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The talent of insinuation is more useful than that of persuasion, as everybody is open to insinuation, but scarce any to persuasion.

Lord Chesterfield

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Lord Chesterfield
Scarce
Persuasion
Gossip
Propaganda
Useful
Talent
Open
Everybody
Insinuation

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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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Good manners, to those one does not love, are no more a breach of truth, than your humble servant, at the bottom of a challengeis they are universally agreed upon, and understand to be things of course. They are necessary guards of the decency and peace of society.
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A man's own good breeding is the best security against other people's ill 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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Dancing is, in itself, a very trifling and silly thing: but it is one of those established follies to which people of sense are sometimes obliged to conform and then they should be able to do it well. And though I would not have you a dancer, yet, when you do dance, I would have you dance well, as I would have you do everything you do well.
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Nothing convinces persons of a weak understanding so effectually, as what they do not comprehend.
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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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At any age we must cherish illusions, consolatory or merely pleasant in youth, they are omnipresent in old age we must search for them, or even invent them. But with all that, boredom is their natural and inevitable accompaniment.
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There are some occasions in which a man must tell half his secret, in order to conceal the rest: but there is seldom one in which a man should tell it all.
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We are really so prejudiced by our educations, that, as the ancients deified their heroes, we deify their madmen.
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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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Letters should be easy and natural, and convey to the persons to whom we send them just what we should say to the persons if we were with them.
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I really think next to the consciousness of doing a good action, that of doing a civil one is the most pleasing and the epithet which I should covet the most next to that of Aristides, would be that of well-bred.
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An honest man may really love a pretty girl, but only an idiot marries her merely because she is pretty.
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Instead of giving in to the greatest misfortune that can happen at my age, deafness, I busy myself in searching out all possible compensations, and I apply myself much more to all the amusements that are here within my grasp.
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Idleness is only the refuge of weak minds.
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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.
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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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Cottages have them (falsehood and dissimulation) as well as courts, only with worse manners.
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I find, by experience, that the mind and the body are more than married, for they are most intimately united and when one suffers, the other sympathizes.
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