In seeing or suffering the pain associated with extreme emotions, in love or in friendship, whether it results from the death of someone you love or from accidents in life, one is tempted to believe that dissipation and frivolity are not quite so foolish, and that life is hardly worth more than what regular people make of it.
“I do not think altogether the worse of a book for having survived the author a generation or two. I have more confidence in the dead than the living.” — Hazlitt
6 February 2012
Not Quite So Foolish
Sébastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort, Oeuvres complètes de Chamfort, Vol. I (Paris: Chaumerot Jeune, 1824), p. 405. My own translation from the French: