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The greatest dangers have their allurements, if the want of success is likely to be attended with a degree of glory. Middling dangers are horrid, when the loss of reputation is the inevitable consequence of ill success.

Lord Chesterfield

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Lord Chesterfield
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I would have all intoleration intolerated in its turn.
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Talk often, but never long in that case, if you do not please, at least you are sure not to tire your hearers. Pay your own reckoning, but do not treat the whole company this being one of the few cases in which people do not care to be treated, every one being fully convinced that he has wherewithal to pay.
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Do as you would be done by, is the surest method of pleasing.
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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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Dispatch is the soul of business, and nothing contributes more to dispatch than method.
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Merit and knowledge will not gain hearts, though they will secure them when gained.
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Never write down your speeches beforehand if you do, you may perhaps be a good declaimer, but will never be a debater.
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Style is the dress of thoughts, and let them be ever so just.
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Nothing sharpens the arrow of sarcasm so keenly as the courtesy that polishes it no reproach is like that we clothe with a smile and present with a bow.
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Men have various subjects in which they may excel, or at least would be thought to excel, and though they love to hear justice done to them where they know they excel, yet they are most and best flattered upon those points where they wish to excel and yet are doubtful whether they do or not.
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People hate those who make them feel their own inferiority.
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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.
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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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Learn to shrink yourself to the size of the company you are in. Take their tone, whatever it may be, and excell in it if you canbut never pretend to give the tone. A free conversation will no more bear a dictator than a free government will.
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Silence and reserve suggest latent power. What some men think has more effect than what others say.
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Few fathers care much for their sons, or at least, most of them care more for their money. Of those who really love their sons, few know how to do it.
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The possibility of remedying imprudent actions is commonly an inducement to commit 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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Knowledge of the world in only to be acquired in the world, and not in a closet.
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There are people who indulge themselves in a sort of lying, which they reckon innocent, and which in one sense is so for it hurtsnobody but themselves. This sort of lying is the spurious offspring of vanity, begotten upon folly.
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