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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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Lord Chesterfield
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Good humor is the health of the soul, sadness is its poison.
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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.
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It seems to me that physical sickness softens, just as moral sickness hardens, the heart.
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History is but a confused heap of facts.
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Very ugly or very beautiful women should be flattered on their understanding, and mediocre ones on their beauty.
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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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If you have an hour, will you not improve that hour, instead of idling it away?
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Nothing sharpens the arrow of sarcasm so keenly as the courtesy that polishes it no reproach is like that we clothe with a smile and present with a bow.
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Love has been not unaptly compared to the small-pox, which most people have sooner or later.
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Be your character what it will, it will be known, and nobody will take it upon your word.
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Swift speedy time, feathered with flying hours, Dissolves the beauty of the fairest brow.
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Deserve a great deal, and you shall have a great deal deserve little, and you shall have but a little and be good for nothing atall, and I assure you, you shall have nothing at all.
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