Life & Wisdom Quote by Nicolas Chamfort

Chamfort slices the French social order with the neat cruelty of a man who’s seen the buffet from both sides. The line works because it reduces “class” to something bodily and undeniable: appetite. Not ideology, not virtue, not “birth.” Just the humiliating arithmetic of hunger versus surplus. In one stroke, the elite become absurd - people forced into ritualized consumption long after desire has gone numb - while the poor are defined by a desire that never gets the chance to be satisfied. It’s a joke, but it’s not playful; it’s the kind of wit that makes you laugh and then check your own plate.

The subtext is sharper than simple rich-versus-poor moralizing. “More dinners than appetite” hints at a ruling class trapped in its own excess: status maintained through endless meals, endless invitations, endless proof of belonging. Their problem isn’t merely greed; it’s boredom, a deadened palate, consumption as obligation. On the other side, “more appetite than dinners” isn’t romanticized deprivation. It’s a structural indictment: need outpacing access, the body kept perpetually waiting.

Context matters. Chamfort wrote in the late Ancien Regime and Revolutionary era, when salons and starvation coexisted within walking distance. His aphorism carries the revolutionary suspicion that inequality isn’t an abstract injustice; it’s a daily, edible fact. The elegance of “dinners” keeps it social, not pastoral: this is about who gets invited, who gets served, and who gets to mistake abundance for refinement.