Francois de La Rochefoucauld Self Quotations

Jealousy contains more of self-love than of love.

Self-interest makes some people blind, and others sharp-sighted.

The name and pretense of virtue is as serviceable to self-interest as are real vices.

It takes nearly as much ability to know how to profit by good advice as to know how to act for one's self.

That good disposition which boasts of being most tender is often stifled by the least urging of self-interest.

The passions possess a certain injustice and self interest which makes it dangerous to follow them, and in reality we should distrust them even when they appear most trustworthy.

It is as easy to deceive one's self without perceiving it, as it is difficult to deceive others without their finding out.

Jealousy springs more from love of self than from love of another.

The secret of pleasing in conversation is not to explain too much everything; to say them half and leave a little for divination is a mark of the good opinion we have of others, and nothing flatters their self-love more.

We feel good and ill only in proportion to our self-love.

Friendship is only a reciprocal conciliation of interests, and an exchange of good offices; it is a species of commerce out of which self-love always expects to gain something.

Self-interest speaks all manner of tongues and plays all manner of parts, even that of disinterestedness.

The sure way to be cheated is to think one's self more cunning than others.

Self-love is the greatest of all flatterers.

We are inconsolable at being deceived by our enemies and being betrayed by our friends, yet we are often content in be being treated like that by our own selves.

Loyalty is in most people only a ruse used by self-interest to attract confidence.

Jealousy is always born with love, but does not die with it. In jealousy there is more of self-love than of love to another.

Virtues lose themselves in self-interest, as rivers in the sea.

Whatever pretended causes we may blame our afflictions upon, it is often nothing but self-interest and vanity that produce them.

Self-love is the love of a man's own self, and of everything else for his own sake. It makes people idolaters to themselves, and tyrants to all the world besides.

Nothing ought in reason to mortify our self-satisfaction more that the considering that we condemn at one time what we highly approve and commend at another.

Men are inconsolable concerning the treachery of their friends or the deceptions of their enemies; and yet they are often very highly satisfied to be both deceived and betrayed by their own selves.

The breeding we give young people is ordinarily but an additional self-love, by which we make them have a better opinion of themselves.

Even the most disinterested love is, after all, but a kind of bargain, in which self-love always proposes to be the gainer one wayor another.

We do not like to praise, and seldom praise anyone without self-interest.

Our self-love can less bear to have our tastes than our opinions condemned.

The fondness or indifference that the philosophers expressed for life was merely a preference inspired by their self-love, and will no more bear reasoning upon than the relish of the palate or the choice of colors.

Self-love makes our friends appear more or less deserving in proportion to the delight we take in them, and the measures by whichwe judge of their worth depend upon the manner of their conversing with us.

Whatever discoveries we may have made in the regions of self-love, there still remain many unknown lands.

Self-love, as it happens to be well or ill conducted, constitutes virtue and vice.

Self-love is more cunning than the most cunning man in the world.

Nothing is so capable of diminishing self-love as the observation that we disapprove at one time what we approve at another.

Jealousy is not love, but self-love.

Friendship is a traffic wherein self-love always proposes to be the gainer.

Self-love increases or diminishes for us the good qualities of our friends, in proportion to the satisfaction we feel with them; and we judge of their merit by the manner in which they act towards us.

The constancy of the wise is only the art of keeping disquietude to one's self.

What men call friendship is no more than a partnership, a mutual care of interests, an exchange of favors - in a word, it is a sort of traffic, in which self-love ever proposes to be the gainer.