Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield Quotes

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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.

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
The talent of insinuation is more useful than that of persuasion, as everybody is open to insinuation, but scarce any to persuasion.

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
Good manners are the settled medium of social, as specie is of commercial, life; returns are equally expected for both.

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
A joker is near akin to a buffoon; and neither of them is the least related to wit.

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
In nature the most violent passions are silent; in tragedy they must speak and speak with dignity too.

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
Human nature is the same everywhere; the modes only are different.

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
If you love music hear it; go to operas, concerts, and pay fiddlers to play to you; but I insist upon your neither piping nor fiddling yourself. It puts a gentleman in a very frivolous, contemptible light; brings him into a great deal of bad company; and takes up a great deal of time, which might be much better employed.

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
The French manner of hunting is gentlemanlike; ours is only for bumpkins and bodies. The poor beasts here are pursued and run downby much greater beasts than themselves; and the true British fox-hunter is most undoubtedly a species appropriated and peculiar to this country, which no other part of the globe produces.

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
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.

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
Talk often, but never long; in that case, if you do not please, at least you are sure not to tire your hearers. Pay your own reckoning, but do not treat the whole company; this being one of the few cases in which people do not care to be treated, every one being fully convinced that he has wherewithal to pay.

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
If you will please people, you must please them in their own way.

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
Those who travel heedlessly from place to place, observing only their distance from each other, and attending only to their accommodation at the inn at night, set out fools, and will certainly return so

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
I am grown old, and have possibly lost a great deal of that fire, which formerly made me love fire in others at any rate, and however attended with smoke: but now I must have all sense, and cannot, for the sake of five righteous lines, forgive a thousand absurd ones.

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
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.

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
A man of fashion never has recourse to proverbs, and vulgar aphorisms; uses neither favourite words nor hard words, but takes great care to speak very correctly and grammatically, and to pronounce properly; that is, according to the usage of the best companies.

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
A man of sense soon discovers, because he carefully observes, where and how long he is welcome; and takes care to leave the company at least as soon as he is wished out of it. Fools never perceive whether they are ill timed or ill placed.

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
We are really so prejudiced by our educations, that, as the ancients deified their heroes, we deify their madmen.

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
Half the business is done, when one has gained the heart and the affections of those with whom one is to transact it.

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
Civility, which is a disposition to accommodate and oblige others, is essentially the same in every country; but good breeding, asit is called, which is the manner of exerting that disposition, is different in almost every country, and merely local; and every man of sense imitates and conforms to that local good breeding of the place which he is at.

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
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.

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
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.

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
It is good breeding alone that can prepossess people in your favor at first sight, more time being necessary to discover greater talents.

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
In your friendships and in your enmities let your confidence and your hostilities have certain bounds; make not the former dangerous, nor the latter irreconcilable. There are strange vicissitudes in business.

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
Most maxim-mongers have preferred the prettiness to the justness of a thought, and the turn to the truth; but I have refused myself to everything that my own experience did not justify and confirm.

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
Conscious virtue is the only solid foundation of all happiness; for riches, power, rank, or whatever, in the common acceptation ofthe word, is supposed to constitute happiness, will never quiet, much less cure, the inward pangs of guilt.

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
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.

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
You will find that reason, which always ought to direct mankind, seldom does; but that passions and weaknesses commonly usurp itsseat, and rule in its stead.

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
Singularity is only pardonable in old age and retirement; I may now be as singular as I please, but you may not.

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
As kings are begotten and born like other men, it is to be presumed that they are of the human species; and perhaps, had they thesame education, they might prove like other men. But, flattered from their cradles, their hearts are corrupted, and their heads are turned, so that they seem to be a species by themselves.... Flattery cannot be too strong for them; drunk with it from their infancy, like old drinkers, they require dreams.

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
Remember that the wit, humour, and jokes of most mixed companies are local. They thrive in that particular soil, but will not often bear transplanting.

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield