manners and customs Quotes

Be careful not to be the first to put your hands in the dish. What you cannot hold in your hands you must put on your plate. Also it is a great breach of etiquette when your fingers are dirty and greasy, to bring them to your mouth in order to lick them, or to clean them on your jacket. It would be more decent to use the tablecloth.

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

Good manners are the settled medium of social, as specie is of commercial, life; returns are equally expected for both.

There is no society or conversation to be kept up in the world without good-nature, or something which must bear its appearance and supply its place. For this reason mankind have been forced to invent a kind of artificial humanity, which is what we express by the word Good-Breeding.

People think, mistakenly, that etiquette means you have to suppress your differences. On the contray, etiquette is what enables you to deal with them; it gives you a set of rules.

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

She was a woman who, between courses, could be graceful with her elbows on the table.

Real good-breeding is independent of the forms and refinements of what has assumed to itself the name of society.

Country manners. Even if somebody phones up to tell you your house is burning down, they ask first how you are.

While the proximate ground of discrimination may be of another kind, still the pervading principle and abiding test of good breeding is the requirement of a substantial and patent waste of time.