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Quotes by Sebastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort

All passions exaggerate; and they are passions only because they do exaggerate.
– Sebastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort
Celebrity is the advantage of being known to people who we don't know, and who don't know us.
– Sebastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort
Change of fashion is the tax levied by the industry of the poor on the vanity of the rich.
– Sebastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort
Conviction is the conscience of the mind.
– Sebastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort
Do you think that revolutions are made with rose water?
– Sebastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort
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.
– Sebastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort
If it were not for the government, we should have nothing to laugh at in France.
– Sebastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort
Living is a sickness to which sleep provides relief every sixteen hours. It's a palliative. The remedy is death.
– Sebastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort
Man arrives as a novice at each age of his life.
– Sebastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort
Most anthologists... of quotations are like those who eat cherries... first picking the best ones and winding up by eating everything.
– Sebastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort
Most books today seemed to have been written overnight from books read the day before.
– Sebastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort
No law reaches it, but all right-minded people observe it.
– Sebastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort
One must not hope to be more than one can be.
– Sebastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort
Paris, a city of gaieties and pleasures, where four-fifths of the inhabitants die of grief.
– Sebastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort
Preoccupation with money is the great test of small natures, but only a small test of great ones.
– Sebastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort
Real worth requires no interpreter: its everyday deeds form its emblem.
– Sebastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort
Some things are easier to legalize than to legitimate.
– Sebastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort
Sometimes apparent resemblance of character will bring two men together and for a certain time unite them. But their mistake gradually becomes evident, and they are astonished to find themselves not only far apart, but even repelled, in some sort, at all their points of contact.
– Sebastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort
Swallow a toad in the morning and you will encounter nothing more disgusting the rest of the day.
– Sebastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort
The contemplative life is often miserable. One must act more, think less, and not watch oneself live.
– Sebastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort
The most wasted day is that in which we have not laughed.
– Sebastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort
The only thing that stops God from sending another flood is that the first one was useless.
– Sebastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort
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.
– Sebastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort
There are more people who wish to be loved than there are who are willing to love.
– Sebastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort
There are two things that one must get used to or one will find life unendurable: the damages of time and injustices of men.
– Sebastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort
There are well-dressed foolish ideas just as there are well-dressed fools.
– Sebastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort
Whatever evil a man may think of women, there is no woman but thinks more.
– Sebastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort
When a man and a woman have an overwhelming passion for each other, it seems to me, in spite of such obstacles dividing them as parents or husband, that they belong to each other in the name of Nature, and are lovers by Divine right, in spite of human convention or the laws.
– Sebastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort
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.
– Sebastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort
If you must love your neighbor as yourself, it is at least as fair to love yourself as your neighbor.
– Sebastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort