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A certain degree of ceremony is a necessary outwork of manners, as well as of religion it keeps the forward and petulant at a proper distance, and is a very small restraint to the sensible and to the well-bred part of the world.
Lord Chesterfield
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Lord Chesterfield
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More quotes by Lord Chesterfield
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.
Lord Chesterfield
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.
Lord Chesterfield
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.
Lord Chesterfield
Whenever a man seeks your advice he generally seeks your praise.
Lord Chesterfield
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.
Lord Chesterfield
Dispatch is the soul of business, and nothing contributes more to dispatch than method.
Lord Chesterfield
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.
Lord Chesterfield
If you can once engage people's pride, love, pity, ambition (or whatever is their prevailing passion) on your side, you need not fear what their reason can do against you.
Lord Chesterfield
Without some dissimulation no business can be carried on at all.
Lord Chesterfield
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.
Lord Chesterfield
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
Real friendship is a slow grower.
Lord Chesterfield
No man tastes pleasures truly, who does not earn them by previous business and few people do business well, who do nothing else.
Lord Chesterfield
In my mind, there is nothing so illiberal, and so ill-bred, as audible laughter.
Lord Chesterfield
Assurance and intrepidity, under the white banner of seeming modesty, clear the way for merit, that would otherwise be discouraged by difficulties...
Lord Chesterfield
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
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.
Lord Chesterfield
If you have wit, use it to please and not to hurt: you may shine like the sun in the temperate zones without scorching.
Lord Chesterfield
Wise people may say what they will, but one passion is never cured by another.
Lord Chesterfield
Many new years you may see, but happy ones you cannot see without deserving them. These virtue, honor, and knowledge alone can merit, alone can produce.
Lord Chesterfield