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

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No man can possibly improve in any company for which he has not respect enough to be under some degree of restraint.
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People will no more advance their civility to a bear, than their money to a bankrupt.
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I really know nothing more criminal, more mean, and more ridiculous than lying. It is the production either of malice, cowardice, or vanity and generally misses of its aim in every one of these views for lies are always detected, sooner or later.
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Speak of the moderns without contempt and of the ancients without idolatry judge them all by their merits, but not by their age
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When one is at play, one should not think of one's learning.
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Dispatch is the soul of business, and nothing contributes more to dispatch than method.
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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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People hate those who make them feel their own inferiority.
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I would have all intoleration intolerated in its turn.
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Lady ---- is safely delivered of a son, to the great joy of that noble family. The expression, of a woman's having brought her husband a son, seems to be a proper and cautious one for it is never said, from whence.
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The company of women of fashion will improve your manners, though not your understanding and that complaisance and politeness, which are so useful in men's company, can only be acquired in women's.
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The possibility of remedying imprudent actions is commonly an inducement to commit them.
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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?
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Take rather than give the tone to the company you are in. If you have parts you will show them more or less upon every subject and if you have not, you had better talk sillily upon a subject of other people's than of your own choosing.
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Real friendship is a slow grower.
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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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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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Style is the dress of thoughts, and let them be ever so just.
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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.
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