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False modesty is the most decent of all lies.

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
False
Lies
Lying
Modesty
Hypocrisy
Decent

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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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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.
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Calumny is like the wasp which worries you, and which it is not best to try to get rid of unless you are sure of slaying it for otherwise it returns to the charge more furious than ever.
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Many men and women enjoy popular esteem, not because they are known, but because they are not known.
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Contact with the world either breaks or hardens the heart.
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We justly consider women to be weaker than ourselves, and yet we are governed by them.
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Most books today seemed to have been written overnight from books read the day before.
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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.
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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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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.
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Man may aspire to virtue, but he cannot reasonably aspire to truth.
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Love is more pleasant than marriage for the same reason that novels are more amusing than history.
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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.
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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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The philosopher who would fain extinguish his passions resembles the chemist who would like to let his furnace go out.
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The contact of two epidermises.
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A modicum of discord is the very spice of courtship.
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We need to be just before we are generous, as we need shirts before ruffles.
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Wicked people sometimes perform good actions. I suppose they wish to see if this gives as great a feeling of pleasure as the virtuous claim for it.
Nicolas Chamfort