Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Nature seems at each man's birth to have marked out the bounds of his virtues and vices, and to have determined how good or how wicked that man shall be capable of being.

Flattery is a kind of bad money, to which our vanity gives us currency.

Though men are apt to flatter and exalt themselves with their great achievements, yet these are, in truth, very often owing not so much to design as chance.

We are all strong enough to bear other men's misfortunes.

No men are oftener wrong than those that can least bear to be so.

There is nothing men are so generous of as advice.

There are a great many men valued in society who have nothing to recommend them but serviceable vices.

Few things are impracticable in themselves and it is for want of application, rather than of means, that men fail to succeed.

It is easier to know men in general, than men in particular.

Old men are fond of giving good advice to console themselves for their inability to give bad examples.

There are but very few men clever enough to know all the mischief they do.

Many men are contemptuous of riches few can give them away.

Most people know no other way of judging men's worth but by the vogue they are in, or the fortunes they have met with.

The happiness and misery of men depend no less on temper than fortune.

There is no better proof of a man's being truly good than his desiring to be constantly under the observation of good men.

Men often pass from love to ambition, but they seldom come back again from ambition to love.

A great many men's gratitude is nothing but a secret desire to hook in more valuable kindnesses hereafter.

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.

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 involve…

Men give away nothing so liberally as their advice.

Passion makes idiots of the cleverest men, and makes the biggest idiots clever.

Love can no more continue without a constant motion than fire can and when once you take hope and fear away, you take from it its very life and being.

We pardon to the extent that we love.

We may sooner be brought to love them that hate us, than them that love us more than we would have them do.

We are nearer loving those who hate us than those who love us more than we wish.