89 Etiquette Quotes

Although there exist many thousand subjects for elegant conversation, there are persons who cannot meet a cripple without talking about feet.

Do not adjust your sandals while passing through a melon-field, nor yet arrange your hat beneath an orange-tree.

His courtesy was somewhat extravagant. He would write and thank people who wrote to thank him for wedding presents and when he encountered anyone as punctilious as himself the correspondence ended only with death.

Manners are of more importance than laws... Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation like that of the air we breathe in.

When you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite.

If you have a grateful heart (which is a miracle amongst you statesmen), show it by directing the bearer to the best wine in town, and pray let not this highest point of sacred friendship be performed slightly, but go about it with all due deliberation and care, as holy priests to sacrifice, or as discreet thieves to the wary performance of burglary and shop-lifting. Let your well-discerning palate (the best judge about you) travel from cellar to cellar and then from piece to piece till it has lighted on wine fit for its noble choice and my approbation.

'Papa is a preferable mode of address,' observed Mrs General. 'Father is rather vulgar, my dear. The word Papa, besides, gives a pretty form to the lips. Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes, and prism are all very good words for the lips: especially prunes and prism. You will find it serviceable, in the formation of a demeanour, if you sometimes say to yourself in company - on entering a room, for instance - Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes and prism, prunes and prism.

In the dying world I come from, quotation is a national vice. No one would think of making an after-dinner speech without the help of poetry. It used to be the classics, now it's lyric verse.

No man who ever held the office of president would congratulate a friend on obtaining it. He will make one man ungrateful, and a hundred men his enemies, for every office he can bestow.

Good manners is the art of making those people easy with whom we converse. Whoever makes the fewest persons uneasy is the best bred in the company.

I know an awful lot of Hollywood people, who are so self-important, I can't understand it. My father was a good Irish saloon-keeper, my mother always said to him, 'Jack, how come you know everybody here' and he'd say, 'because I say hello'. I'm just like that, I've always been that way.

There is always a best way of doing everything, if it be to boil an egg. Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each once a stroke of genius or of love, - now repeated and hardened into usage. They form at last a rich varnish, with which the routine of life is washed, and its details adorned.

When you fall into a man's conversation, the first thing you should consider is, whether he has a greater inclination to hear you, or that you should hear him.

A Frenchman must be always talking, whether he knows anything of the matter or not; an Englishman is content to say nothing, when he has nothing to say.

I'm surprised at the extent of the bigotry. But it really plays out when companies or schools take a side and prohibit the other platform at all. We Mac users should be good even when the other side is bad. We should do what we can to accept the other platforms. All the best people in life seem to like LINUX.

Let us be very strange and well-bred: Let us be as strange as if we had been married a great while; And as well-bred as if we were not married at all.

And surely one of the best rules in conversation is, never to say a thing which any of the company can reasonably wish had been left unsaid:

I wouldn't have ate it, only I'm too lady-like to take it out of my mouth.

Nothing is so great an instance of ill manners as flattery. If you flatter all the company, you please none; if you flatter only one or two, you affront the rest.

Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.

'Get out o' Mr. Fletcher's road, ye idle, lounging, little - ' 'Vagabond,' I think the woman (Sally Walkins, once my nurse,) was going to say, but she changed her mind.

We see the chairman scooping a snack down by the altar. Hey, it's your house, buddy! You eat from anywhere you want, okay?

Si fueris Romae, Romano vivito more; Si fueris alibi, vivito sicut ibi.

Caution: Read no further if you are easily offended. [Thanks for confirming what I suspected about you.]

Manners: 'Courteousness is consideration for others; politeness is the method used to deliver such considerations.'

Manners: 'Callousness and insolence bring to bare unanimous social condemnation, while the simple efforts of politeness are admired; even in those who are otherwise despised.'

I'm aware it's now a hostile city [New York City]. I feel I'm in school, actually. There are signs everywhere you don't get in any other city. When you see all the smokers outside a building in New York, I just think the building is full of bad-mannered people who haven't thought, 'We'll give them a little room to smoke in.' That's what a reasonable person, a person with good manners, would do.

