Lord Chesterfield
If you will please people, you must please them in their own way.Collection: People
A wise man will live as much within his wit as his income.... Bear this truth always in your mind, that you may be admired for your wit, if you have any; but that nothing but good sense and good qualities can make you be loved.Collection: Wise
A man who tells nothing, or who tells all, will equally have nothing told him.Collection: Equality
I wish... that you had as much pleasure in following my advice, as I have in giving it.Collection: Giving
Fear manifested invites danger.Collection: Anticipation
Keep your own secret, and get out other people's. Keep your own temper, and artfully warm other people's. Counterwork your rivalswith diligence and dexterity, but at the same time with the utmost personal civility to them: and be firm without heat.Collection: People
The only sure way of avoiding these evils [vanity and boasting] is never to speak of yourself at all. But when, historically, youare obliged to mention yourself, take care not to drop one single word that can directly or indirectly be construed as fishing for applause.Collection: Vanity
I am provoked at the contempt which most historians show for humanity in general; one would think by them, that the whole human species consisted but of about a hundred and fifty people, called and dignified (commonly very undeservedly too) by the titles of Emperors, Kings, Popes, Generals, and Ministers.Collection: Kings
Horse-play, romping, frequent and loud fits of laughter, jokes, and indiscriminate familiarity, will sink both merit and knowledge into a degree of contempt. They compose at most a merry fellow; and a merry fellow was never yet a respectable man.Collection: Horse
Six, or at most seven, hours' sleep is, for a constancy, as much as you or anybody else can want; more is only laziness and dozing, and is, I am persuaded, both unwholesome and stupefying.Collection: Sleep
It is an undoubted truth, that the less one has to do, the less time one finds to do it in. One yawns, one procrastinates, one can do it when one will, and therefore one seldom does it at all.Collection: Doe
Many young people adopt pleasures for which they have not the least taste, only because they are called by that name.... You mustallow that drunkenness, which is equally destructive to body and mind, is a fine pleasure. Gaming, that draws you into a thousand scraps, leaves you penniless, and gives you the air and manners of an outrageous madman, is another most exquisite pleasure, is it not? As to running after women, the consequences of that vice are only the loss of one's nose, the total destruction of health, and, not unfrequently, the being run through the body.Collection: Running
The great, the rich, the powerful, too often bestow their favours upon their inferiors in the manner they bestow their scraps upontheir dogs, so as neither to oblige man nor dogs. It is no wonder if favours, benefits, and even charities thus bestowed ungraciously, should be as coldly and faintly acknowledged.Collection: Gratitude
Violent measures are always dangerous, but, when necessary, may then be looked on as wise. They have, however, the advantage of never being matter of indifference; and, when well concerted, must be decisive.Collection: Wise
People hate who makes you feel one's inferiority.Collection: Hate
Every man is to be had one way or another and every woman almost anyway.Collection: Men
Human nature is the same everywhere; the modes only are different.Collection: Different
Buy good books, and read them; the best books are the commonest, and the last editions are always the best, if the editors are not blockheads.Collection: Book
The scholar without good breeding is a pedant; the philosopher, a cynic.Collection: Philosophy
The permanency of most friendships depends upon the continuity of good fortune.Collection: Friendship
It seems to me that physical sickness softens, just as moral sickness hardens, the heart.Collection: Heart
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.Collection: Heart
Not to care for philosophy is to be a true philospher.Collection: Wise
History is but a confused heap of facts.Collection: Confused
He adorned whatever subject he either spoke or wrote upon, by the most splendid eloquence.Collection: Inspirational
The heart has such an influence over the understanding, that it is worth while to engage it in our interest.Collection: Heart
Unlike my subject will I frame my song, It shall be witty and it shan't be long.Collection: Witty
Arbitrary power has seldom... been introduced in any country at once. It must be introduced by slow degrees, and as it were step by step.Collection: Country
I always put these pert jackanapeses out of countenance by looking extremely grave when they expect that I should laugh at their pleasantries; and by saying Well, and so?--as if they had not done, and that the sting were still to come. This disconcerts them, as they have no resources in themselves, and have but one set of jokes to live upon.Collection: Laughing
The vulgar only laugh, but never smile; whereas well-bred people often smile, but seldom laugh.Collection: Laughter
You must embrace the man you hate, if you cannot be justified in knocking him down.Collection: Hate
I often wish for the end of the wretched remnant of my life; and that wish is a rational one; but then the innate principle of self-preservation, wisely implanted in our natures, for obvious purposes, opposes that wish, and makes us endeavour to spin out our thread as long as we can, however decayed and rotten it may be.Collection: Death
Next to doing things that deserve to be written, nothing gets a man more credit, or gives him more pleasure than to write things that deserve to be read.Collection: Writing
The receipt to make a speaker, and an applauded one too, is short and easy. Take common sense quantum sufficit; add a little application to the rules and orders of the House [of Commons], throw obvious thoughts in a new light, and make up the whole with a large quantity of purity, correctness and elegancy of style. Take it for granted that by far the greatest part of mankind neither analyze nor search to the bottom; they are incapable of penetrating deeper than the surface.Collection: Order
We are really so prejudiced by our educations, that, as the ancients deified their heroes, we deify their madmen.Collection: Hero
Dispatch is the soul of business.Collection: Business
Indifference is commonly the mother of discretion.Collection: Mother
Give nobly to indigent merit, and do not refuse your charity even to those who have not merit but their misery.Collection: Giving
The vulgar look upon a man, who is reckoned a fine speaker, as a phenomenon, a supernatural being, and endowed with some peculiargift of Heaven; they stare at him, if he walks in the park, and cry, that is he. You will, I am sure, view him in a juster light, and nulla formidine. You will consider him only as a man of good sense, who adorns common thoughts with the graces of elocution, and the elegancy of style. The miracle will then cease.Collection: Men
Let this be one invariable rule of your conduct--never to show the least symptom of resentment, which you cannot, to a certain degree, gratify; but always to smile, where you cannot strike.Collection: Smile
Gratitude is a burden upon our imperfect nature.Collection: Gratitude
The manner of a vulgar man has freedom without ease, and the manner of a gentleman has ease without freedom.Collection: Men
We are hardly ever grateful for a fine clock or watch when it goes right, and we pay attention to it only when it falters, for then we are caught by surprise. It ought to be the other way about.Collection: Gratitude
Virtue and learning, like gold, have their intrinsic value: but if they are not polished, they certainly lose a great deal of their luster: and even polished brass will pass upon more people than rough gold.Collection: Inspirational Life
Learn to shrink yourself to the size of the company you are in. Take their tone, whatever it may be, and excell in it if you can;but never pretend to give the tone. A free conversation will no more bear a dictator than a free government will.Collection: Government
A young fellow ought to be wiser than he should seem to be; and an old fellow ought to seem wise whether he really be so or not.Collection: Wise
Women who are either indisputably beautiful, or indisputably ugly, are best flattered upon the score of their understandings.Collection: Beautiful
Women have, in general, but ne object, which is their beauty; upon which, scarce any flattery is too gross for them to swallow.Collection: Beauty
Women are much more like each other than men: they have, in truth, but two passions, vanity and love; these are their universal characteristics.Collection: Passion