Lord Chesterfield Quotes (132 Quotes)

Honest error is to be pitied, not ridiculed.

Wear your learning like a watch and do not pull it out merely to show you have it. If you are asked for the time, tell it but do not proclaim it hourly unasked.

Observe it, the vulgar often laugh, but never smile, whereas well-bred people often smile, and seldom or never laugh. A witty thing never excited laughter, it pleases only the mind and never distorts the countenance.

Courts and camps are the only places to learn the world in.

A man's own good breeding is the best security against other people's ill manners

A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.

Young men are apt to think themselves wise enough, as drunken men are apt to think themselves sober enough.

Religion must still be allowed to be a collateral security to Virtue

In seeking wisdom thou art wise; in imagining that thou hast attained it - thou art a fool.

Knowledge may give weight, but accomplishments give luster, and many more people see than weigh.

Horse-play, romping, frequent and loud fits of laughter, jokes, and indiscriminate familiarity, will sink both merit and knowledge into a degree of contempt. They compose at most a merry fellow and a merry fellow was never yet a respectable man.

One should always think of what one is about when one is learning, one should not think of play and when one is at play, one should not think of one's learning.

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.

Women are much more like each other than men they have, in truth, but two passions, vanity and love these are their universal characteristics.

Look in the face of the person to whom you are speaking if you wish to know his real sentiments, for he can command his words more easily than his countenance

In the case of scandal as in that of robbery, the receiver is always thought as bad as the thief

Little, vicious minds abound with anger and revenge, and are incapable of feeling the pleasure of forgiving their enemies.

Distrust all those who love you extremely upon a very slight acquaintance and without any visible reason.

Without some dissimulation no business can be carried on at all

It is by vivacity and wit that man shines in company but trite jokes and loud laughter reduce him to a buffoon

Nature has hardly formed a woman ugly enough to be insensible to flattery upon her person

Women, and young men, are very apt to tell what secrets they know, from the vanity of having been trusted

There never were, since the creation of the world, two cases exactly parallel

I find, by experience, that the mind and the body are more than married, for they are most intimately united; and when one suffers, the other sympathizes.

When a person is in fashion, all they do is right.

I knew a gentleman who was so good a manager of his time that he would not even lose that small portion of it which the calls of nature obliged him to pass in the necessary-house but gradually went through all the Latin poets in those moments.

Any affectation whatsoever in dress implies, in my mind, a flaw in the understanding.

Advice is seldom welcome, and those who need it the most, like it the least.

The young leading the young, is like the blind leading the blind they will both fall into the ditch

For my own part, I would rather be in company with a dead man than with an absent one for if the dead man gives me no pleasure, at least he shows me no contempt whereas the absent one, silently indeed, but very plainly, tells me that he does not think me worth his attention.

When a man wants your advice he generally wants your praise.

If ever a man and his wife, or a man and his mistress, who pass nights as well as days together, absolutely lay aside all good breeding, their intimacy will soon degenerate into a coarse familiarity, infallibly productive of contempt or disgust.