Elsa Maxwell Quotes

#1. Good manners spring from just one thing - kind impulses.

Elsa Maxwell

#2. I don't hate anyone. I dislike. But my dislike is the equivalent of anyone else's hate.

Elsa Maxwell

#3. Under pressure, people admit to murder, setting fire to the village church or robbing a bank, but never to being bores.

Elsa Maxwell

#4. Giving parties is a trivial avocation, but it pays the dues for my union card in humanity.

Elsa Maxwell

#5. The wealthy ... live in marble mausoleums surrounded by the suspicions and neuroses that have replaced the medieval moats which once isolated so-called aristocrats from reality.

Elsa Maxwell

#6. Someone said that life is a party. You join in after it's started and leave before it's finished.

Elsa Maxwell

#7. Etiquette-a fancy word for simple kindness.

Elsa Maxwell

#8. Protocol may be defined as the code of etiquette which protects royalty from the competition of intellectual and social superiors.

Elsa Maxwell

#9. [On Hollywood:] I had gone there expecting to see parties that reflected the stock-in-trade of the movies - glamour. Instead, I found the same attitude toward parties that European peasants had for baths. It was something to be done methodically every Saturday night ...

Elsa Maxwell

#10. Bores put you in a mental cemetery while you are still walking.

Elsa Maxwell

#11. [On the British Museum:] It was manifestly impossible to read all the books in that huge, gloomy structure, but I made a good try and accumulated a fund of useless information guaranteed to cast a pall over any dinner table.

Elsa Maxwell

#12. To get fifty people to a cocktail party in New York, you ask one hundred. In Hollywood, you invite twenty.

Elsa Maxwell

#13. Most rich people are the poorest people I know.

Elsa Maxwell

#14. Laugh at yourself first, before anyone else can.

Elsa Maxwell

#15. Down with boredom. It has to go.

Elsa Maxwell

#16. The cocktail party is easily the worst invention since castor oil

Elsa Maxwell

#17. Intolerance of mediocrity has been the main prop of my independence.

Elsa Maxwell

#18. Serve the dinner backward, do anything - but for goodness sake, do something weird.

Elsa Maxwell

#19. I make enemies deliberately. They are the sauce piquante to my dish of life.

Elsa Maxwell

#20. Seeing unhappiness in the marriage of friends, I was content to have chosen music and laughter as a substitute for a husband.

Elsa Maxwell

#21. Good manners - the longer I live the more convinced I am of it - are a priceless insurance against failure and loneliness. And anyone can have them.

Elsa Maxwell

#22. A bore is a vacuum cleaner of society, sucking up everything and giving nothing. Bores are always eager to be seen talking to you.

Elsa Maxwell

#23. Only those who have earned leisure know how to use it profitably.

Elsa Maxwell

#24. Anatomize the character of a successful hostess and the knife will lay bare the fact that she owes her position to one of three things: either she is liked, or she is feared, or she is important.

Elsa Maxwell

#25. Nothing spoils a good party like a genius.

Elsa Maxwell

#26. Keep your talent in the dark and you'll never be insulted.

Elsa Maxwell

#27. Existence is a party. You join after its started and you leave before its finished.

Elsa Maxwell