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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

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Lord Chesterfield
Character
Trade
Whole
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Men
Greatest
Either
Often
Deceive
Business
Deceiving
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Let them show me a cottage where there are not the same vices of which they accuse the courts.
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I really know nothing more criminal, more mean, and more ridiculous than lying. It is the production either of malice, cowardice, or vanity and generally misses of its aim in every one of these views for lies are always detected, sooner or later.
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Real friendship is a slow grower.
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To me it appears strange that the men against whom I should be enabled to bring an action for laying a little dirt at my door, may with impunity drive by it half-a-dozen calves, with their tails lopped close to their bodies and their hinder parts covered with blood.
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Learning is acquired by reading books much more necessary learning, the knowledge of the world, is only to be acquired by reading men, and studying all the various editions of them.
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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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If you will please people, you must please them in their own way and as you cannot make them what they should be, you must take them as they are.
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Women who are either indisputably beautiful, or indisputably ugly, are best flattered upon the score of their understandings.
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Do as you would be done by, is the surest method of pleasing.
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I sometimes give myself admirable advice, but I am incapable of taking it.
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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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An injury is much sooner forgotten than an insult.
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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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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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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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The manner of a vulgar man has freedom without ease, and the manner of a gentleman has ease without freedom.
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Whoever is in a hurry shows that the thing he is about is too big for him.
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Our conjectures pass upon us for truths we will know what we do not know, and often, what we cannot know: so mortifying to our pride is the base suspicion of ignorance.
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