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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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Lord Chesterfield
Ease
Genteel
Art
Affectation
Without
Meanness
Familiarity
Seeming
Respectful
Gentleman
Manners
Insinuating

More quotes by Lord Chesterfield

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Horse-play, romping, frequent and loud fits of laughter, jokes, and indiscriminate familiarity, will sink both merit and knowledge into a degree of contempt. They compose at most a merry fellow and a merry fellow was never yet a respectable man.
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Choose your pleasures for yourself, and do not let them be imposed upon you.
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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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There is a sort of veteran women of condition, who, having lived always in the grand mode, and having possibly had some gallantries, together with the experience of five and twenty or thirty years, form a young fellow better than all the rules that can be given him.
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There is hardly anybody good for everything, and there is scarcely anybody who is absolutely good for nothing.
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One of the greatest difficulties in civil war is, that more art is required to know what should be concealed from our friends, than what ought to be done against our enemies.
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The permanency of most friendships depends upon the continuity of good fortune.
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Politicians neither love nor hate. Interest, not sentiment, directs them.
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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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If you have wit, use it to please and not to hurt: you may shine like the sun in the temperate zones without scorching.
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Sincerity w the most compendious wisdom, an excellent instrument for the speedy despatch of business. It creates confidence in those we have to deal with, saves the labor of many inquiries, and brings things to an issue in few words.
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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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Cottages have them (falsehood and dissimulation) as well as courts, only with worse manners.
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It is by vivacity and wit that man shines in company but trite jokes and loud laughter reduce him to a buffoon.
Lord Chesterfield
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Prepare yourself for the world, as athletes used to do for their exercises oil your mind and your manners, to give them the necessary suppleness and flexibility strength alone will not do.
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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.
Lord Chesterfield
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A man who cannot command his temper, his attention, and his countenance should not think of being a man of business.
Lord Chesterfield
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Do as you would be done by, is the surest method of pleasing.
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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