Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

As a man's salutations, so is the total of his character; in nothing do we lay ourselves so open as in our manner of meeting and salutation.

The wisest and best are repulsive, if they are characterized by repulsive manners. Politeness is an easy virtue, costs little, and has great purchasing power.

I've got confidence that most people in America still have a decent sense of manners, propriety, morality.

Manners are made up of trivialities of deportment which can be easily learned if one does not happen to know them; manner is personality - the outward manifestation of one's innate character and attitude toward life.... Etiquette must, if it is to be of more than trifling use, include ethics as well as manners. Certainly what one is, is of far greater importance than what one appears to be.

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

Manners are very communicable: men catch them from each other.

Judge talent at its best and character at its worst.

There can be no high civility without a deep morality, though it may not always call itself by that name.

That politeness which we put on, in order to keep the assuming and the presumptuous at a proper distance will generally succeed. But it sometimes happens that these obtrusive characters are on such excellent terms with themselves that they put down this very politeness to the score of their own great merits and high pretensions, meeting the coldness of our reserve with a ridiculous condescension of familiarity, in order to set us at ease with ourselves.

Decorum -- that bug-bear which deters so many from bliss until the opportunity for bliss has forever gone by.

What a rare gift, by the by, is that of manners! how difficult to define, how much more difficult to impart! Better for a man to possess them than wealth, beauty, or talent; they will more than supply all.

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.

Some are able and humane men and some are low-grade individuals with the morals of a goat, the artistic integrity of a slot machine, and the manners of a floorwalker with delusions of grandeur.

Everyone asks if a man is rich, no one if he is good.

I never cheat or steal. Also, I never wear a top-hat with a sack coat or munch bananas in public on the streets, because a gentleman does not do those things either. I would as soon do the one as the other sort of thing--it is all a matter of harmony and good taste.

The basis of good manners is self-reliance.

Men are not to be judged by their looks, habits, and appearances; but by the character of their lives and conversations, and by their works.

I was woefully ignorant in the social graces. I was being raised, after all, by Pellinore Warthrop.

Like all of my friends, she's a lousy judge of character.

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.

It is meant that noble minds keep ever with their likes; for who so firm that cannot be seduced.

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.

Good manners do more for a man that good looks.

A gentleman does not appear to know more or to be more than those with whom he is thrown into company.

Be loyal and trustworthy. Do not befriend anyone who is lower than yourself in this regard.