Vanity, or to call it by a gentler name, the desire of admiration and applause, is, perhaps, the … - Lord Chesterfield

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Knowledge of divine things for the most part, as Heraclitus says, is lost to us by incredulity.

Lord Chesterfield

Vanity, or to call it by a gentler name, the desire of admiration and applause, is, perhaps, the most universal principle of humanactions. . . . Where that desire is wanting, we are apt to be indifferent, listless, indolent, and inert. . . . I will own to you, under the secrecy of confession, that my vanity has very often made me take great pains to make many a woman in love with me, if I could, for whose person I would not have given a pinch of snuff.

Gentler, Names, Pain, Pains, Secrecy, Vanity

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Knowledge of the world in only to be acquired in the world, and not in a closet.

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At any age we must cherish illusions, consolatory or merely pleasant; in youth, they are omnipresent; in old age we must search for them, or even invent them. But with all that, boredom is their natural and inevitable accompaniment.

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Physical ills are the taxes laid upon this wretched life; some are taxed higher, and some lower, but all pay something.

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As kings are begotten and born like other men, it is to be presumed that they are of the human species; and perhaps, had they thesame education, they might prove like other men. But, flattered from their cradles, their hearts are corrupted, and their heads are turned, so that they seem to be a species by themselves. . . . Flattery cannot be too strong for them; drunk with it from their infancy, like old drinkers, they require dreams.

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