Nicolas Chamfort Quotes

Change, change,
we all covet change.

The only thing that stops God from sending another flood is that the first one was useless.

Conviction is the conscience of the mind.

Intelligent people make many mistakes because they cannot believe the world is really as foolish as it is.

The sunset glow of self-possession.

In a country where everyone is trying to be noticed, it is better to be bankrupt than to be nothing.

Love is like epidemic diseases. The more one fears it the more likely one is to contract it.

Were a man to consult only his reason, who would marry? For myself, I wouldn't marry, for fear of having a son who resembled me.

What we love intensely or for a long time we are likely to bring within the citadel, and to assert as part of oneself.

I only study the things I like; I apply my mind only to matters that interest me. They'll be useful-or useless-to me or to others in due course, I'll be given-or not given-the opportunity of benefiting from what I've learned. In any case, I'll have enjoyed the inestimable advantage of doing things I like doing and following my own inclinations.

Bachelors' wives and old maids' children are always perfect.

I have three kinds of friends: those who love me, those who pay no attention to me, and those who detest me.

Secrecy is best taught by starting with ourselves.

What one knows best is ... what one has learned not from books but as a result of books, through the reflections to which they have given rise.

How many fools does it take to make up a public?

Society would be a charming affair if we were only interested in one another.

Someone has said that to plagiarise from the ancients is to play the pirate beyond the Equator, but that to steal from the moderns is to pick pockets at street corners.

There is a melancholy that stems from greatness of mind.

Real worth requires no interpreter: its everyday deeds form its emblem.

The philosopher who would fain extinguish his passions resembles the chemist who would like to let his furnace go out.

To enjoy and give enjoyment, without injury to yourself or others; this is true morality.

[Prudence] replaces [strength] by saving the man who has the misfortune of not possessing it from most occasions when it's needed.

Anticipation leads the way to victory, and is the spur to conquest.

Men whose only concern is other people's opinion of them are like actors who put on a poor performance to win the applause of people of poor taste; some of them would be capable of good acting in front of a good audience. A decent man plays his part to the best of his ability, regardless of the taste of the gallery.

There is no history worthy attention save that of free nations; the history of nations under the sway of despotism is no more than a collection of anecdotes.

Most anthologists of poetry or quotations are like those who eat cherries or oysters, first picking the best and ending by eating everything.

Be my brother or I will kill you.

Thought consoles us for all, and heals all. If at times it does you ill, ask it for the remedy for that ill and it will give it to you.

Running a house should be left to innkeepers.

When a man and a woman have an overwhelming passion for each other, it seems to me, in spite of such obstacles dividing them as parents or husband, that they belong to each other in the name of Nature, and are lovers by Divine right, in spite of human convention or the laws.

Remorse turns us against ourselves.

Every woman in choosing a lover takes more account of the way in which other women regard the man than of her own.

His passions make man live, his wisdom merely makes him last.

Society is divided into two classes, the shearers and the shorn.

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.

There is as much expression in the feet as in the hands.

It is with happiness as with watches: the less complicated, the less easily deranged.

Anyone whose needs are small seems threatening to the rich, because he's always ready to escape their control.

Most books today seemed to have been written overnight from books read the day before.

A man should swallow a toad every morning to be sure of not meeting with anything more revolting in the day ahead.

Happiness is not easy to find. It's very difficult to find it in yourself - and impossible to find anywhere else.

Feeling creates thought, men willingly agree; but they will not so willingly agree that thought creates feeling, though this is scarcely less true.

People are governed by the head; a kind heart is of little value in chess.

Tragedy has the great moral defect of giving too much importance to life and death.

Whatever evil a man may think of women, there is no woman but thinks more.

The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.

Living is a sickness to which sleep provides relief every sixteen hours. It's a palliative. The remedy is death.

Obscurity and Innocence, twin sisters, escape temptations which would pierce their gossamer armor, in contact with the world.

Whoever is not a misanthrope at forty can never have loved mankind.

It is when their age of passions is past that great men produce their masterpieces, just as it is after volcanic eruptions that the soil is most fertile.

The great always sell their society to the vanity of the little.

