François de La Rochefoucauld - Maximes

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The most violent passions sometimes leave us at rest, but vanity agitates us constantly.

François de La Rochefoucauld
Absence abates a moderate passion and intensifies a great one - as the wind blows out a candle but fans fire into flame.

François de La Rochefoucauld
When the vices give us up, we flatter ourselves that we are giving up them.

François de La Rochefoucauld
Flattery is counterfeit money which, but for vanity, would have no circulation.

François de La Rochefoucauld
There is an eloquent silence: it serves sometimes to approve, sometimes to condemn; there is a mocking silence; there is a respectful silence.

François de La Rochefoucauld
What is called generosity is usually only the vanity of giving; we enjoy the vanity more than the thing given.

François de La Rochefoucauld
Complete courage and absolute cowardice are extremes that very few men fall into. The vast middle space contains all the intermediate kinds and degrees of courage; and these differ as much from one another as men's faces or their humors do.

François de La Rochefoucauld
Perfect valor is to behave, without witnesses, as one would act were all the world watching.

François de La Rochefoucauld
Hope, deceitful as it is, serves at least to lead us to the end of our lives by an agreeable route.

François de La Rochefoucauld
Hope, deceiving as it is, serves at least to lead us to the end of our lives by an agreeable route.

François de La Rochefoucauld
No one has ever taken the trouble to stretch and carry his understanding as far as it could go.

François de La Rochefoucauld
Jealousy feeds upon suspicion, and it turns into fury or it ends as soon as we pass from suspicion to certainty.

François de La Rochefoucauld
Folly pursues us throughout our lives, and the man whom we call wise is he whose follies are proportionate to his age and to his fortune.

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

François de La Rochefoucauld
Youth is a perpetual intoxication; it is a fever of the mind

François de La Rochefoucauld
Virtue would not go nearly so far if vanity did not keep her company.

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

François de La Rochefoucauld
There are people enough who despise money, but few who know how to bestow it.

François de La Rochefoucauld
We sometimes think that we hate flattery, but we only hate the manner in which it is done.

François de La Rochefoucauld
Hope and fear go arm in arm: there is no fear without hope, no hope without fear.

François de La Rochefoucauld
One is never as unhappy as one thinks, nor as happy as one hopes.

François de La Rochefoucauld
We are often more treacherous through weakness than through calculation.

François de La Rochefoucauld
To safeguard one's health at the cost of too strict a diet is a tiresome illness indeed.

François de La Rochefoucauld
Men would not live long in social contact unless they were deceived by one another.

François de La Rochefoucauld
Humility is often only a feigned submissiveness by which men hope to bring other people to submit to them; it is a more calculated sort of pride.

François de La Rochefoucauld
It is a mistake to imagine, that the violent passions only, such as ambition and love, can triumph over the rest. Idleness, languid as it is, often masters them all; she influences all our designs and actions, and insensibly consumes and destroys both passions and virtues.

François de La Rochefoucauld
Great names abase, instead of elevating, those who do not know how to bear them.

François de La Rochefoucauld
When our hatred is violent, it sinks us even beneath those we hate.

François de La Rochefoucauld
Too great haste in paying off an obligation is a kind of ingratitude.

François de La Rochefoucauld
Old age is a tyrant who forbids, upon pain of death, all of the pleasures of youth.

François de La Rochefoucauld