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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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Marriage follows on love as smoke on flame.
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Women of the world crave excitement.
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Some things are easier to legalize than to legitimate.
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Though we best know and cannot deny our imperfections, it is not for us to lose our self-reliance and true manhood.
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Contact with the world either breaks or hardens the heart.
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If you must love your neighbor as yourself, it is at least as fair to love yourself as your neighbor.
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Almost the whole of history is but a sequence of horrors.
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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.
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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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There some trifles well habited, as there are some fools well clothed.
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The art of the parenthesis is one of the greatest secrets of eloquence in Society
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Egotism is the tongue of vanity.
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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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Love is the exchange of two fantasies and the contact of two skins.
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Nearly all men are slaves for the same reason that the Spartans assigned for the servitude of the Persians -- lack of power to pronounce the syllable, No. To be able to utter that word and live alone, are the only means to preserve one's freedom and one's character.
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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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All passions exaggerate and they are passions only because they do exaggerate.
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One must not hope to be more than one can be.
Nicolas Chamfort
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Remorse turns us against ourselves.
Nicolas Chamfort
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A lover is a man who tries to be more amiable than it is possible for him to be.
Nicolas Chamfort