Life & Wisdom Quote by Nicolas Chamfort

Passion, for Chamfort, isn’t just strong feeling; it’s a kind of optical distortion you willingly live inside. The line lands with the cool brutality of an Enlightenment moralist who watched reason get applauded in salons while vanity, jealousy, and ambition ran the actual show. “All passions exaggerate” is a diagnosis: desire and anger don’t merely intensify reality, they recompose it, rearranging the evidence until the world matches the mood. Then comes the knife twist: passions are “only” passions because they exaggerate. If you subtract the overstatement, you’re left with preference, interest, appetite - manageable, negotiable, polite. Passion begins where proportion ends.

The subtext is double-edged. It punctures romantic self-mythology (the idea that intensity equals authenticity) while admitting something uncomfortably functional: exaggeration is the engine. People don’t sacrifice, create, revolt, or ruin themselves because they’ve made a balanced spreadsheet of outcomes. They do it because the stakes feel cosmic, because the beloved is incomparable, because the insult is unforgivable. Chamfort’s cynicism isn’t bloodless; it’s observational.

Context matters: Chamfort lived through the late ancien regime and the early Revolution, when mass “passions” were not metaphor but policy. Exaggeration became contagious, turning private fixations into public certainties. The line reads like a warning from someone who understood that the same psychological trick that fuels art and devotion can also grease the machinery of fanaticism.