Manners Quotes

How much savage coarseness is concealed in refined, cultivated manners.

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

To disagree, one doesn't have to be disagreeable.

Propriety of manners, and consideration for others, are the two main characteristics of a gentleman.

Children are natural mimics who act like their parents despite every effort to teach them good manners.

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

Manners make often fortunes.

Manners, really good ones, make it possible to live with almost anyone, gracefully and pleasantly.

To offend is my pleasure; I love to be hated.

We should restore the practice of dueling. It might improve manners around here.

Good manners are never passé.

Of course I lie to people. But I lie altruistically - for our mutual good. The lie is the basic building block of good manners. That may seem mildly shocking to a moralist - but then what isn't?

The wisest and best are repulsive, if they are characterized by repulsive manners. Politeness is an easy virtue, costs little, and has great purchasing power.

As is the case with all good things in life - love, good manners, language, cooking - personal creativity is required only rarely.

What you discover about people you try not to offend is that you can offend them without trying.

Nothing is so great an example of bad manners as flattery. If you flatter all the company, you please none; If you flatter only one or two, you offend the rest.

A tragedy can never suffer by delay: a comedy may, because the allusions or the manners represented in it maybe temporary.

In America, writers are afforded the freedom to express themselves in unlimited manners. Creative liberty is a privilege.

Never buy anything with a handle on it. It means work.

I have always been of the mind that in a democracy manners are the only effective weapons against the bowie-knife.

The great business of man is to improve his mind, and govern his manners; all other projects and pursuits, whether in our power to compass or not, are only amusements.

The ruin of a State is generally preceded by an universal degeneracy of manners and contempt of religion.

Under bad manners, as under graver faults, lies very commonly an overestimate of our special individuality, as distinguished from our generic humanity.

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

Friends are often chosen for similitude of manners, and therefore each palliates the other's failings because they are his own.

As new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times.

The whole of heraldry and of chivalry is in courtesy. A man of fine manners shall pronounce your name with all the ornament that titles of nobility could ever add.

Savages we call them because their manners differ from ours.

Laws ought to be fashioned unto the manners and conditions of the people whom they are meant to benefit, and not imposed upon them according to the simple rule of right.

It's the Point of Your View that Decides What You See - / One Man's Flop Is Another Man's Hit. / From Manners to Movies, the Picture Keeps Changing / Depending Upon Where You Sit.

The most important of all revolutions, a revolution in sentiments, manners and moral opinions.

Politeness [is] a sign of dignity, not subservience.

I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings.

They were almond cookies, although they could have been made of spinach and shoes for all I cared. I ate eleven of them, right in a row. It is rude to take the last cookie.

Etiquette means behaving yourself a little better than is absolutely essential.

A healthy appetite for righteousness, kept in due control by good manners, is an excellent thing; but to hunger and thirst after it is often merely a symptom of spiritual diabetes.

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

It strikes me as bad manners for a magazine to accept one of my advertisements and then attack it editorially - like inviting a man to dinner then spitting in his eye.

Etiquette can be at the same time a means of approaching people and of staying clear of them.

Air and manners are more expressive than words.

Contraries are cured by contraries.

Those vices [luxury and neglect of decent manners] are vices of men, not of the times. [Lat., Hominum sunt ista [vitia], non temporum.

Golf in the interest of good health and good manners. It promotes self-restraint and affords a chance to play the man and act the gentleman.

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

Life is all about manners. Nothing else matters.

The total and universal want of manners, both in males and females, is ... remarkable ... that polish which removes the coarser and rougher parts of our nature is unknown and undreamed of.

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.

I am only resolved to act in that manner, which will, in my own opinion, constitute my happiness, without reference to you, or to any person so wholly unconnected with me.

Nothing is so great an instance of ill-manners as flattery.

The child takes most of his nature of the mother, besides speech, manners, and inclination.