Quotes About Manners

This is another thing which I really like investigating in my novels: what is it that makes an intimate society, that makes a society in which moral concern for others will be possible? Part of that I think are manners and ritual. We tried to get rid of manners, we tried to abolish manners in the '60s. Manners were very, very old-fashioned and un-cool. And of course we didn't realise that manners are the building blocks of proper moral relationships between people.

There are two qualities that make fiction. One is the sense of mystery and the other is the sense of manners. You get the manners from the texture of existence that surrounds you. The great advantage of being a Southern writer is that we don't have to go anywhere to look for manners; bad or good, we've got them in abundance. We in the South live in a society that is rich in contradiction, rich in irony, rich in contrast, and particularly rich in its speech

When people complain of the decay of manners they have in mind not the impudent abbreviations of the crowd, but the decline in bowing and scraping and in speaking of one's employer as "the master." What the rich mean by the good manners of the poor is usually not civility, but servility.

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.

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

~I'm strict about manners. I think that kids have a horrible time with other people if they have bad manners.... The one thing you've got to be prepared to do as a parent is not to be liked from time to time.~

Good manners open the closed doors; bad manners close the open doors!

Laws are always unstable unless they are founded on the manners of a nation; and manners are the only durable and resisting power in a people.

Manners will become important to children only if they are important to their parents.

Not to be purple, but I've never been a 'bad boy' kind of girl. I like manners.

Some people really need to be taught some manners," he said disdainfully. I stared up at him. "Would you really have gotten in a fight for me?" "Of course." He didn't hesitate. "But there were four of them." "Beth, I'd take on Megatron's army to protect you." "Who?

We are citizens of an age, as well as of a State; and if it is held to be unseemly, or even inadmissible, for a man to cut himself off from the customs and manners of the circle in which he lives, why should it be less of a duty, in the choice of his activity, to submit his decision to the needs and the taste of his century?

Manners are like primary colors, there are certain rules and once you have these you merely mix, i.e., adapt, them to meet changing situations.

God save us from idealists! They dream of a world without injustice, and what crime won't they commit to get it! I swear, Mirella, I'll settle for a world with good manners.

Lack of manners is the sign of a hero.

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

Oh Tigger, where are your manners?" "I don’t know, but I bet they’re having more fun than I am.

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.

Manners have been somewhat cynically defined to be a contrivance of wise men to keep fools at a distance. Fashion is shrewd to detect those who do not belong to her train, and seldom wastes her attentions. Society is very swift in its instincts, and if you do not belong to it, resists and sneers at you, or quietly drops you.

That survival instinct, that will to live, that need to get back to life again, is more powerful than any consideration of taste, decency, politeness, manners, civility. Anything. It's such a powerful force.

A modest, godly woman will dress modestly. . . The one who is simple and unpretending in her dress and in her manners shows that she understands that a true woman is characterized by moral worth.

I think the biggest reason I was able to express myself and not be intimidated was by not having a mother. For example, mothers teach you manners. And I absolutely did not learn any of those rules and regulations.

Bedside manners are no substitute for the right diagnosis.

Indeed, Miss Manners has come to believe that the basic political division in this country is not between liberals and conservatives but between those who believe that they should have a say in the love lives of strangers and those who do not.

Shame is the proper reaction when one has purposefully violated the accepted behavior of society. Inflicting it is etiquette's response when its rules are disobeyed. The law has all kinds of nasty ways of retaliating when it is disregarded, but etiquette has only a sense of social shame to deter people from treating others in ways they know are wrong. So naturally Miss Manners wants to maintain the sense of shame. Some forms of discomfort are fully justified, and the person who feels shame ought to be dealing with removing its causes rather than seeking to relieve the symptoms.

Honor has to say "please" and "thank you." Manners are really important.

Artificial manners vanish the moment the natural passions are touched.

It was a noteworthy lesson, even for someone who'd been fed a daily diet of italicized lessons: that people in high places, luminaries with advanced degrees in Classics and in possession of excellent manners, can disappoint you as profoundly as anyone else.

I told them he'd be able to get you to go out." Rianne folded her winnings and tucked the bills into her blazer pocket. "Look at him." "He's right here, Ri," Carla murmured, shooting Keenan an apologetic look. "We've tried to teach her manners, but..." She shrugged. "It's like housebreaking a dog. If we'd had her when she was a puppy, maybe." Rianne smacked her on the arm, but she was grinning. "Woof, woof.

Saying thank you is more than good manners. It is good spirituality.

Grace is in garments, in movements, in manners; beauty in the nude, and in forms. This is true of bodies; but when we speak of feelings, beauty is in their spirituality, and grace in their moderation.

My family would soon tell me if I was getting above my station. I love what I do, I love my job, but I also like to go home and lead a normal life. ... I like to go to the gym, go shopping and do normal things, and it's totally unnecessary to not value people working around you. It's down to good manners, really.

Teach a child good manners during babyhood.

Good manners - the longer I live the more convinced I am of it - are a priceless insurance against failure and loneliness. And anyone can have them.

Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each once a stroke of genius or of love, now repeated and hardened into usage.

The difference of language, dress, and manners . . . severs and alienates the nations of the globe.

I think to be oversensitive about cliches is like being oversensitive about table manners.

For if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves and then punish them.

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

Human society is the embodiment of changeless laws which the whimsicalities and circumstances of men and women involve and overwrap. The realm of literature is the realm of these accidental manners and humours--a spacious realm; and the true literary artist concerns himself mainly with them.

The decline of manners, the cynical pursuit without shame or restraint of personal advantage and of money characterizes our times, not without exceptions, of course, but more than we ought to be comfortable with.

The ignorant are afraid to betray surprise or admiration...they think it ill manners.

I have always thought you could take the measure of a man by his sports manners - that is to say, the way in which he conducts himself on the playing field, or even over a game of chess or cards.

She had a womanly instinct that clothes possess an influence more powerful over many than the worth of character or the magic of manners.

Nothing is more essential to the establishment of manners in a State than that all persons employed in places of power and trust must be men of unexceptionable characters.

The expressive word "quiet" defines the dress, manners, bow, and even physiognomy of every true denizen of St. James and Bond street.

The automobile, practical since 1906, was proceeding to disintegrate and stamp anew the pattern of communication, manners, and city life in the United States, by 1918; before long, men would begin to see that the automobile, and the mass production techniques which made its possible, could alter the national character and morality more thoroughly than could the most absolute of tyrants. As a mechanical Jacobin, it rivaled the dynamo. The productive process which made these vehicles cheap was still more subversive of the old ways than was the gasoline engine itself.

A farce is that in poetry which grotesque (caricature) is in painting. The persons and actions of a farce are all unnatural, and the manners false, that is, inconsistent with the characters of mankind; and grotesque painting is the just resemblance of this.