Quotes About Propriety

Good manners are the last thing to desert us, so it seems. They remain behind to mock us with their hollow sound when all else has fled.   On

You must be more gentle, dear, more sedate,' Ellen told her daughter. 'You must not interrupt gentlemen when they are speaking, even if you do think you know more about matters than they do. Gentlemen do not like forward girls.

Captain Butler, you must not hold me so tightly. Everybody is looking. If no one were looking, would you care?

You must not interrupt gentlemen when they are speaking, even if you do think you know more about matters than they do. Gentlemen do not like forward girls.

You must be more gentle, dear, more sedate," Ellen told her daughter. "You must not interrupt gentlemen when they are speaking, even if you do think you know more about matters than they do. Gentlemen do not like forward girls.

Surely an American doesn't want to get it wrong; if there is anything that England stands for, with its quiet central squares, its tweeds and twin sets and teas, the tight-lipped precision of its speech, it is that there is a right way to do things. This is where the right way has its ancestral home.

I would appreciate it if you would stop… stop… ogling me like that, she hissed, tugging her very modest neckline higher. It is very embarrassing. She folded her arms across her breasts defensively. He tried to look contrite. It wasn't me, he confessed. It was my eyes. They are bold and easily led and have no sense of propriety.

I don't think you have the right to shout about other people's private life.

Far better, and more cheerfully, I could dispense with some part of the downright necessaries of life, than with certain circumstances of elegance and propriety in the daily habits of using them.

It seems whenever someone has a good idea like this, other people simply can't wait to rob them.

The outer garments of to-day will become the under-clothes of some destined to-morrow, and centuries hence a man found walking on the public highways dressed as you are will be arrested by the police for shocking the sense of propriety of the community, and so on. It will go on and on until you will find human beings everywhere decked out in layer after layer of clothes until he or she has lost all semblance to that beautiful thing that an all-wise Providence has designed us to be.

I should have known you were no better than the rest of them. You are only a man, you do not have the ability to control yourself, but she," Lady Catherine nodded sagely, "she knew exactly what she was doing. Fluffing her feathers and shaking her tail for you! It was disgraceful!

When all else failed, her grandmother Mary would have said, good manners never deserted one.

Livvy noted there seemed some communal feeling between the married: any wife could be faintly rude to anyone else's husband.

In fact, in eighteenth-century English, the language of Kames's works, property meant the same as propriety: those things that are proper to me, and to me alone. To Kames and his followers, including Hume and Adam Smith, to own things is in fact to own myself. Property makes me a whole and complete human being.

But I remembered that it wouldn't be polite.

Cuban-heeled stockings; not the sort of thing you could buy for another man's wife.

As the slap-dash sentences of a rushing critic express the hasty impatience of modern manners; so the deliberate emphasis, the slow acumen, the steady argument, the impressive narration bring before us what is now a tradition, the picture of the correct eighteenth-century gentleman, who never failed in a measured politeness, partly because it was due in propriety towards others, and partly because from his own dignity it was due most obviously to himself.

Nothing that's worth saying is proper.

Mr. Humphrey's bluster died under the duchess's unwavering gaze. His nose twitched. "Yes, well, indeed. It is all highly irregular." Her grace smiled gently. "Duchesses can be 'highly irregular,' Mr. Humphrey. It's one of the perks of the position.

There is something...more important in life than punctuality, and that is decorum.

Most vices may be committed very genteelly: a man may debauch his friend's wife genteelly: he may cheat at cards genteelly.

The thrill of telling her true feelings without considering good manners or the propriety of what she had to say was intoxicating.

The genteel thing is the genteel thing any time, if as be that a gentleman bees in a concatenation accordingly.