The Gentle Cynic

The Gentle Cynic

via Futility Closet by Greg Ross on 7/1/10

More maxims of Rochefoucauld:

• “Before we passionately wish for anything, we should examine into the happiness of its possessor.”
• “Were we perfectly acquainted with any object, we should never passionately desire it.”
• “It is easier to appear worthy of the employments we are not possessed of, than of those we are.”
• “Those who endeavor to imitate us we like much better than those who endeavor to equal us. Imitation is a sign of esteem but competition of envy.”
• “We are often more agreeable through our faults than through our good qualities.”
• “We easily excuse in our friends those faults that do not affect us.”
• “None are either so happy or so unhappy as they imagine.”
• “Censorious as the world is, it oftener does favor to false merit than injustice to true.”
• “Absence destroys small passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes tapers, and kindles fires.”
• “We never desire ardently what we desire rationally.”
• “Our self-love bears with less patience the condemnation of our taste than of our opinion.”

And “Why have we memory sufficient to retain the minutest circumstances that have happened to us; and yet not enough to remember how often we have related them to the same person?”

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