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
Praise is flattery, artful, hidden, delicate, which gratifies differently him who praises and him who is praised. The one takes it as the reward of merit, the other bestows it to show his impartiality and knowledge.
Everyone praises his heart, none dare praise their understanding.
We often select envenomed praise which, by a reaction upon those we praise, shows faults we could not have shown by other means.
Idleness and fear keeps us in the path of duty, but our virtue often gets the praise.
Few are sufficiently wise to prefer censure which is useful to praise which is treacherous.
The desire which urges us to deserve praise strengthens our good qualities, and praise given to wit, valour, and beauty, tends to increase them.
Some reproaches praise; some praises reproach.
Fortune cures us of many faults that reason could not.
We often act treacherously more from weakness than from a fixed motive.
Our temper sets a price upon every gift that we receive from fortune.
Pride indemnifies itself and loses nothing even when it casts away vanity.
Our distrust of another justifies his deceit.
It is more often from pride than from ignorance that we are so obstinately opposed to current opinions; we find the first places taken, and we do not want to be the last.
The contempt of riches in philosophers was only a hidden desire to avenge their merit upon the injustice of fortune, by despising the very goods of which fortune had deprived them; it was a secret to guard themselves against the degradation of poverty, it was a back way by which to arrive at that distinction which they could not gain by riches.