Top 100 Quotes About Propriety
#1. And like some part of himself that, two days ago, had thought pray and propriety were antidote enough to what ailed the world.
Zoe Ferraris
#2. The responsibility of a minister is to step aside when there is a criminal investigation of the department. That protects the propriety of Parliament and of responsible government.
Jack Layton
#3. Why was it that women were expected to restrain our every passion for the sake of propriety, but men couldn't do it even for the sake of the women they loved?
Stephanie Dray
#4. The pleasantness of an employment does not always evince its propriety.
Jane Austen
#5. She read the letter again and tried to imagine what it would feel like to be so desperate for a response that you would drop all sense of dignity and propriety and dash from the house at the first sight of the postman.
Charlie Lovett
#6. The row of dolls watched her impassively from the bookshelf, their tea party propriety almost certainly offended.
Holly Black
#7. If there are such things as political axioms, the propriety of the judicial power of a government being co-extensive with its legislative, may be ranked among the number.
Alexander Hamilton
#8. Education to independence demands that young people should be accustomed early to consult their own sense of propriety and their own reason. To regard study as mere receptivity and memory work is to have a most incomplete view of what instruction means.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#9. The propriety of some persons seems to consist in having improper thoughts about their neighbors.
F.H. Bradley
#10. Hypocrisy seemed to be the fashionable equivalent of propriety, discretion indistinguishable from morality, and the
Loretta Chase
#11. By going on the defensive ... libertarians are, inadvertently, conceding that speech should be policed for propriety, and that those who violate standards set by the PC set are somehow defective on those grounds alone and deserve to be purged from "polite" company.
Ilana Mercer
#12. All he asked of her was basic civility and an ounce of propriety, but she was like one of her sea creatures, goaded by the slightest disturbance into puffing up and flashing warning colors.
Shipstead, Maggie
#13. I did documentary film for a long time, and I spent a lot of time behind the camera, fervently wishing that the reality I was filming would conform to my narrative propriety. But you can't control it.
Ruth Ozeki
#14. There's this line between propriety and how we really speak and how we really think. And I'm just trying to have fun with that stuff.
Paul Beatty
#15. Firstly you must always implicitly obey orders, without attempting to form any opinion of your own regarding their propriety. Secondly, you must consider every man your enemy who speaks ill of your king; and thirdly you must hate a Frenchman as you hate the devil.
Horatio Nelson
#16. If the people are governed by laws and punishment is used to maintain order, they will try to avoid the punishment but have no sense of shame. If they are governed by virtue and rules of propriety are used to maintain order, they will have a sense of shame and will become good as well.
Confucius
#17. Madam, I assure you that you are dealing with two gentleman of the highest propriety and social standing.
When one contemplates the deeds that are daily done in society's name, such a description is no high recommendation.
Paul Di Filippo
#18. If a man has no humaneness what can his propriety be like? If a man has no humaneness what can his happiness be like?
Confucius
#19. Be aroused by poetry; structure yourself with propriety, refine yourself with music.
Confucius
#20. A novice always behaves with propriety.
Martial
#21. IT is difficult to speak or write with becoming moderation or propriety, on topics to which we are biased by prejudice, interest, or even principle.
Joseph Lancaster
#22. Because partisanship has made anything fair, which honor and propriety might once have kept quiet.
Stephanie Dray
#23. The way in which modern German poetry follows theories reminds me of pupils who, scolded by their teacher for their insubordination, justify themselves by saying that they invented new rules of propriety according to which they are quite well- behaved.
Franz Grillparzer
#24. Lust is absurd. It strikes in the strangest places at the oddest times. She doesn't even realize she's feeling it. She's erected a barricade of propriety and lies between us. I despise the type of woman she is. I loathe her soft pink innocence. My body doesn't concur. I wonder why her?
Karen Marie Moning
#25. There is silence and then the familiar smack of Beatrice Muriel's palm against her forehead. "A love marriage," she says. In her opinion, love marriages border on the indecent. They signify a breakdown of propriety, a giving in to the base instincts exhibited by the lower castes and foreigners.
Nayomi Munaweera
#26. The [President's] Nomination, of Course, brings the Subject fully under the Consideration of the Senate; who have then a Right to decide upon its Propriety or Impropriety.
George Mason
#27. Oratory is good only if it has the qualities of fitness for the occasion, propriety of style, and originality of treatment, while in the case of letters there is no such need whatsoever.
Isocrates
#28. The camel is an ugly animal, seen from above. Its shoulders slope formless like a sack, its silly little ears and fluff of bleached curls behind them have a respectable, boarding-house look, like some faded neatness that dresses for propriety but never dressed for love.
Freya Stark
#29. It has been my experience as a teacher over the years and incarnations that what really counts are not techniques. What really counts is spirit, love. What really counts is a sense of propriety and dedication.
Frederick Lenz
#30. Many of us inhibit our capacity for growth because the culture encourages us to live lives of uniformity. We stall, deny, ignore the ensuing crisis because of confusion, malaise, and yes, even propriety.
Joan Anderson
#31. Certainly a liberal education does manifest itself in a courtesy, propriety, and polish of word and action, which is beautiful in itself, and acceptable to others; but it does much more. It brings the mind into form, - for the mind is like the body.
John Henry Newman
#32. It was as if the words they spoke were weaving a kind of net, a net of normalcy and propriety and sanity, around a situation that was anything but. The
T. Kingfisher
#33. If a man is not good, what has he to do with the rules of propriety? If he is not good, what has he to do with music?
Confucius
#34. The same rule that teaches the propriety of a partition between the various branches of power, teaches us likewise that this partition ought to be so contrived as to render the one independent of the other.
Alexander Hamilton
#35. I'm a gentleman, if nothing else. It's taken me years to become one, but finally I have a sense of propriety.
Eric Stoltz
#36. The ladies of Cranford always dressed with chaste elegance and propriety ...
Elizabeth Gaskell
#37. She had wandered so far from the rules of propriety that she was making up new ones just to keep from sinking into the abyss.
Sabrina Jeffries
#38. Anyone must be mainly ignorant or thoughtless, who is surprised at everything he sees; or wonderfully conceited who expects everything to conform to his standard of propriety.
William Hazlitt
#39. It is the effect of scarcity; one's rules of propriety make one thirst for the improper.
Mohsin Hamid
#40. It was the king's army, the king's people, the king's taxes; and he who questioned the propriety of the royal prerogative of taking from his people without return or accounting, was reckoned, and felt himself to be, a criminal, guilty of the highest crime of disloyalty.
John Buchanan Robinson
#41. Back in his dating days, a man didn't go to a woman's house if she lived alone. He might pick her up at the front porch, but he wouldn't go inside. Propriety ruled.
Karen Kingsbury
#42. They were paragons of conservative propriety in public, but in private they swung like pinatas.
Nicole Peeler
#43. Being, however, nothing but a woman, condemned to patience, propriety, and petticoats for life, I must respect the house-keeper's opinions, and try to compose myself in some feeble and feminine way.
Wilkie Collins
#44. women had to be controlled and kept from going wild because of their inherent susceptibility to lust; thus men had to exercise aidos, "shame," and sophrosyne, "soundness of mind," to keep women from transgressing the bounds of propriety.
Thomas Van Nortwick
#45. But wine was the great assassin of both tradition and propriety, and now the Alethi elite danced with abandon.
Brandon Sanderson
#46. Perhaps propriety is as near a word as any to denote the manners of the gentleman; elegance is necessary to the fine gentleman; dignity is proper to noblemen; and majesty to kings.
William Hazlitt
#47. It is said that the propriety even of old Cato often yielded to the exciting influence of the grape.
Horace
#48. Permit me then to recommend from the sincerity of my heart, ready at all times to bleed in my country's cause, a Declaration of Independence, and call upon the world and the Great God who governs it to witness the necessity, propriety and rectitude thereof.
