Francois de La Rochefoucauld Quotes

The desire to seem clever often keeps us from being so.

Most of our faults are more pardonable than the means we use to conceal them.

Love often leads on to ambition, but seldom does one return from ambition to love.

Pride does not wish to owe and vanity does not wish to pay.

We often pardon those that annoy us, but we cannot pardon those we annoy.

Timidity is a fault for which it is dangerous to reprove persons whom we wish to correct of it.

Repentance is not so much remorse for what we have done as the fear of the consequences.

In the human heart new passions are forever being born; the overthrow of one almost always means the rise of another.

I have always been an admirer. I regard the gift of admiration as indispensable if one is to amount to something; I don’t know where I would be without it.

We are so used to dissembling with others that in time we come to deceive and dissemble with ourselves.