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Nothing prevents one from appearing natural as the desire to appear natural.

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
Desire
Nothing
Prevents
Appearing
Appear
Natural

More quotes by Francois de La Rochefoucauld

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In every walk of life each man puts on a personality and outward appearance so as to look what he wants to be thought in fact you might say that society is entirely made up of assumed personalities.
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He who refuses praise the first time that it is offered does so because he would hear it a second time.
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Sometimes there are accidents in our lives the skillful extrication from which demands a little folly.
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Decency is the least of all laws, but yet it is the law which is most strictly observed.
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Penetration has an air of divination it pleases our vanity more than any other quality of the mind.
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We are sometimes as different from ourselves as we are from others.
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It is not always from valor or from chastity that men are brave, and women chaste.
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The vices enter into the composition of the virtues, as poisons into that of medicines. Prudence collects and arranges them, and uses them beneficially against the ills of life.
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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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Love is one and the same in the original but there are a thousand different copies of it.
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Self-love is the love of a man's own self, and of everything else for his own sake. It makes people idolaters to themselves, and tyrants to all the world besides.
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Flattery is a kind of bad money, to which our vanity gives us currency.
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A man is ridiculous less through the characteristics he has than through those he affects to have.
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Ideas often flash across our minds more complete than we could make them after much labor.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
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The cunningest dissimulation is when a man pretends to be caught in the traps others set for him and a man is never so easily over-reached as when he is contriving to over-reach others.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
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The fondness or indifference that the philosophers expressed for life was merely a preference inspired by their self-love, and will no more bear reasoning upon than the relish of the palate or the choice of colors.
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Repentance is not so much remorse for what we have done as the fear of the consequences.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
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Consolation for unhappiness can often be found in a certain satisfaction we get from looking unhappy.
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It is much easier to seem fitted for posts we do not fill than for those we do.
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The contempt of riches in philosophers was only a hidden desire to avenge their merit upon the injustice of fortune, by despising the very goods of which fortune had deprived them it was a secret to guard themselves against the degradation of poverty, it was a back way by which to arrive at that distinction which they could not gain by riches.
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