Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillacla ʁɔʃfuˈko]; 15 September 1613 – 17 March 1680) was a noted French author of maxims and memoirs. It is said that his world-view was clear-eyed and urbane, and that he neither condemned human conduct nor sentimentally celebrated it. Born in Paris on the Rue des Petits Champs, at a time when the royal court was vacillating between aiding the nobility and threatening it, he was considered an exemplar of the accomplished 17th-century...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth15 September 1613
CountryFrance
Francois de La Rochefoucauld quotes about
We should often feel ashamed of our best actions if the world could see all the motives which produced them.
Not all those who know their minds know their hearts as well.
Those that have had great passions esteem themselves for the rest of their lives fortunate and unfortunate in being cured of them.
Too great haste to repay an obligation is a kind of ingratitude.
We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of others.
We do not praise others, ordinarily, but in order to be praised ourselves.
We easily forgive our friends those faults that do no affect us ourselves.
We would rather speak ill of ourselves than not talk about ourselves at all.
Why can we remember the tiniest detail that has happened to us, and not remember how many times we have told it to the same person.
Women's virtue is frequently nothing but a regard to their own quiet and a tenderness for their reputation.
Our concern for the loss of our friends is not always from a sense of their worth, but rather of our own need of them and that we have lost some who had a good opinion of us.
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.
No man deserves to be praised for his goodness, who has it not in his power to be wicked. Goodness without that power is generally nothing more than sloth, or an impotence of will.
Our actions seem to have their lucky and unlucky stars, to which a great part of that blame and that commendation is due which is given to the actions themselves.