Quotes About Etiquette

Cover that bosom that I must not see: souls are wounded by such things.

Another thing those kind nuns had done was to teach him to say 'the toilet' when he meant the po or the lavatory, which was a vulgarity no one seemed able to straighten out.

her books are shot through with painful parties and awkwardly inane dining-table conversation,

told off for waving her arms around.

Does it really matter what these affectionate people do-- so long as they dont do it in the streets and frighten the horses

It's a whydunnit in q-sharp major and it has a message: never talk to the sort of girls that you wouldn't leave lying about in your drawing-room for the servants to pick up.

Above all, the revolutionary group must divest itself of the forms of power—statutes, hierarchies, property, prescribed opinions, fetishes, paraphernalia, official etiquette—and of the subtlest as well as the most obvious of bureaucratic and bourgeois traits that consciously and unconsciously reinforce authority and hierarchy.

Speech, etiquette, behavior, thinking, everything is mechanized and everything works automatically, everything is carefully programmed for the norm, everything is a formality. The world around us becomes soulless, a world in which there is a utopia of laziness thanks to machines and mechanical thinking.

Zach. You can only call me Mr. Quinn when you're angry.

I didn't realize," she said in a voice so polite it drew blood, "that fawning over you was part of the job requirement.

Oh, I would just love to talk to you sometime, maybe we could have lunch,' she recalled. But Graham politely declined, explaining to the governor's wife that he did not dine alone with women - be they single or married. 'Oh, well, I'm sorry,' Hillary said. 'Maybe we could have a lot of people there.' Graham replied that he would think about it. ... And so five people sat down at a found table in Little Rock's ornate Capital Hotel that fall.

Always be civil to the girls, you never know who they may marry' is a aphorism which has saved many an English spinster from being treated like an Indian widow.

The person at the other end is answering questions from a person she has never met and about whom she knows nothing. Good manners from you will certainly elicit a more complete response than a threatening or superior attitude.

A great reserve and severity of manners are necessary for the command of those who are older than ourselves.

Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse

thought of this introductory part of the interrogation as the Manilov-Chichikov routine, after the characters in Gogol's Dead Souls who dawdled at great length at the door, each trying to let the other enter first. But whereas in Gogol's novel the two men eventually went through the door together, I never permitted myself to violate the etiquette of the investigation.

Do not light candles in shops. That is an invisible rule. An invisible rule is a rule that no one tells you about until you break it, and then everyone gets cross and tells you shouldn't have broken the rule, even though they did not tell you the rule, it is always a very important rule.

If you call the day after, you're maybe a bit desperate because, since the first day is out of the question, the second day is really the first day, so you're calling on the first day. If they're going to call, people call on the third day.

grand that he had the right to keep his hat on in the presence chamber of the king.

The question of how one survived is simply not asked. It is not polite. How one survived is best not discussed.

It was best to approach royalty with answers, not questions.

We shook hands. My mother showed me a dozen different handshakes. This is the one that means I don't think you're worth my attention: a quick shake, with her hand already sliding from mine before it was properly finished. This one shows I hold you in great contempt: a snakelike up and down, bending at the wrist, fingers stiff as though she couldn't wait to shake off my sweat. There were others. Cordova was a mixture of reserve and haste: fast, light, and whippy.

Good manners, in the end, are nothing but the way in which respect is expressed. Since respect, in its turn, is a feeling inspired by the presence of an admitted superior, wherever hierarchies are absent—real or fictitious, but revered—good manners die out. Rudeness is a democratic product.

Civilizations are not made "avec des idées" but with good manners.