Top 160 Nicolas Chamfort Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Stupidity would not be absolute stupidity did it not fear intelligence.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

102. “Living is a sickness to which sleep provides relief every sixteen hours. It’s a palliative. The remedy is death.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

103. “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

104. “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

105. “In order not to find life unbearable, you must accept two things: the ravages of time and the injustices of man.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

106. “Satire is the disease of art.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

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

— Nicolas Chamfort

108. “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.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

109. “In love, everything is true, everything is false; it is the one subject on which one cannot express an absurdity.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

110. “Women bestow on friendship only what they borrow from love.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

111. “Love is more pleasant than marriage for the same reason that novels are more amusing than history.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

112. “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.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

113. “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.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

114. “Women of the world crave excitement.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

115. “There is as much expression in the feet as in the hands.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

116. “The contact of two epidermises.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

117. “If it wasn’t for me, I’d do brilliantly.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

118. “All passions exaggerate; and they are passions only because they do exaggerate.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

119. “She commands who is blest with indifference.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

120. “Society is divided into two classes, the shearers and the shorn.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

121. “Almost the whole of history is but a sequence of horrors.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

122. “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

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

— Nicolas Chamfort

124. “An economist is a surgeon with an excellent scalpel and a rough-edged lancet, who operates beautifully on the dead and tortures the living.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

125. “In great affairs men show themselves as they wish to be seen, in small things they show themselves as they are.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

126. “At the sight of what goes on in the world, the most misanthropic of men must end by being amused, and Heraclitus must die laughing.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

127. “Tis easier to make certain things legal than to make them legitimate.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

128. “The poor are the blacks of Europe.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

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

— Nicolas Chamfort

130. “The moment when one loses the illusions and passions of youth often leaves regrets, but sometimes we hate the spell that deceived us. So it is that Armida burns and razes the palace where she was enchanted.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

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

— Nicolas Chamfort

132. “Wrinkles and ill-nature together made a woman hideous.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

133. “The person is always happy who is in the presence of something they cannot know in full. A person as advanced far in the study of morals who has mastered the difference between pride and vanity.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

134. “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

135. “Woman’s weakness, not man’s merit, oftenest gains the suitor’s victory.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

136. “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.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

137. “The great always sell their society to the vanity of the little.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

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

— Nicolas Chamfort

139. “If a woman were about to proceed to her execution, she would demand a little time to perfect her toilet.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

140. “It must be admitted that there are some parts of the soul which we must entirely paralyse before we can live happily in this world.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

141. “Man may aspire to virtue, but he cannot reasonably aspire to truth.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

142. “Society would be a charming affair if we were only interested in one another.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

143. “We gild our medicines with sweets; why not clothe truth and morals in peasant garments as well?”

— Nicolas Chamfort

144. “All passions are exaggerated, otherwise they would not be passions.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

145. “Most benefactors are like unskillful generals who take the city and leave the citadel intact.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

146. “Many men and women enjoy popular esteem, not because they are known, but because they are not known.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

147. “In the fine arts, as in many other things, we know well only what we have not learned.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

148. “In great matters, men behave as they are expected to; in little ones, as they would naturally.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

149. “What we love intensely or for a long time we are likely to bring within the citadel, and to assert as part of oneself.”

— Nicolas Chamfort

150. “Narrow waists and narrow minds go together.”

— Nicolas Chamfort