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To listen closely and reply well is the highest perfection we are able to attain in the art of conversation.

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
Inspirational
Closely
Art
Educational
Able
Customers
Wells
Perfection
Well
Conversation
Highest
Listening
Reply
Listen
Attain

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Jealousy is the greatest of all evils, and the one that arouses the least pity in the person who causes it.
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We should wish for few things with eagerness, if we perfectly knew the nature of that which was the object of our desire.
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It is a species of coquetry to make a parade of never practising it.
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One thing which makes us find so few people who appear reasonable and agreeable in conversation is, that there is scarcely any one who does not think more of what he is about to say than of answering precisely what is said to him.
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We often brag that we are never bored with ourselves, and are so vain as never to think ourselves bad company.
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Friendship is a traffic wherein self-love always proposes to be the gainer.
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Nothing is so capable of diminishing self-love as the observation that we disapprove at one time what we approve at another.
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Fancy sets the value on the gifts of fortune.
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In misfortune we often mistake dejection for constancy we bear it without daring to look on it like cowards, who suffer themselves to be murdered without resistance.
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Sometimes we meet a fool with wit, never one with discretion.
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Men more easily renounce their interests than their tastes.
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Selfishness is the grand moving principle of nine-tenths of our actions.
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One kind of flirtation is to boast we never flirt.
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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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The passions do very often give birth to others of a nature most contrary to their own. Thus avarice sometimes brings forth prodigality, and prodigality avarice a man's resolution is very often the effect of levity, and his boldness that of cowardice and fear.
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The desire of appearing clever often prevents our becoming so.
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We would rather speak ill of ourselves than not talk about ourselves at all.
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A man may be sharper than another, but not than all others.
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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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Love can no more continue without a constant motion than fire can and when once you take hope and fear away, you take from it its very life and being.
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