Nicolas Chamfort Quotes - Page 3

And so I leave this world, where the heart must either break or turn to lead (suicide note)

A woman is like your shadow; follow her, she flies; fly from her, she follows.

It is passion that makes man live; wisdom makes one only last.

Love, a pleasant folly; ambition, a serious stupidity.

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

Every woman in choosing a lover takes more account of the way in which other women regard the man than of her own.

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

Marriage, as practised by high society, is arranged indecency.

She commands who is blest with indifference.

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.

Love is the exchange of two fantasies and the contact of two skins.

Bachelors' wives and old maids' children are always perfect.

Were a man to consult only his reason, who would marry? For myself, I wouldn't marry, for fear of having a son who resembled me.

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.

Too elevated qualities often unfit a man for society. We do not go to market with ingots, but with silver and small change.

Public opinion reigns in society because stupidity reigns amongst the stupid.

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.

He who leaves the game wins it.

A man is not necessarily intelligent because he has plenty of ideas, any more than he is a good general because he has plenty of soldiers.

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

Society ... is nothing more than the war of a thousand petty opposed interests, an eternal strife of all the vanities, which, turn in turn wounded and humiliated one by the other, intercross, come into collision, and on the morrow expiate the triumph of the eve in the bitterness of defeat. To live alone, to remain unjostled in this miserable struggle, where for a moment one draws the eyes of the spectators, to be crushed a moment later -- this is what is called being a nonentity, having no existence. Poor humanity!

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

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.

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

Contemptuous people are sure to be contemptible.