The generality of virtuous women are like hidden treasures, they are safe only because nobody has sought after them.
Francois De La RochefoucauldRead
Old age is a tyrant, who forbids, under pain of death, the pleasures of youth.
Interpretation
Old age restricts the joys of youth and imposes a rigid authority over one's ability to enjoy life.
This quote by FranΓ§ois de La Rochefoucauld reflects on the oppressive nature of aging, suggesting that as people grow older, they often lose the freedoms and pleasures associated with youth. It implies that old age comes with constraints that can stifle the vibrant experiences that one might have enjoyed earlier in life.
In practice
During a motivational speech about embracing life at any age.
The generality of virtuous women are like hidden treasures, they are safe only because nobody has sought after them.
Old men delight in giving good advice as a consolation for the fact that they can no longer set bad examples.
Some counterfeits reproduce so very well the truth that it would be a flaw of judgment not to be deceived by them.
Conceit causes more conversation than wit.
The defects and faults of the mind are like wounds in the body; after all imaginable care has been taken to heal them up, still there will be a scar left behind, and they are in continual danger of breaking the skin and bursting out again.
To understand matters rightly we should understand their details; and as that knowledge is almost infinite, our knowledge is always superficial and imperfect.
No one may pride himself at being more than an individual, and no one despondently think that he is not an individual.
The media have just buried the last yuppie, a pathetic creature who had not heard the news that the great pendulum of public consciousness has just swung from Greed to Compassion and from Tex-Mex to meatballs
A philosopher knows that in reality he knows very little. That is why he constantly strives to achieve true insight. Socrates was one of these rare people. He knew that he knew nothing about life and about the world. And now comes the important part: it troubled him that he knew so little.
Don't try and save yourself. The self that is trying to be saved is not you.
The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness lost their depth and dimension.
Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind.
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