Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield Quotes

The wisest of the wise may err.

It is not so important to be serious as it is to be serious about the important things. The monkey wears an expression of seriousness which would do credit to any college student, but the monkey is serious because he itches.

Take what you can use and let the rest go by.

We define ourselves, in part, by the discriminations we make. The value of what we love is enriched by our understanding of what we dislike.

The wise man is he who knows the relative value of things.

Being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

The principal point of cleverness is to know how to value things just as they deserve.

People who lack the skill of discrimination tend to believe that everything is of relatively equal importance.

Some information is important, and some is not, and intelligence consists in knowing one from the other.

Focused attention necessarily has an edge, but as focus changes, the edge shifts.

No two things differ more than hurry and despatch. Hurry is the mark of a weak mind; despatch of a strong one.

The vulgar mind always mistakes the exceptional for the important.

...Hard people are weak people whom nobody wants, and the strong, caring little whether they are wanted or not, have alone that meekness which the common herd mistake for weakness.

But clever people all make one mistake. They all think everyone else is stupid. And everyone isn't stupid. They just take a bit more time, that's all.

You have to understand the good in things, to detect the real evil.

I tend to not have to handle things that are probably gonna end up being irrelevant, that aren't gonna have much to do with the film. I have probably a better understanding of really what does matter, when to pick my battles and when to kind of let them go.

Hurry is the mark of a weak mind, dispatch of a strong one.

You need to see things, REALLY see them, feel them, live them, so you know what’s big and what’s little, what matters and what to put aside.

The soul is the perceiver and revealer of truth. We know truth when we see it, let skeptic and scoffer say what they choose. Foolish people ask you, when you have spoken what they do not wish to hear, 'How do you know it is truth, and not an error of your own?' We know truth when we see it, from opinion, as we know when we are awake that we are awake.

A classic engineering mistake and one I've made is confusing what is hard and what is valuable.

Being educated means to prefer the best not only to the worst but to the second best.

The failure and the success both believe in their hearts that they have accurately balanced points of view, the success because he's succeeded, and the failure because he's failed. The successful man tells his son to profit by his father's good fortune, and the failure tells his son to profit by his father's mistakes.

Sir, as a man advances in life, he gets what is better than admiration, - judgement, to estimate things at their true value.

Sire, you are looking at a plain man, and I am looking at a great man. Each of us may benefit.

The fundamental mistake I had always made - and that she had, in fairness, always led me to make - was this: Margo was not a miracle. She was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl.