Top 56 Quotes About Good Breeding
#1. Yes, yes, children must early be made to practise piety, godliness, and propriety; a person of good breeding is one into whom 'good maxims' have been instilled and impressed, poured in through a funnel, thrashed in and preached in.
Max Stirner
#2. Insofar as he'd formed any opinion of her, it was that she suffered from misplaced gentility and the mistaken belief that etiquette meant good breeding. She mistook mannerisms for manners.
Terry Pratchett
#3. Good-breeding shows itself most where to an ordinary eye it appears the least.
Joseph Addison
#4. Compliments of congratulation are always kindly taken, and cost nothing but pen, ink and paper. I consider them as draughts upon good breeding, where the exchange is always greatly in favor of the drawer.
Lord Chesterfield
#5. Women of quality are so civil, you can hardly distinguish love from good breeding.
William Wycherley
#6. A man's own good breeding is the best security against other people's ill manners.
Lord Chesterfield
#7. By nature servile, people attempt at first glance to find signs of good breeding in the appearance of those who occupy more exalted stations.
Anton Chekhov
#8. If proportion is the good breeding of architecture, symmetry, or the answering of one part to another, may be defined as the sanity of decoration.
Edith Wharton
#9. Not everyone knows how to be silent or to leave in good time. It happens that even people of good breeding fail to notice that their presence provokes in the weary or preoccupied host a feeling akin to hatred, and that this feeling is tensely concealed and covered up with lies.
Anton Chekhov
#11. People of small caliber are always carping. They are bent on showing their own superiority, their knowledge or prowess or good breeding.
Van Wyck Brooks
#12. This laudable quality is commonly known by the name of Manners and Good-breeding, and consists in a Fashionable Habit, acquir'd by Precept and Example, of flattering the Pride and Selfishness of others, and concealing our own with Judgment and Dexterity.
Bernard De Mandeville
#13. Now, it is well known, that a man may with more impunity be guilty of an actual breach either of real good breeding or of good morals, than appear ignorant of the most minute point of fashionable etiquette.
Walter Scott
#14. One principal object of good-breeding is to suit our behaviour to the three several degrees of men, our superiors, our equals, and those below us.
Jonathan Swift
#15. Good-breeding is the art of showing men, by external signs, the internal regard we have for them. It arises from good sense, improved by conversing with good company.
Cato The Younger
#16. It is good breeding alone that can prepossess people in your favor at first sight, more time being necessary to discover greater talents.
Lord Chesterfield
#17. If ever a man and his wife, or a man and his mistress, who pass nights as well as days together, absolutely lay aside all good breeding, their intimacy will soon degenerate into a coarse familiarity, infallibly productive of contempt or disgust.
Lord Chesterfield
#18. Good breeding consists of concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.
Mark Twain
#19. The Pantechnicon stored and distributed a good deal of furniture as well. The very idea of a lady of good breeding visiting such a place. There would be tables lying about, on their sides, naked! Not to mention flaccid dirigibles! Alexia shuddered at the very idea.
Gail Carriger
#20. Good-breeding carries along with it a dignity that is respected by the most petulant. Ill-breeding invites and authorizes the familiarity of the most timid.
Lord Chesterfield
#21. The knight knew he was of good breeding and noble blood, that his reputation was sterling. He had no dalliances. He was a highly decorated Knight of the Round Table.
Julia Mills
#22. The chief ingredients in the composition of those qualities that gain esteem and praise, are good nature, truth, good sense, and good breeding.
Joseph Addison
#23. We are so dull that we rarely realize how much history lies hidden in marriage, and how the one word spoken by the bride makes all the difference between cattle-raising and a nation's good breeding.
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
#24. No young woman of good breeding should show exclusive partiality to one partner all night.
Jude Morgan
#25. The little that he had said, thus far, had been sufficient to convince me that I was speaking to a gentleman. He had what I may venture to describe as the unsought self-possession, which is a sure sign of good breeding, not in England only, but everywhere else in the civilized world.
