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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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Lord Chesterfield
Every
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Real friendship is a slow grower.
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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.
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Absolute power can only be supported by error, ignorance and prejudice.
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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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In friendship, as well as in love, the mind is often the dupe of the heart.
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There is hardly any place or any company where you may not gain knowledge, if you please almost everybody knows some one thing, and is glad to talk about that one thing.
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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.
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No woman ever yet either reasoned or acted long together consequentially but some little thing, some love, some resentment, somepresent momentary interest, some supposed slight, or some humour, always breaks in upon, and oversets their most prudent resolutions and schemes.
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If you are not in fashion, you are nobody.
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Wise people may say what they will, but one passion is never cured by another.
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Whatever poets may write, or fools believe, of rural innocence and truth, and of the perfidy of courts, this is most undoubtedly true,--that shepherds and ministers are both men their natures and passions the same, the modes of them only different.
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Silence and reserve suggest latent power. What some men think has more effect than what others say.
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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.
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People hate those who make them feel their own inferiority.
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A cheerful, easy, open countenance will make fools think you a good-natured man, and make designing men think you an undesigning one.
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The possibility of remedying imprudent actions is commonly an inducement to commit them.
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It must be owned, that the Graces do not seem to be natives of Great Britain and I doubt, the best of us here have more of rough than polished diamond.
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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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Health ... is the first and greatest of all blessings.
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Everything is worth seeing once, and the more one sees the less one either wonders or admires.
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