Literary Birthday – 15 September – François de La Rochefoucauld

François de La Rochefoucauld was born 15 September 1613 and died 17 March 1680.

Quotes

1. No persons are more frequently wrong than those who will not admit they are wrong.
2. We are almost always bored by just those whom we must not find boring.
3. We promise according to our hopes and perform according to our fears.
4. True love is like ghosts, which everybody talks about and few have seen.
5. The only thing constant in life is change.
6. One cannot answer for his courage when he has never been in danger.
7. We rarely think people have good sense unless they agree with us.
8. When we are unable to find tranquillity within ourselves, it is useless to seek it elsewhere.
9. The height of cleverness is to be able to conceal it.
10. Thinkers think and doers do. But until the thinkers do and the doers think, progress will be just another word in the already overburdened vocabulary by sense.
11. How can you expect another to keep a secret if we have been unable to keep it ourselves?
12. One may outwit another, but not all the others.
13. Second-rate minds usually condemn everything beyond their grasp.
14. Listening well and answering well is one of the greatest perfections that can be obtained in conversation.

François de La Rochefoucauld was a noted French author of maxims and memoirs. The French classical author was one of the leading exponents of the ‘maxime, a French literary form of epigram that expresses a harsh or paradoxical truth with brevity’. (via) He is the author of Maxims.

Source for image

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fran%C3%A7ois_de_La_Rochefoucauld.jpg

Théodore Chassériau, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

 by Amanda Patterson

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