quotations about manners
Manners are guideposts for behavior that serve as helpful road signs on the path of human interaction.
JUNE EDING
Manners That Matter Most
If we strive to become, then, what we strive to appear, manners may often be rendered useful guides to the performance of our duties.
SYDNEY SMITH
Sermons
Truth, justice, and reason lose all their force and all their lustre when they are not accompanied with agreeable manners.
J. THOMSON
attributed, Day's Collacon
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
Virtue itself offends when coupled with forbidding manners.
BISHOP MIDDLETON
attributed, Treasury of Thought
Should we distrust [a] man because his manners are not our manners?
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER
The Last of the Mohicans
There is no outward mark of politeness that does not have a profound moral reason. The right education would be that which taught the outward mark and the moral reason together.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
Elective Affinities
Bad manners are the fruits of a coarse nature and unwise training.
CLARA JESSUP MOORE
Sensible Etiquette of the Best Society
Art polishes man, and manners distinguish him from the brute creation.
OVID
attributed, Day's Collacon
Air and manners are more expressive than words.
S. RICHARDSON
attributed, Day's Collacon
It's always galling to be taught good manners by an enemy.
K. J. PARKER
Devices and Desires
Good manners do more for a man that good looks.
EDGAR WATSON HOWE
Country Town Sayings
That makes the good and bad of manners, namely, what helps or hinders fellowship.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
"Manners", Essays
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
Manners are laws in their infancy.
HORACE MANN
Thoughts
The importance of manners, my mother always said, is inversely related to how inclined one is to use them.
NICOLE KRAUSS
Great House
You only had to choose which me to talk to, for, you know, we all change our manners, depending on who has come to chat.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There
Observe others manners and correct thy own.
CONRAD II
attributed, Day's Collacon
A man's own manner and character is what best becomes him.
CICERO
attributed, Day's Collacon
Manners are what is left when serious issues of human relations are removed from consideration; yet without manners serious human relations are impossible.
MARK CALDWELL
A Short History of Rudeness