Amy Vanderbilt Quotes

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

Familiarity is a suspension of almost all the laws of civility, which libertinism has introduced into society under the notion of ease.

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

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

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.

Good humour may be said to be one of the very best articles of dress one can wear in society.

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

I swear I've never met a man who has your knack for lack of social grace. If you weren't naturally charming, someone would have stabbed you by now.

No person of quality ever remembers social restrictions save when considering how most piquantly to break them.

The shoe is very much an X-ray of social comportment.

If you wish to appear agreeable in society, you must consent to be taught many things which you know already.

U.K. guys think it is cheesy to be nice.

In social matters, pointless conventions are not merely the bee sting of etiquette, but the snake bite of moral order.

Society is like a large piece of frozen water; and skating well is the great art of social life.

A commercial society whose members are essentially ascetic and indifferent in social ritual has to be provided with blueprints and specifications for evoking the right tone for every occasion.

As manners make laws, so manners likewise repeal them.

I tried to play the etiquette game - the respect game - for too long, and it didn't work out for me.

Etiquette can be at the same time a means of approaching people and of staying clear of them.

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

Nature has left every man a capacity of being agreeable, though not of shining in company; and there are a hundred men sufficiently qualified for both who, by a very few faults, that they might correct in half an hour, are not so much as tolerable.

Without an acquaintance with the rules of propriety, it is impossible for the character to be established

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.

The knowledge of courtesy and good manners is a very necessary study. It is like grace and beauty, that which begets liking and an inclination to love one another at the first sight.

The etiquette question that troubles so many fastidious people New Year's Day is: How am I ever going to face those people again?

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