A Quote by 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

Quote Topics

He Man Man Misfortune Most Needed Occasions Possessing Prudence Saving Strength

Quote Author

Nicolas Chamfort
French - Writer
April 6, 1741 - April 13, 1794

Occasions of adversity best discover how great virtue or strength each one hath. For occasions do not make a man frail, but they show what he is.

Thomas a Kempis

Nothing more unqualified the man to act with prudence than a misfortune that is attended with shame and guilt.

Jonathan Swift

The step between prudence and paranoia is short and steep. Prudence wears a seat belt. Paranoia avoids cars. Prudence washes with soap. Paranoia avoids human contact. Prudence saves for old age. Paranoia hoards even trash. Prudence prepares and plans, paranoia panics. Prudence calculates the risk and takes the plunge. Paranoia never enters the water.

Max Lucado

He said that those who have endured some misfortune will always be set apart but that it is just that misfortune which is their gift and which is their strength.

Cormac McCarthy

The misfortune of the man of color is having been enslaved. The misfortune and inhumanity of the white man are having killed man somewhere.

Frantz Fanon

Swift calls discretion low prudence; it is high prudence, and one of the most important elements entering into either social or political life.

Edwin Hubbel Chapin

A bureaucrat is the most despicable of men, though he is needed as vultures are needed, but one hardly admires vultures whom bureaucrats so strangely resemble. I have yet to meet a bureaucrat who was not petty, dull, almost witless, crafty or stupid, an oppressor or a thief, a holder of little authority in which he delights, as a boy delights in possessing a vicious dog. Who can trust such creatures?

Marcus Tullius Cicero

But after this natural burst of indignation, no man of sense, courage, or prudence will waste his time or his strength in retrospective reproaches or repinings.

Robert Peel

A man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you'd think misfortune would get tired but then time is your misfortune

William Faulkner

Great good nature without prudence is a great misfortune.

Benjamin Franklin

Misfortune sprinkles ashes on the head of the man, but falls like dew on the heart of the woman, and brings forth [gems] of strength of which she herself had no conscious possession.

Anna Cora Mowatt

All courses of action are risky, so prudence is not in avoiding danger (it's impossible), but calculating risk and acting decisively. Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer.

Niccolo Machiavelli

When power replaces truth as the goal, assertion replaces reason as the path

Marshall Fritz

The most hateful human misfortune is for a wise man to have no influence.

Herodotus

For such is man: a Theological Dogma might be refuted to him a thousand times - provided however, that he had need of it, he would again and again accept it as true. Belief is always most desired, most pressingly needed where there is a lack of will. Fanaticism is the sole "volitional strength" to which the weak and irresolute can be excited, as a sort of hypnotising of the entire sensory-intellectual system.