Society is composed of two great classes — those who have more dinners than appetite, and those who have more appetite than dinners.

Chamfort (1741–1794), a French moralist and master of the aphorism, wrote many of his sharpest observations in the years surrounding the French Revolution, when questions of privilege, hunger, and social justice were violently foregrounded. Moving between aristocratic salons and revolutionary circles, he became known for epigrams that reduce complex social arrangements to biting, memorable contrasts. This line reflects the late–Ancien Régime reality of conspicuous elite dining alongside widespread scarcity, and it fits the tone of Chamfort’s posthumously collected maxims—brief, satirical judgments on inequality, hypocrisy, and the moral psychology of wealth and need.

The aphorism divides society into the overprovided and the underprovided: those with surplus consumption (“more dinners than appetite”) and those with unmet need (“more appetite than dinners”). By choosing “dinners” and “appetite,” Chamfort makes inequality visceral and everyday rather than abstract—class difference is felt at the table and in the body. The symmetry of the phrasing implies a structural imbalance: excess on one side corresponds to deprivation on the other. The wit also carries moral sting, suggesting that social order is less a harmonious hierarchy than a misallocation of basic goods, and that refinement and abundance can coexist with, and even depend upon, hunger elsewhere.