Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims — François de La Rochefoucauld

Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims

François de La Rochefoucauld · Лицензия: Public domain · Источник

• 455.--However disposed the world may be to judge wrongly, it far oftener favours false merit than does justice to true. ¶645
• 456.--Sometimes we meet a fool with wit, never one with discretion. ¶646
• 457.--We should gain more by letting the world see what we are than by trying to seem what we are not. ¶647
• 458.--Our enemies come nearer the truth in the opinions they form of us than we do in our opinion of ourselves. ¶648
• 459.--There are many remedies to cure love, yet none are infallible. ¶649
• 460.--It would be well for us if we knew all our passions make us do. ¶650
• 461.--Age is a tyrant who forbids at the penalty of life all the pleasures of youth. ¶651
• 462.--The same pride which makes us blame faults from which we believe ourselves free causes us to despise the good qualities we have not. ¶652
• 463.--There is often more pride than goodness in our grief for our enemies' miseries; it is to show how superior we are to them, that we bestow on them the sign of our compassion. ¶653
• 464.--There exists an excess of good and evil which surpasses our comprehension. ¶654
• 465.--Innocence is most fortunate if it finds the same protection as crime. ¶655
• 466.--Of all the violent passions the one that becomes a woman best is love. ¶656
• 467.--Vanity makes us sin more against our taste than reason. ¶657
• 468.--Some bad qualities form great talents. ¶658
• 469.--We never desire earnestly what we desire in reason. ¶659
• 470.--All our qualities are uncertain and doubtful, both the good as well as the bad, and nearly all are creatures of opportunities. ¶660
• 471.--In their first passion women love their lovers, in all the others they love love. ¶661
• 472.--Pride as the other passions has its follies. We are ashamed to own we are jealous, and yet we plume ourselves in having been and being able to be so. ¶663
• 473.--However rare true love is, true friendship is rarer. ¶664
• 474.--There are few women whose charm survives their beauty. ¶666
• 475.--The desire to be pitied or to be admired often forms the greater part of our confidence. ¶667
• 476.--Our envy always lasts longer than the happiness of those we envy. ¶668
• 477.--The same firmness that enables us to resist love enables us to make our resistance durable and lasting. So weak persons who are always excited by passions are seldom really possessed of any. ¶669
• 478.--Fancy does not enable us to invent so many different contradictions as there are by nature in every heart. ¶670
• 479.--It is only people who possess firmness who can possess true gentleness. In those who appear gentle it is generally only weakness, which is readily converted into harshness. ¶671
• 480.--Timidity is a fault which is dangerous to blame in those we desire to cure of it. ¶672
• 481.--Nothing is rarer than true good nature, those who think they have it are generally only pliant or weak. ¶673
• 482.--The mind attaches itself by idleness and habit to whatever is easy or pleasant. This habit always places bounds to our knowledge, and no one has ever yet taken the pains to enlarge and expand his mind to the full extent of its capacities. ¶674
• 483.--Usually we are more satirical from vanity than malice. ¶675
• 484.--When the heart is still disturbed by the relics of a passion it is proner to take up a new one than when wholly cured. ¶676
• 485.--Those who have had great passions often find all their lives made miserable in being cured of them. ¶677
• 486.--More persons exist without self-love than without envy. ¶678
• 487.--We have more idleness in the mind than in the body. ¶680
• 488.--The calm or disturbance of our mind does not depend so much on what we regard as the more important things of life, as in a judicious or injudicious arrangement of the little things of daily occurrence. ¶681
• 489.--However wicked men may be, they do not dare openly to appear the enemies of virtue, and when they desire to persecute her they either pretend to believe her false or attribute crimes to her. ¶682
• 490.--We often go from love to ambition, but we never return from ambition to love. ¶683
• 491.--Extreme avarice is nearly always mistaken, there is no passion which is oftener further away from its mark, nor upon which the present has so much power to the prejudice of the future. ¶685
• 492.--Avarice often produces opposite results: there are an infinite number of persons who sacrifice their property to doubtful and distant expectations, others mistake great future advantages for small present interests. ¶686
• 493.--It appears that men do not find they have enough faults, as they increase the number by certain peculiar qualities that they affect to assume, and which they cultivate with so great assiduity that at length they become natural faults, which they can no longer correct. ¶688
• 494.--What makes us see that men know their faults better than we imagine, is that they are never wrong when they speak of their conduct; the same self-love that usually blinds them enlightens them, and gives them such true views as to make them suppress or disguise the smallest thing that might be censured. ¶689

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