There are two things that one must get used to or one will find life unendurable: the damages of time and injustices of men.

This maxim is associated with Chamfort’s posthumously published moral and political aphorisms, written out of his experience of late–Ancien Régime society and the early French Revolution. Chamfort moved in aristocratic salons yet became increasingly disenchanted with social hypocrisy and the routine cruelties of power. During the revolutionary years he supported reform but also witnessed arbitrary violence and the rapid corrosion of ideals into factional injustice. The thought fits the tone of his late reflections: a hard-earned stoicism that treats physical decline (“time’s damages”) and human unfairness as the two inescapable pressures that must be endured if one is to go on living.

Chamfort frames endurance as a kind of education: to live at all, one must habituate oneself to two inevitabilities. “The damages of time” points to aging, loss, decay, and the slow erosion of hopes and bodies—harms that arrive without malice yet feel like injury. “Injustices of men” names the social counterpart: betrayal, arbitrariness, and the unequal distribution of power and reward. The quote’s severity lies in its implication that happiness is less a stable condition than a practiced resilience. It also carries a moral sting: while time’s injuries are natural, human injustices are chosen, and thus doubly bitter—yet still common enough that refusing to accommodate them makes life “unendurable.”