Art & Creativity Quote by Nicolas Chamfort

Eloquence, Chamfort implies, isn’t built on grand declarations but on the sly aside - the socially fluent detour that signals you know the rules well enough to bend them. A parenthesis is technically secondary, a whispered clause you could remove without collapsing the sentence. In conversation, that “optional” bit is often the real payload: the hint, the qualification, the dagger wrapped in lace. Chamfort is praising a craft of controlled leakage, where you can smuggle in judgment while maintaining plausible innocence.

The line lands because it treats Society as a performance space with surveillance baked in. In salons and courtly rooms - Chamfort’s natural habitat in pre-Revolutionary France - speech is never just speech. It’s rank management, alliance testing, reputation defense. Parenthetical style becomes a social technology: you can flatter while reserving an escape hatch; you can criticize while keeping your hands clean; you can signal intimacy to one listener while staying readable to the group. The aside creates a second channel, a private frequency inside public talk.

Chamfort’s own reputation as a mordant moralist gives the sentence its cynicism. He’s not celebrating warmth; he’s outlining how power and wit travel when directness is dangerous or gauche. The “greatest secrets” phrasing is knowingly conspiratorial: true eloquence is less about persuasion than about insinuation, the ability to communicate more than you can officially claim. In that sense, the parenthesis isn’t punctuation. It’s deniability with style.