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Absence cools moderate passions, and inflames violent ones just as the wind blows out candles, but kindles fires.

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
Absence
Candles
Violent
Kindles
Blow
Moderate
Ones
Fires
Wind
Moderates
Fire
Blows
Passion
Candle
Inflames
Love
Passions
Cools

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Hatred is stronger than friendship.
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There are some faults which, when well managed, make a greater figure than virtue itself.
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We give advice, but we cannot give the wisdom to profit by it.
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Flattery is a kind of bad money, to which our vanity gives us currency.
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When our hatred is violent, it sinks us even beneath those we hate.
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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.
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On why I don't trust democracy without extremely powerful systems of accountability and recall What seems to be generosity is often only disguised ambition - which despises small interests to gain great ones.
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Jealousy is not love, but self-love.
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What men have called friendship is only a social arrangement, a mutual adjustment of interests, an interchange of services given and received it is, in sum, simply a business from which those involved propose to derive a steady profit for their own self-love.
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No accidents are so unlucky [bad] but that the wise may draw some advantage [good] from them.
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The one thing people are the most liberal with, is their advice.
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Men are not only prone to forget benefits they even hate those who have obliged them, and cease to hate those who have injured them. The necessity of revenging an injury, or of recompensing a benefit seems a slavery to which they are unwilling to submit.
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Our actions seem to have their lucky and unlucky stars, to which a great part of that blame and that commendation is due which is given to the actions themselves.
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Loyalty is in most people only a ruse used by self-interest to attract confidence.
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Man only blames himself in order that he may be praised.
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Honest people will respect us for our merit: the public, for our luck.
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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.
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