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We need to be just before we are generous, as we need shirts before ruffles.

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
Ruffles
Shirts
Generosity
Generous
Need
Needs

More quotes by Nicolas Chamfort

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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.
Nicolas Chamfort
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Man may aspire to virtue, but he cannot reasonably aspire to truth.
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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In the fine arts, as in many other things, we know well only what we have not learned.
Nicolas Chamfort
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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.
Nicolas Chamfort
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Education must have two foundations --morality as a support for virtue, prudence as a defense for self against the vices of others. By letting the balance incline to the side of morality, you only make dupes or martyrs by letting it incline to the other, you make calculating egoists.
Nicolas Chamfort
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The great always sell their society to the vanity of the little.
Nicolas Chamfort
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Be my brother or I will kill you.
Nicolas Chamfort
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We justly consider women to be weaker than ourselves, and yet we are governed by them.
Nicolas Chamfort
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Love is the exchange of two fantasies and the contact of two skins.
Nicolas Chamfort
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Men's hearts and faces are always wide asunder women's are not only in close connection, but are mirror-like in the instant power of reflection.
Nicolas Chamfort
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Where violence reigns, reason is weak.
Nicolas Chamfort
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Almost the whole of history is but a sequence of horrors.
Nicolas Chamfort
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There is as much expression in the feet as in the hands.
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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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.
Nicolas Chamfort
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Knowledge is boundless,--human capacity, limited.
Nicolas Chamfort
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There are more fools than wise men, and even in a wise man there is more folly than wisdom.
Nicolas Chamfort
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The art of the parenthesis is one of the greatest secrets of eloquence in Society
Nicolas Chamfort
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Public opinion reigns in society because stupidity reigns amongst the stupid.
Nicolas Chamfort