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

Lord Chesterfield

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Lord Chesterfield
Hearts
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Though
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Heart
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You must labour to acquire that great and uncommon talent of hating with good breeding, and loving with prudence to make no quarrel irreconcilable by silly and unnecessary indications of anger and no friendship dangerous, in care it breaks, by a wanton, indiscreet, and unreserved confidence.
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One of the greatest difficulties in civil war is, that more art is required to know what should be concealed from our friends, than what ought to be done against our enemies.
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Distrust those who love you extremely upon a slight acquaintance, and without any visible reason.
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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.
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The talent of insinuation is more useful than that of persuasion, as everybody is open to insinuation, but scarce any to persuasion.
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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.
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Real friendship is a slow grower.
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I would have all intoleration intolerated in its turn.
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When a man is once in fashion, all he does is right.
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At any age we must cherish illusions, consolatory or merely pleasant in youth, they are omnipresent in old age we must search for them, or even invent them. But with all that, boredom is their natural and inevitable accompaniment.
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Conscious virtue is the only solid foundation of all happiness for riches, power, rank, or whatever, in the common acceptation ofthe word, is supposed to constitute happiness, will never quiet, much less cure, the inward pangs of guilt.
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It is hard to say which is the greatest fool: he who tells the whole truth, or he who tells no truth at all. Character is as necessary in business as in trade. No man can deceive often in either.
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Indifference is commonly the mother of discretion.
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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.
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Though we cannot totally change our nature, we may in great measure correct it by reflection and philosophy and some philosophy is a very necessary companion in this world, where, even to the most fortunate, the chances are greatly against happiness.
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Do as you would be done by, is the surest method of pleasing.
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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.
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Whatever poets may write, or fools believe, of rural innocence and truth, and of the perfidy of courts, this is most undoubtedly true,--that shepherds and ministers are both men their natures and passions the same, the modes of them only different.
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Always make the best of the best, and never make bad worse.
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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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