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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

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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
Understanding
Stretch
Knowledge
Laziness
Easy
Finds
Ever
Carry
Cramps
Mind
Intelligence
Confines
Always
Habit
Constancy
Trouble
Agreeable
Taken
Idleness

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When a man is in love, he doubts, very often, what he most firmly believes.
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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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In every walk of life each man puts on a personality and outward appearance so as to look what he wants to be thought in fact you might say that society is entirely made up of assumed personalities.
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We easily forgive our friends those faults that do no affect us ourselves.
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Ideas often flash across our minds more complete than we could make them after much labor.
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Hatred is stronger than friendship.
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Great names abase, instead of elevating, those who do not know how to bear them.
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The health of the soul is as precarious as that of the body for when we seem secure from passions, we are no less in danger of their infection than we are of falling ill when we appear to be well.
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Self-love makes our friends appear more or less deserving in proportion to the delight we take in them, and the measures by whichwe judge of their worth depend upon the manner of their conversing with us.
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To safeguard one's health at the cost of too strict a diet is a tiresome illness, indeed.
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Consolation for unhappiness can often be found in a certain satisfaction we get from looking unhappy.
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The only security is courage.
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We can be more clever than one, but not more clever than all.
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To establish ourselves in the world, we have to do all we can to appear established. To succeed in the world, we do everything we can to appear successful.
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Few people have the wisdom to prefer the criticism that would do them good, to the praise that deceives them.
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Familiarity is a suspension of almost all the laws of civility, which libertinism has introduced into society under the notion of ease.
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In the human heart there is a ceaseless birth of passions, so that the destruction of one is almost always the establishment of another.
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