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We get so much in the habit of wearing disguises before others that we finally appear disguised before ourselves.

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
Appear
Finally
Habit
Others
Much
Disguises
Disguised
Disguise
Wearing

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Virtues lose themselves in self-interest, as rivers in the sea.
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The only security is courage.
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What we take for virtue is often nothing but an assemblage of different actions, and of different interests, that fortune or our industry knows how to arrange.
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Some good qualities are like the senses: Those who are entirely deprived of them can have no notion of them.
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It is difficult to define love all we can say is, that in the soul it is a desire to rule, in the mind it is a sympathy, and in the body it is a hidden and delicate wish to possess what we love-Plus many mysteries.
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There are two things which Man cannot look at directly without flinching: the sun and death.
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The caprice of our temper is even more whimsical than that of Fortune.
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To awaken a man who is deceived as to his own merit is to do him as bad a turn as that done to the Athenian madman who was happy in believing that all the ships touching at the port belonged to him.
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A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.
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There are no accidents so unlucky from which clever people are not able to reap some advantage, and none so lucky that the foolish are not able to turn them to their own disadvantage.
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Few people have the wisdom to prefer the criticism that would do them good, to the praise that deceives them.
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Those who are incapable of committing great crimes do not readily suspect them in others.
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It appears that nature has hid at the bottom of our hearts talents and abilities unknown to us. It is only the passions that have the power of bringing them to light, and sometimes give us views more true and more perfect than art could possibly do.
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Jealousy lives upon doubts. It becomes madness or ceases entirely as soon as we pass from doubt to certainty.
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There are few people more convinced of their own genius than those who complain of how stupid they are.
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In all aspects of life, we take on a part and an appearance to seem to be what we wish to be--and thus the world is merely composed of actors.
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Jealousy is in some measure just and reasonable, since it merely aims at keeping something that belongs to us or we think belongsto us, whereas envy is a frenzy that cannot bear anything that belongs to others.
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Of all our faults, the one we avow most easily is idleness we persuade ourselves that it is allied to all the peaceable virtues,and as for the others, that it does not destroy them utterly, but only suspends the exercise of their functions.
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A man seldom finds people unthankful, as long as he remains in a condition of benefiting them further.
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Men and things have each their proper perspective to judge rightly of some it is necessary to see them near, of others we can never judge rightly but at a distance.
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