Complete Maxims and Thoughts

"Chamfort", wrote Balzac in a letter, "put whole volumes in a single biting phrase, while nowadays it's a marvel to find a biting phrase in a volume.""Chamfort," said John Stuart Mill, "is the nobler La Rochefoucauld of the 18th century.""Never a day passes," confessed Mirabeau, the legendary statesman, "in which I do not find myself saying - 'Chamfort would scorn this, I won't do it, I shan't write it."He was friends with the foremost philosophers of the enlightenment - Voltaire, Diderot, Helvetius, D'Alembert. And he was courted by the highest members of the nobility and the queen Marie Antoinette - despite being the son of a grocer. Who later stormed the Bastille.Nietzsche said his aphorisms carried on the spirit of the Renaissance and of what was best in antiquity. But they are almost wholly unknown today to the English-speaking world, and this is the only complete English translation available of his Maxims and Thoughts.His sayings are full of passion, daring and sincerity; he was a philosopher who was intimately familiar with society, both the rich and the poor, and summarized the lessons he found most useful on small sheets of paper he saved throughout his life. After he died, they were found hidden in his desk, and they are translated and published here. Some of them are:'The day we have most lost is the one on which we have not laughed.''We have to reconcile ourselves to two things or we'll find life unbearable: they are the injuries of time and the injustices of men.''Thought consoles all and remedies all. If sometimes it harms you, ask it for the remedy and it will give it to you.'By reading them, we not only get a sense of what society was like in one of the most exciting periods of history, or of a man who saw deeply into it and expressed it with brevity and vigor; we get a sense of what it means to be human.His last words were, 'At last, my friend, I am leaving this world, where one's heart must either constantly break or constantly harden.'