Top 300 Lord Chesterfield Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “I sometimes give myself admirable advice, but I am incapable of taking it.”

— Lord Chesterfield

204. “Every man becomes, to a certain degree, what the people he generally converses with are.”

— Lord Chesterfield

205. “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

206. “Keep your own secret, and get out other people’s. Keep your own temper, and artfully warm other people’s. Counterwork your rivalswith diligence and dexterity, but at the same time with the utmost personal civility to them: and be firm without heat.”

— Lord Chesterfield

207. “Whenever a man seeks your advice he generally seeks your praise.”

— Lord Chesterfield

208. “If you can once engage people’s pride, love, pity, ambition on your side, you need not fear what their reason can do against you.”

— Lord Chesterfield

209. “The greatest powers cannot injure a man’s character whose reputation is unblemished among his party.”

— Lord Chesterfield

210. “A certain degree of fear produces the same effects as rashness.”

— Lord Chesterfield

211. “A cheerful, easy, open countenance will make fools think you a good-natured man, and make designing men think you an undesigning one.”

— Lord Chesterfield

212. “Men will not believe because they will not broaden their minds.”

— Lord Chesterfield

213. “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

214. “Either a good or a bad reputation outruns and gets before people wherever they go.”

— Lord Chesterfield

215. “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

216. “No man can possibly improve in any company for which he has not respect enough to be under some degree of restraint.”

— Lord Chesterfield

217. “Good-breeding carries along with it a dignity that is respected by the most petulant. Ill-breeding invites and authorizes the familiarity of the most timid.”

— Lord Chesterfield

218. “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.”

— Lord Chesterfield

219. “Women’s beauty, like men’s wit, is generally fatal to the owners.”

— Lord Chesterfield

220. “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

221. “Not to care for philosophy is to be a true philospher.”

— Lord Chesterfield

222. “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

223. “Fear invites danger; concealed cowards insult known ones.”

— Lord Chesterfield

224. “All ceremonies are in themselves very silly things; but yet, a man of the world should know them. They are the outworks of Mannersand Decency, which would be too often broken in upon, if it were not for that defence, which keeps the enemy at a proper distance.”

— Lord Chesterfield

225. “If you have wit, use it to please and not to hurt: you may shine like the sun in the temperate zones without scorching.”

— Lord Chesterfield

226. “Let them show me a cottage where there are not the same vices of which they accuse the courts.”

— Lord Chesterfield

227. “Seek always for the best words and the happiest expression you can find.”

— Lord Chesterfield

228. “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

229. “Deserve a great deal, and you shall have a great deal; deserve little, and you shall have but a little; and be good for nothing atall, and I assure you, you shall have nothing at all.”

— Lord Chesterfield

230. “Merit and knowledge will not gain hearts, though they will secure them when gained.”

— Lord Chesterfield

231. “Violent measures are always dangerous, but, when necessary, may then be looked on as wise. They have, however, the advantage of never being matter of indifference; and, when well concerted, must be decisive.”

— Lord Chesterfield

232. “I love every-day senses, every-day wit and entertainment; a man who is only good on holidays, is good for very little.”

— Lord Chesterfield

233. “Compliments of congratulation are always kindly taken, and cost nothing but pen, ink and paper. I consider them as draughts upon good breeding, where the exchange is always greatly in favor of the drawer.”

— Lord Chesterfield

234. “In short, let it be your maxim through life, to know all you can know, yourself; and never to trust implicitly to the informationsof others.”

— Lord Chesterfield

235. “The most familiar and intimate habitudes, connections, friendships, require a degree of good-breeding both to preserve and cement them.”

— Lord Chesterfield

236. “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

237. “A gentleman has ease without familiarity, is respectful without meanness; genteel without affectation, insinuating without seeming art.”

— Lord Chesterfield

238. “If you will please people, you must please them in their own way.”

— Lord Chesterfield

239. “Never write down your speeches beforehand; if you do, you may perhaps be a good declaimer, but will never be a debater.”

— Lord Chesterfield

240. “The permanency of most friendships depends upon the continuity of good fortune.”

— Lord Chesterfield

241. “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

242. “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

243. “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

244. “An honest man may really love a pretty girl, but only an idiot marries her merely because she is pretty.”

— Lord Chesterfield

245. “Few fathers care much for their sons, or at least, most of them care more for their money. Of those who really love their sons, few know how to do it.”

— Lord Chesterfield

246. “Those who see and observe kings, heroes, and statesmen, discover that they have headaches, indigestion, humors and passions, just like other people; every one of which in their turns determine their wills in defiance of their reason.”

— Lord Chesterfield

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

— Lord Chesterfield

248. “Whoever incites anger has a strong insurance against indifference.”

— Lord Chesterfield

249. “The most ignorant are the boldest conjecturers.”

— Lord Chesterfield

250. “The New Year is the season in which custom seems more particularly to authorize civil and harmless lies, under the name of compliments. People reciprocally profess wishes which they seldom form and concern which they seldom feel.”

— Lord Chesterfield