'Kinda be careful, because you might get your tit in a wringer by saying something that isn't quite proper'

So the two of them went to London by the early morning train. 'Let's surprise her,' said Nigel, but Cedric telephoned first, wryly remembering the story of the pedantic adulterer - 'My dear, it is I who am surprised; you are astounded.'

If you must commit suicide - and there is no knowing to what people may be brought - always contrive to do it as decorously as possible; the decencies, whether of life or of death, should never be lost sight of.

He is polite with dignity, affable without formality, distant without haughtiness, grave without austerity; modest, wise and good.

La politesse cache tres-imparfaitement l'egoisme general.

In deiner Kleidung verfalle nie in Nachlassigkeit, wenn du allein bist. Gehe nicht schmutzig, nicht krumm noch mit groben Manieren einher, wenn dich niemand beobachtet.

Drei Dinge sind bei Hofe unentbehrlich: Gesunde Beine, ein geschmeidiger Rucken und eine glatte Zunge.

She didn't ask me to the christening, so I'm not going to the wedding.

When she and Clare Boothe Luce were entering a room, Clare hung back, saying, 'Age before beauty'; Dorothy entered saying 'Pearls before swine.'

In 2002, speaking to a blind, wheelchair bound woman who was accompanied by her guide dog, he remarked : 'Do you know they're now producing eating dogs for the anorexics?'[11]

Where did you get that hat? (1953)

Singing before breakfast is a forewarning of a fight with a neighbour- if the neighbour is trying to sleep late.

Of courtesy it is much less Than courage of heart or holiness Yet in my walks it seems to me That the Grace of God is in courtesy.

If you have any helpful suggestions I'd be pleased to hear them. If all you can do is make snide insinuations then it would probably benefit all concerned if you bestowed the fruits of your prodigious wit on someone with the spare time to give them the consideration they doubtless deserve.

'I see you are looking at my feet,' he said to her when car was in motion. 'I beg your pardon?' said the woman. 'I said I see you're looking at my feet'. 'I beg your pardon. I happened to be looking at the floor,' said the woman, and faced the doors of the car. 'If you want to look at my feet, say so,' said the young man. 'But don't be a God-damned sneak about it.' 'Let me out here, please,' the woman said quickly to the girl operating the car. The car doors opened and the woman got out without looking back. 'I have two normal feet and I can't see the slightest God-damned reason why anybody should stare at them,' said the young man.

A man's manners are a mirror in which he shows his portrait.

If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn't need to have the rest of the universities attached.

You can deny all you want that there is etiquette, and a lot of people do in everyday life. But if you behave in a way that offends the people you're trying to deal with, they will stop dealing with you...There are plenty of people who say, 'We don't care about etiquette, but we can't stand the way so-and-so behaves, and we don't want him around!' Etiquette doesn't have the great sanctions that the law has. But the main sanction we do have is in not dealing with these people and isolating them because their behavior is unbearable.

'Dear Miss Manners: How is a hat correctly worn?

When I like people immensely, I never tell their names to any one. It is like surrendering a part of them.

Well, I can't eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs. One must eat muffins quite calmly, it is the only way to eat them.

My dear father, when one pays a visit it is for the purpose of wasting other people's time, not one's own.

'Yes, sir,' said Jeeves in a low, cold voice, as if he had been bitten in the leg by a personal friend.

Fashion exists for women with no taste, etiquette for people with no breeding.

A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman's birthday... but never remembers her age.

Was Ashlee Simpson nice to me? Yes. She said 'hi' very clearly in a nice voice!

'Was this yours? Oh, could you take it?'

Don't get me wrong, I love Schindler's List, but it's not like 'Hey man let's get loaded and watch Schindler's List.' - SModcast 4: Can I get a (Masturbatory) Witness

Enthusiasm is rude.