quotations about manners
Fine manners are the mantle of fair minds.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Tablets
What once were vices, are now the manners of the day.
SENECA THE YOUNGER
Epistolae Ad Lucilium
Call a jack a jack. Call a spade a spade. But always call a whore a lady. Their lives are hard enough, and it never hurts to be polite.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS
The Name of the Wind
The importance of manners, my mother always said, is inversely related to how inclined one is to use them.
NICOLE KRAUSS
Great House
As the common forms of good manners were intended for regulating the conduct of those who have weak understandings; so they have been corrupted by the persons for whose use they were contrived.
JONATHAN SWIFT
A Treatise on Good Manners and Good Breeding
Many a worthy man sacrifices his peace to formalities of compliments and good manners.
L'ESTRANGE
attributed, Day's Collacon
Manners are rituals, too. They are repeated actions the culture or society has agreed on to smooth our relations with each other.
ELIZABETH HOFFMAN REED
Gathering at the Table
Good manners is the art of making those people easy with whom we converse; whoever makes the fewest persons uneasy is the best bred man in company.
JONATHAN SWIFT
A Treatise on Good Manners and Good Breeding
Manners are necessary because, as a rule, there is a pretense; when our good opinion of others is genuine, manners look after themselves.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Mortals and Others
Nothing, except what flows from the heart, can render even external manners truly pleasing.
HUGH BLAIR
Sermons
Good men ought to let the world see that their manners are more firm than an oath.
SOCRATES
attributed, Day's Collacon
Observe others manners and correct thy own.
CONRAD II
attributed, Day's Collacon
Whoever in a state knows how to form wisely the manners and men and to rule them at home and in war, by excellent institutions, him in the first place above all others I should esteem worthy of honor.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Tablets
A moral, sensible, and well-bred man
Will not affront me, and no other can.
WILLIAM COWPER
Conversation
Lack of manners is the sign of a hero.
JEAN COCTEAU
Opium
Suit your manner to the man.
TERENCE
Adelphi
One of the most important rules of the science of manners is an almost absolute silence in regard to yourself.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
La Comédie Humaine
Manners are tell-tales of men.
THEODORE TILTON
Sanctum Sanctorum
Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Letters and Social Aims
And now, gentlemen, like your manners, I must leave you.
DYLAN THOMAS
Rebecca's Daughters