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Eminence without merit earns deference without esteem.

Nicolas Chamfort

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Nicolas Chamfort
Age: 53 †
Born: 1741
Born: April 6
Died: 1794
Died: April 13
Journalist
Philosopher
Playwright
Poet
Politician
Writer
Clarmont-Ferrand
Eminence
Respectability
Merit
Esteem
Without
Earns
Deference

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Anyone whose needs are small seems threatening to the rich, because he's always ready to escape their control.
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Someone has said that to plagiarise from the ancients is to play the pirate beyond the Equator, but that to steal from the moderns is to pick pockets at street corners.
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It is children only who enjoy the present their elders either live on the memory of the past or the hope of the future.
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We must start human society from scratch as Francis Bacon said, we must recreate human understanding.
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A man should swallow a toad every morning to be sure of not meeting with anything more revolting in the day ahead.
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Covetousness is a sort of mental gluttony, not confined to money, but craving honor, and feeding on selfishness.
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Pleasure may come from illusion, but happiness can come only of reality.
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Every day I add to the list of things I refuse to discuss. The wiser the man, the longer the list.
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There are more people who wish to be loved than there are who are willing to love.
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Scandal is an importunate wasp, against which we must make no movement unless we are quite sure that we can kill it otherwise it will return to the attack more furious than ever.
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All passions are exaggerated, otherwise they would not be passions.
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The only thing that stops God from sending another flood is that the first one was useless.
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There aren't many benefactors who don't say, like Satan: All these things will I give you if you bow down and worship me.
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It is among uneducated women that we may look for the most confirmed gossips. Goethe tells us there is nothing more frightful than bustling ignorance.
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Be my brother or I will kill you.
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Living is a sickness to which sleep provides relief every sixteen hours. It's a palliative. The remedy is death.
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Man may aspire to virtue, but he cannot reasonably aspire to truth.
Nicolas Chamfort
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Change of fashion is the tax levied by the industry of the poor on the vanity of the rich.
Nicolas Chamfort
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We leave unmolested those who set the fire to the house, and prosecute those who sound the alarm.
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Love is the exchange of two fantasies and the contact of two skins.
Nicolas Chamfort