Sébastien-Roch Nicolas (Nicolas Chamfort) Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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A woman is like your shadow; follow her, she flies; fly from her, she follows.
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All passions exaggerate; and they are passions only because they do exaggerate.
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Men of reason have endured;men of passion have lived.
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If you must love your neighbor as yourself, it is at least as fair to love yourself as your neighbor.
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A man without nobility cannot have kindliness; he can only have good nature.
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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.
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Conscience is a dog that does not stop us from passing but that we cannot prevent from barking.
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It is children only who enjoy the present; their elders either live on the memory of the past or the hope of the future.
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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.
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Living is a sickness to which sleep provides relief every sixteen hours. It's a palliative. The remedy is death.
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In the library of the world men have hitherto been ranged according to the form, and the binding; the time is coming when they will take rank and order according to their contents and intrinsic merits.
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We justly consider women to be weaker than ourselves, and yet we are governed by them.
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If it were not for the government, we should have nothing to laugh at in France.
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A fool who has a flash of wit creates astonishment and scandal, like hack-horses setting out to gallop.
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If it wasn't for me, I'd do brilliantly.
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Only the history of free peoples is worth our attention; the history of men under a despotism is merely a collection of anecdotes.
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People are governed by the head; a kind heart is of little value in chess.
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We take our colors, chameleon-like, from each other.
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The best philosophical attitude to adopt towards the world is a union of the sarcasm of gaiety with the indulgence of contempt.
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A lover is a man who tries to be more amiable than it is possible for him to be.
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The only thing that stops God from sending another flood is that the first one was useless.
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I have three kinds of friends: those who love me, those who pay no attention to me, and those who detest me.
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Some things are easier to legalize than to legitimate.
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Wrinkles and ill-nature together made a woman hideous.