A biography for Philip Stanhopehasn’t been written yet.
“A weak mind is like a microscope, which magnifies trifling things, but cannot receive great ones.”
“Men, as well as women, are much oftener led by their hearts than by their understandings.”
“In the mass of mankind, I fear, there is too great a majority of fools and knaves; who, singly from their number, must to a certain degree be respected, though they are by no means respectable.”
“Every man becomes, to a certain degree, what the people he generally converses with are.”
“Take the tone of the company you are in.”
“A man of sense only trifles with them, plays with them, humors and flatters them, as he does with a sprightly and forward child; but he neither consults them about, nor trusts them with, serious matters.”
“Sex: the pleasure is momentary, the position ridiculous, and the expense damnable.”
“Advice is seldom welcome; and those who want it the most always want it the least.”
“Inferiority is what you enjoy in your best friends.”
“Persist and persevere, and you will find most things that are attainable, possible.”
“It is always right to detect a fraud, and to perceive a folly; but it is very often wrong to expose either. A man of business should always have his eyes open, but must often seem to have them shut.”
“Any affectation whatsoever in dress implies, in my mind, a flaw in the understanding.”
“Remember, as long as you live, that nothing but strict truth can carry you through the world, with either your conscience or your honor unwounded.”
“Frequent and loud laughter is the characteristic of folly and ill manners.”
“Be wiser than other people if you can, but do not tell them so.”
“Politeness is as much concerned in answering letters within a reasonable time, as it is in returning a bow, immediately.”
“Let your enemies be disarmed by the gentleness of your manner, but at the same time let them feel, the steadiness of your resentment.”
“Let them show me a cottage where there are not the same vices of which they accuse the courts.”
“If you are not in fashion, you are nobody.”
“In matters of religion and matrimony I never give any advice; because I will not have anybody's torments in this world or the next laid to my charge.”