Quotes by
Nicolas Chamfort |
1740-1794 , French writer
A classic French quotations writer. He also wrote books, essays and plays such as the comedies La Jeune Indienne (1764) and Le Marchand de Smyrne (1770).His main work is the collection of maxims “Maximes et Pensées”. He was appreciated by Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Camus.
He killed himself - because he didn't want to go to jail - in an episodic way: he shot himself in the face, then stabbed himself with a paper cutter, then wrote a note in his own blood. Nevertheless, he survived, and was struggling for 6 months before he died!
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Quotations
| • | When you want to be well-liked in the world, you have to let a lot of people teach you things that you know and they don’t. 4 |
| • | Take and give pleasures without harming yourself or others. That, I think, is the whole meaning of morality. 4 |
| • | War in the castles, peace in the huts. (one of the slogans of the French Revolution) 4 |
| • | The most wasted day of all is that on which we have not laughed. 3 |
| • | Often a person endowed with superior qualities cannot adapt to society. People don’t go to the market with gold bars. They go with coins. 3 |
| • | The only thing that stops God from sending another flood is that the first one was useless. 2 |
| • | Revolutions are not made with rose water. 2 |
| • | The success of many books is due to the affinity between the mediocrity of the author’s ideas and those of the readers. 2 |
| • | If you must love your neighbor as yourself, it is at least as fair to love yourself as your neighbor. 2 |
| • | There are well-dressed foolish ideas just as there are well-dressed fools. 2 |
| • | When it comes to happiness, things are like a clock: the simpler the mechanism, the less often it breaks. 2 |
| • | The man with creative imagination, like a poet, must believe in God. Ab Jove principium Musis – the muses begin with Zeus. 2 |
| • | Luck, in order to reach me, passes through circumstances created by my character. 2 |
| • | When it comes to feelings, anything that can be measured has absolutely no value. 2 |
| • | Don’t you know that we must always have a place where we never go but where we think we’d be happy if we did? 1 |
| • | If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And if it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first. 1 |
| • | If you must love your neighbor as yourself, it is at least as fair to love yourself as your neighbor. 1 |
| • | Pleasure can be supported by an illusion; but happiness rests upon truth. 1 |
| • | There are more people who wish to be loved than there are who are willing to love. 1 |
| • | Intelligent people make many mistakes because they cannot believe the world is really as foolish as it is. 1 |
| • | Nature never said to me: “Do not be poor”; still less did she say: “Be rich”; her cry to me was always: “Be independent”. 1 |
| • | Every day I add to the list of things I refuse to discuss. The wiser the man, the longer the list. 1 |
| • | False modesty is the most decent of all lies. 1 |
| • | There are more fools than wise men, and even in a wise man there is more folly than wisdom. 1 |
| • | Conscience is a dog that does not stop us from passing but that we cannot prevent from barking. 1 |
| • | Society is composed of two great classes, those that have more dinners than appetite, and those who have more appetite than dinners. 1 |
| • | Man reaches each stage of his life as a novice. 1 |
| • | Love is more pleasant than marriage for the same reason that novels are more amusing than history. 1 |
| • | People are governed with the head; kindness of heart is little use in chess. 1 |
| • | Most of those who make collections of verse or quotations are like those who eat cherries or oysters: they choose out the best at first, and end by eating all. 1 |
| • | All passions are exaggerated, otherwise they would not be passions. 1 |
| • | Only the history of free peoples is worth our attention; the history of men under a despotism is merely a collection of anecdotes. 1 |
| • | Change of fashion is the tax levied by the industry of the poor on the vanity of the rich. 1 |
| • | All that I’ve learned, I’ve forgotten. The little that I still know, I’ve guessed. 1 |
| • | A man should swallow a toad every morning to be sure of not meeting with anything more revolting in the day ahead. 1 |
| • | Happiness is not easy to find. It’s very difficult to find it in yourself — and impossible to find anywhere else. 1 |
| • | In order not to find life unbearable, you must accept two things: the ravages of time and the injustices of man. 1 |
| • | Don’t you know that we must always have a place where we never go but where we think we’d be happy if we did? 1 |
| • | Having lots of ideas doesn’t mean you’re clever, any more than having lots of soldiers means you’re a good general. 1 |
| • | Paris, a city of gaieties and pleasures, where four-fifths of the inhabitants die of grief. 1 |
| • | In great affairs men show themselves as they wish to be seen, in small things they show themselves as they are. 1 |
| • | Women, when looking to find a man, consider their girlfriends’ opinion of him much more than their own. 1 |
| • | In order to be happy in this world, one must take care to paralyze some aspects of one’s soul. 1 |
| • | Ambition more easily takes possession of small souls than of great ones, as fire spreads to straw and not to stones, to huts and not to palaces. 1 |
| • | For truly honest people with principles, God’s ten commandments are summed up in one written over the entrance to Telem Monastery: “Do whatever you want.” 1 |
| • | Dress is to the woman the prologue and, sometimes, even the whole book. 1 |
| • | Almost all people are slaves because they do not know how to say the word “no”. 1 |
| • | Love, says Plutarch, silences all other passions. He is the dictator before whom other passions disappear. 1 |
| • | When many gather together, people become small. They are like Milton’s devils who are forced to become pygmies in order to enter Pandemonium. 1 |
| • | I ended my friendship with two people. With one because he never told me about himself. And with the other, because he never spoke to me about myself. 1 |
| • | M. once said that he likes peace, quiet, isolation. Someone answered him: that’s how hospitals are. 1 |
| • | During a siege, a young man carrying two buckets of water shouted: “six coins for a bucket of water!” A bomb fell and destroyed a bucket. “Twelve coins for a bucket of water!” the young man continued undisturbed. 1 |
| • | Woe to him who is clever, but has no strong character. If you took Diogenes’ lantern in your hand, you must also hold his stick in the other. 1 |
| • | A man without principles is usually without character. Because if he had a good character, he would feel the need to create principles as well. 1 |
| • | Instead of trying to correct the people who cause great injustices in society, it is necessary to correct the weakness of the people who endure them. 1 |
| • | There are times when Public Opinion is the worst opinion. 1 |
| • | The heart must either break or turn to stone. 1 |
