Idleness and fear keeps us in the path of duty, but our virtue often gets the praise.
If one acts rightly and honestly, it is difficult to decide whether it is the effect of integrity or skill.
It is much easier to seem fitted for posts we do not fill than for those we do.
There are persons whose only merit consists in saying and doing stupid things at the right time, and who ruin all if they change their manners.
Numberless arts appear foolish whose secret motives are most wise and weighty.
Fortune cures us of many faults that reason could not.
There are some persons who only disgust with their abilities, there are persons who please even with their faults.
The desire which urges us to deserve praise strengthens our good qualities, and praise given to wit, valour, and beauty, tends to increase them.
Few are sufficiently wise to prefer censure which is useful to praise which is treacherous.
Some reproaches praise; some praises reproach.
Praise is flattery, artful, hidden, delicate, which gratifies differently him who praises and him who is praised. The one takes it as the reward of merit, the other bestows it to show his impartiality and knowledge.
We often select envenomed praise which, by a reaction upon those we praise, shows faults we could not have shown by other means.
It is oftener by the estimation of our own feelings that we exaggerate the good qualities of others than by their merit, and when we praise them we wish to attract their praise.
The most clever and polite are content with only seeming attentive while we perceive in their mind and eyes that at the very time they are wandering from what is said and desire to return to what they want to say.
Instead of considering that the worst way to persuade or please others is to try thus strongly to please ourselves, and that to listen well and to answer well are some of the greatest charms we can have in conversation.
There are some who never would have loved if they never had heard it spoken of.
A man would rather say evil of himself than say nothing.
The smallest fault of women who give themselves up to love is to love.
We sometimes differ more widely from ourselves than we do from others.
The daily employment of cunning marks a little mind, it generally happens that those who resort to it in one respect to protect themselves lay themselves open to attack in another.
Too great cleverness is but deceptive delicacy, true delicacy is the most substantial cleverness.
We often act treacherously more from weakness than from a fixed motive.
The most subtle of our acts is to simulate blindness for snares that we know are set for us.
A man for whom accident discovers sense, is not a rational being. A man only is so who understands, who distinguishes, who tests it.
One kind of flirtation is to boast we never flirt.
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