Top 100 Lord Chesterfield Quotes
#1. An ignorant man is insignificant and contemptible; nobody cares for his company, and he can just be said to live, and that is all.
Lord Chesterfield
#2. Should you be unfortunate enough to have vices, you may, to a certain degree, even dignify them by a strict observance of decorum;at least they will lose something of their natural turpitude.
Lord Chesterfield
#3. Every man becomes, to a certain degree, what the people he generally converses with are.
Lord Chesterfield
#4. Give nobly to indigent merit, and do not refuse your charity even to those who have not merit but their misery.
Lord Chesterfield
#5. May you live as long as you are fit to live, but no longer, or, may you rather die before you cease to be fit to live than after!
Lord Chesterfield
#6. The vulgar only laugh, but never smile; whereas well-bred people often smile, but seldom laugh.
Lord Chesterfield
#7. A young fellow ought to be wiser than he should seem to be; and an old fellow ought to seem wise whether he really be so or not.
Lord Chesterfield
#8. Men, as well as women, are much oftener led by their hearts than by their understandings.
Lord Chesterfield
#9. Women are all so far Machiavellians that they are never either good or bad by halves; their passions are too strong, and their reason too weak, to do anything with moderation.
Lord Chesterfield
#10. A man of sense soon discovers, because he carefully observes, where and how long he is welcome; and takes care to leave the company at least as soon as he is wished out of it. Fools never perceive whether they are ill timed or ill placed.
Lord Chesterfield
#11. 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.
Lord Chesterfield
#12. True politeness is perfect ease and freedom. It simply consists in treating others just as you love to be treated yourself.
Lord Chesterfield
#13. It is hard to say which is the greatest fool: he who tells the whole truth, or he who tells no truth at all. Character is as necessary in business as in trade. No man can deceive often in either.
Lord Chesterfield
#14. Conscious virtue is the only solid foundation of all happiness; for riches, power, rank, or whatever, in the common acceptation ofthe word, is supposed to constitute happiness, will never quiet, much less cure, the inward pangs of guilt.
Lord Chesterfield
#16. Let them show me a cottage where there are not the same vices of which they accuse the courts.
Lord Chesterfield
#18. You must embrace the man you hate, if you cannot be justified in knocking him down.
Lord Chesterfield
#20. Never hold anyone by the button or the hand in order to be heard out; for if people are unwilling to hear you, you had better hold your tongue than them.
Lord Chesterfield
#21. A rake is a composition of all the lowest, most ignoble, degrading, and shameful vices; they all conspire to disgrace his character, and to ruin his fortune; while wine and the pox content which shall soonest and most effectually destroy his constitution.
Lord Chesterfield
#22. A judicious reticence is hard to learn, but it is one of the great lessons of life.
Lord Chesterfield
#23. There is not a more prudent maxim, than to live with one's enemies as if they may one day become one's friends; as it commonly happens, sooner or later, in the vicissitudes of political affairs.
Lord Chesterfield
#24. I am grown old, and have possibly lost a great deal of that fire, which formerly made me love fire in others at any rate, and however attended with smoke: but now I must have all sense, and cannot, for the sake of five righteous lines, forgive a thousand absurd ones.
Lord Chesterfield
#25. Awkwardness is a more real disadvantage than it is generally thought to be; it often occasions ridicule, it always lessens dignity.
Lord Chesterfield
#26. The talent of insinuation is more useful than that of persuasion, as everybody is open to insinuation, but scarce any to persuasion.
Lord Chesterfield
#27. The most familiar and intimate habitudes, connections, friendships, require a degree of good-breeding both to preserve and cement them.
Lord Chesterfield
#28. 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.
Lord Chesterfield
#29. 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.
Lord Chesterfield
#31. Nothing convinces persons of a weak understanding so effectually, as what they do not comprehend.
Lord Chesterfield
#32. 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.
Lord Chesterfield
#33. A joker is near akin to a buffoon; and neither of them is the least related to wit.
Lord Chesterfield
#34. A wise man will live as much within his wit as within his income.
Lord Chesterfield
#35. There never were, since the creation of the world, two cases exactly parallel.
Lord Chesterfield
#36. It seems to me that physical sickness softens, just as moral sickness hardens, the heart.
