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The New Year is the season in which custom seems more particularly to authorize civil and harmless lies, under the name of compliments. People reciprocally profess wishes which they seldom form and concern which they seldom feel.

Lord Chesterfield

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I am convinced that a light supper, a good night's sleep, and a fine morning, have sometimes made a hero of the same man, who, by an indigestion, a restless night, and rainy morning, would have proved a coward.
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Swift speedy time, feathered with flying hours, Dissolves the beauty of the fairest brow.
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Wise people may say what they will, but one passion is never cured by another.
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No woman ever yet either reasoned or acted long together consequentially but some little thing, some love, some resentment, somepresent momentary interest, some supposed slight, or some humour, always breaks in upon, and oversets their most prudent resolutions and schemes.
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Little vicious minds abound with anger and revenge and are incapable of feeling te pleasure of forgiving their enemies.
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If you love music hear it go to operas, concerts, and pay fiddlers to play to you but I insist upon your neither piping nor fiddling yourself. It puts a gentleman in a very frivolous, contemptible light brings him into a great deal of bad company and takes up a great deal of time, which might be much better employed.
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A man who owes a little can clear it off in a very little time, and, if he is a prudent man, will whereas a man, who by long negligence, owes a great deal, despairs of ever being able to pay, and therefore never looks into his accounts at all.
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If you have wit, use it to please and not to hurt: you may shine like the sun in the temperate zones without scorching.
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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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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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Whatever poets may write, or fools believe, of rural innocence and truth, and of the perfidy of courts, this is most undoubtedly true,--that shepherds and ministers are both men their natures and passions the same, the modes of them only different.
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It is to be presumed, that a man of common sense, who does not desire to please, desires nothing at all since he must know that he cannot obtain anything without it.
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The permanency of most friendships depends upon the continuity of good fortune.
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In your friendships and in your enmities let your confidence and your hostilities have certain bounds make not the former dangerous, nor the latter irreconcilable. There are strange vicissitudes in business.
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Smooth your way to the head through the heart. The way of reason is a good one: but it is commonly something longer, and perhapsnot so sure.
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Young men are as apt to think themselves wise enough, as drunken men are to think themselves sober enough. They look upon spirit to be a much better thing than experience which they call coldness. They are but half mistaken for though spirit without experience is dangerous, experience without spirit is languid and ineffective.
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Good breeding and good nature do incline us rather to help and raise people up to ourselves, than to mortify and depress them, and, in truth, our own private interest concurs in it, as it is making ourselves so many friends, instead of so many enemies.
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Good humor is the health of the soul, sadness is its poison.
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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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Next to clothes being fine, they should be well made, and worn easily for a man is only the less genteel for a fine coat, if, in wearing it, he shows a regard for it, and is not as easy in it as if it was a plain one.
Lord Chesterfield