Quotes About Propriety

There is modesty, and there is propriety. The former is a natural instinct, given to us when Adam and Eve left the garden and realized their nakedness. The latter is merely a social construct. Although as human beings we wish to consort with our fellows, and therefore yield to their judgments in matters of dress and behavior, surely we may break the rules of propriety when they interfere with the important matters of our lives, so long as modesty is not thereby wounded.

Lust is absurd. It strikes in the strangest places at the oddest times. She doesn't even realize she's feeling it. She's erected a barricade of propriety and lies between us. I despise the type of woman she is. I loathe her soft pink innocence. My body doesn't concur. I wonder why her?

I am not like other men, and the ordinary laws of morality and rules of propriety do not apply to me," Napoleon vaunted.

So acts every 'man-in-the-street' in our own society, so has acted the average member of any society through the past ages, and so acts the present-day savage; and the lower his level of cultural development, the greater stickler he will be for good manners, propriety and form, and the more incomprehensive and odious to him will be the non-conforming point of view.

What used to be called 'good manners' is now regarded as mere affectation. Open a door for a young woman, and she's likely to call security.

President Trump has often crossed the line of what constitutes decent behavior.

There are names I do not want mentioned in my home.

Humans insisted on others behaving properly, but rarely forced the same standards upon themselves. Justifications dispensed with logic, thriving on opportunism and delusions of pious propriety.

But ownership bereft of propriety was a lie.

Leg hair was not a problem to American women before the 1920s because the legs of most women were never on public view. When a change in attitude toward recreation, fashion and female emancipation during the prosperous, post-war Jazz Age made it socially acceptable for women of all ages and classes to expose their limbs, modesty regarding the propriety of showing legs was transformed with astonishing rapidity into a dainty self-consciousness regarding "unsightly" hair.

Some things a lady doesn't tell.

Almost from the beginning, Lucy Stone had run-ins with the established code of female propriety. Every Sunday morning the students had to sit through a long chapel service. Lucy, who suffered from headaches, took her hat off one morning. She was charged by the Ladies' Board, which supervised the manners and morals of the coeds, with violating the Bible's teach that women must keep their heads covered in church.

It is the effect of scarcity; one's rules of propriety make one thirst for the improper.

one's rules of propriety make one thirst for the improper.

It is the effect of scarcity; one's rules of propriety make one thirst for the improper. Moreover, once sensitized in this manner, one numbs only slowly, if at all . . .

Laurence felt his face going red; she was sitting there in breeches that showed every inch of her leg, with a shirt held closed only by a neckcloth; he shifted his gaze to the unalarming top of her head and managed to say, "Your servant, Miss Harcourt.

Never trust a man who sits, uninvited, at the head of the table in another man's home.

Never trust a man who sits, uninvited, at the head of the table in another man's home." 

But in my book, it was basically bad taste to stare at someone's assets, no matter how much on display they were.

The more you act like a lady, the more he'll act like a gentleman.

And the thorny crown of this sad conception was that she whom he really did prefer in a cursory way to the rest, she who knew herself to be more impassioned in nature, cleverer, more beautiful than they, was in the eyes of propriety far less worthy of him than the homelier ones whom he ignored.

My dear Sue,—Of course I wish you joy! And also of course I will give you away. What I suggest is that, as you have no house of your own, you do not marry from your school friend's, but from mine. It would be more proper, I think, since I am, as you say, the person nearest related to you in this part of the world. I don't see why you sign your letter in such a new and terribly formal way? Surely you care a bit about me still!—Ever your affectionate, Jude.

As without law there is no sin, without eyes there is no indecorum.

His learned values of decency and propriety tagged along, shocked at his associations, appalled at his dreams; sorry that in the bone arena of his skull there were no forts for what he loved. His associations came at the speed of light. His value judgments were at the pace of a responsive reading. They could never keep up and direct his thinking.