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The best way to compel weak-minded people to adopt our opinion, is to frighten them from all others, by magnifying their danger.

Lord Chesterfield

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Lord Chesterfield
Others
Compel
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Virtue and learning, like gold, have their intrinsic value: but if they are not polished, they certainly lose a great deal of their luster: and even polished brass will pass upon more people than rough gold.
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Remember that the wit, humour, and jokes of most mixed companies are local. They thrive in that particular soil, but will not often bear transplanting.
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There will never be a better time to start quitting smoking than today
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You must be respectable, if you will be respected.
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Pleasure is the rock which most young people split upon they launch out with crowded sails in quest of it, but without a compassto direct their course, or reason sufficient to steer the vessel for want of which, pain and shame, instead of pleasure, are the returns of their voyage.
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You should not only have attention to everything, but a quickness of attention, so as to observe at once all the people in the room--their motions, their looks and their words--and yet without staring at them and seeming to be an observer.
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The insolent civility of a proud man is, if possible, more shocking than his rudeness could be because he shows you, by his manner, that he thinks it mere condescension in him and that his goodness alone bestows upon you what you have no pretense to claim.
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In my mind, there is nothing so illiberal, and so ill-bred, as audible laughter.
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Singularity is only pardonable in old age and retirement I may now be as singular as I please, but you may not.
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It seems to me that physical sickness softens, just as moral sickness hardens, the heart.
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Let your letter be written as accurately as you are able,--I mean with regard to language, grammar, and stops for as to the matter of it the less trouble you give yourself the better it will be. 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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Women's beauty, like men's wit, is generally fatal to the owners.
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Women are much more like each other than men: they have, in truth, but two passions, vanity and love these are their universal characteristics.
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I would have all intoleration intolerated in its turn.
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Half the business is done, when one has gained the heart and the affections of those with whom one is to transact it.
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Style is the dress of thoughts, and let them be ever so just.
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Most maxim-mongers have preferred the prettiness to the justness of a thought, and the turn to the truth but I have refused myself to everything that my own experience did not justify and confirm.
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For my own part, I would rather be in company with a dead man than with an absent one for if the dead man gives me no pleasure, at least he shows me no contempt whereas the absent one, silently indeed, but very plainly, tells me that he does not think me worth his attention.
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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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