Benjamin Disraeli - Adlai Stevenson - William Shakespeare - Edmund Burke - Charlotte Bronte - Mary Wollstonecraft - Virginia Woolf - James Monroe -
Everyone likes flattery; and when you come to Royalty you should lay it on with a trowel. Benjamin Disraeli to Matthew Arnold
I suppose flattery hurts no-one, that is, if he doesn’t inhale. Adlai Stevenson
But when I tell him he hates flatterers,
He says he does, being then most flattered. William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar II i 207
He that loves to be flattered is worthy o’ th’ flatterer. William Shakespeare, Timon of Athens I I 239, Apemantus
They do abuse the King that flatter him,
For flatt’ry is the bellows blows up sin;
The thing the which is flattered, but a spark,
To which that wind gives heat and stronger glowing. William Shakespeare, Pericles II l @43, Helicanus
Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver. Edmund Burke
It does good to no woman to be flattered [by a man] who does not intend to marry her; and it is madness in all women to let a secret love kindle within them, which, if unreturned and unknown, must devour the life that feeds it; and, if discovered and responded to, must lead, ignis-fatuus-like, into miry wilds whence there is no extrication. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
It flattered her, where she was most susceptible of flattery, to think how, wound about in their hearts, however long they lived she would be woven. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
A little flattery will support a man through great fatigue. James Monroe