Formal Behavior Quotes

I am said to be difficult of acquaintance, unwilling to meet any one half way, and showing a social manner which is easy, not diffident, but formal and unresponsive, tending constantly to hold people off.

Ceremonies are the outworks of manners.

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

A certain degree of ceremony is a necessary outwork of manners, as well as of religion; it keeps the forward and petulant at a proper distance, and is a very small restraint to the sensible and to the well-bred part of the world.

My father was a diplomatic officer. As a diplomat's daughter, you have to learn to present yourself very early on.

I was brought up in a household with sir and ma'am.

The icy precepts of respect.

One night in Tokyo we watched two Japanese businessmen saying good-night to each other after what had clearly been a long night of drinking, a major participant sport in Japan. These men were totally snockered, having reached the stage of inebriation wherein every air molecule that struck caused them to wobble slightly, but they still managed to behave more formally than Americans do at funerals.

Foolish, whenever you take the meanness and formality of that thing you do, instead of converting it into the obedient spiracle ofyour character and aims.

I like America anyway. In Japan we are much more formal. If two friends are separated for a long time and they meet they bow and bow and bow. They keep bowing without exchanging a word. Here they slap each other on the back and say: Hello, old man, how goes everything.

Most English talk is a quadrille in a sentry-box.

A lady never asks a gentleman to dance, or to go to supper with her.

A great reserve and severity of manners are necessary for the command of those who are older than ourselves.

There is something exciting when you see people who are very formal talking with each other, and there is a sense that they have chosen to be that way. There is something masked that is more interesting to me than just people who are intent on displaying their uniqueness or whatever.

Ceremony is necessary in Courts, as the outwork and defense of manners.

I find it very eerie when somebody is being really polite.

Solemnity is a device of the body to hide the faults of the mind.

The show is like an Edwardian play - emotional life gets stepped on for the sake of accepted manners, and that's terrific for actors to play in.

Even the street, the sunshine, the very air had a special Sunday quality. We walked differently on Sundays, with greater propriety and stateliness. Greetings were more formal, more subdued, voices more meticulously polite. Everything was so smooth, bland, polished. And genuinely so, because this was Sunday. In church the rustling and the stillness were alike pervaded with the knowledge that all was for the best. Propriety ruled the universe. God was in His Heaven, and we were in our Sunday clothes.

You can't have someone with a pinkie out there at the U.N. or any other place.