Lord Chesterfield Character Quotations

Be your character what it will, it will be known, and nobody will take it upon your word.

Firmness of purpose is one of the most necessary sinews of character, and one of the best instruments of success. Without it, genius wastes its efforts in a maze of inconsistencies.

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.

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.

Mankind is made up of inconsistencies, and no man acts invariably up to his predominant character. The wisest man sometimes acts weakly, and the weakest sometimes wisely.

The greatest powers cannot injure a man's character whose reputation is unblemished among his party.

Women of fashion and character--I do not mean absolutely unblemished--are a necessary ingredient in the composition of good company; the attention which they require, and which is always paid them by well-bred men, keeps up politeness, and gives a habit of good-breeding; whereas men, when they live together without the lenitive of women in company, are apt to grow careless, negligent, and rough among one another.

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.

Keep your hands clean and pure from the infamous vice of corruption, a vice so infamous that it degrades even the other vices thatmay accompany it. Accept no present whatever; let your character in that respect be transparent and without the least speck, for as avarice is the vilest and dirtiest vice in private, corruption is so in public life.

Whoever plays deep must necessarily lose his money or his character.

Character must be kept bright as well as clean.

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.

Anne of Austria (with great submission to a Crowned Head do I say it) was a B----. She had spirit and courage without parts, devotion without common morality, and lewdness without tenderness either to justify or to dignify it. Her two sons were no more Lewis the Thirteen's than they were mine.

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

You must be respectful and assenting, but without being servile and abject. You must be frank, but without indiscretion, and close, without being costive. You must keep up dignity of character, without the least pride of birth, or rank. You must be gay, within all the bounds of decency and respect; and grave, without the affectation of wisdom, which does not become the age of twenty. You must be essentially secret, without being dark and mysterious. You must be firm, and even bold, but with great seeming modesty.

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