Jane Austen Quotes

I am too inexperienced and ignorant to conduct myself with propriety in this town, where every thing is new to me, and many things are unaccountable and perplexing.

In Colombia, where I was born and raised, women like my mother considered their appearance and personal grooming a matter of principle. There was never an occasion where she didn't show up looking picture-perfect.

In social matters, pointless conventions are not merely the bee sting of etiquette, but the snake bite of moral order.

Yes, but also one of the problems for a novelist in Ireland is the fact that there are no formal manners. I mean some people have beautiful manners but there's no kind of agreed form of manners.

We don't kiss in public. It's not done.

Something I miss terribly from the '60s - the most important phrase in the English language was, 'I got hung up.' Somebody says they got hung up, it's unassailable, you know? You don't go near that. Whoa! I know what that can be like.

People who don't know me sometimes call me 'Mademoiselle.'

I begin to grow heartily tired of the etiquette and nonsense so fashionable in this city.

I lived in a world where social arrangements were taken for granted and assumed to be timeless. A child's obligation was to learn these usages, not to question them. The complexities of racial deportment were of a piece with learning manners and etiquette more generally.

Nothing seems at first sight less important than the outward form of human actions, yet there is nothing upon which men set more store: they grow used to everything except to living in a society which has not their own manners.

All ladies arriving here as strangers it seems expect to be visited by the wives of the heads of the departments and even by the President’s wife. Mrs. Madison subjected herself to this torture, … but from which having begun the practice, she never found an opportunity of receding from.

Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split.

As manners make laws, so manners likewise repeal them.

It's a very ancient culture, British culture. You can't be seen to be too wealthy, and you certainly can't be seen to be giving away any of your wealth either because that's sort of vulgar, too. It's funny, that, because in New York, if you are wealthy, you have to be philanthropic to be successful.

German Jews don't show their emotions in public.

There's something I want to say, and I haven't been able to articulate it yet, about how it's so rude when people don't admit that they have a nanny.

If you call a Brazilian out publicly, you're going to be fighting that Brazilian. That's in their culture.

I tried to play the etiquette game - the respect game - for too long, and it didn't work out for me.

If I saw a glass of wine repeatedly presented to a man, and he took no notice of it, I should be apt to think that he was blind or uncivil. A juster philosophy might teach me rather to think that my eyes deceived me, and that the offer was not really what I conceived it to be.

Ceremony is an invention to take off the uneasy feeling which we derive from knowing ourselves to be less the object of love and esteem with a fellow-creature than some other person is. It endeavours to make up, by superior attentions in little points, for that invidious preference which it is forced to deny in the greater.

We're supposed to be civilized. We're supposed to go to work every day. We're supposed to be nice to our friends and send Christmas cards to our parents.

Whenever we got a glimpse, their faces looked indecently revealed, as though we were used to seeing women in veils.

The ignorant are afraid to betray surprise or admiration...they think it ill manners.

There are few things that so touch us with instinctive revulsion as a breach of decorum.

But to my mind, though I am native here, And to the manner born, it is a custom, More honored in the breach than the observance.