Louis Kronenberger Quotes

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.

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.

Formalized rules of manners were so great because they left no room for basic human haplessness. They allowed us to circumvent our natural boorish tendency to disregard the feelings of others.

Now, it is well known, that a man may with more impunity be guilty of an actual breach either of real good breeding or of good morals, than appear ignorant of the most minute point of fashionable etiquette.

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 civilities of the great are never thrown away.

A gentleman never talks about his tailor.

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.

The Japanese have perfected good manners and made them indistinguishable from rudeness.

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

There's a thing that happens to Midwesterners - we spend a lot of time talking about having a different set of rules about manners. I don't know about ethics, but certainly about manners, what you would say and what you wouldn't say. And that is not very East coast.

Though shyness per se was unacceptable, reserve was a mark of good breeding.

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

Good-breeding shows itself most where to an ordinary eye it appears the least.

To dismiss a guest is a more ungracious act than not to admit him at all.

All children in the '50s were taught manners, they were taught to say please and thank you, they were taught not to be rude. And I'm seeing some problems today where somebody's losing a job because they made fun of a fat lady that couldn't fit in the elevator. I mean that was the sort of thing that, when I was eight years old, my mother made it very clear to me that that was not okay to say that kind of stuff.

Speak in French when you can't think of the English for a thing. Turn out your toes as you walk. And remember who you are!

A single profane expression betrays a man's low breeding.

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

People say that you always have to tell the truth. But they do not mean this because you are not allowed to tell old people that they are old and you are not allowed to tell people if they smell funny or if a grown-up has made a fart. And you are not allowed to say, 'I don't like you,' unless that person has been horrible to you.

Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each once a stroke of genius or of love, now repeated and hardened into usage.

Good behavior is everybody's business, and good taste can be everyone's goal.

A certain degree of ceremony is a necessary outwork of manners, as well as of religion; it keeps the forward and petulant at a proper distance, and is a very small restraint to the sensible and to the well-bred part of the world.

The genteel thing is the genteel thing any time, if as be that a gentleman bees in a concatenation accordingly.

The politer the society, the greater the lies it requires.