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
Old age is a tyrant, who forbids, under pain of death, the pleasures of youth.
The accent of one's birthplace remains in the mind and in the heart as in one's speech.
Good advice is something a man gives when he is too old to set a bad example.
In the human heart there is a ceaseless birth of passions, so that the destruction of one is almost always the establishment of another.
Old people are fond of giving good advice; it consoles them for no longer being capable of setting a bad example.
The defects of the mind, like those of the face, grow worse with age.
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.
We confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no large ones.
We should often blush for our very best actions, if the world did but see all the motives upon which they were done.
When we are in love we often doubt that which we most believe.
We often pardon those that annoy us, but we cannot pardon those we annoy.
How is it that we remember the least triviality that happens to us, and yet not remember how often we have recounted it to the same person?
The word virtue is as useful to self-interest as the vices.
A man is sometimes as different from himself as he is from others.