Nicolas Chamfort Quotes

The virtues and vices are all put in motion by interest.

The vices enter into the composition of the virtues, as poisons into that of medicines. Prudence collects and arranges them, and uses them beneficially against the ills of life.

Educate men without religion and you make of them but clever devils.

Some vices miss what is right because they are deficient, others because they are excessive, in feelings or in actions, while virtue finds and chooses the mean.

If one is not virtuous he becomes vicious.

But goodness alone is never enough. A hard, cold wisdom is required for goodness to accomplish good. Goodness without wisdom always accomplishes evil.

Moral qualities are so constituted as to be destroyed by excess and by deficiency . . .

The mere abhorrence of vice is not a virtue at all.

If reason dominates in man, he rises higher than angels. If lust overpowers man, he descends lower than the beast.

Man is not equally moral at all hours, this is well known. If his morality is judged to be the capability for great self-sacrificing resolutions and self-denial (which, when continuous and grown habitual, are called holiness)

...virtue is not merely a state in conformity with the right principle, but one that implies the right principle; and the right principle in moral conduct is prudence.

Over the last few years, I've been focusing on questions having to do with the self, and questions having to do with morality. I'm very interested in why we do good things, or bad things, and where moral judgments come from.

Since the branch of philosophy on which we are at present engaged differs from the others in not being a subject of merely intellectual interest — I mean we are not concerned to know what goodness essentially is, but how we are to become good men, for this alone gives the study its practical value — we must apply our minds to the solution of the problems of conduct.

Rarely do great beauty and great virtue dwell together.

The very spring and root of honesty and virtue lie in good education.

Morals are an acquirement -- like music, like a foreign language, like piety, poker, paralysis -- no man is born with them.

It is by doing good that we become good.

We do not despise all those who have vices, but we do despise those that have no virtue.

Prudence is a quality incompatible with vice, and can never be effectively enlisted in its cause.

The more virtuous any man is, the less easily does he suspect others to be vicious.

In ethics, prudence is not an important virtue, but in the world it is almost everything.

The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our very existence depend on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life. To make this a living force and bring it to clear consciousness is perhaps the foremost task of education. The foundation of morality should not be made dependent on myth nor tied to any authority lest doubt about the myth or about the legitimacy of the authority imperil the foundation of sound judgment and action.

Self-denial is not a virtue; it is only the effect of prudence on rascality.

Virtue is not always amiable.

I have seen men incapable of the sciences, but never any incapable of virtue.