Nathanael Greene
#50. In the educated class even social life is a series of aptitude tests; we all must perpetually perform in accordance with the shifting norms of propriety, ever advancing signals of cultivation.
David Brooks
#51. It has been so written, for the most part, that the times it describes are with remarkable propriety called dark ages. They are dark, as one has observed, because we are so in the dark about them.
Henry David Thoreau
#52. we have somehow assumed that the interests of speed, or some other function of athletic performance, somehow set aside the requirements of propriety and modesty. In the ancient world, athletes competed naked, and in the modern world, in some events, they might as well be.
Douglas Wilson
#53. The propriety of thoughts and words, which are the hidden beauties of a play, are but confusedly judged in the vehemence of action.
John Dryden
#54. The important consequences to the American States from this Declaration of Independence, considered as the ground and foundation of a future government, naturally suggest the propriety of proclaiming it in such a manner as that the people may be universally informed of it.
John Hancock
#55. A laugh, if purchased at the expense of propriety, costs too much.
Quintilian
#56. The first monster that an audience has to be scared of is the filmmaker. They have to feel in the presence of someone not confined by the normal rules of propriety and decency.
Wes Craven
#57. Golfing with Eisman wasn't like golfing with other Wall Street people. The round usually began with a collective discomfort on the first tee, after Eisman turned up wearing something that violated the Wall Street golfer's notion of propriety.
Michael Lewis
#58. Jamie," I panted. He pushed his kilt out of the way and pressed my hand against him.
"Bloody Christ," I said, impressed despite myself. My sense of propriety slipped another notch.
"Fighting gives ye a terrible cockstand, after. Ye want me, do ye no?
Diana Gabaldon
#59. All prejudice presents itself as piety, propriety.
Hal Duncan
#60. If you cannot conduct yourself with propriety, give place to those who can.
Horace
#61. Those expressions are omitted which can not with propriety be read aloud in the family.
Thomas Bowdler
#62. A gentleman considers justice to be essential in everything. He practices it according to the principles of propriety. He brings it forth in modesty and faithfully completes it. This is indeed a gentleman.
Confucius
#63. Proportion and propriety are among the best secrets of domestic wisdom; and there is no surer test of integrity than a well-proportioned expenditure.
Hannah More
#64. I entirely concur in the propriety of restoring to the sense in which the Constitution was accepted and ratified by the nation. In that sense alone it is a legitimate constitution. And, if that be not the guide in expounding it, there can be no security for consistent and stable government.
James Madison
#65. Once the demands of necessity and propriety have been met, the rest that one owns belongs to the poor.
Pope Leo XIII
#66. There will be no propriety in the spectacle of an elegant interior approached by a low mean entrance.
Marcus Vitruvius Pollio
#67. Like many things with Julie, "family time" did not happen because it was something that you wanted to do. It happened because it was dictated by some outward force of propriety.
Kate Scelsa
#68. A person is born with desires of the eyes and ears, and a liking for beautiful sights and sounds. If he gives way to them, they will lead him to immorality and lack of restriction, and any ritual principles and propriety will be abandoned.
Xun Zi
#69. In quiet crevices, life is born over and over again, without witness, without recognition. It happens, feverishly or serenely, fast or slow, and the guardians or propriety remain laughably ignorant.
Mai Al-Nakib
#71. If I always behave with propriety, no matter what it costs me to suppress my own desires, then that is the measure of me. Such is the essence of self-control.
Frank Herbert
#72. Brings domesticity and common sense, and that propriety which every man loves, directly into this hurly-burly, and makes every bully ashamed.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#73. Her choice ruins the lives of the people she cares most about. Because she picked propriety over passion. Head over heart.
Kody Keplinger
#74. Fashionable dances as now carried on are revolting to every feeling of delicacy and propriety and are fraught with the greatest danger to millions.
