Nicolas Chamfort famous quotes

There are more people who wish to be loved than there are who are willing to love.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Love #Life #Friendship

The most wasted day of all is that on which we have not laughed.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Life #Positive #Happiness

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

#Inspiring #Travel #Thinking

Be my brother or I will kill you.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Brother #My Brother

Pleasure can be supported by an illusion; but happiness rests upon truth.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Happiness #Illusion #Pleasure

There are two things that one must get used to or one will find life unendurable: the damages of time and injustices of men.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Adversity #Men #Two

Pleasure may come from illusion, but happiness can come only of reality.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Reality #May #Illusion

A person of intellect without energy added to it, is a failure.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Failure #Intelligent #Energy

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

#Death #Sleep #Literature

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

#Happiness #Opportunity #Mind

I have three kinds of friends: those who love me, those who pay no attention to me, and those who detest me.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Funny Friend #Pay #Three

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

#Humor #Independent #Cry

Do you think that revolutions are made with rose water?
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Thinking #Water #Rose

Real worth requires no interpreter: its everyday deeds form its emblem.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Real #Everyday #Deeds

Do not suppose opportunity will knock twice at your door.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Opportunity #Doors

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.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Love #Husband #Passion

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

#Women #Men #Lovers

The great always sell their society to the vanity of the little.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

It is inconceivable how much wit it requires to avoid being ridiculous.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Ridiculous #Wit

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

#Affair #Charming

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

#Pirate #Stealing

Tis easier to make certain things legal than to make them legitimate.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

Man may aspire to virtue, but he cannot reasonably aspire to truth.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Men #Literature #May

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

#Funny #Reading #Book

Stupidity would not be absolute stupidity did it not fear intelligence.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Stupidity

Marriage follows on love as smoke on flame.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

Conviction is the conscience of intellect.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Belief #Conviction #Intellect

Most benefactors are like unskillful generals who take the city and leave the citadel intact.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

All passions are exaggerated, otherwise they would not be passions.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Passion

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.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Friendship #Protection #Guilty

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

#Heart #People #Littles

Only the history of free peoples is worth our attention; the history of men under a despotism is merely a collection of anecdotes.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Freedom #Knowledge #Men

The majority of the books of our time give one the impression of having been manufactured in a day out of books read the day before.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Book #Giving #Impression

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.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Friends #Real #Eye

There is no history worthy attention save that of free nations; the history of nations under the sway of despotism is no more than a collection of anecdotes.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#History #Attention #Worthy

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

#Men #Library #World

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.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Women #Heart #Reflection

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.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Passion #Loss #Men

It is when their age of passions is past that great men produce their masterpieces, just as it is after volcanic eruptions that the soil is most fertile.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Passion #Men #Past

The philosopher who would fain extinguish his passions resembles the chemist who would like to let his furnace go out.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Passion #Philosopher

Someone described Providence as the baptismal name of chance; no doubt some pious person will retort that chance is the nickname of Providence.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Doubt #Chance #Pious

In order to forgive reason for the evil it has wrought on the majority of men, we must imagine for ourselves what man would be without his reason. 'Tis a necessary evil.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Men #Evil #Forgiving

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

#Character #Mean #Men

Thought consoles us for all, and heals all. If at times it does you ill, ask it for the remedy for that ill and it will give it to you.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Giving #Ill #Heal

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.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Giving #Miserable #Empty

The best philosophical attitude to adopt towards the world is a union of the sarcasm of gaiety with the indulgence of contempt.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Attitude #Philosophical #Sarcasm

Change, change,--we all covet change.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

It is children only who enjoy the present; their elders either live on the memory of the past or the hope of the future.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Children #Memories #Past

Women see faults much more readily in each other than they can discover perfections.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Perfection #Rivalry

Anticipation leads the way to victory, and is the spur to conquest.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Victory #Anticipation #Conquest

Knowledge is boundless,--human capacity, limited.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Knowledge

Life is a malady in which sleep soothes us every sixteen hours; it is a palliation; death is the remedy.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Life #Sleep #Hours

Though we best know and cannot deny our imperfections, it is not for us to lose our self-reliance and true manhood.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Imperfection #True Man #Manhood

Slander is the balm of malignity.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Slander

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

#Men #Society #Quality

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

#Society

There some trifles well habited, as there are some fools well clothed.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Fool #Trifles

Wrinkles and ill-nature together made a woman hideous.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Together #Ugliness

His passions make man live, his wisdom merely makes him last.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Passion #Men #Mankind

We need to be just before we are generous, as we need shirts before ruffles.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Generosity #Shirts #Generous

We gild our medicines with sweets; why not clothe truth and morals in peasant garments as well?
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Sweet #Moral

To possess a good cognomen is a long way on the road of success in life.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Long #Success In Life

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

#Perfect

In the fine arts, as in many other things, we know well only what we have not learned.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Art #Fine Arts

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.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Writing #Obscure

Contemptuous people are sure to be contemptible.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#People #Contempt

Women bestow on friendship only what they borrow from love.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Friendship

Covetousness is a sort of mental gluttony, not confined to money, but craving honor, and feeding on selfishness.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Honor #Selfishness #Gluttony

A modicum of discord is the very spice of courtship.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Courtship

Narrow waists and narrow minds go together.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Mind #Together

Egotism is the tongue of vanity.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Egotism

Women of the world crave excitement.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#World #Excitement

There is as much expression in the feet as in the hands.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

A fool who has a flash of wit creates astonishment and scandal, like hack-horses setting out to gallop.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Fool #Wit

It is among uneducated women that we may look for the most confirmed gossips. Goethe tells us there is nothing more frightful than bustling ignorance.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Ignorance #Gossip #Uneducated

She commands who is blest with indifference.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Indifference

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

#Nature #Kindness #Men

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

#Men #Oysters #Literature

Public opinion is the worst of all opinions.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Public Opinion #Opinion #Worst

It is with happiness as with watches: the less complicated, the less easily deranged.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Happiness #Watches #Complicated

If you must love your neighbor as yourself, it is at least as fair to love yourself as your neighbor.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Confidence #Love You #Neighbor

One must not hope to be more than one can be.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Acceptance

Many men and women enjoy popular esteem, not because they are known, but because they are not known.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Character #Men #Enjoy

Celebrity is the advantage of being known to people who we don't know, and who don't know us.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#People #Fame #Advantage

We leave unmolested those who set the fire to the house, and prosecute those who sound the alarm.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Fire #Justice #House

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

#Book #Ideas #Cynical

Sometimes apparent resemblance of character will bring two men together and for a certain time unite them. But their mistake gradually becomes evident, and they are astonished to find themselves not only far apart, but even repelled, in some sort, at all their points of contact.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Time #Mistake #Character

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

#Money #Tests #Preoccupation

Love is the exchange of two fantasies and the contact of two skins....
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Love You #Love Is #Two

In great matters, men behave as they are expected to; in little ones, as they would naturally
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Men #Matter #Littles

A man should swallow a toad every morning to be sure of not meeting with anything more revolting in the day ahead.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Morning #Men #Toads

All that I've learned, I've forgotten. The little that I still know, I've guessed.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Littles #Forgotten

If it wasn't for me, I'd do brilliantly.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

In living and in seeing other men, the heart must break or become as bronze.
-- Nicolas Chamfort

#Life #Heart #Men