Nicolas Chamfort

Sourced

• L'amour, tel qu'il existe dans la société, n'est que l'échange de deux fantaisies et le contact de deux épidermes.
  • Maximes et pensées, nr. 359. Translation: Love, as it exists in society, is nothing but the exchange of two fantasies and the contact of two skins.

• La plus perdue de toutes les journées est celle où l'on n'a pas ri
  • Maximes et pensées". Translation: The most completely wasted of all days is that in which we have not laughed.

• Quiconque n'a pas de caractère n'est pas un homme, c'est une chose.
  • Maximes et pensées". Translation: Anyone who has no character is not a man, but a thing.

• Eminence without merit earns deference without esteem.
  • Maximes et pensées (1805)

• The only thing that stops God sending a second Flood is that the first one was useless.
  • Characters and Anecdotes book, 1771

• We must start human society from scratch; as Francis Bacon said, we must recreate human understanding.
  • "Reflections and Anecdotes", nr. 264 (Douglas Parmée translation)

• La pensée console de tout et remédie à tout. Si quelquefois elle vous fait du mal, demandez-lui le reméde du mal qu'elle vous a fait, elle vous le donnera.
  • Samuel Beckett: Collected Poems 161-163. Translation: "Ask of all-healing, all-consoling thought/Salve and solace for the woe it wrought."

• Most anthologists of poetry or quotations are like those who eat cherries or oysters, first picking the best and ending by eating everything.
  • Maximes et anecdotes (1795)

Unsourced

• Le bonheur n’est pas chose aisée, il est très difficile de le trouver en nous et impossible de le trouver ailleurs.
  • Translation: Happiness is not easily won; it is hard to find it in ourselves, and impossible to find it elsewhere.

• Said a man ingenuously to one of his friends: "This morning we condemned three men to death. Two of them definitely deserved it."

• "Swallow a toad in the morning and you will encounter nothing more disgusting the rest of the day." Source: Journalist Mark Stevens, NYC