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Behind many acts that are thought ridiculous there lie wise and weighty motives.
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
Behinds
Behind
Wise
Lying
Weighty
Thought
Motives
Many
Motive
Acts
Ridiculous
More quotes by Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Female gossips are generally actuated by active ignorance.
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Our minds are as much given to laziness as our bodies.
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Virtue would go far if vanity did not keep it company.
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Marriage is the only war in which you sleep with the enemy.
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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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Old men delight in giving good advice as a consolation for the fact that they can no longer set bad examples.
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Avarice misapprehends itself almost always. There is no passion which more often will miss its aim, nor upon which the present has so much influence to the prejudice of the future.
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Before strongly desiring anything, we should look carefully into the happiness of its present owner.
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What renders other people's vanity insufferable is that it wounds our own.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Moral severity in women is only a dress or paint which they use to set off their beauty.
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The qualities we have do not make us so ridiculous as those which we affect to have. [Fr., On n'est jamais si ridicule par les qualites que l'on a que par celles que l'on affecte d'avoir.]
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
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.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
One of the greatest and also the commonest of faults is for men to believe that, because they never hear their shortcomings spoken of, or read about them in cold print, others can have no knowledge of them. GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG, The Reflections of Lichtenberg We are often more agreeable through our faults than our good qualities.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
The pleasure of love is in the loving and there is more joy in the passion one feels than in that which one inspires.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Idleness and constancy fix the mind to what it finds easy and agreeable. This habit always confines and cramps up our knowledge and no one has ever taken the trouble to stretch and carry his understanding as far as it could go.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Silence is the safest policy if you are unsure of yourself.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
In friendship as well as love, ignorance very often contributes more to our happiness than knowledge.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
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.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
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.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
It is much easier to seem fitted for posts we do not fill than for those we do.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
