Quotes About Society

There were always people to snatch at you, and it would never occur to them that they were eating you up. They did that without tasting.

It wouldn't be the first time she had seen herself obliged to accept with smothered irony other people's interpretation of her conduct. She often ended by giving up to them --it seemed really the way to live --the version that met their convenience.

She existed in that view wholly for the small house in Chelsea; the moral of which moreover, of course, was that the more one gave oneself the less of one was left. There were always people to snatch at one, and it would never occur to them that they were eating one up. They did that without tasting.

You can do a great many things if you're rich which would be severely criticised if you were poor. You can go and come, you can travel alone, you can have your own establishment: I mean of course if you'll take a companion—some decayed gentlewoman, with a darned cashmere and dyed hair, who paints on velvet.

But if he isn't a gentleman — What is he? He's a horror.

I never really have believed in the existence of friendship in big societies - in great towns and great crowds. It's a plant that takes time and space and air; and London society is a huge squash, as we elegantly call it - an elbowing, pushing, perspiring, chattering mob.

From lapsing into eagerness on this point she earnestly prayed she might be delivered; she held that a woman ought to be able to live to herself, in the absence of exceptional flimsiness, and that it was perfectly possible to be happy without the society of a more or less coarse-minded person of another sex.

Whether or no being hopelessly vulgar is being 'bad' is a question for the metaphysicians.

She's the latest freshest fruit of our great American evolution. She's the self-made girl! (…) Well, to begin with, the self-made girl's a new feature. That, however, you know. In the second place she isn't self-made at all. We all help to make her, we take such an interest in her.

Prettiness is terribly vulgar nowadays, and it is not every one that knows just the sort of ugliness that has chic.

They had from an early hour made up their mind that society was, luckily, unintelligent, and the margin allowed them by this had fairly become one of their commonplaces.

I'm perfectly aware, for instance, that you know good society from bad. Society is all bad.

But for a nice girl you do attract the most unnatural people.

I never congratulate any girl on marrying; I think they ought to make it somehow not quite so awful a steel trap.

What young man had ever paraded about that way, without a reason, a maiden in her flower? And

Certainly, the clothes which, as you say, I choose to wear, don't express me; and heaven forbid they should! 'You dress very well . . .' 'Possibly; but I don't care to be judged by that. My clothes may express the dressmaker, but they don't express me. To begin with, it's not my own choice that I wear them; they are imposed upon me by society.

Wasn't that what women always said they wanted to do when they deprecated the addresses of gentlemen they couldn't more intimately go on with? It was what they, no doubt, sincerely fancied they could make of men of whom they couldn't make husbands.

If you could see none but the people I like, my dear, you'd have a very small society.

Oh they're every one—all sorts and sizes; of course I mean within limits, though limits down perhaps rather more than limits up. There are always artists—he's beautiful and inimitable to the cher confrère; and then gros bonnets of many kinds—ambassadors, cabinet ministers, bankers, generals, what do I know? even Jews. Above

The way certain classes arrogate to themselves the title of the people has never pleased me. Why are some human beings the people, and the people only, and others not? I am of the people myself, I have worked all my days like a knife-grinder, and I have really never changed.

In Paris such debts are tacit.

She paused again for an instant; she was looking at Winterbourne with all her prettiness in her lively eyes and in her light, slightly monotonous smile. 'I have always had,' she said, 'a great deal of gentlemen's society.

Mrs. Keith was precisely the widow that young unmarried ladies wish to be.

I don't see why I should regard what is done here," said Bessie Alden. "Why should I suffer the restrictions of a society of which I enjoy none of the privileges?