Life & Wisdom Quote by Nicolas Chamfort

Aphorisms promise selectivity: the jeweled sentence, the perfectly turned barb, the “only the best” life in miniature. Chamfort punctures that fantasy by comparing anthologizers to people polishing off cherries or oysters. The image is comic, even faintly gross, because it treats literary taste as appetite: you start refined, you end greedy, you end indiscriminate. What begins as discernment collapses into consumption.

The intent is less to scold readers than to expose a social ritual. Collections of verse and epigrams were Enlightenment status objects, portable proofs of one’s sensibility. Chamfort, who made a career among salons and then watched the Revolution devour its own, understands how quickly “taste” becomes performance, then habit, then compulsion. The subtext: people don’t only curate culture; culture also trains them to keep feeding. The collector imagines a sovereign chooser; Chamfort recasts him as a diner obeying the logic of the platter. Once you’ve started, finishing feels inevitable.

It also carries a sly warning about the marketplace of wit. Epigrams are designed to be plucked, repeated, traded. The form encourages cherry-picking; the collector’s hunger encourages overindulgence. By the end, the “best” loses meaning because everything has been swallowed into the same pile of impressions. Chamfort’s cynicism is surgical: even our most refined pleasures are vulnerable to the most ordinary human drift from judgment to mere completion.