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The greatest part of our faults are more excusable than the methods that are commonly taken to conceal them.

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
Method
Greatest
Taken
Part
Excusable
Conceal
Commonly
Methods
Faults

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The passions are the only orators that always persuade: they are, as it were, a natural art, the rules of which are infallible and the simplest man with passion is more persuasive than the most eloquent without it.
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We always get bored with those whom we bore.
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Time's chariot-wheels make their carriage-road in the fairest face.
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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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People are often vain of their passions, even of the worst, but envy is a passion so timid and shame-faced that no one ever dare avow her.
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Love can no more continue without a constant motion than fire can and when once you take hope and fear away, you take from it its very life and being.
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Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and fans fires.
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Perfect courage is to do without witnesses what one would be capable of doing with the world looking on.
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The height of ability consists in a thorough knowledge of the real value of things, and of the genius of the age in which we live.
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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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Not to love is in love an infallible means of being loved.
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Few things are impracticable in themselves and it is for want of application, rather than of means, that men fail to succeed.
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To know oneself is not necessarily to improve oneself
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Those only are despicable who fear to be despised.
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Too great haste to repay an obligation is a kind of ingratitude.
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Passion often renders the most clever man a fool, and sometimes renders the most foolish man clever.
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Men would not live in society long if they were not each others dupes.
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We sometimes condemn the present, by praising the past and show our contempt of what is now, by our esteem for what is no more.
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For envy, like lightning, generally strikes at the top Or any point which sticks out from the ordinary level. LUCRETIUS, De Rerum Natura Our envy always outlives the felicity of its object.
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