dots-menu
×

Home  »  Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay  »  François, duc de La Rochefoucauld

S. Austin Allibone, comp. Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay. 1880.

François, duc de La Rochefoucauld

Absence destroys trifling intimacies, but it invigorates strong ones.

François, duc de La Rochefoucauld.

We may say of agreeableness, as distinct from beauty, that it consists in a symmetry of which we know not the rules, and a secret conformity of the features to each other, and to the air and complexion of the person.

François, duc de La Rochefoucauld.

Grace is to the body what good sense is to the mind.

François, duc de La Rochefoucauld.

The humours of the body have a stated and a regular course, which impels and imperceptibly guides our will. They co-operate with each other, and exercise successively a secret empire within us; so that they have a considerable part in all our actions, without our being able to know it. Hence the necessity of attention to our bodily health.

François, duc de La Rochefoucauld.

Preserving the health by too strict a regimen is a wearisome malady.

François, duc de La Rochefoucauld.

There are more faults in the humour than in the mind.

François, duc de La Rochefoucauld.

Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue.

François, duc de La Rochefoucauld.

We seldom find people ungrateful as long as we are in a condition to render them services.

François, duc de La Rochefoucauld.

Love, like fire, cannot subsist without continual movement: so soon as it ceases to hope and fear, it ceases to exist.

François, duc de La Rochefoucauld.

Nothing so much prevents our being natural as the desire of appearing so.

François, duc de La Rochefoucauld.

Narrowness of mind is often the cause of obstinacy: we do not easily believe beyond what we see.

François, duc de La Rochefoucauld.

Philosophy can hold an easy triumph over the misfortunes which are past and to come; but those which are present triumph over her. By philosophy we are taught to dismiss our regrets for the past and our apprehensions of future evils; but the immediate sense of suffering she cannot teach us to subdue.

François, duc de La Rochefoucauld.