The generality of virtuous women are like hidden treasures, they are safe only because nobody has sought after them.
Francois De La RochefoucauldRead
However rare true love may be, it is less so than true friendship.
Interpretation
True friendship is a rarer and more valuable connection than even true love.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld's quote suggests that while true love is indeed precious, the rarity of genuine friendship is even more pronounced. Friendship is often built on mutual understanding, trust, and shared experiences, making it a cornerstone of human relationships and more infrequent than romantic love.
In practice
During a speech about the importance of relationships.
The generality of virtuous women are like hidden treasures, they are safe only because nobody has sought after them.
Old men delight in giving good advice as a consolation for the fact that they can no longer set bad examples.
Some counterfeits reproduce so very well the truth that it would be a flaw of judgment not to be deceived by them.
Conceit causes more conversation than wit.
The defects and faults of the mind are like wounds in the body; after all imaginable care has been taken to heal them up, still there will be a scar left behind, and they are in continual danger of breaking the skin and bursting out again.
To understand matters rightly we should understand their details; and as that knowledge is almost infinite, our knowledge is always superficial and imperfect.
Thou wert my guide, philosopher, and friend.
Let our friends perish, provided that our enemies fall at the same time.
Thus people--so it seems to me-- Become good friends from sheer ennui.
One of the strange things about friendship is that time together isn't cancelled out by time apart. One doesn't erase the other or balance it on some invisible scale. You can spend a few hours with someone and they will change your life, or you can spend a lifetime with a person and remain unchanged.
We were not just competitors and colleagues, we were friends. We had a lot of opportunities to reflect on this in the last year. It was a competitive brotherhood.
There is nothing worth the wear of winning, but laughter and the love of friends.
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