Top 185 Quotes & Sayings by Nicolas Chamfort - Page 3

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

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.

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

Eminence without merit earns deference without esteem.

All passions are exaggerated, otherwise they would not be passions.

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.

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.

Be my brother or I will kill you.

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

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.

Only the history of free peoples is worth our attention; the history of men under a despotism is merely a collection of anecdotes.

We justly consider women to be weaker than ourselves, and yet we are governed by them.

Remorse turns us against ourselves.

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

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.

Almost the whole of history is but a sequence of horrors.

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.

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

It is inconceivable how much wit it requires to avoid being ridiculous.

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.

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

Men's hearts and faces are always wide asunder; women's are not only in close connection, but are mirror-like in the instant power of reflection.

Your intelligence often bears the same relation to your heart as the library of a chateau does to its owner.

A modicum of discord is the very spice of courtship.

All that I've learned, I've forgotten. The little that I still know, I've guessed.

We must start human society from scratch; as Francis Bacon said, we must recreate human understanding.

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

Woman's weakness, not man's merit, oftenest gains the suitor's victory.

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

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

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

Calumny is like the wasp which worries you, and which it is not best to try to get rid of unless you are sure of slaying it; for otherwise it returns to the charge more furious than ever.

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.

At the sight of what goes on in the world, the most misanthropic of men must end by being amused, and Heraclitus must die laughing.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

The art of the parenthesis is one of the greatest secrets of eloquence in Society

Chance is a nickname for Providence.

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

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

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

Wrinkles and ill-nature together made a woman hideous.

The poor are the blacks of Europe.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The sunset glow of self-possession.

The contact of two epidermises.

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.

In love, everything is true, everything is false; it is the one subject on which one cannot express an absurdity.

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

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

Satire is the disease of art.

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.