Nicolas Chamfort Quotes

157 Sourced Quotes

To please, one must make up his mind to be taught many things which he already knows, by people who do not know them.

Nicolas Chamfort
Good taste, tact, and propriety have more in common than men of letters affect to believe. Tact is good taste applied to bearing and conduct, and propriety is good taste applied to conversation.

Nicolas Chamfort
At every stage of life he reaches, man finds himself but a novice.

Nicolas Chamfort
Love, in the form in which it exists in society, is nothing but the exchange of two fantasies and the superficial contact of two bodies.

Nicolas Chamfort
Nature didn't tell me "Don't be poor"; and certainly didn't say: "Get rich"; but she did shout: "Always be independent!"

Nicolas Chamfort
Madame X. is a woman of too much wit and cleverness to be ever despised as much as some women less despicable.

Nicolas Chamfort
Both the court and the general public give a conventional value to men and things, and then are surprised to find themselves deceived by it. This is as if arithmeticians should give a variable an arbitrary value to the figures in a sum, and then, after restoring their true and regular value in the addition, be astonished at the incorrectness of their answer.

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

Nicolas Chamfort
Foolish, ignorant and vicious persons go to books for their thoughts and judgments, and for all their elevated and noble sentiments, just as a rich woman goes with her money to a draper.

Nicolas Chamfort
The only secret a woman guards inviolably is that of her age.

Nicolas Chamfort
The things you know best are: first, those you know intuitively; second, those you've learned from experience; third, those you've learned not from but through books and the ideas they've inspired in you; and finally, those you've learned in books and from your teachers.

Nicolas Chamfort
There are very few things in the world upon which an honest man can repose his soul, or his thoughts.

Nicolas Chamfort
And so I leave this world, where the heart must either break or turn to lead.

Nicolas Chamfort
There is no sweeter repose than that which is bought with labor.

Nicolas Chamfort
Society is not, as is commonly supposed, the development of nature, but rather her dismantling and entire recasting. It is a second building made from the ruins of the first.

Nicolas Chamfort
I asked M.—why he'd turned down the offer of a particular post. I didn't want a post where the office is more important than the holder of it, he replied.

Nicolas Chamfort
Living is an illness to which sleep provides relief every sixteen hours. It's a palliative. The remedy is death.

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

Nicolas Chamfort
Anyone who has no character is not a man, but a thing.

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

Nicolas Chamfort
Qualities of a too superior order render a man less adapted to society. One does not go to market with big lumps of gold; one goes with silver or small change.

Nicolas Chamfort
A lover is a man who endeavors to be more amiable than it is possible for him to be: this is the reason why almost all lovers are ridiculous.

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

Nicolas Chamfort
Eminence without merit earns deference without esteem.

Nicolas Chamfort
Few people are prepared to use their reason without fear or favor, or bold enough to apply it relentlessly to every moral, political and social issue: to kings and ministers, to men in high places … And if we don't, we're doomed to remain mediocre.

Nicolas Chamfort
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.

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
An indiscreet man is an unsealed letter: every one can read it.

Nicolas Chamfort
Most of those who make collections of verse or epigrams are like men eating cherries or oysters: they choose out the best at first, and end by eating all.

Nicolas Chamfort
A man well-known to be a liar had just told a most improbable story. Sir, while I believe you, someone said, you must admit that it's very wrong of truth not to condescend to be more plausible.

Nicolas Chamfort