Nature in causing reason and the passions to be born at one and the same time apparently wished by the latter gift to distract man from the evil she had done him by the former, and by only permitting him to live for a few years after the loss of his passions seems to show her pity by early deliverance from a life that reduces him to reason as his sole resource.

A man without nobility cannot have kindliness; he can only have good nature.

There aren't many benefactors who don't say, like Satan: All these things will I give you if you bow down and worship me.

We ought to be able to combine opposites: the love of goodness with indifference to other people's opinions, a liking for work with indifference to fame, concern for our health with indifference to life.

In living and in seeing other men, the heart must break or become as bronze.

In the library of the world men have hitherto been ranged according to the form, and the binding; the time is coming when they will take rank and order according to their contents and intrinsic merits.

Every day I add to the list of things I refuse to discuss. The wiser the man, the longer the list.

There are more fools than wise men, and even in a wise man there is more folly than wisdom.

In great affairs men show themselves as they wish to be seen, in small things they show themselves as they are

Hope is but a charlatan that ceases not to deceive us. For myself happiness only began when I had lost it.

People are governed with the head; kindness of heart is little use in chess.

Women of the world crave excitement.

Though we best know and cannot deny our imperfections, it is not for us to lose our self-reliance and true manhood.

Someone described Providence as the baptismal name of chance; no doubt some pious person will retort that chance is the nickname of Providence.

One can be certain that every generally held idea, every received notion, will be an idiocy, because it has been able to appeal to a majority.

Stupidity would not be absolute stupidity did it not fear intelligence.

Women bestow on friendship only what they borrow from love.

A modicum of discord is the very spice of courtship.

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.

If it were not for the government, we should have nothing to laugh at in France.

Tis easier to make certain things legal than to make them legitimate.

Success makes success, like money makes money.

He who disguises tyranny, protection, or even benefits under the air and name of friendship reminds me of the guilty priest who poisoned the sacramental bread.

The majority of the books of our time give one the impression of having been manufactured in a day out of books read the day before.

A day without laughter is a day wasted.

Too elevated qualities often unfit a man for society. We do not go to market with ingots, but with silver and small change.

Conviction is the conscience of intellect.

An economist is a surgeon with an excellent scalpel and a rough-edged lancet, who operates beautifully on the dead and tortures the living.

Celebrity is the advantage of being known to people who we don't know, and who don't know us.

Society ... is nothing more than the war of a thousand petty opposed interests, an eternal strife of all the vanities, which, turn in turn wounded and humiliated one by the other, intercross, come into collision, and on the morrow expiate the triumph of the eve in the bitterness of defeat. To live alone, to remain unjostled in this miserable struggle, where for a moment one draws the eyes of the spectators, to be crushed a moment later
this is what is called being a nonentity, having no existence. Poor humanity!

There are more people who wish to be loved than there are who are willing to love.

A woman is like your shadow; follow her, she flies; fly from her, she follows.

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.

Where violence reigns, reason is weak.

Man may aspire to virtue, but he cannot reasonably aspire to truth.

In great matters, men behave as they are expected to; in little ones, as they would naturally

We take our colors, chameleon-like, from each other.

In the fine arts, as in many other things, we know well only what we have not learned.

If taking vitamins doesn't keep you healthy enough, try more laughter: The most wasted of all days is that on which one has not laughed.

Men of reason have endured;men of passion have lived.

Some things are easier to legalize than to legitimate.

Philosophy, like medicine, has plenty of drugs, few good remedies, and hardly any specific cures.

We need to be just before we are generous, as we need shirts before ruffles.

Sometimes apparent resemblance of character will bring two men together and for a certain time unite them. But their mistake gradually becomes evident, and they are astonished to find themselves not only far apart, but even repelled, in some sort, at all their points of contact.

Most benefactors are like unskillful generals who take the city and leave the citadel intact.

Change of fashion is the tax levied by the industry of the poor on the vanity of the rich.

If we would please in society, we must be prepared to be taught many things we know already by people who do not know them.

Life is a malady in which sleep soothes us every sixteen hours; it is a palliation; death is the remedy.

Satire is the disease of art.