A Quote by Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Those who have the most cunning affect all their lives to condemn cunning; that they may make use of it on some great occasion, and to some great end.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Quote Topics

Affect Condemn Cunning End Great Lives Make May Most Occasion Some Those Use

Quote Author

Francois de La Rochefoucauld
French - Writer
September 15, 1613 - March 17, 1680

The most ingenious men continually pretend to condemn tricking--but this is often done that they may use it more conveniently themselves, when some great occasion or interest offers itself to them.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

All my own experience of life teaches me the contempt of cunning, not the fear. The phrase "profound cunning," has always seemed to me a contradiction in terms. I never knew a cunning mind which was not either shallow, or on some point diseased.

Anna Brownell Jameson

A cunning mind emphatically delights in its own cunning, and is the ready prey of cunning.

Anna Brownell Jameson

The animals to whom nature has given the faculty we call cunning know always when to use it, and use it wisely; but when man descends to cunning he blunders and betrays.

Thomas Paine

There are a great many simpletons who know themselves to be so, and who make a very cunning use of their own simplicity.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

In the meane time know this, that the learning of warranties is one of the most curious and cunning learnings of the law, and of great use and consequence.

Edward Coke

Don't think so much of your own Cunning, as to forget other Men's; a Cunning Man is overmatched by a cunning Man and a Half.

Benjamin Franklin

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

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Cunning has effect from the credulity of others, rather than from the abilities of those who are cunning. It requires no extraordinary talents to lie and deceive.

Samuel Johnson

It has been a sort of maxim, that the greatest art is to conceal art; but I know not how, among some people we meet with, their greatest cunning is to appear cunning.

Richard Steele

Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form.

Herman Melville

Somewhere in [China's] soul lurks the cunning of an old dog, and it is a cunning that is strangely impressive. What a strange old soul! What a great old soul!

Lin Yutang

Cunning has only private selfish aims, and sticks at nothing which may make them succeed. Discretion has large and extended views, and, like a well-formed eye, commands a whole horizon; cunning is a kind of shortsightedness, that discovers the minutest objects which are near at hand, but is not able to discern things at a distance.

Joseph Addison

Probably those three things affect the most people: reproductive freedom, freedom from violence, and democratic families. But there may well be someone sitting at this table who has a great idea to do something else that wouldn't come under those umbrellas and that would really be great, and make all kinds of change.

Gloria Steinem

Every man of action has a strong dose of egoism, pride, hardness, and cunning. But all those things will be regarded as high qualities if he can make them the means to achieve great ends.