Lord Chesterfield
#37. Keep carefully not of all scrapes and quarrels. They lower a character extremely; and are particularly dangerous in France, wherea man is dishonoured by not resenting an affront, and utterly ruined by resenting it.
Lord Chesterfield
#38. Dispatch is the soul of business, and nothing contributes more to dispatch than method.
Lord Chesterfield
#39. Many new years you may see, but happy ones you cannot see without deserving them. These virtue, honor, and knowledge alone can merit, alone can produce.
Lord Chesterfield
#40. 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
#41. A certain degree of fear produces the same effects as rashness.
Lord Chesterfield
#42. Physical ills are the taxes laid upon this wretched life; some are taxed higher, and some lower, but all pay something.
Lord Chesterfield
#43. A gentleman has ease without familiarity, is respectful without meanness; genteel without affectation, insinuating without seeming art.
Lord Chesterfield
#44. Elegance of manner is the outgrowth of refined and exalted sense.
Lord Chesterfield
#45. Frequent and loud laughter is the characteristic of folly and ill manners.
Lord Chesterfield
#46. Pray be always in motion. Early in the morning go and see things; and the rest of the day go and see people. If you stay but a week at a place, and that an insignificant one, see, however, all that is to be seen there; know as many people, and get into as many houses as ever you can.
Lord Chesterfield
#47. Gold and silver are but merchandise, as well as cloth or linen; and that nation that buys the least, and sells the most, must always have the most money.
Lord Chesterfield
#48. 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.
Lord Chesterfield
#49. Never seem wiser, nor more learned, than the people you are with. Wear your learning, like your watch, in a private pocket: and do not merely pull it out and strike it; merely to show that you have one.
Lord Chesterfield
#50. The herd of mankind can hardly be said to think; their notions are almost all adoptive; and, in general, I believe it is better that it should be so; as such common prejudices contribute more to order and quiet, than their own separate reasonings would do, uncultivated and unimproved as they are.
Lord Chesterfield
#51. Never write down your speeches beforehand; if you do, you may perhaps be a good declaimer, but will never be a debater.
Lord Chesterfield
#52. Those who travel heedlessly from place to place, observing only their distance from each other, and attending only to their accommodation at the inn at night, set out fools, and will certainly return so
Lord Chesterfield
#53. There will never be a better time to start quitting smoking than today
Lord Chesterfield
#54. There are some occasions when a man must tell half his secret, in order to conceal the rest.
Lord Chesterfield
#55. In business be as able as you can, but do not be cunning; cunning is the dark sanctuary of incapacity.
Lord Chesterfield
#56. Learning is acquired by reading books, but the much more necessary learning, the knowledge of the world, is only to be acquired by reading men, and studying all the various facets of them.
Lord Chesterfield
#57. A seeming ignorance is very often a most necessary part of worldly knowledge. It is, for instance, commonly advisable to seem ignorant of what people offer to tell you; and, when they say, Have you not heard of such a thing? to answer, No, and to let them go on, though you know it already.
Lord Chesterfield
#58. It is by vivacity and wit that man shines in company; but trite jokes and loud laughter reduce him to a buffoon.
Lord Chesterfield
#59. Loud laughter is the mirth of the mob, who are only pleased with silly things; for true Wit or good Sense never excited a laugh since the creation of the world. A man of parts and fashion is therefore often seen to smile, but never heard to laugh.
Lord Chesterfield
#60. The difference between a man of sense and a fop is that the fop values himself upon his dress; and the man of sense laughs at it, at the same time he knows he must not neglect it.
Lord Chesterfield
#61. Good manners are the settled medium of social, as specie is of commercial, life; returns are equally expected for both.
Lord Chesterfield
#62. Next to doing things that deserve to be written, nothing gets a man more credit, or gives him more pleasure than to write things that deserve to be read.
Lord Chesterfield
#63. Women's beauty, like men's wit, is generally fatal to the owners.
Lord Chesterfield
#64. I am very sure that any man of common understanding may, by culture, care, attention, and labor, make himself what- ever he pleases, except a great poet.
Lord Chesterfield
#65. Instead of giving in to the greatest misfortune that can happen at my age, deafness, I busy myself in searching out all possible compensations, and I apply myself much more to all the amusements that are here within my grasp.
