Lena Guerrero Quotes

It's very much simpler to get rid of any written rule you choose than it is an item of customary morality... while laws are preserved on tablets of wood or stone, customary morality is engraved deep in our living souls

As manners make laws, so manners likewise repeal them.

In civilized communities men's idiosyncrasies are mitigated by the necessity of conforming to certain rules of behavior. Culture is a mask that hides their faces.

... it is a great mistake to confuse conventionality with simplicity ... it takes a good deal of intelligence and a great many inhibitions to follow a social code.

Custom is our nature. What are our natural principles but principles of custom?

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.

Conventions are unstated agreements within a community to abide by a single way of doing things - not because there is any inherent advantage to the choice, but because there is an advantage to everyone making the same choice.

The way of the world is to make laws, but follow custom.

Members will not stand with their behinds facing the speaker.

It is my opinion that whatever is the custom of a nation, and is practiced by the first characters of that nation towards their chief, cannot degrade strangers who perform the same.

Some laws are not written, but are more decisive than any written law.

I asked my mother, 'Why shouldn't I act?' She said, 'Nobody in the family has acted, so why should you?'

She was already learning that if you ignore the rules people will, half the time, quietly rewrite them so that they don't apply to you.

Life is livable because we know that wherever we go most of the people we meet will be restrained in their actions towards us by an almost instinctive network of taboos.

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.

In my day, there were things that were done, and things that were not done, and there was even a way of doing things that were not done.

How many things both just and unjust are sanctioned by custom?

Society cannot exist without etiquette ... It never has, and until our own century, everybody knew that.

Culture is everything you don't have to do.

Custom determines what is agreeable.

It takes far more courage to violate a custom than a law.

Propriety is the least of all laws, and the most observed.

In most old communities there is a common sense even in sensuality. Vice itself gets gradually digested into a system, is amenable to certain laws of conventional propriety and honor, has for its object simply the gratification of its appetites, and frowns with quite a conservative air on all new inventions, all untried experiments in iniquity.

There is nothing sacred about convention; there is nothing sacred about primitive passions or whims; but the fact that a convention exists indicates that a way of living has been devised capable of maintaining itself.

Conventions are often more cruel than the law.