It is said of a lonely man that he does not appreciate the life of society. This is like saying he hates hiking because he dislikes walking in thick forest on a dark night.
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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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Most of those who make collections of verse or epigram are like men eating cherries or oysters they choose out the best at first, and end by eating all.
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The most wasted day of all is that on which we have not laughed
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How many fools does it take to make up a public?
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Pleasure may come from illusion, but happiness can come only of reality.
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The most wasted of all days is that on which one has not laughed.
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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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We leave unmolested those who set the fire to the house, and prosecute those who sound the alarm.
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Once we have resolved only to see those who will treat us morally and virtuously, reasonably and truthfully, without treating conventions, vanities and ceremonials as anything other than props of polite society, we will have to live more or less on our own.
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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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The person of intellect is lost unless they unite with energy of character. When we have the lantern of Diogenese we must also have his staff.
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Scandal is an importunate wasp, against which we must make no movement unless we are quite sure that we can kill it; otherwise it will return to the attack more furious than ever.
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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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A man is not necessarily intelligent because he has plenty of ideas, any more than he is a good general because he has plenty of soldiers.
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An author is often obscure to the reader because they proceed from the thought to expression than like the reader from the expression to the thought.
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If it were not for the government, we should have nothing to laugh at in France.
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Nature never said to me: Do not be poor; still less did she say: Be rich; her cry to me was always: Be independent.
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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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Man arrives as a novice at each age of his life.
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Philosophy, like medicine, has plenty of drugs, few good remedies, and hardly any specific cures.
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There are well-dressed foolish ideas, just as there are will-dressed fools.
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No law reaches it, but all right-minded people observe it.
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Most of today's books have an air of having been written in one day from books read the night before.
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Conviction is the conscience of the mind.
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The art of the parenthesis is one of the greatest secrets of eloquence in Society.
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There are certain times when public opinion is the worst of all opinions.
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An economist is a surgeon with an excellent scalpel and a rough-edged lancet, who operates beautifully on the dead and tortures the living.
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People are governed with the head; kindness of heart is little use in chess.
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The most wasted day of all is that during which we have not laughed.
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