Jean de La Fontaine Quotes

We are all selfish and I no more trust myself than others with a good motive.

Credulity without enquiry is a sure way to deceive oneself.

So foolish is the heart of man that he ever puts his hope in the future, learning nothing from his past errors and fancying that tomorrow must be better than today.

We are more naive than those of the Middle Ages, and more frightened, for we can be made to believe almost anything.

A man, well, he'll walk right into Hell with both eyes open. But even the devil can't fool a dog.

People are naive about such things, and they would rather write them off as evil than attempt to understand them. An unfortunate truth, but a truth nonetheless.

Incredulity is the wisdom of the fool.

He flattered himself on being a man without any prejudices; and this pretension itself is a very great prejudice.

He thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing.

People believed what they wanted to believe, no matter what was right in front of their eyes.

Unless you see your nature, you shouldn't go around criticizing the goodness of others. There's no advantage in deceiving yourself. Good and bad are distinct. Cause and effect are clear. But fools don't believe and fall straight into a hell of endless darkness without even knowing it. What keeps them from believing is the heaviness of their karma. They're like blind people who don't believe there's such a thing as light. Even if you explain it to them, they still don't believe, because they're blind. How can they possibly distinguish light?

Repudiating the sensible world, which he neither sees himself nor believes from those who have, the Peripatetic joins combat by childish quibbling in a world on paper, and denies the Sun shines because he himself is blind.

Men are so stupid and concerned with their present needs, they will always let themselves be deceived.

Left to himself, man is half beast and half devil.

To succeed in life, you need two things: ignorance and confidence.

Believe in your own eyes and you'll get into a lot of trouble, hot water, a mess.

If you search for truthfulness, you might as well be blind.

This is always history's greatest failure, its inability to believe what it sees, what, almost always, someone sees.

One of the greatest superstitions of our time is the belief that it has none.

A man of good sense always believes what he is told, and what he finds written down.

Our nature is to desperately want to believe and to take what we believe is the quickest path there even against our better judgment.

He was impregnably armored by his good intentions and his ignorance.

All people have their blind side-their superstitions.

Wherever you go you will find people lying to you, and as your awareness grows, you will notice that you also lie to yourself. Do not expect people to tell you the truth because they also lie to themselves. You have to trust yourself and choose to believe or not to believe what someone says to you.