Quotes by Francois De La Rochefoucauld

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.

Old age is a tyrant, who forbids, under pain of death, the pleasures of youth.

The defects of the mind, like those of the face, grow worse with age.

It is great folly to wish to be wise all alone.

Though nature be ever so generous, yet can she not make a hero alone. Fortune must contribute her part too and till both concur, the work cannot be perfected.

Being a blockhead is sometimes the best security against being cheated by a man of wit.

In the misfortunes of our best friends we always find something not altogether displeasing to us.

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

We should often blush for our very best actions, if the world did but see all the motives upon which they were done.

What men have called friendship is only a social arrangement, a mutual adjustment of interests, an interchange of services given and received it is, in sum, simply a business from which those involved propose to derive a steady profit for their own self-love.