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Nothing is rarer than true good nature they who are reputed to have it are generally only pliant or weak.
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
Nothing
Pliant
Good
Reputed
Rarer
Generally
Goodness
Weak
True
Nature
More quotes by Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and fans fires.
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Taste may change, but inclination never.
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Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.
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Virtue would not make such advances if there were not a little vanity to keep it company.
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There are a great many men valued in society who have nothing to recommend them but serviceable vices.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
A certain harmony should be kept between actions and ideas if we want to fully develop the effects they can produce.
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In infants, levity is a prettiness in men a shameful defect but in old age, a monstrous folly.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
The heart of man ever finds a constant succession of passions, so that the destroying and pulling down of one proves generally tobe nothing else but the production and the setting up of another.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
We do not lack strength so much as the will to use it and very often our imagining that things are impossible is nothing but an excuse of our own contriving, to reconcile ourselves to our own idleness.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Our actions are like blank rhymes, to which everyone applies what sense he pleases.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
If it were not for the company of fools, a witty man would often be greatly at a loss.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
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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One man may be more cunning than another, but no one can be more cunning than all the world.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Most men expose themselves in battle enough to save their honor, few wish to do so more than sufficiently, or than is necessary to make the design for which they expose themselves succeed.
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Selfishness is the grand moving principle of nine-tenths of our actions.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Women know not the whole of their coquetry.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Humility is the sure evidence of Christian virtues. Without it, we retain all our faults still, and they are only covered over with pride, which hides them from other men's observation, and sometimes from our own too.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Some people displease with merit, and others' very faults and defects are pleasing.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
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.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
If we are to judge of love by its consequences, it more nearly resembles hatred than friendship.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
