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It is often laziness and timidity that keep us within our duty while virtue gets all the credit.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
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Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Age: 66 †
Born: 1613
Born: September 15
Died: 1680
Died: March 17
Memoirist
Military Personnel
Writer
Paris
France
François VI
Duc de La Rochefoucauld
Prince de Marcillac
François
Duc de La Rochefoucauld
Virtue
Within
Often
Keep
Timidity
Laziness
Credit
Gets
Duty
More quotes by Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Passions often produce their contraries: avarice sometimes leads to prodigality, and prodigality to avarice we are often obstinate through weakness and daring through timidity.
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Most people know no other way of judging men's worth but by the vogue they are in, or the fortunes they have met with.
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What is called generosity is usually only the vanity of giving we enjoy the vanity more than the thing given.
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We had better appear what we are, than affect to appear what we are not.
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Absence abates a moderate passion and intensifies a great one - as the wind blows out a candle but fans fire into flame.
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Affected simplicity is a subtle imposture.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
The sicknesses of the soul have their ups and downs like those of the body what we take to be a cure is most often merely a respite or change of disease.
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Few things are impossible in themselves: application to make them succeed fails us more often than the means.
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The more one loves a mistress, the more one is ready to hate her.
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Nothing is more contagious than example, and no man does any exceeding good or exceeding ill but it spawns new deeds of the same kind. The good we imitate through emulation, the ill through the malignity of our nature, which shame keeps locked up, but example sets free.
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Whatever good things people say of us, they tell us nothing new.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
However glorious an action in itself, it ought not to pass for great if it be not the effect of wisdom and intention.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
The most subtle of our acts is to simulate blindness for snares that we know are set for us.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Flattery is a counterfeit money which, but for vanity, would have no circulation.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
True bravery is shown by performing without witness what one might be capable of doing before all the world.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
The breeding we give young people is ordinarily but an additional self-love, by which we make them have a better opinion of themselves.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Perfect valour consists in doing without witnesses that which we would be capable of doing before everyone.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Men's happiness and misery depends altogether as much upon their own humor as it does upon fortune.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
We should not be much concerned about faults we have the courage to own.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Virtue would not make such advances if there were not a little vanity to keep it company.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
