Francois De La Rochefoucauld

If we are to judge of love by its consequences, it more nearly resembles hatred than friendship.

People always complain about their memories, never about their minds.

The principal point of cleverness is to know how to value things just as they deserve.

We have no patience with other people's vanity because it is offensive to our own.

However greatly we distrust the sincerity of those we converse with, yet still we think they tell more truth to us than to anyone else.

The surest way to be deceived is to consider oneself cleverer than others.

Funeral pomp is more for the vanity of the living than for the honor of the dead.

Those who occupy their minds with small matters, generally become incapable of greatness.

It is from a weakness and smallness of mind that men are opinionated; and we are very loath to believe what we are not able to comprehend.

The heart is forever making the head its fool.

In love we often doubt what we most believe.

We are never so ridiculous through what we are as through what we pretend to be.

Perfect behavior is born of complete indifference.

The sure mark of one born with noble qualities is being born without envy.

What men have called friendship is only a social arrangement, a mutual adjustment of interests, an interchange of services given and received; it is, in sum, simply a business from which those involved propose to derive a steady profit for their own self-love.

Mediocre minds usually dismiss anything which reaches beyond their own understanding.

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.

We seldom find people ungrateful so long as it is thought we can serve them.

Few people have the wisdom to prefer the criticism that would do them good, to the praise that deceives them.

The man that thinks he loves his mistress for her own sake is mightily mistaken.

Jealousy contains more of self-love than of love.