520 Quotes by Lord Chesterfield

History is but a confused heap of facts.

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

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

Wear your learning like a watch and do not pull it out merely to show you have it. If you are asked for the time, tell it; but do not proclaim it hourly unasked.

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.

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.

Vulgarism in language is the distinguishing characteristic of bad company, and a bad education. A man of fashion avoids nothing with more care than that. Proverbial expressions, and trite sayings, are the flowers of the rhetoric of vulgar man.

We are in truth, more than half what we are by imitation. The great point is to choose good models and to study them with care.

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