Christopher Paolini Quotes

I am not accustomed to protocol.

The etiquette question has become of so much importance as to be an object of state.

Ceremonies are the outworks of manners.

As manners make laws, so manners likewise repeal them.

One must observe the proper rites.

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.

It is not polite for a Russian to interfere in British politics.

I am a journalist in the field of etiquette. I try to find out what the most genteel people regularly do, what traditions they have discarded, what compromises they have made.

The English never smash in a face. They merely refrain from asking it to dinner.

Be polite. Write diplomatically. Even in a declaration of war one observes the rules of politeness.

Protocol is everything.

Custom is our nature …

Education proceeds ultimately from the patterns furnished by institutions, customs, and laws.

Everything ends this way in France. Weddings, christenings, duels, burials, swindles, affairs of state—everything is a pretext for a good dinner.

We drove to the airport. On the way, Clay gave him "the lecture," including all the do's and don'ts of meeting the Alpha, which was only slightly more complicated than an audience with the queen. Don't sit until you're invited to. Don't talk unless he asks you a question. Don't eat before he does. Don't make direct eye contact. Jeremy demanded none of this, but that wasn't the point.

Ceremony is an invention to take off the uneasy feeling which we derive from knowing ourselves to be less the object of love and esteem with a fellow-creature than some other person is. It endeavours to make up, by superior attentions in little points, for that invidious preference which it is forced to deny in the greater.

Breaking a glass in the northwest is rather like belching in Arabia, for it appears to be done as a mark of appreciation or elation.

He was violating the second rule of the two rules for getting on well with people that speak Spanish; give the men tobacco and leave the women alone

"Sorry," she said, "I got out as fast as I could, but I had to stay and socialize. Protocol, you know." "Explain protocol," Nell said. This was how she always talked to the Primer. "At the place we’re going, you need to watch your manners. Don’t say 'explain this' or 'explain that.'" "Would it impose on your time unduly to provide me with a concise explanation of the term protocol?" Nell said. Again Rita made that nervous laugh and looked at Nell with an expression that looked like poorly concealed alarm.

His courtesy was somewhat extravagant. He would write and thank people who wrote to thank him for wedding presents and when he encountered anyone as punctilious as himself the correspondence ended only with death.

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.

All ceremonies are in themselves very silly things; but yet, a man of the world should know them. They are the outworks of Mannersand Decency, which would be too often broken in upon, if it were not for that defence, which keeps the enemy at a proper distance.

When people complain of the decay of manners they have in mind not the impudent abbreviations of the crowd, but the decline in bowing and scraping and in speaking of one's employer as "the master." What the rich mean by the good manners of the poor is usually not civility, but servility.

When politeness is used to show up other people, it is reclassified as rudeness. Thus it is technically impossible to be too polite.

The appurtenance of welcome is fashion and ceremony.