Horace Bushnell
#75. A footman may swear; but he cannot swear like a lord. He can swear as often: but can he swear with equal delicacy, propriety, and judgment?
Jonathan Swift
#76. The superior man, extensively studying all learning, and keeping himself under the restraint of the rules of propriety, may thus likewise not overstep what is right.
Confucius
#77. I'm waiting for the day when my children cease to find my domestic propriety reassuring and actually find it annoying.
Rachel Cusk
#78. Because like all whores you value propriety. You are creature of capitalism, the ethics of which are so totally corrupt and hypocritical that your beauty is no more than the beauty of gold, which is to say false and cold and useless.
E.L. Doctorow
#79. Regarding vengeance and arch-enemies, one must not only be timely but prideful, and pride exacts propriety.
Adam Levin
#80. Female schools might be comprised in the list of those worthy the public patronage, with great propriety.
Joseph Lancaster
#81. There is an aptness, a propriety, a fitness in these things which one can understand perhaps better than explain.
Anthony Trollope
#82. I was a little doubtful about the propriety of going to the Mammoth Cave without a gentleman escort, but if two ladies travel alone they must have the courage of men.
Maria Mitchell
#83. (Those who) possessed the highest (sense of) propriety were (always seeking) to show it, and when men did not respond to it, they bared the arm and marched up to them.
Lao-Tzu
#84. Emancipation, to be of any value to the slave, must be the free, voluntary act of the master, performed from a conviction of its propriety.
Elijah Parish Lovejoy
#85. Generosity, pleasing address, courage and propriety of conduct are not acquired, but are inbred qualities.
Chanakya
#86. Avant-garde art jousts with propriety, but takes care never to unseat it.
Mason Cooley
#87. Losing maturity in one's fiction for the sake of marvels and monsters can also mean losing propriety, and that's not always a bad thing.
Hal Duncan
#88. Jewish nationalism means no more than recognition of the peoplehood of Israel, and of the propriety of that people's being a religio-cultural group in America, a nationality in Eastern Europe, and in Palestine an actualized nation.
Milton Steinberg
#89. Architecture depends on Order, Arrangement, Eurythmy, Symmetry , Propriety , and Economy.
Marcus Vitruvius Pollio
#90. I do not mean that you could continue to do this with propriety or even with safety; I merely assert that the power is, in point of fact, in your hands. And for such a power, what a responsibility to God and man!
Jay Alan Sekulow
#91. She had learned propriety, which was the same as saying she had learned to trust only herself.
Kristin Cashore
#92. Repression is a seamless garment; a society which is authoritarian in its social and sexual codes, which crushes its women beneath the intolerable burdens of honour and propriety, breeds repressions of other kinds as well.
Salman Rushdie
#93. The happy man ... will be always or at least most often employed in doing and contemplating the things that are in conformity with virtue. And he will bear changes of fortunes most nobly, and with perfect propriety in every way.
Aristotle.
#94. CHAP. III. The Master said, 'If a man be without the virtues proper to humanity, what has he to do with the rites of propriety? If a man be without the virtues proper to humanity, what has he to do with music?' CHAP.
Confucius
#95. Genius disregards the boundaries of propriety. Genius is permitted to shout if shouting is productive.
Lois Lowry
#96. There is no virtue in concealment. When the earth is rendered chaos, regulations of speech and propriety are rendered impotent, just as city may become desolate, and street, battle ground, and flesh may become fire.
M T Anderson
#97. I respectfully suggest the propriety of having stationed at the arsenal a full company of U. S. troops, that they may be made available in any emergency, from fire, insurrection, or any thing else.
Thomas L. Smith
#98. Just because I tread heavily on propriety's toes doesn't mean I can't play the game when it's of use to me.
Patrick Rothfuss
#99. Confucius himself has repeatedly taught that external appurtenances are as little a part of propriety as sounds are of music.
Inazo Nitobe
#100. My mother used to say that nothing limited the human spirit like propriety.
Kresley Cole
