Willem Dafoe Quotes

My manners, abominable at times, can be sweet.

Charm, I think, is education, really, no? I was educated to be nice to everybody. If you want to be rude and mean, I'm sure your life isn't that nice.

I pride myself on being the nicest person in the room. My grandmother always told me, 'Manners will take you where money won't.' When I walk into a room, I say "hello" to everyone I don't care who the person is or what they do, it's simply being respectful.

Civility is a desire to receive civilities, and to be accounted well-bred.

Manners. Manners will get you through anything.

The challenge of manners is not so much to be nice to someone whose favor and/or person you covet (although more people need to be reminded of that necessity than one would suppose) as to be exposed to the bad manners of others without imitating them.

It is a very nice world-that is, if you remember that while morals are all-important between the Lord and His creatures, what counts between one creature and another is good manners.

Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation.

In truth, politeness is artificial good humor, it covers the natural want of it, and ends by rendering habitual a substitute nearly equivalent to the real virtue.

Manners are the basic building blocks of civil society.

Etiquette is all human social behavior. If you're a hermit on a mountain, you don't have to worry about etiquette; if somebody comes up the mountain, then you've got a problem. It matters because we want to live in reasonably harmonious communities.

Etiquette means behaving yourself a little better than is absolutely essential.

Don't keep your good manners to the end another time, but begin with them.

I would hope I was raised polite and charming.

To be always thinking about your manners is not the way to make them good; the very perfection of manners is not to think about yourself.

Manners are one of the greatest engines of influence ever given to man.

It's so important to have manners and treat people from all walks of life the way they should be treated.

Manners are really very important to me.

Civility is a choice.

I don't accept bad manners, so all my grandchildren are very well behaved, just like my kids.

In the contemporary world, we think of politeness as surface behavior, like frosting - it's sweet and attractive and finishes off the cake. But 19th century nobility and the enlightened thinkers and stoics before them viewed manners in a very different way. To them, manners are an outward expression of an inward struggle.

I'm polite.

There is reason in the distinction of civil and uncivil. The manners are sometimes so rough a rind that we doubt whether they cover any core or sap-wood at all.

Manners, really good ones, make it possible to live with almost anyone, gracefully and pleasantly.

It seldom pays to be rude. It never pays to be only half-rude.