The real wisdom here isn't merely that kindness works better than hostility—anyone can grasp that. Rather, de Sales is suggesting something subtler: that *attraction* operates on entirely different principles than *repulsion*. You can spend tremendous energy pushing people away with criticism, yet a single genuine compliment often accomplishes what months of fault-finding could never touch. A manager who shifts from cataloging employee mistakes to acknowledging small wins suddenly finds the same person working with energy they didn't know was possible. The alchemy isn't complicated, yet we exhaust ourselves daily choosing the gallon when the spoon sits right there.