Jim Butcher Quotes

I don't walk into a dinner party and say, 'You're an idiot; give me my coat.'

I have realised that it's important to be a sport, be nice, and know what to speak and when.

One of the hardest things in the world is to be right and not hurt other people with it.

You can choose to be civil or not be civil. What is the point of going through the day and think it's cool to wear your honesty on your sleeve at the expense of everyone around you?

Tact is the ability to make a person see lightning without letting him feel the bolt.

Tact is one of the first of mental virtues, the absence of which is frequently fatal to the best of talents. Without denying that it is a talent of itself, it will suffice if we admit that it supplies the place of many talents.

Tact does for life just what lubricating oil does for machinery.

Without tact you can learn nothing. Tact teaches you when to be silent. Inquirers who are always questioning never learn anything.

In nothing do we fail more, as a Mission, than in lack of tact and politeness.

I consider social skills a bit like learning a language. I've been practising it for so long over so many years I've almost lost my accent.

Obama's stern demeanor punctuated by intermittent flashes of his wide, relaxing smile is his greatest weapon in defusing pent-up angst.

We're not teaching our students the importance of relationships with other people: how you work with them, what the relational pathology consists of, how you examine your own conscience, how you examine the inner world, how you examine your dreams.

Most mental health professionals, including clinicians and researchers, endorse the deficit theory. They're convinced that we wage war simply because we don't know how to make love. We desperately want loving, satisfying relationships but lack the skills we need to develop them.

We're losing social skills, the human interaction skills, how to read a person's mood, to read their body language, how to be patient until the moment is right to make or press a point. Too much exclusive use of electronic information dehumanises what is a very, very important part of community life and living together.

I have a good relationship with the world. But I don't know what the trick is to maintaining it.

When I was younger I probably didn't understand something basic about tact, but I think it kept faint-hearted people at arm's distance and that's not such a bad thing, because life is short and I know the kind of people I want to work with.

It is wise to apply the oil of refined politeness to the mechanism of friendship.

Give the other person the ability to save face…. Don’t rub his nose in things.

I have poor people skills, and I cannot become a minister.

I want children who can make eye contact. I want children who know how to resolve conflicts with their peers. I want children who understand the dynamics of interpersonal relationships that are physical and tactile. I do not want children that only know how to interface with the world through a screen.

Bill Kenwright has taught me how to deal with people.

I come across as quite aggressive and quite in people's faces and everything like that, but I know where to draw the line.

More faults are often committed while we are trying to oblige than while we are giving offense.

Opinion! If every one had so little tact as to give their true opinion when it was asked this would be a miserable world.

You must labour to acquire that great and uncommon talent of hating with good breeding, and loving with prudence; to make no quarrel irreconcilable by silly and unnecessary indications of anger; and no friendship dangerous, in care it breaks, by a wanton, indiscreet, and unreserved confidence.