"Good advice is something a man gives when he is too old to set a bad example."
"It is a mighty error to suppose that none but violent and strong passions, such as love and ambition, are able to vanquish the rest. Even idleness, as feeble and languishing as it is, sometimes reigns over them; it usurps the throne and sits paramount over all the designs and actions of our lives, and imperceptibly wastes and destroys all our passions and all our virtues."
4 likes
Source: The Moral Maxims and Reflections. Book by François de La Rochefoucauld. Maxim 110, 1678.
About the author
Same author
More quotes by Francois de La Rochefoucauld
"All women are flirts, but some are restrained by shyness, and others by sense."
"Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and fans fires."
"The passions are the only orators that always persuade: they are, as it were, a natural art, the rules of which are infallible; and the simplest man with passion is more persuasive than the most eloquent without it."
"True love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about and few have seen."
"A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant."