Alexander McCall Smith Quotes

Perhaps the summary of good-breeding may be reduced to this rule. "Behave unto all men as you would they should behave unto you." This will most certainly oblige us to treat all mankind with the utmost civility and respect, there being nothing that we desire more than to be treated so by them.

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

People give out compliments because it's polite.

Good manners can replace morals. It may be years before anyone knows if what you are doing is right. But if what you are doing is nice, it will be immediately evident.

Politeness has been defined to be artificial good-nature; but we may affirm, with much greater propriety, that good-nature is natural politeness.

It is a very nice world-that is, if you remember that while morals are all-important between the Lord and His creatures, what counts between one creature and another is good manners.

It would be nice if people said, God bless you not just when you sneezed but also when you farted.

Not greeting people isn't enough. One also doesn't greet people one doesn't know.

You have not fulfilled every duty unless you have fulfilled that of being pleasant.

When it came to, like, appropriate behavior towards one another, it was - I was well-versed.

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

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

Whoever one is, and wherever one is, one is always in the wrong if one is rude.

Ceremonies are the outworks of manners.

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

A lot of our lives are about being polite.

The wisest and best are repulsive, if they are characterized by repulsive manners. Politeness is an easy virtue, costs little, and has great purchasing power.

If an armed nation were a polite nation, America would be paradise. We have more than 200 million guns in private owernship here. But our manners are not getting better.

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.

People who stare deserve the looks they get.

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

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.

Good manners consist of doing precisely what everyone thinks should be done, especially when no one knows quite what that is.

Americans are incredibly polite as long as they get what they want.

Good general-purpose manners nowadays may be said to consist in knowing how much you can get away with.