Nicolas Chamfort Quotes

157 Sourced Quotes

When I hear it contended that the least sensitive are, on the whole, the most happy, I recall the Indian proverb: "It's better to sit than to stand, it is better lie down than to sit, but death is best of all."

Nicolas Chamfort
We have three kinds of friends: those who love us, those who are indifferent to us, and those who hate us.

Nicolas Chamfort
Few people are able to appreciate a philosopher; he's almost a sort of public enemy. Faced by the various pretensions of mankind, …he says bluntly: "I'm prepared to take you only at your true value, what you're really worth." It's not easy to get people to appreciate anyone who makes such an uncompromising declaration.

Nicolas Chamfort
There is a kind of harmful modesty which … sometimes affects men of superior character to their detriment by keeping them in a state of mediocrity. I am reminded of the remark that a certain gentleman of acknowledged eminence once made at luncheon to some persons of the Court, "How bitterly I regret the time I wasted merely to learn how superior I am to all of you!"

Nicolas Chamfort
In cities the old are more corrupt than the young.

Nicolas Chamfort
The change of fashions is the tax that the industry of the poor levies on the vanity of the rich.

Nicolas Chamfort
What is a philosopher? One who opposes nature to law, reason to usage, conscience to opinion, and his judgment to error.

Nicolas Chamfort
Women of the world never use harsh expressions when condemning their rivals. Like the savage, they hurl elegant arrows, ornamented with feathers of purple and azure, but with poisoned points.

Nicolas Chamfort
A man is not necessarily intelligent because he has plenty of ideas, any more than he is a good general because he has plenty of soldiers.

Nicolas Chamfort
Despising money is like toppling a king off his throne.

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

Nicolas Chamfort
That a liaison between a man and a woman may be truly interesting, there must be between them enjoyment, remembrance, or desire.

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

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

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

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

Nicolas Chamfort
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.

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
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.

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
Nearly all men are slaves for the same reason that the Spartans assigned for the servitude of the Persians -- lack of power to pronounce the syllable, "No." To be able to utter that word and live alone, are the only means to preserve one's freedom and one's character.

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

Nicolas Chamfort
In order to forgive reason for the evil it has wrought on the majority of men, we must imagine for ourselves what man would be without his reason. 'Tis a necessary evil.

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

Nicolas Chamfort
Chance is a nickname of Providence.

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
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.

Nicolas Chamfort
In experiencing the ills of nature, one despises death; in learning the evils of society, one despises life.

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