Top 300 Lord Chesterfield Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 7 of 7

301. “Second-rate knowledge, and middling talents, carry a man farther at courts, and in the busy part of the world, than superior knowledge and shining parts.”

— Lord Chesterfield

302. “Speak the language of the company you are in; speak it purely, and unlarded with any other.”

— Lord Chesterfield

303. “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

304. “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

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

— Lord Chesterfield

306. “A man of sense only trifles with them, plays with them, humors and flatters them, as he does with a sprightly and forward child; but he neither consults them about, nor trusts them with, serious matters.”

— Lord Chesterfield

307. “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

308. “The greatest dangers have their allurements, if the want of success is likely to be attended with a degree of glory. Middling dangers are horrid, when the loss of reputation is the inevitable consequence of ill success.”

— Lord Chesterfield

309. “People will no more advance their civility to a bear, than their money to a bankrupt.”

— Lord Chesterfield

310. “Honest error is to be pitied not ridiculed.”

— Lord Chesterfield

311. “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

312. “Most arts require long study and application; but the most useful of all, that of pleasing, only the desire.”

— Lord Chesterfield

313. “We are really so prejudiced by our educations, that, as the ancients deified their heroes, we deify their madmen.”

— Lord Chesterfield

314. “He adorned whatever subject he either spoke or wrote upon, by the most splendid eloquence.”

— Lord Chesterfield

315. “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

316. “It seems to me that physical sickness softens, just as moral sickness hardens, the heart.”

— Lord Chesterfield

317. “I am in the pitiable situation of feeling all the force of temptation without having the strength to succumb to it.”

— Lord Chesterfield

318. “The world can doubtless never be well known by theory: practice is absolutely necessary; but surely it is of great use to a young man, before he sets out for that country, full of mazes, windings, and turnings, to have at least a general map of it, made by some experienced traveler.”

— Lord Chesterfield

319. “It may be objected, that I am now recommending dissimulation to you; I both own and justify it. It has been long said: Qui nescitdissimular nescit regnare: I go still farther, and say, that without some dissimulation, no business can be carried on at all.”

— Lord Chesterfield

320. “Gratitude is a burden upon our imperfect nature.”

— Lord Chesterfield

321. “Choose the company of your superiors whenever you can have it.”

— Lord Chesterfield

322. “Enjoy pleasures, but let them be your own, and then you will taste them.”

— Lord Chesterfield

323. “Men are much more unwilling to have their weaknesses and their imperfections known than their crimes.”

— Lord Chesterfield

324. “Whoever plays deep must necessarily lose his money or his character.”

— Lord Chesterfield

325. “I do not think that a Physician should be admitted into the College till he could bring proofs of his having cured, in his own person, at least four incurable distempers.”

— Lord Chesterfield

326. “Armies, though always the supporters and tools of absolute power for the time being, are always the destroyers of it too; by frequently changing the hands in which they think proper to lodge it.”

— Lord Chesterfield

327. “Custom has made dancing sometimes necessary for a young man; therefore mind it while you learn it, that you may learn to do it well, and not be ridiculous, though in a ridiculous act.”

— Lord Chesterfield

328. “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

329. “The heart never grows better with age; I fear rather worse, always harder.”

— Lord Chesterfield

330. “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

331. “So much are our minds influenced by the accidents of our bodies, that every man is more the man of the day than a regular and consequential character.”

— Lord Chesterfield

332. “Statesmen and beauties are very rarely sensible of the gradations of their decay.”

— Lord Chesterfield

333. “Love has been not unaptly compared to the small-pox, which most people have sooner or later.”

— Lord Chesterfield

334. “No woman ever yet either reasoned or acted long together consequentially; but some little thing, some love, some resentment, somepresent momentary interest, some supposed slight, or some humour, always breaks in upon, and oversets their most prudent resolutions and schemes.”

— Lord Chesterfield

335. “Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial.”

— Lord Chesterfield

336. “Every man is to be had one way or another and every woman almost anyway.”

— Lord Chesterfield

337. “Ugliness is a letter of credit for some special purposes.”

— Lord Chesterfield

338. “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

339. “In friendship, as well as in love, the mind is often the dupe of the heart.”

— Lord Chesterfield

340. “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

341. “Lady – – is safely delivered of a son, to the great joy of that noble family. The expression, of a woman’s having brought her husband a son, seems to be a proper and cautious one; for it is never said, from whence.”

— Lord Chesterfield

342. “A man must have a good share of wit himself to endure a great share in another.”

— Lord Chesterfield