Nicolas Chamfort Quotes

Contemplation often makes life miserable. We should act more, think less, and stop watching ourselves live.

Whoever is not a misanthrope at forty can never have loved mankind.

Love is more pleasant than marriage for the same reason that novels are more amusing than history.

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.

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

Society ... is nothing more than the war of a thousand petty opposed interests, an eternal strife of all the vanities, which, turn in turn wounded and humiliated one by the other, intercross, come into collision, and on the morrow expiate the triumph of the eve in the bitterness of defeat. To live alone, to remain unjostled in this miserable struggle, where for a moment one draws the eyes of the spectators, to be crushed a moment later -- this is what is called being a nonentity, having no existence. Poor humanity!

Narrow waists and narrow minds go together.

Love, a pleasant folly; ambition, a serious stupidity.

Contact with the world either breaks or hardens the heart.

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 most wasted day of all is that on which we have not laughed.

Slander is the balm of malignity.

If a woman were about to proceed to her execution, she would demand a little time to perfect her toilet.

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.

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

Most books today seemed to have been written overnight from books read the day before.

Chance is a nickname for Providence.

Women bestow on friendship only what they borrow from love.

Men of reason have endured;men of passion have lived.

A man without nobility cannot have kindliness; he can only have good nature.

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.

Preoccupation with money is the great test of small natures, but only a small test of great ones.

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

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

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.

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.

Living is a sickness to which sleep provides relief every sixteen hours. It's a palliative. The remedy is death.

He who leaves the game wins it.

We take our colors, chameleon-like, from each other.

Too elevated qualities often unfit a man for society. We do not go to market with ingots, but with silver and small change.

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

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

People are governed by the head; a kind heart is of little value in chess.

Anyone whose needs are small seems threatening to the rich, because he's always ready to escape their control.

When a man and a woman have an overwhelming passion for each other, it seems to me, in spite of such obstacles dividing them as parents or husband, that they belong to each other in the name of Nature, and are lovers by Divine right, in spite of human convention or the laws.

An economist is a surgeon with an excellent scalpel and a rough-edged lancet, who operates beautifully on the dead and tortures the living.

Bachelors' wives and old maids' children are always perfect.

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

The only thing that stops God from sending another flood is that the first one was useless.

Remorse turns us against ourselves.

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

Nature never said to me: Do not be poor; still less did she say: Be rich; her cry to me was always: Be independent.

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.

If it were not for the government, we should have nothing to laugh at in France.

Secrecy is best taught by starting with ourselves.

Scandal is an importunate wasp, against which we must make no movement unless we are quite sure that we can kill it; otherwise it will return to the attack more furious than ever.

Public opinion is the worst of all opinions.

Spero Speroni explains admirably how an author who writes very clearly for himself is often obscure to his readers. "It is," he says, "because the author proceeds from the thought to the expression, and the reader from the expression to the thought.