Nicolas Chamfort (1740–1794): French journalist and moralistic author. The library holds 182 quotes by Nicolas Chamfort, drawn from Maxims and Thoughts, At his last moments. The 60 below are the most quoted; search the library in the maker for the rest.
It is unfortunate for men, fortunate perhaps for tyrants, that the poor and unhappy have not the instinct or pride of the elephant which does not reproduce itself in servitude.
An entertainment manager was asking M. de Villars to waive the right of free admission for the king’s pages. “You must observe, my lord,” he said, “that several pages make a volume.”
A man of no principles is also, as a rule, a man of no character, for had he been born with character, he would have felt the need of forming principles.
The sincerest of affections lays the soul open to petty passions. Marriage makes your soul liable to your wife’s petty passions; also, ambition, vanity, and the like.
To turn a widow from the idea of marrying again, one of her friends remarked to her: “Don’t you see that it is a very fine thing to bear the name of a man who can no longer make a fool of himself?”
A man who is not only honest but wise owes it to himself to add to the prudence that satisfies his conscience, the prudence that foresees and disarms calumny.
I should advise any one who wishes to obtain a favour of a minister to accost him with an air of melancholy rather than one of gaiety. We do not like to see others happier than ourselves.
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.
Nature seems to make use of men for the accomplishment of her designs without concerning herself about her instruments, like tyrants who rid themselves of those who have been of service to them.
M. —— said to me, à propos of his constant offences against digestion, and of the pleasures in which he indulged—the only obstacles to his regaining his health: “I should be marvellously well if it were not for myself.”
One of the great misfortunes of man is that even his good qualities are sometimes useless to him, and that the art of profiting by them and governing them wisely is often the tardy fruit of experience alone.
There is no need to regard Burrhus as an absolutely virtuous man; he is only so, contrasted with Narcissus. Seneca and Burrhus are the honest men of an age in which there are none.
Vanity is often the motive that forces a man to summon up all the energy of his soul. Wood added to a steel point makes a dart, two feathers added to the wood make an arrow.
Some one 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.
Apparently love does not seek real perfections—one might say it fears them. It only loves those which it creates or supposes, and so resembles those monarchs who only recognise the great things they themselves have achieved.
The nobility, say the nobles, is an intermediary between the king and the people… Precisely; just as the hound is the intermediary between the huntsman and the hares.
There is no man who can be by himself alone so contemptible as a body of men, and there is no body of men that can be so contemptible as the public at large.
“In the world,” remarked some one to me, “you have three kinds of friends: the friends who love you, the friends who do not trouble their heads about you, and the friends who hate you.”
Rulhière said to him one day: “I have only been guilty of one baseness all my life.” “When will it end?” asked Chamfort. PRINTED BY R. FOLKARD AND SON, 22, DEVONSHIRE STREET, QUEEN SQUARE, LONDON, W.C.
The majority of our social institutions seem to have as object the maintenance of man in a mediocrity of ideas and emotions, which renders him best fitted to govern or be governed.