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Montesquieu well knew, and justly admired, the happy constitution of this country [Great Britain], where fixed and known laws equally restrain monarchy from tyranny and liberty from licentiousness.

Lord Chesterfield

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Lord Chesterfield
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More quotes by Lord Chesterfield

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Choose your pleasures for yourself, and do not let them be imposed upon you.
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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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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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When a man is once in fashion, all he does is right.
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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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Distrust those who love you extremely upon a slight acquaintance, and without any visible reason.
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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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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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Keep your hands clean and pure from the infamous vice of corruption, a vice so infamous that it degrades even the other vices thatmay accompany it. Accept no present whatever let your character in that respect be transparent and without the least speck, for as avarice is the vilest and dirtiest vice in private, corruption is so in public life.
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In order to judge of the inside of others, study your own for men in general are very much alike and though one has one prevailing passion, and another has another, yet their operations are much the same and whatever engages or disgusts, pleases or offends you, in others, will, mutatis mutandis, engage, disgust, please, or offend others, in you.
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One of the greatest difficulties in civil war is, that more art is required to know what should be concealed from our friends, than what ought to be done against our enemies.
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You must be respectable, if you will be respected.
Lord Chesterfield
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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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An honest man may really love a pretty girl, but only an idiot marries her merely because she is pretty.
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Most arts require long study and application, but the most useful art of all, that of pleasing, requires only the desire.
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Real friendship is a slow grower.
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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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Common sense (which, in truth, is very uncommon) is the best sense I know of: abide by it it will counsel you best.
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When a person is in fashion, all they do is right.
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It is an undoubted truth, that the less one has to do, the less time one finds to do it in. One yawns, one procrastinates, one can do it when one will, and therefore one seldom does it at all.
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