Nicolas Chamfort Quotes

157 Sourced Quotes

The perfect man … is in a well-lit area watching the foolish antics of people stumbling around in the dark. He can demolish with a laugh the false standards and judgments which others apply to people and things.

Nicolas Chamfort
Life is a disease of which sleep relieves us; it is but a palliative: death is the remedy.

Nicolas Chamfort
Economists are surgeons … who operate beautifully on the dead and torment the living.

Nicolas Chamfort
An honest fellow stripped of all his illusions is the ideal man. Though he may have little wit, his society is always pleasant. As nothing matters to him, he cannot be pedantic; yet is he tolerant, remembering that he too has had the illusions which still beguile his neighbor. [...] He is more entertaining than other people because he is in a constant state of epigram against his neighbor. He dwells in truth, and smiles at the stumbling of others who grope in falsehood. He watches from a lighted place the ludicrous antics of those who walk in a dim room at random. Laughing, he breaks the false weight and measure of men and things.

Nicolas Chamfort
Someone was talking about the respect we owe the public. Yes, said M…., It's a question of prudence. Nobody has a high opinion of fishwives but who would dare offend them while walking through the fish market.

Nicolas Chamfort
Enjoy and give enjoyment, without injury to thyself or to others: this is true morality.

Nicolas Chamfort
There are none who are truly virtuous, but those who have combated.

Nicolas Chamfort
A witty woman once told me something which may well be the genuine secret of her sex: that in choosing a lover each one of her kind takes more account of how other women regard him than of how she regards him herself.

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
High society is a poor play, a bad, boring opera, made slightly better by its staging, costumes and scenery.

Nicolas Chamfort
"The difference between you and me," said a philosopher, "is that you say to masked hypocrites, 'I know you,' while I leave them with the idea that they have deceived me."

Nicolas Chamfort
To live without bitterness, one must turn his eyes toward the ludicrous side of the world, and accustom himself to look at men only as jumping-jacks, and at society as the board on which they jump.

Nicolas Chamfort
If you would find to what extent each condition of society can corrupt a man, examine what he is when he has undergone that influence for the longest possible time, that is to say, when he is old. See what an old courtier is like, an old priest, an old judge, an old solicitor, an old surgeon.

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

Nicolas Chamfort
Love pleases more than marriage, for the reason that romance is more interesting than history.

Nicolas Chamfort
Love is a malicious blind boy, who seeks to blind the eyes of his guide, that both may go astray together.

Nicolas Chamfort
Stubbornness equals character roughly as lust equals love.

Nicolas Chamfort
The best philosophy to employ toward the world is to alloy the sarcasm of gayety with the indulgence of contempt.

Nicolas Chamfort
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
Petty souls are more susceptible to ambition than great ones, just as straw or thatched cottages burn more easily than palaces.

Nicolas Chamfort
Love as it exists in society is merely the mingling of two fantasies and the contact of two skins.

Nicolas Chamfort