Top 160 Nicolas Chamfort Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “I have three kinds of friends: those who love me, those who pay no attention to me, and those who detest me.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

52. “Whatever evil a man may think of women, there is no woman but thinks more.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

53. “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

54. “Celebrity is the advantage of being known to people who we don’t know, and who don’t know us.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

55. “A lover is a man who tries to be more amiable than it is possible for him to be.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

56. “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

57. “Contact with the world either breaks or hardens the heart.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

58. “Egotism is the tongue of vanity.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

59. “Tragedy has the great moral defect of giving too much importance to life and death.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

60. “Every day I add to the list of things I refuse to discuss. The wiser the man, the longer the list.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

61. “We take our colors, chameleon-like, from each other.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

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

— Nicolas Chamfort

63. “The threat of a neglected cold is for doctors what the threat of purgatory is for priests-a gold mine.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

64. “We justly consider women to be weaker than ourselves, and yet we are governed by them.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

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

— Nicolas Chamfort

66. “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

67. “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

68. “To possess a good cognomen is a long way on the road of success in life.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

69. “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

70. “Secrecy is best taught by starting with ourselves.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

71. “Feeling creates thought, men willingly agree; but they will not so willingly agree that thought creates feeling, though this is scarcely less true.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

72. “Women see faults much more readily in each other than they can discover perfections.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

73. “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

74. “Change, change, – we all covet change.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

75. “Your intelligence often bears the same relation to your heart as the library of a chateau does to its owner.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

76. “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

77. “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

78. “Where violence reigns, reason is weak.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

79. “In a country where everyone strives for attention, it is better to be bankrupt than to be nothing.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

80. “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

81. “Most books today seemed to have been written overnight from books read the day before.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

82. “Remorse turns us against ourselves.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

83. “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

84. “The sunset glow of self-possession.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

85. “Love is the exchange of two fantasies and the contact of two skins...”

— Nicolas Chamfort

86. “There are more fools than wise men, and even in a wise man there is more folly than wisdom.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

87. “Of lies, false modesty is the most decent.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

88. “Society is composed of two great classes, those that have more dinners than appetite, and those who have more appetite than dinners.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

89. “If you must love your neighbor as yourself, it is at least as fair to love yourself as your neighbor.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

90. “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

91. “Love, a pleasant folly; ambition, a serious stupidity.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

92. “We need to be just before we are generous, as we need shirts before ruffles.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

93. “The only thing that stops God from sending another flood is that the first one was useless.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

94. “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.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

95. “It is with happiness as with watches: the less complicated, the less easily deranged.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

96. “The art of the parenthesis is one of the greatest secrets of eloquence in Society.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

97. “Change of fashion is the tax levied by the industry of the poor on the vanity of the rich.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

98. “We leave unmolested those who set the fire to the house, and prosecute those who sound the alarm.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

99. “How many fools does it take to make up a public?”

— Nicolas Chamfort

100. “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