Nicolas-sebastien Chamfort Quotes & Sayings

Egotism is the tongue of vanity. — Nicolas Chamfort

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. — Nicolas Chamfort

Many men and women enjoy popular esteem, not because they are known, but because they are not known. — Nicolas Chamfort

Knowledge is boundless,
human capacity, limited. — Nicolas Chamfort

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

To possess a good cognomen is a long way on the road of success in life. — Nicolas Chamfort

Narrow waists and narrow minds go together. — Nicolas Chamfort

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

Nature never said to me: Do not be poor; still less did she say: Be rich; her cry to me was always: Be independent. — Nicolas Chamfort

Paris, a city of gaieties and pleasures, where four-fifths of the inhabitants die of grief. — Nicolas Chamfort

All passions are exaggerated, otherwise they would not be passions. — Nicolas Chamfort

It is among uneducated women that we may look for the most confirmed gossips. Goethe tells us there is nothing more frightful than bustling ignorance. — Nicolas Chamfort

Men of reason have endured;men of passion have lived. — Nicolas Chamfort

An author is often obscure to the reader because they proceed from the thought to expression than like the reader from the expression to the thought. — Nicolas Chamfort

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

Women bestow on friendship only what they borrow from love. — Nicolas Chamfort

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

Running a house should be left to innkeepers. — Nicolas Chamfort

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

All is true and all is false in love; love is the only thing about which it is impossible to say anything absurd."
Sebastien Roch Nicolas Chamfort — Lee DeBourg

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

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

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. — Nicolas Chamfort

Tis easier to make certain things legal than to make them legitimate. — Nicolas Chamfort

The threat of a neglected cold is for doctors what the threat of purgatory is for priests-a gold mine. — Nicolas Chamfort

The new friends whom we make after attaining a certain age and by whom we would fain replace those whom we have lost, are to our old friends what glass eyes, false teeth and wooden legs are to real eyes, natrual teeth and legs of flesh and bone. — Nicolas Chamfort

The best philosophical attitude to adopt towards the world is a union of the sarcasm of gaiety with the indulgence of contempt. — Nicolas Chamfort

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. — Nicolas Chamfort

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

If you must love your neighbor as yourself, it is at least as fair to love yourself as your neighbor. — Nicolas Chamfort

We gild our medicines with sweets; why not clothe truth and morals in peasant garments as well? — Nicolas Chamfort

We leave unmolested those who set the fire to the house, and prosecute those who sound the alarm. — Nicolas Chamfort

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

Success makes success, like money makes money. — Nicolas Chamfort

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

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

Covetousness is a sort of mental gluttony, not confined to money, but craving honor, and feeding on selfishness. — Nicolas Chamfort

Education must have two foundations
morality as a support for virtue, prudence as a defense for self against the vices of others. By letting the balance incline to the side of morality, you only make dupes or martyrs; by letting it incline to the other, you make calculating egoists. — Nicolas Chamfort

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

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. — Nicolas Chamfort

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. — Nicolas Chamfort

Contact with the world either breaks or hardens the heart. — Nicolas Chamfort

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

Wicked people sometimes perform good actions. I suppose they wish to see if this gives as great a feeling of pleasure as the virtuous claim for it. — Nicolas Chamfort

Pleasure may come from illusion, but happiness can come only of reality. — Nicolas Chamfort

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

There are two things that one must get used to or one will find life unendurable: the damages of time and injustices of men. — Nicolas Chamfort

It is children only who enjoy the present; their elders either live on the memory of the past or the hope of the future. — Nicolas Chamfort

In order not to find life unbearable, you must accept two things: the ravages of time and the injustices of man. — Nicolas Chamfort

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

A good number of works owe their success to the mediocrity of their authors' ideas, which match the mediocrity of those of the general public. — Nicolas Chamfort

Remorse turns us against ourselves. — Nicolas Chamfort

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

Change, change,
we all covet change. — Nicolas Chamfort

Some things are easier to legalize than to legitimate. — Nicolas Chamfort

A lover is a man who tries to be more amiable than it is possible for him to be. — Nicolas Chamfort

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

The art of the parenthesis is one of the greatest secrets of eloquence in Society. — Nicolas Chamfort

It is passion that makes man live; wisdom makes one only last. — Nicolas Chamfort

All passions exaggerate; and they are passions only because they do exaggerate. — Nicolas Chamfort

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. — Nicolas Chamfort

If it wasn't for me, I'd do brilliantly. — Nicolas Chamfort

Almost the whole of history is but a sequence of horrors. — Nicolas Chamfort

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

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. — Nicolas Chamfort

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

Love is more pleasant than marriage for the same reason that novels are more amusing than history. — Nicolas Chamfort

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

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

Swallow a toad in the morning and you will encounter nothing more disgusting the rest of the day. — Nicolas Chamfort

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. — Nicolas Chamfort

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. — Nicolas Chamfort

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. — Nicolas Chamfort

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

Pleasure can be supported by an illusion; but happiness rests upon truth. — Nicolas Chamfort

The contemplative life is often miserable. One must act more, think less, and not watch oneself live. — Nicolas Chamfort

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. — Nicolas Chamfort

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

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

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

A fool who has a flash of wit creates astonishment and scandal, like hack-horses setting out to gallop. — Nicolas Chamfort

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

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

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

The contact of two epidermises. — Nicolas Chamfort

Where violence reigns, reason is weak. — Nicolas Chamfort

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

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

A day without laughter is a day wasted. — Nicolas Chamfort

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

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

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

Having lots of ideas doesn't mean you're clever, any more than having lots of soldiers means you're a good general. — Nicolas Chamfort

Marriage follows on love as smoke on flame. — Nicolas Chamfort

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. — Nicolas Chamfort

Women see faults much more readily in each other than they can discover perfections. — Nicolas Chamfort

Man reaches each stage of his life as a novice. — Nicolas Chamfort

The most wasted day of all is that on which we have not laughed. — Nicolas Chamfort

Bachelors' wives and old maids' children are always perfect. — Nicolas Chamfort

Vain is equivalent to empty; thus vanity is so miserable a thing, that one cannot give it a worse name than its own. It proclaims itself for what it is. — Nicolas Chamfort