Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield Quotations

Be wiser than other people if you can; but do not tell them so.

If you can once engage people's pride, love, pity, ambition (or whatever is their prevailing passion) on your side, you need not fear what their reason can do against you.

Men have various subjects in which they may excel, or at least would be thought to excel, and though they love to hear justice done to them where they know they excel, yet they are most and best flattered upon those points where they wish to excel and yet are doubtful whether they do or not.

Dispatch is the soul of business.

I assisted at the birth of that most significant word "flirtation," which dropped from the most beautiful mouth in the world.

There is hardly anybody good for everything, and there is scarcely anybody who is absolutely good for nothing.

An able man shows his spirit by gentle words and resolute actions. He is neither hot nor timid.

Real merit of any kind cannot long be concealed; it will be discovered, and nothing can depreciate it but a man exhibiting it himself. It may not always be rewarded as it ought; but it will always be known.

There is hardly any place or any company where you may not gain knowledge, if you please; almost everybody knows some one thing, and is glad to talk about that one thing.

Those whom you can make like themselves better will, I promise you, like you very well.

Great merit, or great failings, will make you respected or despised; but trifles, little attentions, mere nothings, either done or neglected, will make you either liked or disliked in the general run of the world.