Lord Chesterfield Quotes

Wise people may say what they will, but one passion is never cured by another.

When one is at play, one should not think of one's learning.

A gentleman has ease without familiarity, is respectful without meanness; genteel without affectation, insinuating without seeming art.

It is by vivacity and wit that man shines in company; but trite jokes and loud laughter reduce him to a buffoon.

Either a good or a bad reputation outruns and gets before people wherever they go.

Sexual intercourse is a grossly overrated pastime; the position is undignified, the pleasure momentary and the consequences damnable.

There are some occasions in which a man must tell half his secret, in order to conceal the rest: but there is seldom one in which a man should tell it all.

Little secrets are commonly told again, but great ones generally kept.

If you will please people, you must please them in their own way; and as you cannot make them what they should be, you must take them as they are.

Good-breeding carries along with it a dignity that is respected by the most petulant. Ill-breeding invites and authorizes the familiarity of the most timid.

Letters should be easy and natural, and convey to the persons to whom we send them just what we should say to the persons if we were with them.

The greatest powers cannot injure a man's character whose reputation is unblemished among his party.

Give Dayrolles a chair.

Sincerity is the most compendious wisdom.

So much are our minds influenced by the accidents of our bodies, that every man is more the man of the day than a regular and consequential character.

To govern mankind, one must not overrate them.

Statesmen and beauties are very rarely sensible of the gradations of their decay.

In nature the most violent passions are silent; in tragedy they must speak and speak with dignity too.

The most ignorant are the boldest conjecturers.

A gentleman is often seen, but very seldom heard to laugh.

Two people cannot be alone together for upwards of half an hour without one emerging as the superior.

Study the heart and the mind of man, and begin with your own. Meditation and reflection must lay the foundation of that knowledge, but experience and practice must, and alone can, complete it.

It must be owned, that the Graces do not seem to be natives of Great Britain; and I doubt, the best of us here have more of rough than polished diamond.

Those whom you can make like themselves better will, I promise you, like you very well.

Give nobly to indigent merit, and do not refuse your charity even to those who have not merit but their misery.

I do not think that a Physician should be admitted into the College till he could bring proofs of his having cured, in his own person, at least four incurable distempers.

When griefs are genuine, I find, there is nothing more vacuous, more burdensome, or even more impertinent, than letters of consolation.

Montesquieu well knew, and justly admired, the happy constitution of this country [Great Britain], where fixed and known laws equally restrain monarchy from tyranny and liberty from licentiousness.

Cardinal Mazarin was a great knave, but no great man; much more cunning than able; scandalously false and dirtily greedy.

Do as you would be done by, is the surest method of pleasing.

Many new years you may see, but happy ones you cannot see without deserving them. These virtue, honor, and knowledge alone can merit, alone can produce.

There never were, since the creation of the world, two cases exactly parallel.

An ignorant man is insignificant and contemptible; nobody cares for his company, and he can just be said to live, and that is all.

If you will please people, you must please them in their own way.

A man who tells nothing, or who tells all, will equally have nothing told him.

The nation looked upon him as a deserter, and he shrunk into insignificancy and an earldom.

I wish... that you had as much pleasure in following my advice, as I have in giving it.

The heart has such an influence over the understanding, that it is worth while to engage it in our interest.

Unlike my subject will I frame my song, It shall be witty and it shan't be long.

Honest error is to be pitied not ridiculed.

True politeness is perfect ease and freedom. It simply consists in treating others just as you love to be treated yourself.

Indifference is commonly the mother of discretion.

Dispatch is the soul of business, and nothing contributes more to dispatch than method.

In friendship, as well as in love, the mind is often the dupe of the heart.

To write anything tolerable, the mind must be in a natural, proper disposition; provocatives, in that case, as well as in another,will only produce miserable, abortive performances.

Our conjectures pass upon us for truths; we will know what we do not know, and often, what we cannot know: so mortifying to our pride is the base suspicion of ignorance.

It seems to me that physical sickness softens, just as moral sickness hardens, the heart.

Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial.

I would have all intoleration intolerated in its turn.

Merit and knowledge will not gain hearts, though they will secure them when gained.