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Danh ngôn của Francois de La Rochefoucauld (Sứ mệnh: 5)

There is no disguise which can hide love for long where it exists, or simulate it where it does not.
Gratitude is merely the secret hope of further favors.
Jealousy contains more of self-love than of love.
Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and fans fires.
True love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about and few have seen.
Good advice is something a man gives when he is too old to set a bad example.
If we resist our passions, it is more due to their weakness than our strength.
Men give away nothing so liberally as their advice.
One forgives to the degree that one loves.
Hope, deceiving as it is, serves at least to lead us to the end of our lives by an agreeable route.
Jealousy lives upon doubts. It becomes madness or ceases entirely as soon as we pass from doubt to certainty.
Repentance is not so much remorse for what we have done as the fear of the consequences.
However rare true love may be, it is less so than true friendship.
A true friend is the greatest of all blessings, and that which we take the least care of all to acquire.
One is never fortunate or as unfortunate as one imagines.
We give advice, but we cannot give the wisdom to profit by it.
Neither the sun nor death can be looked at with a steady eye.
If we are to judge of love by its consequences, it more nearly resembles hatred than friendship.
In the misfortunes of our best friends we always find something not altogether displeasing to us.
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.
There is only one kind of love, but there are a thousand imitations.
Passion makes idiots of the cleverest men, and makes the biggest idiots clever.
We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of others.
Taste may change, but inclination never.
The happiness and misery of men depend no less on temper than fortune.
Perfect Valor is to do, without a witness, all that we could do before the whole world.
It is great folly to wish to be wise all alone.
We often forgive those who bore us, but we cannot forgive those whom we bore.
The defects of the mind, like those of the face, grow worse with age.
We have no patience with other people's vanity because it is offensive to our own.
However glorious an action in itself, it ought not to pass for great if it be not the effect of wisdom and intention.
Perfect courage is to do without witnesses what one would be capable of doing with the world looking on.
One can find women who have never had one love affair, but it is rare indeed to find any who have had only one.
It is almost always a fault of one who loves not to realize when he ceases to be loved.
There are few virtuous women who are not bored with their trade.
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.
In friendship as well as love, ignorance very often contributes more to our happiness than knowledge.
Few people have the wisdom to prefer the criticism that would do them good, to the praise that deceives them.
What makes the pain we feel from shame and jealousy so cutting is that vanity can give us no assistance in bearing them.
Jealousy is bred in doubts. When those doubts change into certainties, then the passion either ceases or turns absolute madness.
No man deserves to be praised for his goodness, who has it not in his power to be wicked. Goodness without that power is generally nothing more than sloth, or an impotence of will.