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Endeavor, as much as you can, to keep company with people above you.... Do not mistake, when I say company above you, and think that I mean with regard to their birth that is the least consideration but I mean with regard to their merit, and the light in which the world considers them.

Lord Chesterfield

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Lord Chesterfield
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More quotes by 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.
Lord Chesterfield
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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.
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.
Lord Chesterfield
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Remember that the wit, humour, and jokes of most mixed companies are local. They thrive in that particular soil, but will not often bear transplanting.
Lord Chesterfield
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Women who are either indisputably beautiful, or indisputably ugly, are best flattered upon the score of their understandings but those who are in a state of mediocrity are best flattered upon their beauty, or at least their graces for every woman who is not absolutely ugly thinks herself handsome.
Lord Chesterfield
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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.
Lord Chesterfield
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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.
Lord Chesterfield
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Dispatch is the soul of business.
Lord Chesterfield
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It is by vivacity and wit that man shines in company but trite jokes and loud laughter reduce him to a buffoon.
Lord Chesterfield
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The value of moments, when cast up, is immense, if well employed if thrown away, their loss is irrecoverable.
Lord Chesterfield
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Good manners, to those one does not love, are no more a breach of truth, than your humble servant, at the bottom of a challengeis they are universally agreed upon, and understand to be things of course. They are necessary guards of the decency and peace of society.
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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If you are not in fashion, you are nobody.
Lord Chesterfield
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Wise people may say what they will, but one passion is never cured by another.
Lord Chesterfield
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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.
Lord Chesterfield
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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.
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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A man who cannot command his temper, his attention, and his countenance should not think of being a man of business.
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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Should you be unfortunate enough to have vices, you may, to a certain degree, even dignify them by a strict observance of decorumat least they will lose something of their natural turpitude.
Lord Chesterfield