Quotes About Manners

Morals refine manners, as manners refine morals.

Good manners on a man are like wearing an exquisite suit. They never go out of style

It is ill-manners to silence a fool and cruelty to let him go on

Manners are one of the greatest engines of influence ever given to man.

True merit does not depend on the times or on fashion. Those who have no other advantage than courtly manners lose it when they are away from court. But good sense, knowledge, and wisdom make their possessors knowledgeable and beloved in all ages and in all times.

When every benefit received is a right, there is no place for good manners, let alone for gratitude.

The Greeks put us to shame not only by their simplicity, which is foreign to our age; they are at the same time our rivals, nay, frequently our models, in those very points of superiority from which we seek comfort when regretting the unnatural character of our manners. We see that remarkable people uniting at once fullness of form and fullness of substance, both philosophising and creating, both tender and energetic, uniting a youthful fancy to the virility of reason in a glorious humanity.

One musn't overrate the culture of what used to be called "top people" before the wars. They had charming manners, but they were as ignorant as swans.

The company of women of fashion will improve your manners, though not your understanding; and that complaisance and politeness, which are so useful in men's company, can only be acquired in women's.

I am single because I am allergic for cursing words and bad table manners

The elegance of dress, of motion, and of manners gives a lustre to beauty, and inflames the senses through the imagination. Luxurious entertainments, midnight dances, and licentious spectacles, present at once temptation and opportunity to female frailty. From such dangers the unpolished wives of the barbarians were secured by poverty, solitude, and the painful cares of a domestic life.

To make a pleasant and friendly impression is not alone good manners, but equally good business.

Nations are possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate the memory of themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave. What if equal pains were taken to smooth and polish their manners?

Air and manners are more expressive than words.

The Revolutionist is a doomed man. He has no private interests, no affairs, sentiments, ties, property nor even a name of his own. His entire being is devoured by one purpose, one thought, one passion - the revolution. Heart and soul, not merely by word but by deed, he has severed every link with the social order and with the entire civilized world; with the laws, good manners, conventions, and morality of that world. He is its merciless enemy and continues to inhabit it with only one purpose - to destroy it.

The etiquette of intimacy is very different from the etiquette of formality, but manners are not just something to show off to the outside world. If you offend the head waiter, you can always go to another restaurant. If you offend the person you live with, it's very cumbersome to switch to a different family.

In a culture, manners are the lubrication that ease the frictions of social contacts.

The talent of a meat packer, the morals of a money changer, and the manners of an undertaker.

The most essential elements of success in life are a purpose, increasing industry, temperate habits, scrupulous regard for ones word ... courteous manners, a generous regard for the rights of others, and, above all, integrity which admits of no qualification or variation.

Manners are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything.

Judging others’ intentions is the right of God alone. We don’t have this right, and it is poor manners with God.

A parent can give a child no greater gift than beautiful manners.

Nature never hurries: atom by atom, little by little, she achieves her work. The lesson one learns from yachting or planting is the manners of Nature; patience with the delays of wind and sun, delays of the seasons, bad weather, excess or lack of water.

To be thoroughly imbued, with the liberal arts refines the manners, and makes men to be mild and gentle in their conduct.

When Jo's conservative sister Meg says she must turn up her hair now that she is a "young lady," Jo shouts, "I'm not! and if turning up my hair makes me one, I'll wear it in two tails till I'm twenty.... I hate to think I've got to grow up, and be Miss March, and wear long gowns, and look as prim as a China aster! It's bad enough to be a girl anyway, when I like boys' games and work and manners! I can't get over my disappointment in not being a boy; and it's worse than ever now, for I'm dying to go and fight with Papa, and I can only stay at home and knit, like a poky old woman.

If short hair and good manners won football games, Army and Navy would play for the national championship every year.

A man is but a little thing in the midst of the objects of nature, yet, by the moral quality radiating from his countenance, he may abolish all considerations of magnitude, and in his manners equal the majesty of the world.

There is no rest for the person who has envy, and there is no love for the person who has bad manners.

A constitution founded on these principles introduces knowledge among the people, and inspires them with a conscious dignity becoming freemen; a general emulation takes place, which causes good humor, sociability, good manners, and good morals to be general. That elevation of sentiment inspired by such a government, makes the common people brave and enterprising. That ambition which is inspired by it makes them sober, industrious, and frugal.

Pride, ill nature, and want of sense, are the three great sources of ill manners.

The best of America drifts to Paris. The American in Paris is the best American. It is more fun for an intelligent person to live in an intelligent country. France has the only two things toward which we drift as we grow older—intelligence and good manners.

Spiritual strength and passion, when accompanied by bad manners, only provoke loathing.

As a writer and director, I want to know what is behind the good manners and soft voice. Who is inside the silhouette?

Defect in manners is usually the defect of fine perceptions. Men are too coarsely made for the delicacy of beautiful carriage and customs. It is not quite sufficient to good breeding, a union of kindness and independence.

My heart rushes into the garden, joyfully tasting all the delights. But reason frowns, disapproving of the heart's bad manners.

Dressing well is a kind of good manners, if you ask me. When you're standing in a room, your effect is the same as a chair's effect, or a sculpture's. You're part of someone's view, you're part of that world, and so you should dress well. I find it's a show of respect to try to put on your best face and look as good as you can.

Gentleness is the great point to be obtained in the study of manners.

No civilization would ever have been possible without a framework of stability, to provide the wherein for the flux of change. Foremost among the stabilizing factors, more enduring than customs, manners and traditions, are the legal systems that regulate our life in the world and our daily affairs with each other.

We often value the exterior and superficial aspect of things more than their inner reality. Bad manners taint everything even justice and reason. The 'how' of things matters most, and even the most disagreeable matters can be sweetened and gilded over with the proper appearance. Such is the bias and the weakness of the human mind.

Punishments of unreasonable severity, especially where indiscriminately afflicted, have less effect in preventing crimes, and amending the manners of a people, than such as are more merciful in general, yet properly intermixed with due distinctions of severity.

Whosoever will list himself under the banner of Christ, must, in the first place and above all things, make war upon his own lusts and vices. It is in vain for any man to usurp the name of Christian, without holiness of life, purity of manners, benignity and meekness of spirit.

Good manners have much to do with the emotions. To make them ring true, one must feel them, not merely exhibit them.

Solitude is an excellent laboratory in which to observe the extent to which manners and habits are conditioned by others.

S'mimasen," Alyss said repeatedly as they brushed against passerby. "What does that mean?" Will asked as they reached a stretch of street bare of any other pedestrians. He was impressed by Alyss's grasp of the local language. "It means 'pardon me,'" Alyss replied, but then a shadow of doubt crossed her face. "At least, I hope it does. Maybe I'm saying 'you have the manners of a fat, rancid sow.

Society is infected with rude, cynical, restless, and frivolous persons who prey upon the rest, and whom no public opinion concentrated into good manners, forms accepted by the sense of all, can reach; the contradictors and railers at public and private tables, who are like terriers, who conceive it the duty of a dog of honor to growl at any passer-by, and do the honors of the house by barking him out of sight.

Natural dignity of mind or manners can never be concealed; it ever commands our respect: assumed dignity, or importance, excites our ridicule and contempt.

Good breeding consists in having no particular mark of any profession, but a general elegance of manners.

The tone and tendency of liberalism...is to attack the institutions of the country under the name of reform and to make war on the manners and customs of the people under the pretext of progress.