Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Only the contemptible fear contempt.

Repentance is not so much remorse for what we have done as the fear of the consequences.

We come altogether fresh and raw into the several stages of life, and often find ourselves without experience, despite our years.

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.

Neither the sun nor death can be looked at with a steady eye.

On neither the sun, nor death, can a man look fixedly.

Perfect courage is to do without witnesses what one would be capable of doing with the world looking on.

Heat of blood makes young people change their inclinations often, and habit makes old ones keep to theirs a great while.

Taste may change, but inclination never.

Jealousy is bred in doubts. When those doubts change into certainties, then the passion either ceases or turns absolute madness.

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.

We should often blush for our very best actions, if the world did but see all the motives upon which they were done.

We should often feel ashamed of our best actions if the world could see all the motives which produced them.

In the misfortunes of our best friends we always find something not altogether displeasing to us.

Being a blockhead is sometimes the best security against being cheated by a man of wit.

Though nature be ever so generous, yet can she not make a hero alone. Fortune must contribute her part too and till both concur, the work cannot be perfected.

It is great folly to wish to be wise all alone.

The defects of the mind, like those of the face, grow worse with age.

Old age is a tyrant, who forbids, under pain of death, the pleasures of youth.

It is with an old love as it is with old age a man lives to all the miseries, but is dead to all the pleasures.