Top 300 Lord Chesterfield Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “Choose your pleasures for yourself, and do not let them be imposed upon you.”

— Lord Chesterfield

252. “A man who tells nothing, or who tells all, will equally have nothing told him.”

— Lord Chesterfield

253. “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

254. “To take a wife merely as an agreeable and rational companion, will commonly be found to be a grand mistake.”

— Lord Chesterfield

255. “If you are not in fashion, you are nobody.”

— Lord Chesterfield

256. “The less one has to do, the less time one finds to do it in.”

— Lord Chesterfield

257. “All I desire for my own burial, is not to be buried alive; but how or where, I think, must be entirely indifferent to every rational creature.”

— Lord Chesterfield

258. “Ties of blood are not always ties of friendship; but friendship founded on merit, on esteem, and on mutual trust, becomes more vital and more tender when strengthened by the ties of blood.”

— Lord Chesterfield

259. “Lord Tyrawley and I have been dead these two years, but we don’t choose to have it known.”

— Lord Chesterfield

260. “As fathers commonly go, it is seldom a misfortune to be fatherless; and considering the general run of sons, as seldom a misfortune to be childless.”

— Lord Chesterfield

261. “A joker is near akin to a buffoon; and neither of them is the least related to wit.”

— Lord Chesterfield

262. “It is reported here that the King of Prussia has gone mad and has been locked up. There would be nothing bad about that: at leastthat might of his would no longer be a menace, and you could breathe freely for a while. I much prefer madmen who are locked up to those who are not.”

— Lord Chesterfield

263. “I would have all intoleration intolerated in its turn.”

— Lord Chesterfield

264. “A proper secrecy is the only mystery of able men; mystery is the only secrecy of weak and cunning ones.”

— Lord Chesterfield

265. “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.”

— Lord Chesterfield

266. “Artichoke: That vegetable of which one has more at the finish than at the start of dinner.”

— Lord Chesterfield

267. “In the mass of mankind, I fear, there is too great a majority of fools and knaves; who, singly from their number, must to a certain degree be respected, though they are by no means respectable.”

— Lord Chesterfield

268. “Whenever I go to an opera, I leave my sense and reason at the door with my half-guinea, and deliver myself up to my eyes and my ears.”

— Lord Chesterfield

269. “Nature has hardly formed a woman ugly enough to be insensible to flattery upon her person.”

— Lord Chesterfield

270. “Cardinal Mazarin was a great knave, but no great man; much more cunning than able; scandalously false and dirtily greedy.”

— Lord Chesterfield

271. “To this principle of vanity, which philosophers call a mean one, and which I do not, I owe a great part of the figure which I have made in life.”

— Lord Chesterfield

272. “Our prejudices are our mistresses; reason is at best our wife, very often heard indeed, but seldom minded.”

— Lord Chesterfield

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

— Lord Chesterfield

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

— Lord Chesterfield

275. “Remember that whatever knowledge you do not solidly lay the foundation of before you are eighteen, you will never be master of while you breathe.”

— Lord Chesterfield

276. “Buy good books, and read them; the best books are the commonest, and the last editions are always the best, if the editors are not blockheads.”

— Lord Chesterfield

277. “Good manners are the settled medium of social, as specie is of commercial, life; returns are equally expected for both.”

— Lord Chesterfield

278. “The nation looked upon him as a deserter, and he shrunk into insignificancy and an earldom.”

— Lord Chesterfield

279. “Deafness produces bizarre effects, reversing the natural order of things; the interchange of letters is the conversation of the deaf, and the only link with society. I would be in despair, for instance, over seeing you speak, but, instead, I am only too happy to hear you write.”

— Lord Chesterfield

280. “I have, by long experience, found women to be like Telephus’s spear: if one end kills, the other cures.”

— Lord Chesterfield

281. “This is the day when people reciprocally offer, and receive, the kindest and the warmest wishes, though, in general, without meaning them on one side, or believing them on the other. They are formed by the head, in compliance with custom, though disavowed by the heart, in consequence of nature.”

— Lord Chesterfield

282. “It is to be presumed, that a man of common sense, who does not desire to please, desires nothing at all; since he must know that he cannot obtain anything without it.”

— Lord Chesterfield

283. “Business by no means forbids pleasures; on the contrary, they reciprocally season each other; and I will venture to affirm that noman enjoys either in perfection that does not join both.”

— Lord Chesterfield

284. “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.”

— Lord Chesterfield

285. “Unlike my subject will I frame my song, It shall be witty and it shan’t be long.”

— Lord Chesterfield

286. “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

287. “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

288. “Being pretty on the inside means you don’t hit your brother and you eat all your peas – that’s what my grandma taught me.”

— Lord Chesterfield

289. “To have frequent recourse to narrative betrays great want of imagination.”

— Lord Chesterfield

290. “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

291. “Assurance and intrepidity, under the white banner of seeming modesty, clear the way to merit that would otherwise be discouraged by difficulties.”

— Lord Chesterfield

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

— Lord Chesterfield

293. “Little secrets are commonly told again, but great ones generally kept.”

— Lord Chesterfield

294. “It must be owned, that the Graces do not seem to be natives of Great Britain; and I doubt, the best of us here have more of rough than polished diamond.”

— Lord Chesterfield

295. “Give nobly to indigent merit, and do not refuse your charity even to those who have not merit but their misery.”

— Lord Chesterfield

296. “Common sense is the best sense I know of.”

— Lord Chesterfield

297. “Singularity is only pardonable in old age and retirement; I may now be as singular as I please, but you may not.”

— Lord Chesterfield

298. “Experience only can teach men not to prefer what strikes them for the present moment, to what will have much greater weight with the them hereafter.”

— Lord Chesterfield

299. “Letters should be easy and natural, and convey to the persons to whom we send them just what we should say to the persons if we were with them.”

— Lord Chesterfield

300. “When one is at play, one should not think of one’s learning.”

— Lord Chesterfield