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There are various sorts of curiosity one is from interest, which makes us desire to know that which may be useful to us and the other, from pride which comes from the wish to know what others are ignorant of.
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
May
Various
Pride
Interest
Wish
Desire
Sorts
Comes
Useful
Makes
Curiosity
Others
Ignorant
More quotes by Francois de La Rochefoucauld
If it were not for the company of fools, a witty man would often be greatly at a loss.
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Too great cleverness is but deceptive delicacy, true delicacy is the most substantial cleverness.
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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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Gratitude, in most men, is only a strong and secret hope of greater favors.
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We are not fond of praising, and never praise any one except from interested motives. Praise is a clever, concealed, and delicate flattery, which gratifies in different ways the giver and the receiver. The one takes it as a recompense of his merit, and the other bestows it to display his equity and discernment.
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A man of understanding finds less difficulty in submitting to a wrong-headed fellow, than in attempting to set him right.
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The rust of business is sometimes polished off in a camp but never in a court.
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The distempers of the soul have their relapses, as many and as dangerous as those of the body and what we take for a perfect cureis generally either an abatement of the same disease or the changing of that for another.
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The more one loves a mistress, the more one is ready to hate her.
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A small degree of wit, accompanied by good sense, is less tiresome in the long run than a great amount of wit without it.
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Great men should not have great faults.
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The passions are the only orators that always persuade: they are, as it were, a natural art, the rules of which are infallible and the simplest man with passion is more persuasive than the most eloquent without it.
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We sometimes condemn the present, by praising the past and show our contempt of what is now, by our esteem for what is no more.
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Friendship is a traffic wherein self-love always proposes to be the gainer.
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All who know their own minds know not their own hearts.
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Nothing ought more to humiliate men who have merited great praise than the care they still take to boast of little things.
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There are few people who are more often in the wrong than those who cannot endure to be so.
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All our qualities, whether good or bad, are unstable and ambiguous, and almost all are at the mery of chance.
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The generality of friends puts us out of conceit with friendship just as the generality of religious people puts us out of conceit with religion.
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History never embraces more than a small part of reality
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