quotations about manners
Manners are primarily codes by which we express relationships, particularly status, and are thus contingent upon power. There is nothing absolute about manners: doing or not doing something does not mean it is good or bad manners, but depends upon the people and the context.
DAVID TRIPP
Critical Incidents in Teaching: Developing Professional Judgement
Fashion which affects to be honor, is often, in all men's experience, only a ballroom code. Yet, so long as it is the highest circle, in the imagination of the best heads on the planet, there is something necessary and excellent in it; for it is not to be supposed that men have agreed to be the dupes of anything preposterous; and the respect which these mysteries inspire in the most rude and sylvan characters, and the curiosity with which details of high life are read, betray the universality of the love of cultivated manners.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
"Manners", Essays
Fit for the mountains and the barb'rous caves,
Where manners ne'er were preach'd.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Twelfth Night
Manners are the shadows of virtues.
SYDNEY SMITH
Sermons
He was so generally civil, that nobody thanked him for it.
SAMUEL JOHNSON
attributed, Life of Samuel Johnson
Ladies will sooner pardon want of sense than want of manners.
VENERONI
attributed, Day's Collacon
We ought always to conform to the manners of the great number, and so behave as not to draw attention to ourselves.
MOLIÈRE
attributed, Day's Collacon