Top 100 Chamfort Quotes
#1. All is true and all is false in love; love is the only thing about which it is impossible to say anything absurd."
Sebastien Roch Nicolas Chamfort
Lee DeBourg
#2. Chamfort, echoing the misanthropic attitude of generations of philosophers before and after him, put the matter simply: 'Public opinion is the worst of all opinions.
Alain De Botton
#3. A man should swallow a toad every morning to be sure of not meeting with anything more revolting in the day ahead.
Nicolas Chamfort
#5. Anyone whose needs are small seems threatening to the rich, because he's always ready to escape their control.
Nicolas Chamfort
#6. Conscience is a dog that does not stop us from passing but that we cannot prevent from barking.
Nicolas Chamfort
#7. Pleasure may come from illusion, but happiness can come only of reality.
Nicolas Chamfort
#8. Women see faults much more readily in each other than they can discover perfections.
Nicolas Chamfort
#9. Education 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
#11. Don't you know that we must always have a place where we never go but where we think we'd be happy if we did?
Nicolas Chamfort
#12. Public opinion reigns in society because stupidity reigns amongst the stupid.
Nicolas Chamfort
#13. We must start human society from scratch; as Francis Bacon said, we must recreate human understanding.
Nicolas Chamfort
#14. The only thing that stops God from sending another flood is that the first one was useless.
Nicolas Chamfort
#15. Society would be a charming affair if we were only interested in one another.
Nicolas Chamfort
#18. Calumny is like the wasp which worries you, and which it is not best to try to get rid of unless you are sure of slaying it; for otherwise it returns to the charge more furious than ever.
Nicolas Chamfort
#19. In the library of the world men have hitherto been ranged according to the form, and the binding; the time is coming when they will take rank and order according to their contents and intrinsic merits.
Nicolas Chamfort
#20. 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
#21. Stupidity would not be absolute stupidity did it not fear intelligence.
Nicolas Chamfort
#22. In the fine arts, as in many other things, we know well only what we have not learned.
Nicolas Chamfort
#23. When you want to be well-liked in the world, you have to let a lot of people teach you things that you know and they don't.
Nicolas Chamfort
#26. It is commonly supposed that the art of pleasing is a wonderful aid in the pursuit of fortune; but the art of being bored is infinitely more successful.
Nicolas Chamfort
#27. A person of intellect without energy added to it, is a failure.
Nicolas Chamfort
#28. Anticipation leads the way to victory, and is the spur to conquest.
Nicolas Chamfort
#29. Society is composed of two great classes
those who have more dinners than appetite, and those who have more appetite than dinners.
Sebastien Chamfort
#30. Your intelligence often bears the same relation to your heart as the library of a chateau does to its owner.
Nicolas Chamfort
#31. The philosopher who would fain extinguish his passions resembles the chemist who would like to let his furnace go out.
Nicolas Chamfort
#32. Contemplation often makes life miserable. We should act more, think less, and stop watching ourselves live.
Nicolas Chamfort
#33. Woman's weakness, not man's merit, oftenest gains the suitor's victory.
Nicolas Chamfort
#34. Living is a sickness to which sleep provides relief every sixteen hours. It's a palliative. The remedy is death.
Nicolas Chamfort
#35. Most of those who make collections of verse or epigram are like men eating cherries or oysters: they choose out the best at first, and end by eating all.
Nicolas Chamfort
#36. Most benefactors are like unskillful generals who take the city and leave the citadel intact.
Nicolas Chamfort
#38. Most anthologists of poetry or quotations are like those who eat cherries or oysters, first picking the best and ending by eating everything.
Nicolas Chamfort
#39. 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.
Nicolas Chamfort
#40. There are well-dressed foolish ideas just as there are well-dressed fools.
Nicolas Chamfort
#41. There some trifles well habited, as there are some fools well clothed.
Nicolas Chamfort
#42. A good number of works owe their success to the mediocrity of their authors' ideas, which match the mediocrity of those of the general public.
Nicolas Chamfort
#43. The person is always happy who is in the presence of something they cannot know in full. A person as advanced far in the study of morals who has mastered the difference between pride and vanity.
Nicolas Chamfort
#44. Covetousness is a sort of mental gluttony, not confined to money, but craving honor, and feeding on selfishness.
