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Before strongly desiring anything, we should look carefully into the happiness of its present owner.

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
Happiness
Anything
Look
Desiring
Looks
Owner
Strongly
Carefully
Owners
Present

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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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If it were not for poetry, few men would ever fall in love.
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Nothing ought more to humiliate men who have merited great praise than the care they still take to boast of little things.
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Time's chariot-wheels make their carriage-road in the fairest face.
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Happiness is in the taste, and not in the things themselves we are happy from possessing what we like, not from possessing what others like.
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Customary use of artifice is the sign of a small mind, and it almost always happens that he who uses it to cover one spot uncovers himself in another.
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True eloquence consists in saying all that should be said, and that only.
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We are more interested in making others believe we are happy than in trying to be happy ourselves.
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We sometimes think that we hate flattery, but we only hate the manner in which it is done. [Fr., On croit quelquefoir hair la flatterie maid on ne hait que a maniere de flatter.]
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The only security is courage.
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True bravery is shown by performing without witness what one might be capable of doing before all the world.
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Not to love is in love an infallible means of being loved.
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Mediocre minds usually dismiss anything which reaches beyond their own understanding.
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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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Were we perfectly acquainted with the object, we should never passionately desire it.
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The most brilliant fortunes are often not worth the littleness required to gain them.
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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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Our self-love can less bear to have our tastes than our opinions condemned.
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Humility is often merely feigned submissiveness assumed in order to subject others, an artifice of pride which stoops to conquer, and although pride has a thousand ways of transforming itself it is never so well disguised and able to take people in as when masquerading as humility.
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