Quotes by Francois De La Rochefoucauld

We may sooner be brought to love them that hate us, than them that love us more than we would have them do.

We pardon to the extent that we love.

Love can no more continue without a constant motion than fire can and when once you take hope and fear away, you take from it its very life and being.

Passion makes idiots of the cleverest men, and makes the biggest idiots clever.

Men give away nothing so liberally as their advice.

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.

It is from a weakness and smallness of mind that men are opinionated and we are very loath to believe what we are not able to comprehend.

A great many men's gratitude is nothing but a secret desire to hook in more valuable kindnesses hereafter.

Men often pass from love to ambition, but they seldom come back again from ambition to love.

There is no better proof of a man's being truly good than his desiring to be constantly under the observation of good men.