All passions exaggerate; and they are passions only because they do exaggerate.
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Celebrity is the advantage of being known to people who we don't know, and who don't know us.
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Change of fashion is the tax levied by the industry of the poor on the vanity of the rich.
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Contemplation often makes life miserable. We should act more, think less, and stop watching ourselves live.
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Conviction is the conscience of the mind.
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Education must have two foundations - morality as a support for virtue, prudence as a defense for self against the vices of others. By letting the balance incline to the side of morality, you only make dupes or martyrs; by letting it incline to the other, you make calculating egoists.
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If it were not for the government, we should have nothing to laugh at in France.
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Living is a sickness to which sleep provides relief every sixteen hours. It's a palliative. The remedy is death.
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Man arrives as a novice at each age of his life.
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Most anthologists... of quotations are like those who eat cherries... first picking the best ones and winding up by eating everything.
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Most books today seemed to have been written overnight from books read the day before.
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No law reaches it, but all right-minded people observe it.
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One must not hope to be more than one can be.
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Paris, a city of gaieties and pleasures, where four-fifths of the inhabitants die of grief. [About Paris]
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Preoccupation with money is the great test of small natures, but only a small test of great ones.
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Real worth requires no interpreter: its everyday deeds form its emblem.
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Some things are easier to legalize than to legitimate.
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Sometimes apparent resemblance of character will bring two men together and for a certain time unite them. But their mistake gradually becomes evident, and they are astonished to find themselves not only far apart, but even repelled, in some sort, at all their points of contact.
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Swallow a toad in the morning and you will encounter nothing more disgusting the rest of the day.
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The contemplative life is often miserable. One must act more, think less, and not watch oneself live.
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The most wasted day is that in which we have not laughed.
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The only thing that stops God from sending another flood is that the first one was useless.
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The person is always happy who is in the presence of something they cannot know in full. A person as advanced far in the study of morals who has mastered the difference between pride and vanity.
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There are more people who wish to be loved than there are who are willing to love.
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There are two things that one must get used to or one will find life unendurable: the damages of time and injustices of men.
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There are well-dressed foolish ideas just as there are well-dressed fools.
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Whatever evil a man may think of women, there is no woman but thinks more.
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When a man and a woman have an overwhelming passion for each other, it seems to me, in spite of such obstacles dividing them as parents or husband, that they belong to each other in the name of Nature, and are lovers by Divine right, in spite of human convention or the laws.
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