Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield Quotes

Tyrawley and I have been dead these two years; but we don't choose to have it known.

I am sure that since I have had the full use of my reason, nobody has ever heard me laugh.

It is commonly said, and more particularly by Lord Shaftesbury, that ridicule is the best test of truth.

People will no more advance their civility to a bear, than their money to a bankrupt.

Know the true value of time; snatch, seize, and enjoy every moment of it. No idleness, no laziness, no procrastination: never put off till to-morrow what you can do to-day.

Speak of the moderns without contempt, and of the ancients without idolatry.

Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.

Patience, to hear frivolous, impertinent, and unreasonable applications: with address enough to refuse, without offending; or, by your manner of granting, to double the obligation: dexterity enough to conceal a truth, without telling a lie: sagacity enough to read other people’s countenances: and serenity enough not to let them discover anything by yours; a seeming frankness, with a real reserve. These are the rudiments of a politician; the world must be your grammar.

The knowledge of the world is only to be acquired in the world, and not in a closet.

I wish to God that you had as much pleasure in following my advice, as I have in giving it to you.

The young leading the young, is like the blind leading the blind; “they will both fall into the ditch.”

Style is the dress of thoughts.

Abject flattery and indiscriminate assentation degrade, as much as indiscriminate contradiction and noisy debate disgust. But a modest assertion of one’s own opinion, and a complaisant acquiescence in other people’s, preserve dignity.

Take the tone of the company you are in.

The idle story of the Pretender's having been introduced in a warming-pan, into the Queen's bed, though as destitute of all probability as of all foundation, has been much more prejudicial to the cause of Jacobitism, than all that Mr. Locke and others have written, to show the unreasonableness and absurdity of the doctrines of indefeasible hereditary right, and unlimited passive obedience.