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This is no time to be getting all steamed up about La Rochefoucauld. It's only a question of minutes before I'm going to be pretty darned good and sick of La Rochefoucauld, once and for all. La Rochefoucauld this and La Rochefoucauld that. Yes, well, let me tell you that if nobody had ever learned to quote, very few people would be in love with La Rochefoucauld. I bet you I don't know ten souls who read him without a middleman.
--
Dorothy Parker short story The Little Hours published in Here Lies (1939), the narrator during insomnia dwelling on La Rochefoucauld's pronouncement that if nobody learned to read, very few people would be in love.

 

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

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Dilettanten haben nicht einmal in einer sekundären Kunst etwas Bleibendes geleistet, sich aber verdient gemacht um die höchste aller Wissenschaften, die Philosophie. Den Beweis dafür liefern: Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld, Vauvenargues.

 

Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

 

"Old age is a tyrant," said La Rochefoucauld, "who forbids indulgence in the pleasures of youth under penalty of death." First of all, those of love are prohibited. Old men and old women have the utmost difficulty in inspiring love, though they be full of spirit and vigor. When affairs of this sort do exist, it must be determined how great a part is played by respect, admiration, and abnegation.

 

Andre Maurois

 

I read it for the first time in about 20 years this year–-recently. It wasn't so bad. I get it. I get fan mail now from people who weren't really born yet when the book came out. I don't think it's a perfect book by any means, but it's valid. I get where it comes from. I get what it is. I know that sounds so ambiguous. It's sort of out of my hands and it has its reputation so what can you do about it? There's a lot of it that I wish was slightly more elegantly written. Overall, I was pretty shocked. It was pretty good writing for someone who was 19. I was pretty surprised by the level of writing.

 

Bret Easton Ellis

 

I have read now and then that I am one of the most tragic figures in baseball. Well, maybe that's the way some people look at it, but I don't quite see it that way myself. I guess one of the reasons I never fought my suspension any harder than I did was that I thought I had spent a pretty full life in the big leagues. I was 32 years old at the time, and I had been in the majors 13 years; I had a life time batting average of .356; I held the all-time throwing record for distance; and I had made pretty good salaries for those days. There wasn't much left for me in the big leagues.

 

Shoeless Joe Jackson

 

The question, "How well does one read?" is a bad question... essentially unanswerable. A more proper question is "How well does one read poetry, or history, or science, or religion?" No one I have ever known is so brilliant as to have learned the languages of all fields of knowledge equally well. Most of us do not learn some of them at all.

 

Neil Postman