What one knows best is ... what one has learned not from books but as a result of books, through the reflections to which they have given rise.
Nicolas ChamfortMany men and women enjoy popular esteem, not because they are known, but because they are not known.
Nicolas ChamfortNature 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 ChamfortLiving is a sickness to which sleep provides relief every sixteen hours. It's a palliative. The remedy is death.
Nicolas ChamfortSomeone 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.
Nicolas ChamfortEducation must have two foundations --morality as a support for virtue, prudence as a defense for self against the vices of others. By letting the balance incline to the side of morality, you only make dupes or martyrs; by letting it incline to the other, you make calculating egoists.
Nicolas Chamfort