Lord Chesterfield
#66. Few men are of one plain, decided color; most are mixed, shaded, and blended; and vary as much, from different situations, as changeable silks do from different lights.
Lord Chesterfield
#67. Little secrets are commonly told again, but great ones generally kept.
Lord Chesterfield
#68. Unlike my subject will I frame my song, It shall be witty and it shan't be long.
Lord Chesterfield
#69. I am convinced that a light supper, a good night's sleep, and a fine morning, have sometimes made a hero of the same man, who, by an indigestion, a restless night, and rainy morning, would have proved a coward.
Lord Chesterfield
#70. I look upon indolence as a sort of suicide; for the man is effectually destroyed, though the appetites of the brute may survive.
Lord Chesterfield
#71. 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.
Lord Chesterfield
#72. Our self-love is mortified, when we think our opinions, and even our tastes, customs, and dresses, either arraigned or condemned;as, on the contrary, it is tickled and flattered by approbation.
Lord Chesterfield
#73. The rich are always advising the poor, but the poor seldom return the compliment.
Lord Chesterfield
#74. 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.
Lord Chesterfield
#75. There is a sort of veteran women of condition, who, having lived always in the grand mode, and having possibly had some gallantries, together with the experience of five and twenty or thirty years, form a young fellow better than all the rules that can be given him.
Lord Chesterfield
#77. It is good breeding alone that can prepossess people in your favor at first sight, more time being necessary to discover greater talents.
Lord Chesterfield
#78. Vice, in its true light, is so deformed, that it shocks us at first sight; and would hardly ever seduce us, if it did not at first wear the mask of some virtue.
Lord Chesterfield
#79. 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
#80. A man who owes a little can clear it off in a very little time, and, if he is a prudent man, will; whereas a man, who by long negligence, owes a great deal, despairs of ever being able to pay, and therefore never looks into his accounts at all.
Lord Chesterfield
#81. A certain degree of ceremony is a necessary outwork of manners, as well as of religion; it keeps the forward and petulant at a proper distance, and is a very small restraint to the sensible and to the well-bred part of the world.
Lord Chesterfield
#82. A man must have a good share of wit himself to endure a great share in another.
Lord Chesterfield
#83. Truth, but not the whole truth, must be the invariable principle of every man who hath either religion, honour, or prudence. Thosewho violate it, may be cunning, but they are not able. Lies and perfidy are the refuge of fools and cowards.
Lord Chesterfield
#84. The heart has such an influence over the understanding, that it is worth while to engage it in our interest.
Lord Chesterfield
#85. 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.
Lord Chesterfield
#87. I really think next to the consciousness of doing a good action, that of doing a civil one is the most pleasing; and the epithet which I should covet the most next to that of Aristides, would be that of well-bred.
Lord Chesterfield
#90. Statesmen and beauties are very rarely sensible of the gradations of their decay.
Lord Chesterfield
#91. Most people have ears, but few have judgment; tickle those ears, and depend upon it, you will catch their judgments, such as they are.
Lord Chesterfield
#92. At any age we must cherish illusions, consolatory or merely pleasant; in youth, they are omnipresent; in old age we must search for them, or even invent them. But with all that, boredom is their natural and inevitable accompaniment.
Lord Chesterfield
#93. Love has been not unaptly compared to the small-pox, which most people have sooner or later.
Lord Chesterfield
#94. The insolent civility of a proud man is, if possible, more shocking than his rudeness could be; because he shows you, by his manner, that he thinks it mere condescension in him; and that his goodness alone bestows upon you what you have no pretense to claim.
Lord Chesterfield
#95. The value of moments, when cast up, is immense, if well employed; if thrown away, their loss is irrevocable.
Lord Chesterfield
#96. 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
#97. In nature the most violent passions are silent; in tragedy they must speak and speak with dignity too.
Lord Chesterfield
#98. No man can possibly improve in any company for which he has not respect enough to be under some degree of restraint.
Lord Chesterfield
#99. In your friendships and in your enmities let your confidence and your hostilities have certain bounds; make not the former dangerous, nor the latter irreconcilable. There are strange vicissitudes in business.
Lord Chesterfield
#100. Many people come into company full of what they intend to say in it themselves, without the least regard to others; and thus charged up to the muzzle are resolved to let it off at any rate.
Lord Chesterfield
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