Nicolas Chamfort Men Quotations

There are two things that one must get used to or one will find life unendurable: the damages of time and injustices of men.

Most of those who make collections of verse or epigram are like men eating cherries or oysters: they choose out the best at first, and end by eating all.

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

Man reaches each stage of his life as a novice.

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

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

In great matters, men behave as they are expected to; in little ones, as they would naturally

Were a man to consult only his reason, who would marry? For myself, I wouldn't marry, for fear of having a son who resembled me.

Men of reason have endured;men of passion have lived.

[Prudence] replaces [strength] by saving the man who has the misfortune of not possessing it from most occasions when it's needed.

Men whose only concern is other people's opinion of them are like actors who put on a poor performance to win the applause of people of poor taste; some of them would be capable of good acting in front of a good audience. A decent man plays his part to the best of his ability, regardless of the taste of the gallery.

At the sight of what goes on in the world, the most misanthropic of men must end by being amused, and Heraclitus must die laughing.

A lover is a man who tries to be more amiable than it is possible for him to be.

In living and in seeing other men, the heart must break or become as bronze.

Only the history of free peoples is worth our attention; the history of men under a despotism is merely a collection of anecdotes.

Every day I add to the list of things I refuse to discuss. The wiser the man, the longer the list.

A man without nobility cannot have kindliness; he can only have good nature.

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

Too elevated qualities often unfit a man for society. We do not go to market with ingots, but with silver and small change.

Many men and women enjoy popular esteem, not because they are known, but because they are not known.

A man should swallow a toad every morning to be sure of not meeting with anything more revolting in the day ahead.

A man is not necessarily intelligent because he has plenty of ideas, any more than he is a good general because he has plenty of soldiers.

Nature in causing reason and the passions to be born at one and the same time apparently wished by the latter gift to distract man from the evil she had done him by the former, and by only permitting him to live for a few years after the loss of his passions seems to show her pity by early deliverance from a life that reduces him to reason as his sole resource.

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.

In order to forgive reason for the evil it has wrought on the majority of men, we must imagine for ourselves what man would be without his reason. 'Tis a necessary evil.

Nearly all men are slaves for the same reason that the Spartans assigned for the servitude of the Persians -- lack of power to pronounce the syllable, "No." To be able to utter that word and live alone, are the only means to preserve one's freedom and one's character.

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.

Woman's weakness, not man's merit, oftenest gains the suitor's victory.