About human nature - one of the greatest minds
François VI duke de La Rochefoucauld
(1613-1680)
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Aphorisms
(some of his 504 aphorisms found in his book "Réflexions ou sentences et maximes morales")
It is not enough to have great qualities; We should also have the management of them.
It is not in the power of even the most crafty dissimulation to conceal love long, where it really is, nor to counterfeit it long where it is not.
It is often laziness and timidity that keep us within our duty while virtue gets all the credit.
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.
It is with true love as it is with ghosts; everyone talks about it, but few have seen it.
It takes nearly as much ability to know how to profit by good advice as to know how to act for one's self.
It's easier to be wise for others than for ourselves.
It's the height of folly to want to be the only wise one.
Mediocre minds usually dismiss anything which reaches beyond their own understanding.
Jealously is always born with love but it does not die with it.
Jealousy contains more of self-love than of love.
Jealousy is bred in doubts. When those doubts change into certainties, then the passion either ceases or turns absolute madness.
Jealousy is not so much the love of another as the love of ourselves.
Jealousy lives upon doubts. It becomes madness or ceases entirely as soon as we pass from doubt to certainty.
Jealousy springs more from love of self than from love of another.
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.
Love often leads on to ambition, but seldom does one return from ambition to love.
Many men are contemptuous of riches; few can give them away.
Men give away nothing so liberally as their advice.
Men often pass from love to ambition, but they seldom come back again from ambition to love.
A great many men's gratitude is nothing but a secret desire to hook in more valuable kindnesses hereafter.
A man is sometimes as different from himself as he is from others.
A man's worth has its season, like fruit.
A refusal of praise is a desire to be praised twice.
A true friend is the greatest of all blessings, and that which we take the least care of all to acquire.
A wise man thinks it more advantageous not to join the battle than to win.
A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.
Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and fans fires.
All the passions make us commit faults; love makes us commit the most ridiculous ones.
As great minds have the faculty of saying a great deal in a few words, so lesser minds have a talent of talking much, and saying nothing.
As it is the characteristic of great wits to say much in few words, so small wits seem to have the gift of speaking much and saying nothing.
As one grows older, one becomes wiser and more foolish.
Before we set our hearts too much upon anything, let us examine how happy they are, who already possess it.
Being a blockhead is sometimes the best security against being cheated by a man of wit.
Conceit causes more conversation than wit.
Confidence contributes more to conversation than wit.
Decency is the least of all laws, but yet it is the law which is most strictly observed.
Every one speaks well of his own heart, but no one dares speak well of his own mind.
Everyone complains of his memory, and nobody complains of his judgment.
Few people have the wisdom to prefer the criticism that would do them good, to the praise that deceives them.
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