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If you have wit, use it to please and not to hurt: you may shine like the sun in the temperate zones without scorching.

Lord Chesterfield

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Lord Chesterfield
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The company of women of fashion will improve your manners, though not your understanding and that complaisance and politeness, which are so useful in men's company, can only be acquired in women's.
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Loud laughter is the mirth of the mob, who are only pleased with silly things for true Wit or good Sense never excited a laugh since the creation of the world. A man of parts and fashion is therefore often seen to smile, but never heard to laugh.
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Sexual intercourse is a grossly overrated pastime the position is undignified, the pleasure momentary and the consequences damnable.
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In your friendships and in your enmities let your confidence and your hostilities have certain bounds make not the former dangerous, nor the latter irreconcilable. There are strange vicissitudes in business.
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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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If you have an hour, will you not improve that hour, instead of idling it away?
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Violent measures are always dangerous, but, when necessary, may then be looked on as wise. They have, however, the advantage of never being matter of indifference and, when well concerted, must be decisive.
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History is but a confused heap of facts.
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Knowledge of the world in only to be acquired in the world, and not in a closet.
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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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Common sense (which, in truth, is very uncommon) is the best sense I know of: abide by it it will counsel you best.
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Armies, though always the supporters and tools of absolute power for the time being, are always the destroyers of it too by frequently changing the hands in which they think proper to lodge it.
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Smooth your way to the head through the heart. The way of reason is a good one: but it is commonly something longer, and perhapsnot so sure.
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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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The value of moments, when cast up, is immense, if well employed if thrown away, their loss is irrecoverable.
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It is to be presumed, that a man of common sense, who does not desire to please, desires nothing at all since he must know that he cannot obtain anything without it.
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You should not only have attention to everything, but a quickness of attention, so as to observe at once all the people in the room--their motions, their looks and their words--and yet without staring at them and seeming to be an observer.
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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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Our self-love is mortified, when we think our opinions, and even our tastes, customs, and dresses, either arraigned or condemnedas, on the contrary, it is tickled and flattered by approbation.
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Keep your own secret, and get out other people's. Keep your own temper, and artfully warm other people's. Counterwork your rivalswith diligence and dexterity, but at the same time with the utmost personal civility to them: and be firm without heat.
Lord Chesterfield