"Whatever pretext we may give for our affections, often it is only interest and vanity which cause them."
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Francois de La Rochefoucauld quotes (page 17 of 55)
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"If it requires great tact to speak to the purpose, it requires no less to know when to be silent."
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"It is a wearisome disease to preserve health by too strict a regimen."
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"Idleness is more an infirmity of the mind than of the body."
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"The extreme pleasure we take in speaking of ourselves should make us apprehensive that it gives hardly any to those who listen to us."
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"Our probity is not less at the mercy of fortune than our property."
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"There are a great many simpletons who know themselves to be so, and who make a very cunning use of their own simplicity."
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"The reason why so few people are agreeable in conversation is that each is thinking more about what he intends to say than others are saying."
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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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"The desire to seem clever often keeps us from being so."
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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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"Some accidents there are in life that a little folly is necessary to help us out of."
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"In the human heart new passions are forever being born; the overthrow of one almost always means the rise of another."
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"Of all our faults, the one that we excuse most easily is idleness."
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"Our enemies come nearer the truth in the opinions they form of us than we do in our opinion of ourselves."
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"We often bore others when we think we cannot possibly bore them."
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"True bravery is shown by performing without witness what one might be capable of doing before all the world."
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"For most men the love of justice is only the fear of suffering injustice."
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"The defects of the mind, like those of the face, grow worse with age."
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"The dullness of certain people is sometimes a sufficient security against the attack of an artful man."
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