Quotes from Nicolas Chamfort

It is children only who enjoy the present; their elders either live on the memory of the past or the hope of the future.

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

Some things are easier to legalize than to legitimate.

All that I've learned, I've forgotten. The little that I still know, I've guessed.

A person of intellect without energy added to it, is a failure.

Scandal is an importunate wasp, against which we must make no movement unless we are quite sure that we can kill it; otherwise it will return to the attack more furious than ever.

The contemplative life is often miserable. One must act more, think less, and not watch oneself live.

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

People are governed with the head; kindness of heart is little use in chess.

Conviction is the conscience of the mind.

Knowledge is boundless,--human capacity, limited.

Change of fashion is the tax levied by the industry of the poor on the vanity of the rich.

Philosophy, like medicine, has plenty of drugs, few good remedies, and hardly any specific cures.

Society is divided into two classes, the shearers and the shorn.

We take our colors, chameleon-like, from each other.

Marriage, as practised by high society, is arranged indecency.

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

Public opinion is the worst of all opinions.

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

We must start human society from scratch; as Francis Bacon said, we must recreate human understanding.

It is said of a lonely man that he does not appreciate the life of society. This is like saying he hates hiking because he dislikes walking in thick forest on a dark night.

Tragedy has the great moral defect of giving too much importance to life and death.

The success of many books is due to the affinity between the mediocrity of the author's ideas and those of the public.

A good number of works owe their success to the mediocrity of their authors' ideas, which match the mediocrity of those of the general public.