Quotes from Nicolas Chamfort

To possess a good cognomen is a long way on the road of success in life.

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

Life is a malady in which sleep soothes us every sixteen hours; it is a palliation; death is the remedy.

There are more people who wish to be loved than there are who are willing to love.

If a woman were about to proceed to her execution, she would demand a little time to perfect her toilet.

What we love intensely or for a long time we are likely to bring within the citadel, and to assert as part of oneself.

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.

I have three kinds of friends: those who love me, those who pay no attention to me, and those who detest me.

If you must love your neighbor as yourself, it is at least as fair to love yourself as your neighbor.

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

Wrinkles and ill-nature together made a woman hideous.

Love, a pleasant folly; ambition, a serious stupidity.

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

Man may aspire to virtue, but he cannot reasonably aspire to truth.

We gild our medicines with sweets; why not clothe truth and morals in peasant garments as well?

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

The contact of two epidermises.

Love is like epidemic diseases. The more one fears it the more likely one is to contract it.

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

It is passion that makes man live; wisdom makes one only last.

His passions make man live, his wisdom merely makes him last.

Your intelligence often bears the same relation to your heart as the library of a chateau does to its owner.

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.

Marriage follows on love as smoke on flame.