Luc de Clapiers Vauvenargues (1715 – 1747)
French moralist, essayist, and miscellaneous writer.
Men dissimulate their dearest, most constant, and most virtuous inclination from weakness and a fear of being condemned.
Great men in teaching weak men to reflect have set them on the road to error.
If our friends do us a service, we think they owe it to us by their title of friend. We never think that they do not owe us their friendship.
It cannot be a vice in men to be sensible of their strength.
Great men are sometimes so even in small things.
When a thought is too weak to be expressed simply, it should be rejected.
The art of pleasing is the art of deception.
Most people grow old within a small circle of ideas, which they have not discovered for themselves. There are perhaps less wrong-minded people than thoughtless.
We are very wrong to think that some fault or other can exclude virtue, or to consider the alliance of good and evil as a monstrosity or an enigma.
Whatever affection we have for our friends or relations, the happiness of others never suffices for our own.
The falsest of all philosophies is that which, under the pretext of delivering men from the embarrassment of their passions, counsels idleness and the abandonment and neglect of themselves.
Necessity relieves us from the embarrassment of choice.
Superficial knowledge … is hurtful to those who possess true genius; for it necessarily draws them away from their main object, wastes their industry over details and subjects foreign to their needs and natural talent, and lastly does not serve, as they flatter themselves, to prove the breadth of their mind. In all ages there have been men of very moderate intelligence who knew much, and so on the contrary, men of the highest intelligence who knew very little. Ignorance is not lack of intelligence, nor knowledge a proof of genius.
Reason and emotion counsel and supplement each other. Whoever heeds only the one, and puts aside the other, recklessly deprives himself of a portion of the aid granted us for the regulation of our conduct.
Some are born to invent, others to embellish; but the gilder attracts more attention than the architect.
It is proof of a narrow mind when things worthy of esteem are distinguished from things worthy of love. Great minds naturally love whatever is worthy of their esteem.
It is good to be firm by temperament and pliant by reflection.
Our failings sometimes bind us to one another as closely as could virtue itself.