Quote

Never seem wiser, nor more learned, than the people you are with. Wear your learning, like your watch, in a private pocket: and do not merely pull it out and strike it merely to show that you have one.

Lord Chesterfield

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Lord Chesterfield
Seems
Wear
Pocket
Never
Watches
Strike
Like
Watch
Wiser
People
Seem
Pockets
Learned
Pull
Learning
Strikes
Show
Private
Shows
Merely

More quotes by Lord Chesterfield

Image
Ceremony is necessary in Courts, as the outwork and defense of manners.
Lord Chesterfield
Image
Sincerity is the most compendious wisdom.
Lord Chesterfield
Image
We are really so prejudiced by our educations, that, as the ancients deified their heroes, we deify their madmen.
Lord Chesterfield
Image
Modesty is the only sure bait when you angle for praise.
Lord Chesterfield
Image
Good manners are the settled medium of social, as specie is of commercial, life returns are equally expected for both.
Lord Chesterfield
Image
If a man, notoriously and designedly, insults and affronts you, knock him down but if he only injures you, your best revenge is to be extremely civil to him in your outward behaviour, though at the same time you counterwork him, and return him the compliment, perhaps with interest.
Lord Chesterfield
Image
Almost all men are born with every passion to some extent, but there is hardly a man who has not a dominant passion to which the others are subordinate. Discover this governing passion in every individual and when you have found the master passion of a man, remember never to trust to him where that passion is concerned.
Lord Chesterfield
Image
The talent of insinuation is more useful than that of persuasion, as everybody is open to insinuation, but scarce any to persuasion.
Lord Chesterfield
Image
If originally it was not good for a man to be alone, it is much worse for a sick man to be so he thinks too much of his distemper, and magnifies it.
Lord Chesterfield
Image
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.
Lord Chesterfield
Image
In your friendships and in your enmities let your confidence and your hostilities have certain bounds make not the former dangerous, nor the latter irreconcilable. There are strange vicissitudes in business.
Lord Chesterfield
Image
Instead of giving in to the greatest misfortune that can happen at my age, deafness, I busy myself in searching out all possible compensations, and I apply myself much more to all the amusements that are here within my grasp.
Lord Chesterfield
Image
Young men are as apt to think themselves wise enough, as drunken men are to think themselves sober enough. They look upon spirit to be a much better thing than experience which they call coldness. They are but half mistaken for though spirit without experience is dangerous, experience without spirit is languid and ineffective.
Lord Chesterfield
Image
A man's own good breeding is the best security against other people's ill manners.
Lord Chesterfield
Image
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.
Lord Chesterfield
Image
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.
Lord Chesterfield
Image
Human nature is the same everywhere the modes only are different.
Lord Chesterfield
Image
Deserve a great deal, and you shall have a great deal deserve little, and you shall have but a little and be good for nothing atall, and I assure you, you shall have nothing at all.
Lord Chesterfield
Image
Next to clothes being fine, they should be well made, and worn easily for a man is only the less genteel for a fine coat, if, in wearing it, he shows a regard for it, and is not as easy in it as if it was a plain one.
Lord Chesterfield
Image
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.
Lord Chesterfield