Quotes About Manners

Putting out crackers and cheese is reasonable when visitors show up with wine, but not when they arrive with cyanide.

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.

Just like a man," she says. "Does not know how to be silent, thinks we always want to hear what he has to say, always talking talking talking, interrupting his betters.

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

The things that make you a functional citizen in society - manners, discretion, cordiality - don't necessarily make you a good writer. Writing needs raw truth, wants your suffering and darkness on the table, revels in a cutting mind that takes no prisoners...

Jane Austen has taught me to view the ridiculous and rude with amusement rather than disdain.

One of the things I'd learned ... was how to take a compliment. Just say, "Thank you." It's the only response a confident person can make.

For as laws are necessary that good manners be preserved, so there is need of good manners that law may be maintained

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

People who confuse social behavior with manners naturally think of it as something that can be donned and doffed, a fashion that can be copied. But social behavior is nerve and bone, not clothes, and is never just a copy, however derivative it may look.

Human cultures kept the oddest gestures.

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.

The anonymity of the modern city is as intolerable as the familiarity of modern customs. Life should resemble a salon of people with good manners, where all know each other but where none hug each other.

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

The only indices of civilization are the clarity, lucidity, order, good manners of everyday prose.

Vulgarity is not a product of the people but a subproduct of bourgeois prosperity.

A little patience in dealing with a fool helps us avoid sacrificing our good manners to our convictions.

The ignoramus believes that the expression "aristocratic manners" signified insolent behavior; whoever investigates discovers that the expression signified courtesy, refinement, dignity.

Vulgarity consists as much in disrespecting what deserves respect as in respecting what does not deserve it.

Vulgarity consists, basically, in being on first name terms with Plato or Goethe.

In a perfect penal code, vulgarity would be punished with the death penalty.

A fop sometimes gives important advice.