Quotes About Decorum

Manners require time, as nothing is more vulgar than haste.

You don't talk about celebrities in the Hamptons, duh!

There's a civility that has always been a part of me.

I know you aren't supposed to speak ill of the dead.

But people don't on the whole fart raucously in Mozart [concerts]. So I suppose a few vestiges of the thin crust of civilization which prevents our descent into utter barbarism are just about holding. ~Vigilance, by Julian Barnes

it was understood that the word "Redmond" would be treated in their house rather as though someone had silently broken wind in company. Its occurrence was distasteful but occasionally unavoidable, and while it could be politely ignored, it was certainly not encouraged or enjoyed.

The monkey girl had made another unscheduled appearance, and it had landed her in jail again. When would she learn to behave with restraint and decorum?

Chastity is not chastity in an old man, but a disability to be unchaste.

One may know a man that never conversed in the world, by his excess of good-breeding.

Modesty becomes a young man. [Lat., Adolescentem verecundum esse decet.]

It well becomes a young man to be modest.

Close your legs to married men.

Men sometimes have to leave their ladies alone, and ladies are not responsible for the bad manners of fools.

One shouldn't talk of halters in the hanged man's house.

A man's tie should never be louder than his wife.

Talking about money is garish. It's tacky.

Do not run a campaign that would embarrass your mother.

When we were growing up, our mother taught us never to have your belly button exposed.

Politeness requires this thing; decorum that; ceremony has its forms, and fashion its laws, and these must always follow, never the promptings of our own nature.

A well-behaved person is not always well-dressed.

No animal should ever jump up on the dining-room furniture unless absolutely certain that he can hold his own in the conversation.

Keep your head high and your skirt down.

I never let my politics supersede my manners.

if the emotional person is another man, it is the worst possible catastrophe. The societal fabric has been rent. A man would rather be shot by a firing squad than to break down in front of his fellows, and to witness such a breakdown is almost as bad a breach of decorum as to break down oneself.