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Common sense (which, in truth, is very uncommon) is the best sense I know of: abide by it it will counsel you best.

Lord Chesterfield

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Lord Chesterfield
Uncommon
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More quotes by Lord Chesterfield

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Keep your hands clean and pure from the infamous vice of corruption, a vice so infamous that it degrades even the other vices thatmay accompany it. Accept no present whatever let your character in that respect be transparent and without the least speck, for as avarice is the vilest and dirtiest vice in private, corruption is so in public life.
Lord Chesterfield
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Remember that whatever knowledge you do not solidly lay the foundation of before you are eighteen, you will never be master of while you breathe.
Lord Chesterfield
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Speak of the moderns without contempt and of the ancients without idolatry judge them all by their merits, but not by their age
Lord Chesterfield
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A man who cannot command his temper, his attention, and his countenance should not think of being a man of business.
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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
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To me it appears strange that the men against whom I should be enabled to bring an action for laying a little dirt at my door, may with impunity drive by it half-a-dozen calves, with their tails lopped close to their bodies and their hinder parts covered with blood.
Lord Chesterfield
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Few fathers care much for their sons, or at least, most of them care more for their money. Of those who really love their sons, few know how to do it.
Lord Chesterfield
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Should you be unfortunate enough to have vices, you may, to a certain degree, even dignify them by a strict observance of decorumat least they will lose something of their natural turpitude.
Lord Chesterfield
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If you can once engage people's pride, love, pity, ambition on your side, you need not fear what their reason can do against you.
Lord Chesterfield
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When one is at play, one should not think of one's learning.
Lord Chesterfield
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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.
Lord Chesterfield
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I look upon indolence as a sort of suicide.
Lord Chesterfield
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In order to judge of the inside of others, study your own for men in general are very much alike and though one has one prevailing passion, and another has another, yet their operations are much the same and whatever engages or disgusts, pleases or offends you, in others, will, mutatis mutandis, engage, disgust, please, or offend others, in you.
Lord Chesterfield
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Dispatch is the soul of business, and nothing contributes more to dispatch than method.
Lord Chesterfield
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The company of women of fashion will improve your manners, though not your understanding and that complaisance and politeness, which are so useful in men's company, can only be acquired in women's.
Lord Chesterfield
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Compliments of congratulation are always kindly taken, and cost nothing but pen, ink and paper. I consider them as draughts upon good breeding, where the exchange is always greatly in favor of the drawer.
Lord Chesterfield
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You must look into people, as well as at them.
Lord Chesterfield
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Women's beauty, like men's wit, is generally fatal to the owners.
Lord Chesterfield
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I am convinced that a light supper, a good night's sleep, and a fine morning, have sometimes made a hero of the same man, who, by an indigestion, a restless night, and rainy morning, would have proved a coward.
Lord Chesterfield
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I would have all intoleration intolerated in its turn.
Lord Chesterfield