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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.

Lord Chesterfield

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Lord Chesterfield
Age
May
Pardonable
Singularity
Singular
Individualism
Retirement
Please

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Style is the dress of thoughts and let them be ever so just, if your style is homely, coarse, and vulgar, they will appear to as much disadvantage, and be as ill received, as your person, though ever so well-proportioned, would if dressed in rags, dirt, and tatters.
Lord Chesterfield
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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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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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Be wiser than other people if you can but do not tell them so.
Lord Chesterfield
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Distrust those who love you extremely upon a slight acquaintance, and without any visible reason.
Lord Chesterfield
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How often should a woman be pregnant? Continually, or hardly ever? Or must there be a certain number of pregnancy anniversaries established by fashion? What do you, at the age of forty-three, have to say on the subject? Is it a fact that the laws of nature, or of the country, or of propriety, have ordained this time of life for sterility?
Lord Chesterfield
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We are really so prejudiced by our educations, that, as the ancients deified their heroes, we deify their madmen.
Lord Chesterfield
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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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The world can doubtless never be well known by theory: practice is absolutely necessary but surely it is of great use to a young man, before he sets out for that country, full of mazes, windings, and turnings, to have at least a general map of it, made by some experienced traveler.
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Statesmen and beauties are very rarely sensible of the gradations of their decay.
Lord Chesterfield
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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.
Lord Chesterfield
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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.
Lord Chesterfield
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Nothing is more dissimilar than natural and acquired politeness. The first consists in a willing abnegation of self the second in a compelled recollection of others.
Lord Chesterfield
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Physical ills are the taxes laid upon this wretched life some are taxed higher, and some lower, but all pay something.
Lord Chesterfield
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Do as you would be done by, is the surest method of pleasing.
Lord Chesterfield
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In the case of scandal, as in that of robbery, the receiver is always thought as bad as the thief.
Lord Chesterfield
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Good manners are the settled medium of social, as specie is of commercial, life returns are equally expected for both.
Lord Chesterfield
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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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If a man, notoriously and designedly, insults and affronts you, knock him down but if he only injures you, your best revenge is to be extremely civil to him in your outward behaviour, though at the same time you counterwork him, and return him the compliment, perhaps with interest.
Lord Chesterfield
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The herd of mankind can hardly be said to think their notions are almost all adoptive and, in general, I believe it is better that it should be so as such common prejudices contribute more to order and quiet, than their own separate reasonings would do, uncultivated and unimproved as they are.
Lord Chesterfield