Top 15 Luc de Clapiers, marquis de Vauvenargues Quotes

He who knows how to suffer everything can risk everything.

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.

Hope deceives more men than cunning does.

L'espérance fait plus de dupes que l'habileté.

There does not exist a man sufficiently intelligent never to be tiresome.

Some are born to invent, others to embellish; but the gilder attracts more attention than the architect.

You can purchase the mind of Pascal for a crown. Pleasures even cheaper are sold to those who give themselves up to them. It is only luxuries and objects of caprice that are rare and difficult to obtain; unfortunately they are the only things that touch the curiosity and taste of ordinary men.

If a man is endowed with a noble and courageous soul, if he is painstaking, proud, ambitious, without meanness, of a profound a deep-seated intelligence, I dare assert that he lacks nothing to be neglected by the great and men in high office, who fear, more than other men, those whom they cannot dominate.

Great men are sometimes so even in small things.

Whatever affection we have for our friends or relations, the happiness of others never suffices for our own.

It cannot be a vice in men to be sensible of their strength.

When we are convinced of some great truths, and feel our convictions keenly, we must not fear to express it, although others have said it before us. Every thought is new when an author expresses it in a manner peculiar to himself.

It is in our own mind and not in exterior objects that we perceive most things; fools know scarcely anything because they are empty, and their heart is narrow; but great souls find in themselves a number of exterior things; they have no need to read or travel or to listen or to work to discover the highest truths; they have only to delve into themselves and search, if we may say so, their own thoughts.