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Numberless arts appear foolish whose secret motives are most wise and weighty.
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
Foolish
Whose
Wise
Numberless
Secret
Weighty
Art
Motives
Motive
Arts
Appear
More quotes by Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Moral severity in women is only a dress or paint which they use to set off their beauty.
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Our good qualities expose us more to hatred and persecution than all the ill we do.
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When our hatred is too alive puts us below what we hate.
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Those that have had great passions esteem themselves for the rest of their lives fortunate and unfortunate in being cured of them.
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We make promises to the extent that we hope-and keep them to the extent that we fear.
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Pity is a sense of our own misfortunes in those of another man it is a sort of foresight of the disasters which may befall ourselves. We assist others,, in order that they may assist us on like occasions so that the services we offer to the unfortunate are in reality so many anticipated kindnesses to ourselves.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
To praise princes for virtues they do not possess is to insult them without fear of consequences.
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The extreme delight we experience in talking about ourselves should warn us that those who listen do not share it.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
The reason that lovers never weary each other is because they are always talking about themselves.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Few things are impracticable in themselves and it is for want of application, rather than of means, that men fail to succeed.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Prudence and love are inconsistent in proportion as the last increases, the other decreases.
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Loyalty is in most people only a ruse used by self-interest to attract confidence.
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The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. The glory of great men should always be measured by the means they have used to acpuire it.
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As we grow older we grow both more foolish and wiser at the same time.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
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.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
A weak mind is the only defect out of our power to mend.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
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.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Eloquence: saying the proper thing and stopping.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Those who are condemned to death affect sometimes a constancy and contempt for death which is only the fear of facing it so that one may say that this constancy and contempt are to their mind what the bandage is to their eyes.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
The sicknesses of the soul have their ups and downs like those of the body what we take to be a cure is most often merely a respite or change of disease.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
