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Good manners are the settled medium of social, as specie is of commercial, life returns are equally expected for both.

Lord Chesterfield

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Lord Chesterfield
Social
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Life
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Equally
Manners
Expected
Specie
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Settled

More quotes by Lord Chesterfield

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Sincerity is the most compendious wisdom.
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If you have an hour, will you not improve that hour, instead of idling it away?
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Indifference is commonly the mother of discretion.
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A wise man will live as much within his wit as within his income.
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If you love music hear it go to operas, concerts, and pay fiddlers to play to you but I insist upon your neither piping nor fiddling yourself. It puts a gentleman in a very frivolous, contemptible light brings him into a great deal of bad company and takes up a great deal of time, which might be much better employed.
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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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The manner of a vulgar man has freedom without ease, and the manner of a gentleman has ease without freedom.
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Women are much more like each other than men: they have, in truth, but two passions, vanity and love these are their universal characteristics.
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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.
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In the case of scandal, as in that of robbery, the receiver is always thought as bad as the thief.
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.
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So much are our minds influenced by the accidents of our bodies, that every man is more the man of the day than a regular and consequential character.
Lord Chesterfield
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Be wiser than other people if you can but do not tell them so.
Lord Chesterfield
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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.
Lord Chesterfield
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Pleasure is the rock which most young people split upon they launch out with crowded sails in quest of it, but without a compassto direct their course, or reason sufficient to steer the vessel for want of which, pain and shame, instead of pleasure, are the returns of their voyage.
Lord Chesterfield
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To take a wife merely as an agreeable and rational companion, will commonly be found to be a grand mistake.
Lord Chesterfield
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The New Year is the season in which custom seems more particularly to authorize civil and harmless lies, under the name of compliments. People reciprocally profess wishes which they seldom form and concern which they seldom feel.
Lord Chesterfield
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The world can doubtless never be well known by theory: practice is absolutely necessary but surely it is of great use to a young man, before he sets out for that country, full of mazes, windings, and turnings, to have at least a general map of it, made by some experienced traveler.
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The power of applying attention, steady and undissipated, to a single object, is the sure mark of superior genius.
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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