Wilkie Collins
#26. There are few defects in our nature so glaring as not to be veiled from observation by politeness and good-breeding.
Stanislaw Leszczynski
#27. The British are apt to make merits of their stupidities, and to represent their various incapacities as points of good breeding.
George Bernard Shaw
#28. Good breeding in cattle depends on physical health, but in men on a well-formed character.
Democritus
#29. Good breeding and good nature do incline us rather to help and raise people up to ourselves, than to mortify and depress them, and, in truth, our own private interest concurs in it, as it is making ourselves so many friends, instead of so many enemies.
Lord Chesterfield
#31. Good-breeding is not confined to externals, much less to any particular dress or attitude of the body; it is the art of pleasing, or contributing as much as possible to the ease and happiness of those with whom you converse.
Henry Fielding
#32. Real good-breeding is independent of the forms and refinements of what has assumed to itself the name of society.
George MacDonald
#33. 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.
Thorstein Veblen
#34. The scholar without good breeding is a pedant; the philosopher, a cynic.
Lord Chesterfield
#35. He is just what a young man ought to be," said she, "sensible, good-humoured, lively; and I never saw such happy manners! - so much ease, with such perfect good breeding!
Jane Austen
#36. One may know a man that never conversed in the world, by his excess of good-breeding.
Joseph Addison
#37. 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.
Joseph Addison
#38. You must labour to acquire that great and uncommon talent of hating with good breeding, and loving with prudence; to make no quarrel irreconcilable by silly and unnecessary indications of anger; and no friendship dangerous, in care it breaks, by a wanton, indiscreet, and unreserved confidence.
Lord Chesterfield
#39. Simplicity is a great element of good breeding.
Fanny Kemble
#40. 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.
Henry Fielding
#41. Fashion understands itself; good-breeding and personal superiority of whatever country readily fraternize with those of every other. The chiefs of savage tribes have distinguished themselves in London and Paris, by the purity of their tournure.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#42. There are certainly numberless women of fashion who consider it perfectly natural to go miles down Fifth Avenue, or Madison Avenue, yet for whom a voyage of half a dozen blocks to east or west would be an adventure, almost a dangerous impairment of good breeding.
Jules Romains
#43. Good breeding differs, if at all, from high breeding only as it gracefully remembers the rights of others, rather than gracefully insists on its own rights.
Thomas Carlyle
#44. Good breeding consists in having no particular mark of any profession, but a general elegance of manners.
Samuel Johnson
#45. Good breeding is the result of good sense, some good nature, and a little self-denial for the sake of others.
Lord Chesterfield
#46. Though shyness per se was unacceptable, reserve was a mark of good breeding.
Susan Cain
#47. The intelligence of affection is carried on by the eye only; good-breeding has made the tongue falsify the heart, and act a part of continued restraint, while nature has preserved the eyes to herself, that she may not be disguised or misrepresented.
Joseph Addison
#48. The most familiar and intimate habitudes, connections, friendships, require a degree of good-breeding both to preserve and cement them.
Lord Chesterfield
#49. And it's not my fault that I have a penchant for good breeding, reasonable intelligence, and passable personal hygiene, not necessarily in that order.
Kami Garcia
#51. No rent-roll nor army-list can dignify skulking and dissimulation: and the first point of courtesy must always be truth, as really all the forms of good-breeding point that way.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#52. Taylor Swift is so flawless, and so unattainable, and I don't think it's breeding anything good in young girls.
Lorde
#53. yeah, my dad was human. He was a good man, and I'm proud to be his daughter. My mother, on the other hand, was Firstborn. So unless you call the First of your race Mommy or Daddy, I think my breeding is better than yours." Verona
Seanan McGuire
#54. Where would anyone in publicity be if they allowed sensitivity, restraint, breeding or good taste to stand in their way?
Isabelle Holland
#55. Candor is a proof of both a just frame of mind, and of a good tone of breeding. It is a quality that belongs equally to the honest man and to the gentleman.
James F. Cooper
#56. What mattered at fifty-eight was what had mattered at eighteen: breeding and good bone structure.
P.D. James
