Philip Stanhope (1694 – 1773)
British statesman and man of letters.
Let this be one invariable rule of your conduct—never to show the least symptom of resentment, which you cannot, to a certain degree, gratify; but always to smile, where you cannot strike.
An injury is much sooner forgotten than an insult.
People will no more advance their civility to a bear, than their money to a bankrupt.
It is an undoubted truth, that the less one has to do, the less time one finds to do it in. One yawns, one procrastinates, one can do it when one will, and therfore one seldom does it at all.
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.
Do as you would be done by, is the surest method of pleasing.
A weak mind is like a microscope, which magnifies trifling things but cannot receive great ones.
Let dull critics feed upon the carcasses of plays; give me the taste and the dressing.
Whatever is worth doing at all, is worth doing well.
The dews of the evening most carefully shun —
Those tears of the sky for the loss of the sun.
Women who are either indisputably beautiful, or indisputably ugly, are best flattered upon the score of their understandings; but those who are in a state of mediocrity are best flattered upon their beauty, or at least their graces; for every woman who is not absolutely ugly thinks herself handsome.
Advice is seldom welcome; and those who want it the most always like it the least.
Style is the dress of thoughts.
In short, let it be your maxim through life, to know all you can know, yourself; and never to trust implicitly to the informations of others.
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.
The reputation of generosity is to be purchased pretty cheap; it does not depend so much upon a man’s general expense, as it does upon his giving handsomely where it is proper to give at all. A man, for instance, who should give a servant four shillings, would pass for covetous, while he who gave him a crown, would be reckoned generous; so that the difference of those two opposite characters, turns upon one shilling.
In my mind, there is nothing so illiberal and so ill-bred, as audible laughter.
Every woman is infallibly to be gained by every sort of flattery, and every man by one sort or other.
It is commonly said, and more particularly by Lord Shaftesbury, that ridicule is the best test of truth.
Never seem wiser, nor more learned, than the people you are with. Wear your learning, like your watch, in a private pocket: and do not pull it out and strike it; merely to show that you have one.