quotations about manners
Manners are laws in their infancy.
HORACE MANN
Thoughts
For if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves and then punish them.
THOMAS MORE
Utopia
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
Air and manners are more expressive than words.
S. RICHARDSON
attributed, Day's Collacon
Manners are guideposts for behavior that serve as helpful road signs on the path of human interaction.
JUNE EDING
Manners That Matter Most
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
The importance of manners, my mother always said, is inversely related to how inclined one is to use them.
NICOLE KRAUSS
Great House
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
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
Manners differ with climates; the northern nations are distinguished for etiquette, the eastern for ceremony, and the southern for courtesy.
LORD ACTON
attributed, Day's Collacon
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
Virtue itself offends when coupled with forbidding manners.
BISHOP MIDDLETON
attributed, Treasury of Thought
It's always galling to be taught good manners by an enemy.
K. J. PARKER
Devices and Desires
Observe others manners and correct thy own.
CONRAD II
attributed, Day's Collacon
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
As the best law is founded upon reason, so are the best manners. And as some lawyers have introduced unreasonable things into common law, so likewise many teachers have introduced absurd things into common good manners.
JONATHAN SWIFT
A Treatise on Good Manners and Good Breeding
A robot could be programmed to show good manners. A pleasant demeanor can disguise evil, courtesy can be a window of opportunism, gracious conduct may conceal disdain.
JASON W. BROWN
Process and the Authentic Life
Bad manners are the fruits of a coarse nature and unwise training.
CLARA JESSUP MOORE
Sensible Etiquette of the Best Society
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
Lack of manners is the sign of a hero.
JEAN COCTEAU
Opium