Duc de La Rochefoucauld

Duc de La Rochefoucauld (1613 - 1680), given name Francois A F Rochefoucauld Liancourt, also known as Francoi VI, Prince de Marcillac, was a French writer and moralist who was also author of maxims and memoirs. He was part of the literary movement of classicism.

Wisdom & Quotes

From his Maxims

• One gives nothing so freely as advice.
• To establish oneself in the world, on has to do all one can to appear established.
• We only confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no large ones.
• One is never as fortunate or as unfortunate as one imagines.
• A true friend is the most precious of all possessions and the one we take the least thought about acquiring.
• Hypocrisy is the homage which vice pays to virtue.
• The intellect is always fooled by the heart.
• Jealousy is always born with love, but does not always die with it.
• Love of justice in most men is no more than the fear of suffering injustice.
• If one judges love by the majority of its effects, it is more like hatred than friendship.
• There is no disguise which can hide love for long where it exists, or simulate it where it does not.
• In their first passion, women love their lovers; in all the others, they love love.
• There are some good marriages, but no delightful ones.
• In the misfortune of our best friends, we find something that is not unpleasing.
• Those who have great passions find themselves all their lives both happy and unhappy at being cured of them.
• If we resist our passions, it is due more to their weakness than our own strength.
• In the human heart, there is a ceaseless birth of passions, so that the destruction of one is almost always the establishment of another.
• Self-love is the greatest of all flatterers.
• Vanity is the greatest of all flatterers.
• The most violent passions sometimes leave us at rest, but vanity agitates us constantly.
• Virtue would not go to such lengths if vanity did not keep her company.
• Very often our virtues are only vices in disguise.
• Youth is unending intoxication; it is a fever of the mind.

Richard Lovelace