Art & Creativity Quote by Nicolas Chamfort

A clean little guillotine of a sentence: Chamfort doesn’t just complain that books are bad, he accuses them of being secondhand on principle. “Overnight” and “the day before” compress the whole literary economy into a slapdash 24-hour loop, where speed replaces thought and reading becomes mere raw material. The joke is temporal, but the target is moral: writers who confuse production with originality, and a culture that rewards rapid synthesis over risky invention.

Chamfort’s intent is to puncture the vanity of “new” ideas. He implies that much of what passes for authorship is closer to transcription or remix, a kind of intellectual laundering where yesterday’s pages emerge as today’s “work.” The subtext is sharper than a standard screed about plagiarism. He’s diagnosing a system: books begetting books, a self-feeding apparatus in which literature becomes commentary on literature, untethered from lived experience, observation, or genuine argument. The overnight pace is also a dig at opportunism - writing to meet demand, fashion, or patronage rather than necessity.

Context matters. Chamfort moved through the salons of late ancien regime France and into the revolutionary maelstrom, a world where wit was currency and reputations were made by how quickly you could turn a thought. Print culture was expanding; so was the incentive to sound informed without being deep. His cynicism lands because it’s not anti-intellectual. It’s anti-parasitic: a warning that when culture starts rewarding instant cleverness, even intelligence learns to counterfeit itself.