We must learn which ceremonies may be breached occasionally at our convenience and which ones may never be if we are to live pleasantly with our fellow man.

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

Parents must get across the idea that "I love you always, but sometimes I do not love your behavior."

When we learn to give thanks, we are learning to concentrate not on the bad things, but on the good things in our lives.

Everyone knows that a man can marry even if he reaches the age of 102, is penniless, and has all his facilities gone. There is always some woman willing to take a chance on him.

I am a journalist in the field of etiquette. I try to find out what the most genteel people regularly do, what traditions they have discarded, what compromises they have made.

Only a great fool or a great genius is likely to flout all social grace with impunity, and neither one, doing so, makes the most comfortable companion.

The modern rule is that every woman should be her own chaperon.

Breakfast is the one meal at which it is permissible to read the paper.

The best-dressed women I know pay very little attention to the picayune aspects of fashion, but they have a sound understanding of style.

Do not smoke without asking permission or sit so near (as in a train) that the smoke might annoy.

Have you ever started to wave at someone and then realized they weren’t really waving at you, so you abort and go for a head scratch instead? That’s how I felt.

This day, you are free, because you have chosen to be free – and because of your choice, your days of insignificance are over.

Music, the mosaic of the air.

A million million years gives us some time to prepare for the end . . . let us make the best of it.

If I did not wear torn pants, orthopedic shoes, frantic disheveled hair, that is to say, if I did not tone down my beauty, people would go mad. Married men would run amuck.

The dream appears to be real. It does really seem we are here in this world; but this is not so.

I don't want the attention. I want the respect.

I would hope they would be our fellow artists, rather than trying to emulate or idolize clowns like us.

I think most non-Christians who try to be good people are probably better Christians than Christians.

Winter's not gone yet, if the wild geese fly that way.