Philip Stanhope

“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.”

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

“Advice is seldom welcome; and those who want it the most always like it the least.”

“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.”

“I recommend you to take care of the minutes: for hours will take care of themselves.”

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

“I knew once a very covetous, sordid fellow, who used to say, "Take care of the pence, for the pounds will take care of themselves."”

“Take the tone of the company you are in.”

“Do as you would be done by, is the surest method of pleasing.”

“The world is a country which nobody ever yet knew by description; one must travel through it one's self to be acquainted with it.”

“Courts and camps are the only places to learn the world in.”

“I really know nothing more criminal, more mean, and more ridiculous than lying. It is the production either of malice, cowardice, or vanity; and generally misses of its aim in every one of these views; for lies are always detected, sooner or later.”

“There is time enough for everything, in the course of the day, if you do but one thing at once; but there is not time enough in the year, if you will do two things at a time.”

“An injury is much sooner forgotten than an insult.”

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

“Whatever is worth doing at all, is worth doing well.”

“Be wiser than other people if you can; but do not tell them so.”

“He adorned whatever subject he either spoke or wrote upon, by the most splendid eloquence.”

“The nation looked upon him as a deserter, and he shrunk into insignificancy and an earldom.”

“Marriage is the cure of love, and friendship the cure of marriage.”