Richard Lingard

c. 1598–1670 · Anglo-Irish clergyman, Dean of Lismore · wrote the 1670 pamphlet that is the line’s earliest match

Richard Lingard (c. 1598–1670) was an Anglo-Irish churchman and academic at Trinity College Dublin who became Dean of Lismore. His posthumously printed A Letter of Advice to a Young Gentleman Leaveing the University (1670) contains the earliest known form of this saying — about watching a man gamble to read his character. The generalized, Plato-branded version circulating today is a much later paraphrase of that idea, not anything Lingard would have recognized as a quotation of the ancient philosopher.

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“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation”

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