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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

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Lord Chesterfield
People
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When one is at play, one should not think of one's learning.
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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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The only solid and lasting peace between a man and his wife is, doubtless, a separation.
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Next to clothes being fine, they should be well made, and worn easily for a man is only the less genteel for a fine coat, if, in wearing it, he shows a regard for it, and is not as easy in it as if it was a plain one.
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Young men are as apt to think themselves wise enough, as drunken men are to think themselves sober enough. They look upon spirit to be a much better thing than experience which they call coldness. They are but half mistaken for though spirit without experience is dangerous, experience without spirit is languid and ineffective.
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You must labour to acquire that great and uncommon talent of hating with good breeding, and loving with prudence to make no quarrel irreconcilable by silly and unnecessary indications of anger and no friendship dangerous, in care it breaks, by a wanton, indiscreet, and unreserved confidence.
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In my mind, there is nothing so illiberal, and so ill-bred, as audible laughter.
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Those whom you can make like themselves better will, I promise you, like you very well.
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Statesmen and beauties are very rarely sensible of the gradations of their decay.
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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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Though we cannot totally change our nature, we may in great measure correct it by reflection and philosophy and some philosophy is a very necessary companion in this world, where, even to the most fortunate, the chances are greatly against happiness.
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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.
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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.
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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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In the course of the world, a man must very often put on an easy, frank countenance, upon very disagreeable occasions he must seem pleased, when he is very much otherwise he must be able to accost and receive with smiles, those whom he would much rather meet with swords.
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If you will please people, you must please them in their own way and as you cannot make them what they should be, you must take them as they are.
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A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.
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Remember that whatever knowledge you do not solidly lay the foundation of before you are eighteen, you will never be master of while you breathe.
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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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An honest man may really love a pretty girl, but only an idiot marries her merely because she is pretty.
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