Nicolas Chamfort
#45. Philosophy, like medicine, has plenty of drugs, few good remedies, and hardly any specific cures.
Nicolas Chamfort
#48. 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.
Nicolas Chamfort
#49. A woman is like your shadow; follow her, she flies; fly from her, she follows.
Nicolas Chamfort
#50. In great affairs men show themselves as they wish to be seen, in small things they show themselves as they are
Nicolas Chamfort
#51. Swallow a toad in the morning and you will encounter nothing more disgusting the rest of the day.
Nicolas Chamfort
#52. In a country where everyone is trying to be noticed, it is better to be bankrupt than to be nothing.
Nicolas Chamfort
#53. His passions make man live, his wisdom merely makes him last.
Nicolas Chamfort
#54. Love is like epidemic diseases. The more one fears it the more likely one is to contract it.
Nicolas Chamfort
#55. The success of many books is due to the affinity between the mediocrity of the author's ideas and those of the public.
Nicolas Chamfort
#59. Whoever is not a misanthrope at forty can never have loved mankind.
Nicolas Chamfort
#60. All passions are exaggerated, otherwise they would not be passions.
Nicolas Chamfort
#61. The art of the parenthesis is one of the greatest secrets of eloquence in Society.
Nicolas Chamfort
#62. Bachelors' wives and old maids' children are always perfect.
Nicolas Chamfort
#63. The best philosophical attitude to adopt towards the world is a union of the sarcasm of gaiety with the indulgence of contempt.
Nicolas Chamfort
#64. Too elevated qualities often unfit a man for society. We do not go to market with ingots, but with silver and small change.
Nicolas Chamfort
#65. Pleasure can be supported by an illusion; but happiness rests upon truth.
Nicolas Chamfort
#66. If taking vitamins doesn't keep you healthy enough, try more laughter: The most wasted of all days is that on which one has not laughed.
Nicolas Chamfort
#68. Society is divided into two classes, the shearers and the shorn.
Nicolas Chamfort
#70. If we would please in society, we must be prepared to be taught many things we know already by people who do not know them.
Nicolas Chamfort
#71. A lover is a man who tries to be more amiable than it is possible for him to be.
Nicolas Chamfort
#73. 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
#74. At the sight of what goes on in the world, the most misanthropic of men must end by being amused, and Heraclitus must die laughing.
Nicolas Chamfort
#76. One can be certain that every generally held idea, every received notion, will be an idiocy, because it has been able to appeal to a majority.
Nicolas Chamfort
#77. Real worth requires no interpreter: its everyday deeds form its emblem.
Nicolas Chamfort
#78. All passions exaggerate; and they are passions only because they do exaggerate.
Nicolas Chamfort
#80. If it were not for the government, we should have nothing to laugh at in France.
Nicolas Chamfort
#81. Life is a malady in which sleep soothes us every sixteen hours; it is a palliation; death is the remedy.
Nicolas Chamfort
#82. Love is the exchange of two fantasies and the contact of two skins ...
Nicolas Chamfort
#83. Celebrity is the advantage of being known to people who we don't know, and who don't know us.
Nicolas Chamfort
#84. 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
#85. It is with happiness as with watches: the less complicated, the less easily deranged.
Nicolas Chamfort
#86. All that I've learned, I've forgotten. The little that I still know, I've guessed.
Nicolas Chamfort
#87. The great always sell their society to the vanity of the little.
Nicolas Chamfort
#88. Women bestow on friendship only what they borrow from love.
Nicolas Chamfort
#89. Hope is but a charlatan that ceases not to deceive us. For myself happiness only began when I had lost it.
Nicolas Chamfort
#91. Though we best know and cannot deny our imperfections, it is not for us to lose our self-reliance and true manhood.
Nicolas Chamfort
#92. A man without nobility cannot have kindliness; he can only have good nature.
Nicolas Chamfort
#94. Marriage, as practised by high society, is arranged indecency.
Nicolas Chamfort
#96. If you must love your neighbor as yourself, it is at least as fair to love yourself as your neighbor.
Nicolas Chamfort
#97. The most wasted day of all is that on which we have not laughed.
Nicolas Chamfort
#99. 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.
Nicolas Chamfort
#100. Intelligent people make many mistakes because they cannot believe the world is really as foolish as it is.
Nicolas Chamfort
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