Sébastien-Roch Nicolas Quotes
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In living and in seeing other men, the heart must break or become as bronze.
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Most benefactors are like unskillful generals who take the city and leave the citadel intact.
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Almost the whole of history is but a sequence of horrors.
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Narrow waists and narrow minds go together.
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Calumny is like the wasp which worries you, and which it is not best to try to get rid of unless you are sure of slaying it; for otherwise it returns to the charge more furious than ever.
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The sunset glow of self-possession.
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The new friends whom we make after attaining a certain age and by whom we would fain replace those whom we have lost, are to our old friends what glass eyes, false teeth and wooden legs are to real eyes, natrual teeth and legs of flesh and bone.
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Women see faults much more readily in each other than they can discover perfections.
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Spero Speroni explains admirably how an author who writes very clearly for himself is often obscure to his readers. "It is," he says, "because the author proceeds from the thought to the expression, and the reader from the expression to the thought.
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Egotism is the tongue of 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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Intelligent people make many mistakes because they cannot believe the world is really as foolish as it is.
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Thought consoles us for all, and heals all. If at times it does you ill, ask it for the remedy for that ill and it will give it to you.
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Prudence replaces strength by saving the man who has the misfortune of not possessing it from most occasions when it's needed.
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Most anthologists of poetry or quotations are like those who eat cherries or oysters, first picking the best and ending by eating everything.
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Nature in causing reason and the passions to be born at one and the same time apparently wished by the latter gift to distract man from the evil she had done him by the former, and by only permitting him to live for a few years after the loss of his passions seems to show her pity by early deliverance from a life that reduces him to reason as his sole resource.
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In order to forgive reason for the evil it has wrought on the majority of men, we must imagine for ourselves what man would be without his reason. 'Tis a necessary evil.
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Marriage follows on love as smoke on flame.
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In the fine arts, as in many other things, we know well only what we have not learned.
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A person of intellect without energy added to it, is a failure.
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Men whose only concern is other people's opinion of them are like actors who put on a poor performance to win the applause of people of poor taste; some of them would be capable of good acting in front of a good audience. A decent man plays his part to the best of his ability, regardless of the taste of the gallery.
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Chance is a nickname for Providence.
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We must start human society from scratch; as Francis Bacon said, we must recreate human understanding.
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Every day I add to the list of things I refuse to discuss. The wiser the man, the longer the list.