Philip Dormer Stanhope Quotes

Take warning then by them: choose your pleasures for yourself, and do not let them be imposed upon you. Follow nature and not fashion: weigh the present enjoyment of your pleasures against the necessary consequences of them, and then let your own common sense determine your choice.

Conceal your learning from the company.

Never display your learning, but on particular occasions. Reserve it for learned men, and let even these rather extort it from you, than appear forward to display it. Hence you will be deemed modest, and reputed to possess more knowledge than you really have. Never seem wiser or more learned than your company. The man who affects to display his learning, will be frequently questioned; and if found superficial, will be ridiculed and despised; if otherwise, he will be deemed a pedant. Nothing can lessen real merit (which will always shew itself) in the opinion of the world, but an ostentatious display by its possessor.

Well, then, good night to you; you have no objection, I hope, to my being drunk to-night, which I certainly will be.

There is nothing that people bear more impatiently, or forgive less, than contempt; and an injury is much sooner forgotten than an insult.

There are several short intervals during the day, between studies and pleasures: instead of sitting idle and yawning, in those intervals, take up any book, though ever so trifling a one, even down to a jest-book; it is still better than doing nothing.

In matters of religion and matrimony I never give advice, because I will not have anybody's torments in this world or the next laid to my charge.

I come now to another part of your letter, which is the orthography, if I may call bad spelling orthography. You spell induce, enduce; and grandeur, you spell grandure; two faults, of which few of my house-maids would have been guilty. I must tell you, that orthography, in the true sense of the word, is so absolutely necessary for a man of letters, or a gentleman, that one false spelling may fix a ridicule upon him for the rest of his life; and I know a man of quality, who never recovered the ridicule of having spelled wholesome without the w.

Secret thoughts and an open countenance will take you safely the world over

If you have an hour, will you not improve that hour, instead of idling it away?

Take care of the minutes and the hours will take care of themselves

errors and mistakes, however gross, in matters of opinion, if they are sincere, are to be pitied, but not punished nor laughed at. The blindness of the understanding is as much to be pitied as the blindness of the eye; and there is neither jest nor guilt in a man's losing his way in either case. Charity bids us set him right if we can, by arguments and persuasions; but charity, at the same time, forbids, either to punish or ridicule his misfortune.

Whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing well.

Young men are apt to think themselves wise enough, as drunken men are apt to think themselves sober enough.

A man is fit for neither business nor pleasure, who either cannot, or does not, command and direct his attention to the present object, and, in some degree, banish for that time all other objects from his thoughts.

Knowledge may give weight, but accomplishments give luster, and many more people see than weigh.