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Observe any meetings of people, and you will always find their eagerness and impetuosity rise or fall in proportion to their numbers.

Lord Chesterfield

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Lord Chesterfield
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I always put these pert jackanapeses out of countenance by looking extremely grave when they expect that I should laugh at their pleasantries and by saying Well, and so?--as if they had not done, and that the sting were still to come. This disconcerts them, as they have no resources in themselves, and have but one set of jokes to live upon.
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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.
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Not to care for philosophy is to be a true philospher.
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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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One should always think of what one is about when one is learning, one should not think of play and when one is at play, one should not think of learning.
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People will no more advance their civility to a bear, than their money to a bankrupt.
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Do as you would be done by, is the surest method of pleasing.
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Since attaining the full use of my reason no one has ever heard me laugh.
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Nothing convinces persons of a weak understanding so effectually, as what they do not comprehend.
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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.
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