Pour exécuter de grandes choses, il faut vivre comme si on ne devait jamais mourir.
Quoted in Queers in History: The Comprehensive Encyclopedia of Historical Gays (2009), by Keith Stern, p. 466.
Varianta: In order to achieve great things, we must live as though we were never going to die.
Zdroj: Reflections and Maxims (1746), p. 172.

“He who knows how to suffer everything can dare everything.”

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Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues

Qui sait tout souffrir peut tout oser.
Varianta: He who knows how to suffer everything can dare everything.
Zdroj: Reflections and Maxims (1746), p. 176.

“Persons of rank do not talk about such trifles as the common people do; but the common people do not busy themselves about such frivolous things as do persons of rank.”

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Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues

Zdroj: Reflections and Maxims (1746), pp. 181-182.

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

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Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues

Zdroj: Reflections and Maxims (1746), p. 190.

“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.”

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Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues

Zdroj: Reflections and Maxims (1746), p. 183.

“The generality of men are so bound within the sphere of their circumstances that they have not even the courage to get out of them through their ideas, and if we see a few whom, in a way, speculation over great things makes incapable of mean ones, we find still more with whom the practice of small things takes away the feeling for great ones.”

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Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues

Zdroj: Reflections and Maxims (1746), pp. 180-181.

“Clarity is the good faith of philosophers”

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Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues

La clarté est la bonne foi des philosophes
Maxim 729, Réflexions et maximes ("Reflections and Maxims") (1746).

“It is unjust to exact that men shall do out of deference to our advice what they have no desire to do for themselves.”

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Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues

Zdroj: Reflections and Maxims (1746), p. 174.

“Men dissimulate their dearest, most constant, and most virtuous inclination from weakness and a fear of being condemned.”

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Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues

Zdroj: Reflections and Maxims (1746), p. 184.

“Neither the gifts nor the blows of fortune equal those of nature.”

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Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues

Zdroj: Reflections and Maxims (1746), p. 180.

“Are we surprised if a sick man cannot walk, or keep awake, or stand upright? Would it not be more surprising if he was the same man as when he was well? If we have a headache, or have slept badly, we are excused for telling incapable of work, and yet no one suspects us of always being lazy. Shall we deny a dying man the privilege we grant a man with a headache? And dare we assert that the man who lacks courage in his last agony never possessed virtue when he was well.”

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Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues

Zdroj: Reflections and Maxims (1746), p. 172.

“Hope deceives more men than cunning does.”

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Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues

L'espérance fait plus de dupes que l'habileté.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“It is not true that equality is a law of nature. nature has made nothing equal, her sovereign law is subordination and dependence.”

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Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues

Il est faux que l’égalité soit une loi de la nature. La nature n’a rien fait d’égal; la loi souveraine est la subordination et la dépendance.
Zdroj: Reflections and Maxims (1746), p. 180.