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Our merit gains us the esteem of the virtuous-our star that of the public.
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
Stars
Popularity
Virtuous
Merit
Esteem
Gains
Star
Public
More quotes by Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Few know how to be old.
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Beautiful coquettes are quacks of love.
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Virtue would go far if vanity did not keep it company.
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If it requires great tact to speak to the purpose, it requires no less to know when to be silent.
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The passions often engender their contraries.
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A man often imagines that he acts, when he is acted upon.
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To be a great man it is necessary to know how to profit by the whole of our good fortune.
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In the human heart new passions are forever being born the overthrow of one almost always means the rise of another.
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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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Commonplace minds usually condemn what is beyond the reach of their understanding.
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The greatest part of our faults are more excusable than the methods that are commonly taken to conceal them.
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What we take for virtue is often but an assemblage of various ambitions and activities that chance, or our own astuteness, have arranged in a certain manner and it is not always out of courage or purity that men are brave, and women chaste.
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We often see malefactors, when they are led to execution, put on resolution and a contempt of death which, in truth, is nothing else but fearing to look it in the face--so that this pretended bravery may very truly be said to do the same good office to their mind that the blindfold does to their eyes.
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We sometimes differ more widely from ourselves than we do from others.
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We are better pleased to see those on whom we confer benefits than those from whom we receive them.
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Even the most disinterested love is, after all, but a kind of bargain, in which self-love always proposes to be the gainer one wayor another.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Very few people are acquainted with death. They undergo it, commonly, not so much out of resolution as custom and insensitivity and most men die because they cannot help it.
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Nothing is more contagious than example, and no man does any exceeding good or exceeding ill but it spawns new deeds of the same kind. The good we imitate through emulation, the ill through the malignity of our nature, which shame keeps locked up, but example sets free.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
The temperament that produces a talent for little things is the opposite of that required for great ones.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
It is most difficult to speak when we are ashamed of being silent.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
