Prepare yourselves for the great world, as the athletes used to do for their exercises; oil your mind and your manners, to give them the necessary suppleness and flexibility; strength alone will not do, as young people are too apt to think.
—Earl of Chesterfield
Topics: Mind
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.
—Earl of Chesterfield
Topics: Writing
There is nothing that people bear more impatiently, or forgive less, than contempt: and an injury is much sooner forgotten than an insult.
—Earl of Chesterfield
Topics: Insults, Injury
Armies, though always the supporters and tools of absolute power for the time being, are always its destroyers too, by frequently changing the hands in which they think proper to lodge it.
—Earl of Chesterfield
Topics: Army
The manner of a vulgar man has freedom without ease; the manner of a gentleman, ease without freedom.
—Earl of Chesterfield
Topics: Manners
Great merit, or great failings, will make you respected or despised; but trifles, little attentions, mere nothings, either done or neglected, will make you either liked or disliked in the general run of the world.
—Earl of Chesterfield
Topics: Greatness, Life, Trifles, Greatness & Great Things
Knowledge is a comfortable and necessary retreat and shelter for us in advanced age, and if we do not plant it while young, it will give us no shade when we grow old.
—Earl of Chesterfield
Topics: Knowledge
Frequent and loud laughing is the characteristic of folly and ill-manners.—True wit never made a man laugh.
—Earl of Chesterfield
Topics: Laughter
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.
—Earl of Chesterfield
Topics: Vice, Virtue
Whoever is in a hurry shows that the thing he is about is too big for him.—Haste and hurry are very different things.
—Earl of Chesterfield
Topics: Action, Haste
Let the great book of the world be your principle study.
—Earl of Chesterfield
The young leading the young, is like the blind leading the blind; they will both fall into the ditch.
—Earl of Chesterfield
It has been said that ridicule is the best test of truth, for that it will not stick where it is not just. I deny it. A truth viewed in a certain light, and attacked in certain words, by men of wit and humor, may, and often doth, become ridiculous, at least so far that the truth is only remembered and repeated for the sake of the ridicule.
—Earl of Chesterfield
A judicious reticence is hard to learn, but it is one of the great lessons of life.
—Earl of Chesterfield
Topics: Silence
The knowledge of the world is only to be acquired in the world, and not a closet.
—Earl of Chesterfield
Topics: Experience, Knowledge
I am very sure that any man of common understanding may, by culture, care, attention, and labor, make himself whatever he pleases, except a great poet.
—Earl of Chesterfield
Inferiority is what you enjoy in your best friends.
—Earl of Chesterfield
Topics: Inferiority
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 were a plain one.
—Earl of Chesterfield
Topics: Dress
Nature has hardly formed a woman ugly enough to be insensible to flattery upon her person; if her face is so shocking that she must in some degree be conscious of it, her figure and her air, she trusts, make ample amends for it.
—Earl of Chesterfield
Topics: Flattery
I assisted at the birth of that most significant word flirtation, which dropped from the most beautiful mouth in the world, and which has since received the sanction of our most accurate Laureate in one of his comedies.
—Earl of Chesterfield
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.
—Earl of Chesterfield
Topics: Proverbial Wisdom
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.
—Earl of Chesterfield
Topics: Virtue
Real merit of any kind cannot long be concealed; it will be discovered, and nothing can depreciate it but a man exhibiting it himself. It may not always be rewarded as it ought; but it will always be known.
—Earl of Chesterfield
Topics: Merit
Mutual comulaisances, attentions, and sacrifices of little conveniences, are as natural an implied compact between civilized people, as protection and obedience are between kings and subjects; whoever, in either case, violates that compact, justly forfeits all advantages arising from it.
—Earl of Chesterfield
Topics: Politeness
If you will please people, you must please them in their own way.
—Earl of Chesterfield
Our prejudices are our mistresses; reason is at best our wife, very often heard indeed, but seldom minded.
—Earl of Chesterfield
Topics: Aging, Youth, Age, Prejudice
Any affectation whatsoever in dress implies, in my mind, a flaw in the understanding.
—Earl of Chesterfield
Topics: Dress, Fashion, Affectation
Pleasure is a reciprocal; no one feels it who does not at the same time give it. To be pleased, one must please.
—Earl of Chesterfield
Topics: Helpfulness, Goodwill, Service, Kindness, Happiness, Giving
A wise man will live as much within his wit as within his income.
—Earl of Chesterfield
Topics: Wit, Humor
Women are much more like each other than men: they have, in truth, but two passions, vanity and love; these are their universal characteristics.
—Earl of Chesterfield
Topics: Vanity
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Francis Thompson English Poet
- William Blackstone English Judge
- Thomas Henry Huxley English Biologist
- Edmund Spenser English Poet
- E. V. Lucas British Writer
- Jane Austen English Novelist
- Isaac Newton English Physicist
- Jackie Collins English Romance Novelist
- Philip James Bailey English Poet
- Arthur Conan Doyle Scottish Writer
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