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Many new years you may see, but happy ones you cannot see without deserving them. These virtue, honor, and knowledge alone can merit, alone can produce.

Lord Chesterfield

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Lord Chesterfield
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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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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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I am very sure that any man of common understanding may, by culture, care, attention, and labor, make himself what- ever he pleases, except a great poet.
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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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I wish... that you had as much pleasure in following my advice, as I have in giving it.
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Though we cannot totally change our nature, we may in great measure correct it by reflection and philosophy and some philosophy is a very necessary companion in this world, where, even to the most fortunate, the chances are greatly against happiness.
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Ceremony is necessary in Courts, as the outwork and defense of manners.
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In friendship, as well as in love, the mind is often the dupe of the heart.
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Nothing convinces persons of a weak understanding so effectually, as what they do not comprehend.
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Young men are as apt to think themselves wise enough, as drunken men are to think themselves sober enough. They look upon spirit to be a much better thing than experience which they call coldness. They are but half mistaken for though spirit without experience is dangerous, experience without spirit is languid and ineffective.
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Assurance and intrepidity, under the white banner of seeming modesty, clear the way for merit, that would otherwise be discouraged by difficulties...
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I can hardly bring myself to caution you against drinking, because I am persuaded that I am writing to a rational creature, a gentleman, and not to a swine. However, that you may not be insensibly drawn into that beastly custom of even sober drinking and sipping, as the sots call it, I advise you to be of no club whatsoever.
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Politicians neither love nor hate. Interest, not sentiment, directs them.
Lord Chesterfield
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A gentleman has ease without familiarity, is respectful without meanness genteel without affectation, insinuating without seeming art.
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Endeavor, as much as you can, to keep company with people above you.... Do not mistake, when I say company above you, and think that I mean with regard to their birth that is the least consideration but I mean with regard to their merit, and the light in which the world considers them.
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If originally it was not good for a man to be alone, it is much worse for a sick man to be so he thinks too much of his distemper, and magnifies it.
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Many people come into company full of what they intend to say in it themselves, without the least regard to others and thus charged up to the muzzle are resolved to let it off at any rate.
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A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.
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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.
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Our own self-love draws a thick veil between us and our faults.
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