Sébastien Nicolas de Chamfort (1741-1794) was hailed by Friedrich Nietzsche as "the wittiest of all moralists ... a man who was rich in depths and backgrounds of the soul-gloomy, suffering, ardent-a thinker who needed laughter as a remedy against life and who almost considered himself lost on every day on which he had not laughed. " His collected Maxims and Considerations rank among the greatest books of aphorisms, alongside La Rochefoucauld. This superb translation by E. Powys Mathers, first published as two separate volumes in 1926, is now available again.