Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Lord Chesterfield
Love
Side
People
Sides
Passion
Whatever
Prevailing
Fear
Engage
Reason
Pity
Need
Ambition
Needs
Pride

More quotes by Lord Chesterfield

Image
Wit is so shining a quality that everybody admires it most people aim at it, all people fear it, and few love it unless in themselves. A man must have a good share of wit himself to endure a great share of it in another.
Lord Chesterfield
Image
Pleasure is a necessary reciprocal. No one feels, who does not at the same time give it. To be pleased, one must please. What pleases you in others, will in general please them in you.
Lord Chesterfield
Image
Ridicule is the best test of truth.
Lord Chesterfield
Image
Most arts require long study and application, but the most useful art of all, that of pleasing, requires only the desire.
Lord Chesterfield
Image
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
Image
It may be objected, that I am now recommending dissimulation to you I both own and justify it. It has been long said: Qui nescitdissimular nescit regnare: I go still farther, and say, that without some dissimulation, no business can be carried on at all.
Lord Chesterfield
Image
There are some occasions in which a man must tell half his secret, in order to conceal the rest: but there is seldom one in which a man should tell it all.
Lord Chesterfield
Image
To me it appears strange that the men against whom I should be enabled to bring an action for laying a little dirt at my door, may with impunity drive by it half-a-dozen calves, with their tails lopped close to their bodies and their hinder parts covered with blood.
Lord Chesterfield
Image
Violent measures are always dangerous, but, when necessary, may then be looked on as wise. They have, however, the advantage of never being matter of indifference and, when well concerted, must be decisive.
Lord Chesterfield
Image
It must be owned, that the Graces do not seem to be natives of Great Britain and I doubt, the best of us here have more of rough than polished diamond.
Lord Chesterfield
Image
Be your character what it will, it will be known, and nobody will take it upon your word.
Lord Chesterfield
Image
A wise man will live as much within his wit as within his income.
Lord Chesterfield
Image
Our conjectures pass upon us for truths we will know what we do not know, and often, what we cannot know: so mortifying to our pride is the base suspicion of ignorance.
Lord Chesterfield
Image
Not to perceive the little weaknesses and the idle but innocent affectations of the company may be allowable as a sort of polite duty. The company will be pleased with you if you do, and most probably will not be reformed by you if you do not.
Lord Chesterfield
Image
Politicians neither love nor hate. Interest, not sentiment, directs them.
Lord Chesterfield
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Statesmen and beauties are very rarely sensible of the gradations of their decay.
Lord Chesterfield
Image
Human nature is the same everywhere the modes only are different.
Lord Chesterfield
Image
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