Quotes about Courtesy

A kindly courtesy does at least save one's feelings, even if it is not professing to stand for a welcome.

Perhaps she had not succeeded in inspiring any wonderful ambitions in her pupils, but she had taught them, more by her own sweet personality than by all her careful precepts, that it was good and necessary in the years that were before them to live their lives finely and graciously, holding fast to truth and courtesy and kindness, keeping aloof from all that savored of falsehood and meanness and vulgarity.

Never argue. In society nothing must be; give only results. If any person differs from you, bow, and turn the conversation.

Whether it's eight o'clock in the morning or eight o'clock at night, I always try to greet others before they have a chance to speak to me.

Good manners are an admission that everybody is so tender that they have to be handled with gloves. Now, human respect—you don't call a man a coward or a liar lightly, but if you spend your life sparing people's feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can't distinguish what should be respected in them.

My generation of radicals and breakers-down never found anything to take the place of the old virtues of work and courage and the old graces of courtesy and politeness.

The true greatness of a person, in my view, is evident in the way he or she treats those with whom courtesy and kindness are not required.

It is almost a definition of a gentleman to say that he is one who never inflicts pain.

Do not speak ill of the dead.

My only hope was to be polite.

You can disagree without being disagreeable.

When someone takes your time, it doesn't cost them anything, but it costs you everything.