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Most anthologists of poetry or quotations are like those who eat cherries or oysters, first picking the best and ending by eating everything.

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
Ending
Eating
Poetry
Best
Firsts
Cherries
Everything
Oysters
First
Quotations
Like
Picking

More quotes by Nicolas Chamfort

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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.
Nicolas Chamfort
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What one knows best is ... what one has learned not from books but as a result of books, through the reflections to which they have given rise.
Nicolas Chamfort
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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.
Nicolas Chamfort
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To possess a good cognomen is a long way on the road of success in life.
Nicolas Chamfort
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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.
Nicolas Chamfort
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Conscience is a dog that does not stop us from passing but that we cannot prevent from barking.
Nicolas Chamfort
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Anyone whose needs are small seems threatening to the rich, because he's always ready to escape their control.
Nicolas Chamfort
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In love, everything is true, everything is false it is the one subject on which one cannot express an absurdity.
Nicolas Chamfort
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Public opinion reigns in society because stupidity reigns amongst the stupid.
Nicolas Chamfort
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When a man and a woman have an overwhelming passion for each other, it seems to me, in spite of such obstacles dividing them as parents or husband, that they belong to each other in the name of Nature, and are lovers by Divine right, in spite of human convention or the laws.
Nicolas Chamfort
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There are more people who wish to be loved than there are who are willing to love.
Nicolas Chamfort
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The great always sell their society to the vanity of the little.
Nicolas Chamfort
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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.
Nicolas Chamfort
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The new friends whom we make after attaining a certain age and by whom we would fain replace those whom we have lost, are to our old friends what glass eyes, false teeth and wooden legs are to real eyes, natrual teeth and legs of flesh and bone.
Nicolas Chamfort
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Marriage follows on love as smoke on flame.
Nicolas Chamfort
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False modesty is the most decent of all lies.
Nicolas Chamfort
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Swallow a toad in the morning and you will encounter nothing more disgusting the rest of the day.
Nicolas Chamfort
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Spero Speroni explains admirably how an author who writes very clearly for himself is often obscure to his readers. It is, he says, because the author proceeds from the thought to the expression, and the reader from the expression to the thought.
Nicolas Chamfort
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The person is always happy who is in the presence of something they cannot know in full. A person as advanced far in the study of morals who has mastered the difference between pride and vanity.
Nicolas Chamfort
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Preoccupation with money is the great test of small natures, but only a small test of great ones.
Nicolas Chamfort