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Virtues lose themselves in self-interest, as rivers in the sea.
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
Self
Virtues
Rivers
Sea
Lose
Loses
Virtue
Interest
Lost
More quotes by Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Perfect courage is to do without witnesses what one would be capable of doing with the world looking on.
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Imagination could never invent the number of different contradictions that exist innately in each person's heart.
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Sobriety is love of health, or inability to eat much.
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The breeding we give young people is ordinarily but an additional self-love, by which we make them have a better opinion of themselves.
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Gracefulness is to the body what understanding is to the mind.
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To eat is a necessity, but to eat intelligently is an art.
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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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Too great cleverness is but deceptive delicacy, true delicacy is the most substantial cleverness.
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The passions do very often give birth to others of a nature most contrary to their own. Thus avarice sometimes brings forth prodigality, and prodigality avarice a man's resolution is very often the effect of levity, and his boldness that of cowardice and fear.
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Hope and fear are inseparable. There is no hope without fear, nor any fear without hope.
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The vices enter into the composition of the virtues, as poisons into that of medicines. Prudence collects and arranges them, and uses them beneficially against the ills of life.
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The good or the bad fortune of men depends not less upon their own dispositions than upon fortune.
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The most sure method of subjecting yourself to be deceived is to consider yourself more cunning than others.
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Timidity is a fault for which it is dangerous to reprove persons whom we wish to correct of it.
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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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Gratitude is merely the secret hope of further favors.
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One man may be more cunning than another, but no one can be more cunning than all the world.
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We have not strength enough to follow our reason so far as it would carry us.
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Old people are fond of giving good advice it consoles them for no longer being capable of setting a bad example.
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The confidence which we have in ourselves give birth to much of that, which we have in others.
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