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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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Lord Chesterfield
Truth
Preferred
Everything
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Prettiness
Experience
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Assurance and intrepidity, under the white banner of seeming modesty, clear the way for merit, that would otherwise be discouraged by difficulties...
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In friendship, as well as in love, the mind is often the dupe of the heart.
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Wear your knowledge like your watch - in you pocket - and don't pull it out just for show.
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The best way to compel weak-minded people to adopt our opinion, is to frighten them from all others, by magnifying their danger.
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Let your letter be written as accurately as you are able,--I mean with regard to language, grammar, and stops for as to the matter of it the less trouble you give yourself the better it will be. 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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Knowledge may give weight, but accomplishments give luster, and many more people see than weigh.
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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
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Good humor is the health of the soul, sadness is its poison.
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The difference between a man of sense and a fop is that the fop values himself upon his dress and the man of sense laughs at it, at the same time he knows he must not neglect it.
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If you are not in fashion, you are nobody.
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Whenever a man seeks your advice he generally seeks your praise.
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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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Love has been not unaptly compared to the small-pox, which most people have sooner or later.
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Good breeding and good nature do incline us rather to help and raise people up to ourselves, than to mortify and depress them, and, in truth, our own private interest concurs in it, as it is making ourselves so many friends, instead of so many enemies.
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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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Most arts require long study and application, but the most useful art of all, that of pleasing, requires only the desire.
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Take rather than give the tone to the company you are in. If you have parts you will show them more or less upon every subject and if you have not, you had better talk sillily upon a subject of other people's than of your own choosing.
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Physical ills are the taxes laid upon this wretched life some are taxed higher, and some lower, but all pay something.
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We are hardly ever grateful for a fine clock or watch when it goes right, and we pay attention to it only when it falters, for then we are caught by surprise. It ought to be the other way about.
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Let them show me a cottage where there are not the same vices of which they accuse the courts.
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