All passions exaggerate; and they are passions only because they do exaggerate.

Sébastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort (1741–1794) was a French moralist and aphorist whose sharp maxims circulated in salons and, later, amid the upheavals of the French Revolution. The line belongs to the tradition of French “moralistes” (La Rochefoucauld, Pascal), who anatomized self-interest, vanity, and the distortions of feeling. Chamfort’s observations were largely composed as brief notes and epigrams rather than as parts of sustained treatises, and many were published posthumously from his papers. The remark reflects an Enlightenment-inflected skepticism about the reliability of emotion and the way intense feeling reshapes perception and judgment.

Chamfort suggests that passion is not merely a strong feeling but a cognitive force that warps proportion. To be “in” a passion is to see its object enlarged—desire magnifies pleasure, jealousy magnifies threats, anger magnifies offenses, fear magnifies dangers. The exaggeration is not an accidental side effect; it is what makes the state a passion rather than a calm preference or rational assessment. The aphorism therefore doubles as a warning about judgment: when we are most certain—because we feel most intensely—we are also most likely to mismeasure reality. It implies that lucidity requires distance from the heat of emotion.