Joseph Cook Quotes

Those who seek to impress upon us that they are gentlemen will usually be found mistaken.

Insofar as he'd formed any opinion of her, it was that she suffered from misplaced gentility and the mistaken belief that etiquette meant good breeding. She mistook mannerisms for manners.

Good company requires only birth, education, and manners, and with regard to education is not very nice. Birth and good manners are essential; but a little learning is by no means a dangerous thing in good company; on the contrary, it will do very well.

Defect in manners is usually the defect of fine perceptions. Elegance comes of no breeding, but of birth.

A footman may swear; but he cannot swear like a lord. He can swear as often: but can he swear with equal delicacy, propriety, and judgment?

Manners are just a formal expression of how you treat people.

it was always insolent for a common man to take a chair in the presence of a lady - the word LADY, we may be sure, capitalized in her mind, and denoting not sex but rank.

You can raise her up a lady but there's one thing you just can't avoid.

It is disgusting to pick your teeth; what is vulgar is to use a gold toothpick.

Do you dance, Mr. Darcy?" Darcy: "Not if I can help it!" Sir William: "What a charming amusement for young people this is, Mr. Darcy! There is nothing like dancing, after all. I consider it as one of the first refinements of polished societies." Mr. Darcy: "Certainly, sir; and it has the advantage also of being in vogue amongst the less polished societies of the world; every savage can dance.

The manner of a vulgar man has freedom without ease, and the manner of a gentleman has ease without freedom.

The rich, like well brought up children, are meant to be seen, not heard.

That bad manners are so prevalent in the world is the fault of good manners.

If you rise in life, you have to behave in a certain way. You can go to a strip club if you're a beer-swilling sand shoveler, but if you're the Bishop of Boston, you shouldn't go.

Manners are the root, laws only the trunk and branches. Manners are the archetypes of laws. Manners are laws in their infancy; laws are manners fully grown,--or, manners are children, which, when they grow up, become laws.

Good breeding consists in having no particular mark of any profession, but a general elegance of manners.

Every man of any education would rather be called a rascal, than accused of deficiency in the graces.

Good manners require space and time.

It is in bad taste," is the most formidable word an Englishman can pronounce.

Good manners disappear in proportion as the influence of a Court and an exclusive aristocracy lessens; this decrease can be plainly observed from decade to decade by those who have an eye for public behavior, which grows visibly.

Somebody has said, that a king may make a nobleman but he cannot make a gentleman.

There are certainly numberless women of fashion who consider it perfectly natural to go miles down Fifth Avenue, or Madison Avenue, yet for whom a voyage of half a dozen blocks to east or west would be an adventure, almost a dangerous impairment of good breeding.

The way one was brought up isn't an excuse for rude behavior.

When people complain of the decay of manners they have in mind not the impudent abbreviations of the crowd, but the decline in bowing and scraping and in speaking of one's employer as "the master." What the rich mean by the good manners of the poor is usually not civility, but servility.

The society of women is the element of good manners.