Quotes About Manners

GENTLE READER: You, sir, are an anarchist, and Miss Manners is frightened to have anything to do with you. It is true that questioning the table manners of others is rude. But to overthrow the accepted conventions of society, on the flimsy grounds that you have found them silly, inefficient and discomforting, is a dangerous step toward destroying civilization.

Working- and Middle-class families sat down at the dinner table every night - the shared meal was the touchstone of good manners. Indeed, that dinner table was the one time when we were all together, every day: parents, grandparents, children, siblings. Rudeness between siblings, or a failure to observe the etiquette of passing dishes to one another, accompanied by "please" and "thank you," was the training ground of behavior, the place where manners began.

Well, that’s just a little hard, since I can’t even talk her into sparing your life, huh? You haven’t exactly endeared yourself to her. (Kat) Oh, excuse my utter lack of manners there. Should we call Mommy dearest and invite her over for tea? I promise to be on my best manners when I choke the life out of her. (Sin)

Comedies of manners swiftly become obsolete when there are no longer any manners.

We don't bother much about dress and manners in England, because as a nation we don't dress well and we've no manners.

You can get through life with bad manners, but it's easier with good manners.

The challenge of manners is not so much to be nice to someone whose favor and/or person you covet (although more people need to be reminded of that necessity than one would suppose) as to be exposed to the bad manners of others without imitating them.

Morals refine manners, as manners refine morals.

Good manners sometimes means simply putting up with other people's bad manners.

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

Paris is a sum total. Paris is the ceiling of the human race. All this prodigious city is an epitome of dead and living manners and customs. He who sees Paris, seems to see all history through with the sky and constellations in the intervals.

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

A gentleman doesn't have one set of manners for the house of a poor man and another for the house of someone with an income incomparable to his own.

Good manners are a sign of strength.

Country manners. Even if somebody phones up to tell you your house is burning down, they ask first how you are.

I have been missing the point. The point is not knowing another person, or learning to love another person. The point is simply this: how tender can we bear to be? What good manners can we show as we welcome ourselves and others into our hearts?

In professions where the criteria of professionalism, expertise, good manners and ethics apply, the gender aspect, i.e., whether a person is a man or woman, is not relevant at all. What is important is that citizens' confidence in politicians and the politics is strong enough to make politicians proud of their profession.

Manners must adorn knowledge and smooth its way in the world, without them it is like a great rough diamond, very well in a closet by way of curiosity, and also for its intrinsic value; but most prized when polished.

The simple circumstantial narrative (did such a narrative exist) of the ruin of a single town, of the misfortunes of a single family, might exhibit an interesting and instructive picture of human manners; but the tedious repetition of vague and declamatory complaints would fatigue the attention of the most patient reader.

It is good manners, not rank, wealth, or beauty, that constitute the real lay.

Custom governs the world; it is the tyrant of our feelings and our manners and rules the world with the hand of a despot.

I think dating courtesies are common courtesies that should be practiced in most all civilized encounters. I pine for the days of good, old-fashioned manners.

More than a code of manners in war and love, Chivalry was a moral system, governing the whole of noble life.

There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistical thing which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly and crippling kind. The other is an outpouring of everything good in you — of kindness and consideration and respect — not only the social respect of manners but the greater respect which is recognition of another person as unique and valuable. The first kind can make you sick and small and weak but the second can release in you strength, and courage and goodness and even wisdom you didn’t know you had.

Public opinion, I am sorry to say, will bear a great deal of nonsense. There is scarcely any absurdity so gross, whether in religion, politics, science or manners, which it will not bear.

The introduction of Christianity, which, under whatever form, always confers such inestimable benefits on mankind, soon made a sensible change in these rude and fierce manners.

No girl who is well bred, 'kind, and modest, is ever offensively plain; all real deformity means want of manners, or of heart.

It is a mistake that there is no bath that will cure people's manners, but drowning would help.

Manners are just a formal expression of how you treat people.

It is for the most part in our skill in manners, and in the observations of time and place and of decency in general, that what is called taste by way of distinction consists; and which is in reality no other than a more refined judgment.

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

Cecily. This is no time for wearing the shallow mask of manners. When I see a spade I call it a spade. Gwendolen. [Satirically.] I am glad to say that I have never seen a spade. It is obvious that our social spheres have been widely different.

The people were simpler, more peaceable and friendly in their manners and dispositions; and assassinations, which give the southern provinces so ill a reputation, were almost unknown.

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

What once were vices are manners now.

And now, gentlemen, like your manners, I must leave you.

It is the same India which has withstood the shocks of centuries, of hundreds of foreign invasions of hundreds of upheavals of manners and customs. It is the same land which stands firmer than any rock in the world, with its undying vigour, indestructible life. Its life is of the same nature as the soul, without beginning and without end, immortal; and we are the children of such a country.

I read the paper every day. There are certain subjects that will catch my attention. I have an entire file of articles. Of course I make up the story, especially since most criminals are not very smart and fictional crime must be clever. I have to make sure the story I am telling is interesting and realistic. In this book I went on line and found out the manners of codes. I thought it interesting to use them as a jumping off point.

We all originally came from the woods! it is hard to eradicate from any of us the old taste for the tattoo and the war-paint; and the moment that money gets into our pockets, it somehow or another breaks out in ornaments on our person, without always giving refinement to our manners.

When the Prince of Wales [later King George IV] and the Duke of York went to visit their brother Prince William [later William IV]at Plymouth, and all three being very loose in their manners, and coarse in their language, Prince William said to his ship's crew, "now I hope you see that I am not the greatest blackguard of my family.

[Yankees] are pretty much like southerners except with worse manners, of course, and terrible accents.

Neither the wisest constitution nor the wisest laws will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt.

Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each one a stroke of genius or of love, now repeated and hardened into usage, they form at last a rich varnish, with which the routine of life is washed, and its details adorned. If they are superficial, so are the dew-drops which give such a depth to the morning meadows.

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.

The conduct and manners of women, in fact, evidently prove that their minds are not in a healthy state; for, like the flowers which are planted in too rich a soil, strenght state; usefulness are sacrificed to beauty; and the flaunting leaves, after having pleased a fastidious eye, fade, disregarded on the stalk, long before the season when they ought to have arrived at maturity.

Seattle is a liberal city, its politics not so much blue in the American, not the British, sense as deep ultramarine, and its manners are studiously polite.

Being nice should never be perceived as being weak. It's not a sign of weakness, it's a sign of courtesy, manners, grace, a woman's ability to make everyone...feel at home, and it should never be construed as weakness.

Most women find a man with good manners sexy.