SÉBASTIEN CHAMFORT, Maximes et pensées

There are more fools than wise men, and even in the wise man himself there is more folly than wisdom.

CHAMFORT, The Cynic's Breviary

The philosopher who would fain extinguish his passions resembles the chemist who would like to let his furnace go out.

CHAMFORT, The Cynic's Breviary

Man reaches each stage in his life as a novice.

CHAMFORT, The Cynic's Breviary

Nearly all men are slaves for the same reason that the Spartans assigned for the servitude of the Persians -- lack of power to pronounce the syllable, "No." To be able to utter that word and live alone, are the only means to preserve one's freedom and one's character.

CHAMFORT, The Cynic's Breviary

A man is not clever simply because he has many ideas, just as he is not necessarily a good general because he has many soldiers.

CHAMFORT, The Cynic's Breviary

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

CHAMFORT, The Cynic's Breviary

What makes the success of many books consists in the affinity there is between the mediocrity of the author's ideas and those of the public.

CHAMFORT, The Cynic's Breviary

Thought consoles us for all, and heals all. If at times it does you ill, ask it for the remedy for that ill and it will give it to you.

CHAMFORT, The Cynic's Breviary

Love of glory a virtue! A strange virtue truly, that calls to its aid the cooperation of all the vices, that finds stimulants in ambition, envy, vanity, sometimes even avarice! Would Titus have been Titus had he had as his ministers Sejanus, Narcissus, and Tigellinus?

CHAMFORT, The Cynic's Breviary

Someone has said that to plagiarise from the ancients is to play the pirate beyond the Equator, but that to steal from the moderns is to pick pockets at street corners.

CHAMFORT, The Cynic's Breviary

False modesty is the most decent of all deceptions.

CHAMFORT, The Cynic's Breviary

All passions are exaggerated, otherwise they would not be passions.

CHAMFORT, The Cynic's Breviary

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

CHAMFORT, The Cynic's Breviary

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.

CHAMFORT, The Cynic's Breviary

Vain is equivalent to empty; thus vanity is so miserable a thing, that one cannot give it a worse name than its own. It proclaims itself for what it is.

CHAMFORT, The Cynic's Breviary

'Tis easier to make certain things legal than to make them legitimate.

CHAMFORT, The Cynic's Breviary

The majority of the books of our time give one the impression of having been manufactured in a day out of books read the day before.

CHAMFORT, The Cynic's Breviary

Society ... is nothing more than the war of a thousand petty opposed interests, an eternal strife of all the vanities, which, turn in turn wounded and humiliated one by the other, intercross, come into collision, and on the morrow expiate the triumph of the eve in the bitterness of defeat. To live alone, to remain unjostled in this miserable struggle, where for a moment one draws the eyes of the spectators, to be crushed a moment later -- this is what is called being a nonentity, having no existence. Poor humanity!

CHAMFORT, The Cynic's Breviary

Hope is but a charlatan that ceases not to deceive us. For myself happiness only began when I had lost it.

CHAMFORT, The Cynic's Breviary

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

CHAMFORT, The Cynic's Breviary

Nature in causing reason and the passions to be born at one and the same time apparently wished by the latter gift to distract man from the evil she had done him by the former, and by only permitting him to live for a few years after the loss of his passions seems to show her pity by early deliverance from a life that reduces him to reason as his sole resource.

CHAMFORT, The Cynic's Breviary

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

CHAMFORT, The Cynic's Breviary

Every woman in choosing a lover takes more account of the way in which other women regard the man than of her own.

CHAMFORT, The Cynic's Breviary

Living is a disease from the pains of which sleep eases us every sixteen hours; sleep is but a palliative, death alone is the cure.

CHAMFORT, The Cynic's Breviary

Paris is a city of gaieties and pleasures, where four fifths of the inhabitants die of grief.

CHAMFORT, The Cynic's Breviary

Stupidity would not be absolute stupidity did it not fear intelligence.

CHAMFORT, The Cynic's Breviary

It is when their age of passions is past that great men produce their masterpieces, just as it is after volcanic eruptions that the soil is most fertile.

CHAMFORT, The Cynic's Breviary

Marriage follows on love as smoke on flame.

CHAMFORT, The Cynic's Breviary

The new friends whom we make after attaining a certain age and by whom we would fain replace those whom we have lost, are to our old friends what glass eyes, false teeth and wooden legs are to real eyes, natrual teeth and legs of flesh and bone.

CHAMFORT, The Cynic's Breviary

In order to forgive reason for the evil it has wrought on the majority of men, we must imagine for ourselves what man would be without his reason. 'Tis a necessary evil.

CHAMFORT, The Cynic's Breviary

Someone described Providence as the baptismal name of chance; no doubt some pious person will retort that chance is the nickname of Providence.

CHAMFORT, The Cynic's Breviary

Change of fashions is the tax which industry imposes on the vanity of the rich.

NICOLAS CHAMFORT, attributed, Many Thoughts of Many Minds

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

SEBASTIEN ROCH NICOLAS CHAMFORT, attributed, Day's Collacon

The most completely wasted of all days is that in which we have not laughed.

NICOLAS CHAMFORT, Maximes et pensees