Quotes About Behavior

We learn more about people with an attitude than years of talk.

For a moment Eustace contemplated an existence spent in pleasing himself. How would he set about it? He had been told by precept, and had learned from experience, that the things he did to please himself usually ended in making other people grieved and angry, and were therefore wrong. Was he to spend his life in continuous wrong-doing, and in making other people cross? There would be no pleasure in that. Indeed what pleasure was there, except in living up to people's good opinion of him?

For a long time visits among lovers and professions of love are kept up through habit, after their behavior has plainly proved that love no longer exists.

Among some people arrogance supplies the place of grandeur, inhumanity of decision, and roguery of intelligence.

A man must be completely wanting in intelligence if he does not show it when actuated by love, malice, or necessity.

The same amount of pride which makes a man treat haughtily his inferiors, makes him cringe servilely; to those above him.

A man must be very inert to have no character at all.

It is too much for a husband to have a wife who is a coquette and sanctimonious as well; she should select only one of those qualities.

Courtly manners are contagious; they are caught at Versailles.

A party spirit betrays the greatest men to act as meanly as the vulgar herd.

We are often more agreeable through our faults than our good qualities.

We can give advice, but we cannot give conduct.

The mind cannot long act the role of the heart.

Civility is a desire to receive civilities, and to be accounted well-bred.

Nothing is so catching as example.

That conduct often seems ridiculous the secret reasons of which are wise and solid.

A gentleman may love like a lunatic, but not like a beast.

Propriety is the least of all laws, but the most obeyed.

A man often imagines that he acts, when he is acted upon.

A fool has not stuff enough to make a good man.

Our virtues are usually just vices in disguise.

Sometimes we meet a fool with wit, never one with discretion.

What seems like generosity is often but a disguised ambition, which overlooks little interests, in order to gratify great ones.

We try to make a virtue of vices we are loath to correct.