities.

Humility is often merely feigned submissiveness assumed in order to subject others, an artifice of pride which stoops to conquer, and although pride has a thousand ways of transforming itself it is never so well disguised and able to take people in as when masquerading as humility.

In the human heart there is a perpetual generation of passions; so that the ruin of one is almost always the foundation of another.

'Tis more dishonourable to distrust a friend than to be deceived by him.

True love is like ghosts, which everybody talks about and few have seen.

We can give advice, but we cannot give conduct.

No people are more often wrong than those who will not allow themselves to be wrong.

We rarely find any persons of good sense except those who agree with us.

Our minds are as much given to laziness as our bodies.

When our hatred is too violent, it sinks us beneath those we hate.

If we had no faults ourselves, we should not take such pleasure in observing those of others.

There is no disguise which can hide love for long where it exists, or simulate it where it does not.

We are so used to disguise ourselves to others, that at last we disguise ourselves even to ourselves.

Hope, deceitful as it is, carries us through life agreeably enough.

Age is a tyrant who forbids at the penalty of life all the pleasures of youth.

We like better to see those on whom we confer benefits, than those from whom we receive them.

We confess small faults to insinuate that we have no great ones.

A man convinced of his own merit will accept misfortune as an honor, for thus can he persuade others, as well as himself, that he is a worthy target for the arrows of fate.

A true friend is the greatest of all blessings, and the one which we take the least thought to acquire.

A true friend is the most precious of all possessions and the one we take the least thought about acquiring.

Absence abates a moderate passion and intensifies a great one- as the wind blows out a candle but fans fire into flame. (Maxims)

Absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones, as the wind blows out the candle and blow up the bonfire.

Absence lessens the minor passions and increases the great ones, as the wind douses a candle and kindles a fire.

Ah, Hope what would life be, stripped of thy encouraging smiles, that teach us to look behind the dark clouds of to-day, for the golden beams that are to gild the morrow.