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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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Lord Chesterfield
Judging
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More quotes by Lord Chesterfield

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Montesquieu well knew, and justly admired, the happy constitution of this country [Great Britain], where fixed and known laws equally restrain monarchy from tyranny and liberty from licentiousness.
Lord Chesterfield
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Most maxim-mongers have preferred the prettiness to the justness of a thought, and the turn to the truth but I have refused myself to everything that my own experience did not justify and confirm.
Lord Chesterfield
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People hate who makes you feel one's inferiority.
Lord Chesterfield
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There is a sort of veteran women of condition, who, having lived always in the grand mode, and having possibly had some gallantries, together with the experience of five and twenty or thirty years, form a young fellow better than all the rules that can be given him.
Lord Chesterfield
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Women who are either indisputably beautiful, or indisputably ugly, are best flattered upon the score of their understandings.
Lord Chesterfield
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A wise man will live as much within his wit as within his income.
Lord Chesterfield
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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.
Lord Chesterfield
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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.
Lord Chesterfield
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Half the business is done, when one has gained the heart and the affections of those with whom one is to transact it.
Lord Chesterfield
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Always make the best of the best, and never make bad worse.
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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Real friendship is a slow grower.
Lord Chesterfield
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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
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I really know nothing more criminal, more mean, and more ridiculous than lying. It is the production either of malice, cowardice, or vanity and generally misses of its aim in every one of these views for lies are always detected, sooner or later.
Lord Chesterfield
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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
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Men have various subjects in which they may excel, or at least would be thought to excel, and though they love to hear justice done to them where they know they excel, yet they are most and best flattered upon those points where they wish to excel and yet are doubtful whether they do or not.
Lord Chesterfield
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Human nature is the same everywhere the modes only are different.
Lord Chesterfield
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If you have an hour, will you not improve that hour, instead of idling it away?
Lord Chesterfield
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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.
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