Nicolas Chamfort Quotes
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.
Anyone whose needs are small seems threatening to the rich, because he's always ready to escape their control.
Life is a malady in which sleep soothes us every sixteen hours; it is a palliation; death is the remedy.
Vivre est un maladie dont le sommeil nous soulage toutes les 16 heures. C'est un pallatif. La mort est le remede.
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.
Hope is but a charlatan that ceases not to deceive us. For myself happiness only began when I had lost it.
Most anthologists of poetry or quotations are like those who eat cherries or oysters, first picking the best and ending by eating everything.
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.
It is with happiness as with watches: the less complicated, the less easily deranged.
A fool who has a flash of wit creates astonishment and scandal, like hack-horses setting out to gallop.
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.
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.
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.
Women see faults much more readily in each other than they can discover perfections.
Only the history of free peoples is worth our attention; the history of men under a despotism is merely a collection of anecdotes.
We gild our medicines with sweets; why not clothe truth and morals in peasant garments as well?
Someone described Providence as the baptismal name of chance; no doubt some pious person will retort that chance is the nickname of Providence.
A man should swallow a toad every morning to be sure of not meeting with anything more revolting in the day ahead.
We must start human society from scratch; as Francis Bacon said, we must recreate human understanding.
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.
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.
It is said of a lonely man that he does not appreciate the life of society. This is like saying he hates hiking because he dislikes walking in thick forest on a dark night.
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.
In a country where everyone strives for attention, it is better to be bankrupt than to be nothing.
Many men and women enjoy popular esteem, not because they are known, but because they are not known.
The best philosophical attitude to adopt towards the world is a union of the sarcasm of gaiety with the indulgence of contempt.
In the fine arts, as in many other things, we know well only what we have not learned.
If a woman were about to proceed to her execution, she would demand a little time to perfect her toilet.
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.