Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, was a British statesman, diplomat, man of letters, and an acclaimed wit of his time. Wikipedia
“Marriage is the cure of love, and friendship the cure of marriage.”
Detached Thoughts http://books.google.com/books?id=vVdSAAAAcAAJ&q=%22Marriage+is+the+cure+of+love+and+friendship+the+cure+of+marriage%22&pg=PA384#v=onepage, first published in Letters and Works of Philip Dormer Stanhope, volume 5 (1847)
“Religion is by no means a proper subject of conversation in a mixed company.”
Letter to his godson, No.112 (undated)
“Advice is seldom welcome; and those who want it the most always like it the least.”
29 January 1748
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)
5 September 1748
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)
1 July 1748
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)
“Knowledge may give weight, but accomplishments give luster, and many more people see than weigh.”
8 May 1750
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)
22 February 1748
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)
10 August 1749
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)
11 May 1752
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)
“People will no more advance their civility to a bear, than their money to a bankrupt.”
25 December 1753
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)
“Be wiser than other people if you can; but do not tell them so.”
19 November 1745
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)
15 January 1748
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)
“The knowledge of the world is only to be acquired in the world, and not in a closet.”
4 October 1746
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)
“Courts and camps are the only places to learn the world in.”
2 October 1747
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)
2 October 1747
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)
19 December 1749
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)
Context: We must not suppose that, because a man is a rational animal, he will, therefore, always act rationally; or, because he has such or such a predominant passion, that he will act invariably and consequentially in pursuit of it. No, we are complicated machines; and though we have one main spring that gives motion to the whole, we have an infinity of little wheels, which, in their turns, retard, precipitate, and sometime stop that motion.
17 March 1748
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)
“I wish to God that you had as much pleasure in following my advice, as I have in giving it to you.”
5 February 1750
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)
19 December 1749
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)
16 March 1752
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)
Letter
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)
6 November 1747
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)
"Advice to a Lady in Autumn", published in A Collection of Poems in Six Volumes. By Several Hands. Vol. I. (1763), printed by J. Hughs, for R. and J. Dodsley
"Advice to a Lady in Autumn", published in A Collection of Poems in Six Volumes. By Several Hands. Vol. I. (1763), printed by J. Hughs, for R. and J. Dodsley
“Without some dissimulation no business can be carried on at all.”
22 May 1749
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)
“Mark in the meadows the ruin of Time;
Take the hint, and let life be improv'd in its prime.”
"Advice to a Lady in Autumn", published in A Collection of Poems in Six Volumes. By Several Hands. Vol. I. (1763), printed by J. Hughs, for R. and J. Dodsley
“Tyrawley and I have been dead these two years; but we don't choose to have it known.”
Quoted in Boswell's Life of Johnson
14 April 1747
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)
“Dispatch is the soul of business.”
5 February 1750
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)
“Whatever is worth doing at all, is worth doing well.”
The French attribute this to the painter Nicolas Poussin (born 15 June 1594) "Ce qui vaut la peine d'être fait vaut la peine d'être bien fait"
Disputed
“The chapter of knowledge is a very short, but the chapter of accidents is a very long one.”
To Solomon Dayrolles (16 February 1753)
7 February 1749
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)
15 January 1753
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)
“Idleness is only the refuge of weak minds.”
20 July 1749
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)
“You foolish man, you do not understand your own foolish business.”
Attributed to Chesterfield by George Agar-Ellis, 1st Baron Dover, in his 1833 edition of Horace Walpole's letters to Sir Horace Mann, such statements have been attributed to many others, such as Lord Chief Justice Campbell, William Henry Maule (in the form "You silly old fool, you don't even know the alphabet of your own silly old business"), Sir William Harcourt, Lord Pembroke, Lord Westbury, and to an anonymous judge, and said to have been spoken in court to Garter King at Arms, Rouge Dragon Pursuivant, or some other high-ranking herald, who had confused a "bend" with a "bar" or had demanded fees to which he was not entitled. George Bernard Shaw uses it in Pygmalion (1912) in the form, "The silly people dont [sic] know their own silly business." Similar remarks occur in Charles Jenner's The Placid Man: Or, The Memoirs of Sir Charles Beville (1770): "Sir Harry Clayton ... was perhaps far better qualified to have written a Peerage of England than Garter King at Arms, or Rouge Dragon, or any of those parti-coloured officers of the court of honor, who, as a great man complained on a late solemnity, are but too often so silly as not to know their own silly business." "Old Lord Pembroke" (Henry Herbert, 9th Earl of Pembroke) is said by Horace Walpole (in a letter of 28 May 1774 to the Rev. William Cole) to have directed the quip, "Thou silly fellow! Thou dost not know thy own silly business," at John Anstis, Garter King at Arms. Edmund Burke also quotes such a remark in his "Speech in the Impeachment of Warren Hastings, Esq." on 7 May 1789: "'Silly man, that dost not know thy own silly trade!' was once well said: but the trade here is not silly."
Disputed
6 February 1752
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)
“Unlike my subject will I frame my song,
It shall be witty, and it shan't be long.”
Epigram on ("Long") Sir Thomas Robinson
“Speak of the moderns without contempt, and of the ancients without idolatry.”
22 February 1748
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)
“A weak mind is like a microscope, which magnifies trifling things but cannot receive great ones.”
Generally attributed to Lord Chesterfield, the first publication of this yet located is in a section of proverbs called "Diamond Dust" in Eliza Cook's Journal, No. 98 (15 March 1851), with the first attribution to Chesterfield as yet located in: Many Thoughts of Many Minds (1862) edited by Henry Southgate
Disputed
15 January 1753
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)
6 December 1748
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)
“The manner is often as important as the matter, sometimes more so.”
1751
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)
“An injury is much sooner forgotten than an insult.”
9 October 1746
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)
15 January 1753
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)
“He adorned whatever subject he either spoke or wrote upon, by the most splendid eloquence.”
Character of Bolingbroke; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
18 March 1751
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)
“The nation looked upon him as a deserter, and he shrunk into insignificancy and an earldom.”
Character of Pulteney; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
“Take the tone of the company you are in.”
16 October 1747
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)
22 May 1749
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)
26 March 1754
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)
16 March 1759
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)
“In my mind, there is nothing so illiberal and so ill-bred, as audible laughter.”
9 March 1748
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)
“Let dull critics feed upon the carcasses of plays; give me the taste and the dressing.”
6 February 1752
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)
“Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.”
1 November 1750
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)
24 November 1747
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)
14 December 1756
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)
21 September 1747
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)
“Do as you would be done by, is the surest method of pleasing.”
9 October 1747
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)
“I recommend you to take care of the minutes: for hours will take care of themselves.”
1747
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)
Variant: I recommend you to take care of the minutes: for hours will take care of themselves.
“Style is the dress of thoughts.”
24 November 1749
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)
“I am sure that since I have had the full use of my reason, nobody has ever heard me laugh.”
9 March 1748
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)
9 March 1748
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)
19 December 1749
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)
