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Tact is one of the first mental virtues, the absence of which is often fatal to the best of talents; it supplies the place of many talents.
Tact is the rare talent for not admitting you were right in the first place.
Tact is the rare ability to keep silent while two friends are arguing, and you know both of them are wrong.
Tact is, after all, a kind of mind reading.
Don't flatter yourself that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. The nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become.
Tact is rubbing out another's mistakes, not rubbing them in.
The mathematician requires tact and good taste at every step of his work, and he has to learn to trust to his own instinct to distinguish between what is really worthy of his efforts and what is not.
Tact is the unsaid part of what you think; its opposite, the unthought part which you say.
You can't use tact with a Congressman. A Congressman is a hog. You must take a stick and hit him on the snout.
Had Grant been a Congressman one would have been on one's guard, for one knew the type. One never expected from a Congressman more than good intentions and public spirit. Newspaper-men as a rule had no great respect for the lower House; Senators had less; and Cabinet officers had none at all. Indeed, one day when Adams was pleading with a Cabinet officer for patience and tact in dealing with Representatives, the Secretary impatiently broke out: "You can't use tact with a Congressman! A Congressman is a hog! You must take a stick and hit him on the snout!" The secretary who made the remark "may well have been Adams's friend, Secretary of the Interior Jacob Dolson Cox," according to note 18 on p. 617.
Tact is the ability to stay in the middle without getting caught there.
Step with care and great tact
And remember that Life's a Great Balancing Act
Just never forget to be dexterous and deft
And never mix up your right foot with your left.
Simplicity is a pleasant thing in children, or at any age, but it is not necessarily admirable, nor is affectation altogether a thing of evil. To be normal, to be at home in the world, with a prospect of power, usefulness, or success, the person must have that imaginative insight into other minds that underlies tact and savoir-faire, morality and beneficence. This insight involves sophistication, some understanding and sharing of the clandestine impulses of human nature. A simplicity that is merely the lack of this insight indicates a sort of defect.
Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves.
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