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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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Lord Chesterfield
Writing
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Never
Beforehand
Speeches
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Perhaps
Write
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Merit and knowledge will not gain hearts, though they will secure them when gained.
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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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Not to care for philosophy is to be a true philospher.
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Women who are either indisputably beautiful, or indisputably ugly, are best flattered upon the score of their understandings.
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In the case of scandal, as in that of robbery, the receiver is always thought as bad as the thief.
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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.
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Instead of giving in to the greatest misfortune that can happen at my age, deafness, I busy myself in searching out all possible compensations, and I apply myself much more to all the amusements that are here within my grasp.
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History is but a confused heap of facts.
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Ceremony is necessary in Courts, as the outwork and defense of manners.
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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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Whenever a man seeks your advice he generally seeks your praise.
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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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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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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.
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Those whom you can make like themselves better will, I promise you, like you very well.
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The power of applying attention, steady and undissipated, to a single object, is the sure mark of superior genius.
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If you have an hour, will you not improve that hour, instead of idling it away?
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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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Dispatch is the soul of business, and nothing contributes more to dispatch than method.
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Politicians neither love nor hate. Interest, not sentiment, directs them.
Lord Chesterfield