We should ask God
to help us toward manners. Inner gifts
do not find their way
to creatures without just respect.
“There is nothing wrong with being the most important person under the sun if everybody else is just as important as you are.”
L. Ron Hubbard
Good breeding is the result of good sense, some good nature, and a little self-denial for the sake of others.
Our inheritance of well-founded, slowly conceived codes of honor, morals and manners, the passionate convictions which so many hundreds of millions share together of the principles of freedom and justice, are far more precious to us than anything which scientific discoveries could bestow.
In his Philosophy of Style, Herbert Spencer gives two sentences to illustrate how the vague and general can be turned into the vivid and particular: In proportion as the manners, customs, and amusements of a nation are cruel and barbarous, the regulations of its penal code will be severe. In proportion as men delight in battles, bullfights, and combats of gladiators, will they punish by hanging, burning, and the rack.
Those that are good manners at the court are as ridiculous in the country, as the behavior of the country is most mockable at the court.
Men's evil manners live in brass; their virtues We write in water.
The test of good manners is to be able to put up pleasantly with bad ones.
Children are natural mimics who act like their parents despite every effort to teach them good manners.
If we are to understand the animals with whom we share the world, we need to watch them, interact with them, without too much prejudice. Undestanding them, we may also understand ourselves a little more. By seeing what constrains and motivates our kindred we may, perhaps, discover what the morals and manners of the human beasts might be.
For changing peoples' manners and altering their customs there is nothing better than music.
That saw the manners in the face.
We sometimes meet an original gentleman, who, if manners had not existed, would have invented them.
'Tis a rule of manners to avoid exaggeration.
There are men whose manners have the same essential splendor as the simple and awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon, and the remains of the earliest Greek art.
Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.
Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each one a stroke of genius or of love, now repeated and hardened into usage. They form at least a rich varnish, with which the routine of life is washed, and its details adorned.
There is always a best way of doing everything, if it be to boil an egg. Manners are the happy ways of doing things.
The great business of man is to improve his mind, and govern his manners; all other projects and pursuits, whether in our power to compass or not, are only amusements.
I love everything that's old: old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wine.
There are many things that go to make up an education, but there are just two things without which no man can ever hope to have an education and these two things are character and good manners.
Politeness is half good manners and half good lying.
Friends and good manners will carry you where money won't go.
True merit does not depend on the times or on fashion. Those who have no other advantage than courtly manners lose it when they are away from court. But good sense, knowledge, and wisdom make their possessors knowledgeable and beloved in all ages and in all times.
