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Be your character what it will, it will be known, and nobody will take it upon your word.

Lord Chesterfield

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Lord Chesterfield
Nobody
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Known
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More quotes by Lord Chesterfield

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I heartily wish you, in the plain home-spun style, a great number of happy new years, well employed in forming both your mind andyour manners, to be useful and agreeable to yourself, your country, and your friends.
Lord Chesterfield
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Give Dayrolles a chair.
Lord Chesterfield
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Pleasure is a necessary reciprocal. No one feels, who does not at the same time give it. To be pleased, one must please. What pleases you in others, will in general please them in you.
Lord Chesterfield
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Pocket all your knowledge with your watch, and never pull it out in company unless desired.
Lord Chesterfield
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A gentleman has ease without familiarity, is respectful without meanness genteel without affectation, insinuating without seeming art.
Lord Chesterfield
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An honest man may really love a pretty girl, but only an idiot marries her merely because she is pretty.
Lord Chesterfield
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Few people do business well, who do nothing else.
Lord Chesterfield
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No man can possibly improve in any company for which he has not respect enough to be under some degree of restraint.
Lord Chesterfield
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How often should a woman be pregnant? Continually, or hardly ever? Or must there be a certain number of pregnancy anniversaries established by fashion? What do you, at the age of forty-three, have to say on the subject? Is it a fact that the laws of nature, or of the country, or of propriety, have ordained this time of life for sterility?
Lord Chesterfield
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Nothing sharpens the arrow of sarcasm so keenly as the courtesy that polishes it no reproach is like that we clothe with a smile and present with a bow.
Lord Chesterfield
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The insolent civility of a proud man is, if possible, more shocking than his rudeness could be because he shows you, by his manner, that he thinks it mere condescension in him and that his goodness alone bestows upon you what you have no pretense to claim.
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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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
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Politicians neither love nor hate. Interest, not sentiment, directs them.
Lord Chesterfield
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Men will not believe because they will not broaden their minds.
Lord Chesterfield
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The heart never grows better by age I fear rather worse, always harder. A young liar will be an old one, and a young knave will only be a greater knave as he grows older.
Lord Chesterfield
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A certain degree of ceremony is a necessary outwork of manners, as well as of religion it keeps the forward and petulant at a proper distance, and is a very small restraint to the sensible and to the well-bred part of the world.
Lord Chesterfield
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There is hardly any place or any company where you may not gain knowledge, if you please almost everybody knows some one thing, and is glad to talk about that one thing.
Lord Chesterfield
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We are really so prejudiced by our educations, that, as the ancients deified their heroes, we deify their madmen.
Lord Chesterfield
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I really think next to the consciousness of doing a good action, that of doing a civil one is the most pleasing and the epithet which I should covet the most next to that of Aristides, would be that of well-bred.
Lord Chesterfield