Quotes by Chamfort

* * * * * CHANGE in fashion is the tax which the industry of the poor levies on the vanity of the rich. * * * * * IT is an incontestable fact that there are in France seven million folk who beg for alms, and another twelve millions who are too poor to give them. * * * * * THE nobility, say the nobles, is an intermediary between the king and the people.... Precisely; just as the hound is the intermediary between the huntsman and the hares. * * * * * FRANCE is a country where it is often useful to exhibit one’s vices, and invariably dangerous to exhibit one’s virtues. * * * * * A FRIEND said to me _à propos_ of some ridiculous ministerial blunders: “If it were not for the government, we should have nothing left to laugh at in France.” * * * * * IN France we leave unmolested those who set fire to the house and persecute those who sound the alarm bell. * * * * * PARIS is a city of gaieties and pleasures, where four fifths of the inhabitants die of grief. * * * * * WHEN princes condescend to emerge from their miserable systems of etiquette it is never in favour of a man of merit, but of a wench or a buffoon. When women forget themselves it is never for love of an honest man but of a rascal. In short when people break the yoke of public opinion, it is rarely to rise above it, nearly always to descend below it. * * * * * ONE must make choice between loving women and knowing them; there is no middle course. * * * * * NATURALISTS tell us that in all animal species degeneration begins in the female. In civilised society philosophers can apply this observation to morals. * * * * * APPARENTLY nature, in giving man an absolutely irradicable taste for women, must have foreseen that, without this precaution, the contempt inspired by the vices of their sex, vanity in particular, would be a great obstacle to the maintenance and propagation of the human species.

* * * * * THE majority of our social institutions seem to have as object the maintenance of man in a mediocrity of ideas and emotions, which renders him best fitted to govern or be governed. * * * * * THERE is no man who can be by himself alone so contemptible as a body of men, and there is no body of men that can be so contemptible as the public at large. * * * * * IT may be argued that every public idea, every accepted convention, is a piece of stupidity, for has it not commended itself to the greatest number? * * * * * THE public is governed as it reasons. It is its right to say foolish things, as it is that of the ministers to do them. * * * * * A CERTAIN witty advocate remarked: “One would risk being disgusted if one saw politics, justice, and one’s dinner in the making.” * * * * * ’TIS easier to make certain things legal than to make them legitimate. * * * * * EXPERIENCE which enlightens private persons corrupts princes and officials. * * * * * HAD any one told Adam, on the day following the death of Abel, that some centuries later there would be places where, in an enclosure of twelve square miles, seven or eight hundred thousand people would be concentrated, piled one upon another, do you imagine he would have believed it possible that such multitudes could ever live together? Would he not have conceived an idea of the crimes and monstrosities that would be committed under such conditions much more terrible than the reality has proved? This is a point we ought to bear in mind, as a consolation for the drawbacks of these extraordinary assemblages of human beings. * * * * * WERE a historian like Tacitus to write a history of the best of our kings, giving an exact account of all the tyrannical acts and abuses of authority, the majority of which lie buried in the profoundest obscurity, there would be few reigns which would not inspire us with the same horror as that of Tiberius.

But the moral world seems rather the production of a crazy fiend’s caprices. * * * * * WHEN I hear it argued that, taking everything into account, the least sensitive folk are the happiest, I remember the Indian proverb: “Better to be seated than standing, better to be lying than seated, but better than all else to be dead.” * * * * * 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. * * * * * TIME diminishes for us the intensity of _absolute_ pleasures, to use the metaphysician’s term, but apparently it increases _relative_ pleasures; and I suspect that this is the artifice by which nature is able to attach men to life after the loss of the objects or pleasures which most rendered it agreeable. * * * * * SOME ONE described Providence as the baptismal name of chance; no doubt some pious person will retort that chance is the nickname of Providence. * * * * * M. ---- said to me, _à propos_ of his constant offences against digestion, and of the pleasures in which he indulged--the only obstacles to his regaining his health: “I should be marvellously well if it were not for myself.” * * * * * NATURE seems to make use of men for the accomplishment of her designs without concerning herself about her instruments, like tyrants who rid themselves of those who have been of service to them. * * * * * THERE is no need to regard Burrhus as an absolutely virtuous man; he is only so, contrasted with Narcissus. Seneca and Burrhus are the honest men of an age in which there are none. * * * * * IN order to sum up in a single word the rarity of honest folk, a friend remarked to me that in society the honest man is a variety of the human species. * * * * * I USED to know a misanthrope who in his good-humoured moments would say: “I should not be at all surprised if there were an honest man hidden away in some corner without any one knowing of him.

* * * * * 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. * * * * * WILL it be believed that despotism has its partizans on the ground of the necessity for encouraging the fine arts? The brilliancy of the reign of Louis XIV. has to an incredible extent multiplied the number of those who think thus. According to them the crowning glory of all human society is to have fine tragedies, fine comedies and other works of art. There are those who willingly forgive all the evil wrought by priests, since without the priests we should not have had the comedy of _Tartuffe_. * * * * * WHAT is a cardinal? He is a priest clad in scarlet, who receives a hundred thousand crowns from the king, to flout him in the name of the pope. * * * * * SOCIETY is composed of two great classes--those who have more dinners than appetite, and those who have more appetite than dinners. * * * * * CHANGE in fashion is the tax which the industry of the poor levies on the vanity of the rich. * * * * * IT is an incontestable fact that there are in France seven million folk who beg for alms, and another twelve millions who are too poor to give them. * * * * * THE nobility, say the nobles, is an intermediary between the king and the people.... Precisely; just as the hound is the intermediary between the huntsman and the hares. * * * * * FRANCE is a country where it is often useful to exhibit one’s vices, and invariably dangerous to exhibit one’s virtues. * * * * * A FRIEND said to me _à propos_ of some ridiculous ministerial blunders: “If it were not for the government, we should have nothing left to laugh at in France.” * * * * * IN France we leave unmolested those who set fire to the house and persecute those who sound the alarm bell.

” * * * * * SOCIETY, what people call the world, 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! * * * * * 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. * * * * * 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. * * * * * THERE are well-dressed foolish ideas just as there are well-dressed fools. * * * * * 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. * * * * * THE tragic drama has the great moral drawback of attaching too high an importance to life and death. * * * * * SPERON-SPERONI admirably explains how it is that an author who, in his own opinion, delivers himself clearly, is sometimes obscure to his reader. “It is because,” he says, “the author proceeds from the thought to the expression, the reader from the expression to the thought.” * * * * * 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. * * * * * A POETASTER asked Chamfort’s opinion on a couplet. “Excellent,” he said, “were it not for its length.