Advice for Men from the 1850s

• Keep good company or none.
• Never be idle. If your hands cannot be usefully employed, attend to the cultivation of your mind.
• Always speak the truth.
• Make few promises. Live up to all your engagements.
• Have no very intimate friends.
• Keep your own secrets, if you have any.
• When you speak to a person, look him in the face.
• Good company and conversation are the very sinews of virtue.
• Good character is above all things else.
• Never listen to loose or infidel conversation.
• You had better be poisoned in your blood than in your principles.
• Your character cannot be essentially injured except by your own acts.
• If any one speak evil of you, let your life be so virtuous that none will believe him.
• Always speak and act as in the presence of God.
• Drink no kind of intoxicating liquors.
• Ever live (misfortune excepted) within your income.
• When you retire to bed, think over what you have been doing during the day.
• Never speak lightly of religion.
• Make no haste to be rich, if you would prosper.
• Small and steady gains give competency with tranquillity of mind.
• Never play at any game of chance.
• Avoid temptation, through fear that you may not withstand it.
• Earn your money before you spend it.
• Never run into debt, unless you see a way to get out again.
• Never borrow if you can possibly avoid it.
• Do not marry till you are able to support a wife.
• Never speak evil of any one.
• Be just before you are generous.
• Keep yourself innocent, if you would be happy.
• Save when you are young, to spend when you are old.
• Often think of death, and your accountability to God.
• Read over the above maxims at least once a week.

Polonius' fatherly advices to Laertes

And these few precepts in thy memory
Look thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportioned thought his act.
Be thou familiar but by no means vulgar.
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatched, unfledged courage. Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel; but being in,
Bear ’t that th' opposèd may beware of thee.
Give every man thy ear but few thy voice.
Take each man’s censure but reserve thy judgment.
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not expressed in fancy - rich, not gaudy,
For the apparel oft proclaims the man,
And they in France of the best rank and station
Are of a most select and generous chief in that.
Neither a borrower nor a lender be,
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Farewell. My blessing season this in thee.

William Shakespeare - Hamlet
(The New Oxford Shakespeare - The Complete Works, Modern Critical Edition)