Quotes from Nicolas Chamfort

Love, as it exists in society, is nothing but the exchange of two fantasies and the contact of two skins.

In cities the old are more corrupt than the young.

Economists are surgeons who operate beautifully on the dead and torment the living.

The things you know best are: first, those you know intuitively; second, those you've learned from experience; third, those you've learned not from but through books and the ideas they've inspired in you; and finally, those you've learned in books and from your teachers.

If you would estimate the extent of a woman's pride in youth, see how much remains even after she has passed the age of pleasing.

Middle-class women who entertain the hope or fancy of being something in the world, lose Nature's happiness and miss Society's. They are the most unfortunate creatures I have known.

After a certain age, any new friends we make in our attempt to replace the ones we've lost are like glass eyes, false teeth and wooden legs.

Nature didn't tell me Don't be poor; and certainly didn't say: Get rich; but she did shout: Always be independent!

Money is the greatest concern for small characters, but is nothing but the smallest for great characters.

Society is not, as is commonly supposed, the development of nature, but rather her dismantling and entire recasting. It is a second building made from the ruins of the first.

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

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

Happiness is not easily won; it is hard to find it in ourselves, and impossible to find it elsewhere.

And so I leave this world, where the heart must either break or turn to lead.

Anyone who has no character is not a man, but a thing.

A man begins every stage of his life as a novice.

Anyone whose needs are small seems threatening to the rich, because he's always ready to escape their control.

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

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

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

Despising money is like toppling a king off his throne.

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

Conviction is the conscience of the mind.

Education must have two foundations --morality as a support for virtue, prudence as a defense for self against the vices of others. By letting the balance incline to the side of morality, you only make dupes or martyrs; by letting it incline to the other, you make calculating egoists.