“Love is more pleasant than marriage for the same reason that novels are more amusing than history.”
Source: Chamfort maxims: anecdotes, personalities, letters, historical writings, etc
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Famous Nicolas Chamfort Quotes
“Philosophy, like medicine, has plenty of drugs, few good remedies, and hardly any specific cures.”
“If it were not for the government, we should have nothing to laugh at in France.”
“Man may aspire to virtue, but he cannot reasonably aspire to truth.”
“Most books today seemed to have been written overnight from books read the day before.”
“People are governed with the head; kindness of heart is little use in chess.”
Source: Chamfort: Reflections on Life, Love & Society : Together with Anecdotes and Little Philosophical Dialogues
“It is with happiness as with watches: the less complicated, the less easily deranged.”
“Celebrity is the advantage of being known to people who we don't know, and who don't know us.”
“We leave unmolested those who set the fire to the house, and prosecute those who sound the alarm.”
“And so I leave this world, where the heart must either break or turn to lead (suicide note)”
“A person of intellect without energy added to it, is a failure.”
“Society is divided into two classes, the shearers and the shorn.”
Source: The Cynic's Breviary: Maxims and Anecdotes from Nicolas de Chamfort
“Preoccupation with money is the great test of small natures, but only a small test of great ones.”
“Love is the exchange of two fantasies and the contact of two skins.”
“Pleasure may come from illusion, but happiness can come only of reality.”
Source: Chamfort: Reflections on Life, Love & Society : Together with Anecdotes and Little Philosophical Dialogues
“Public opinion reigns in society because stupidity reigns amongst the stupid.”
“There are more fools than wise men, and even in a wise man there is more folly than wisdom.”
Source: Chamfort: Reflections on Life, Love & Society : Together with Anecdotes and Little Philosophical Dialogues
“Change of fashion is the tax levied by the industry of the poor on the vanity of the rich.”
“A lover is a man who tries to be more amiable than it is possible for him to be.”
“Pleasure can be supported by an illusion; but happiness rests upon truth.”
“Whatever evil a man may think of women, there is no woman but thinks more.”
Source: The Cynic's Breviary: Maxims and Anecdotes from Nicolas de Chamfort
“In living and in seeing other men, the heart must break or become as bronze.”
Source: Chamfort: Reflections on Life, Love & Society : Together with Anecdotes and Little Philosophical Dialogues
“Every day I add to the list of things I refuse to discuss. The wiser the man, the longer the list.”
Source: Chamfort: Reflections on Life, Love & Society : Together with Anecdotes and Little Philosophical Dialogues
“He who leaves the game wins it.”
Source: Chamfort maxims: anecdotes, personalities, letters, historical writings, etc
“All passions exaggerate; and they are passions only because they do exaggerate.”
“The art of the parenthesis is one of the greatest secrets of eloquence in Society”