Nicolas Chamfort Quotes

"Pleasure can be supported by an illusion; but happiness rests upon truth."

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

"There are certain times when public opinion is the worst of all opinions."

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

"Most books today seemed to have been written overnight from books read the day before."

"There is a melancholy that stems from greatness."

"The most wasted day of all is that on which we have not laughed."

"Of all days, the day on which one has not laughed is the one most surely wasted."

"How many fools does it take to make up a public?"

"There are well-dressed foolish ideas, just as there are will-dressed fools."

"Secrecy is best taught by starting with ourselves."

"Celebrity is the advantage of being known to people who we don't know, and who don't know us."

"Conviction is the conscience of the mind."

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

"The art of the parenthesis is one of the greatest secrets of eloquence in Society."

"Some things are easier to legalize than to legitimate."

"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."

"Real worth requires no interpreter: its everyday deeds form its emblem."

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

"Men of reason have endured;men of passion have lived."