“One's ridiculousness increases in proportion as one denies it.”
Letter 141: La Marquise de Merteuil to le Vicomte de Valmont. Trans. Richard Aldington (1924). http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Les_Liaisons_dangereuses_-_Lettre_141
Les liaisons dangereuses (1782)
Original
Le ridicule qu’on a augmente toujours en proportion qu’on s’en défend.
Les Liaisons dangereuses, 1782, Marquise de Merteuil
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Pierre Choderlos de Laclos 16
French novelist, official and army general 1741–1803Related quotes

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X magazine (1959-62)
Context: There is a sense, and a very exciting sense, in which art is moral. When Stendhal says a good picture is nothing but a construction in ethics, one recognises a truth about art which opens up vistas that are at the same time liberating and terrifying. The ethics of art are terrifying because real art by increasing our knowledge of ourselves increases in exactly the same proportion the ethical commitment.

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[Swami Tapasyananda, Swami Nikhilananda, Sri Sarada Devi, the Holy Mother; Life and Conversations, 302]