Politeness Quotes

1. "People should be left to believe what they like, so long as they harm no one else. Apart from normal expectations of politeness, it is not however clear why people should require their personal beliefs to be treated with special sensitivity by others, to the point that if others fail to tip-toe respectfully around them they will start throwing bombs."
Author: A.C. Grayling

2. "Deep in my heart politeness impresses me more than competence."
Author: Amit Kalantri

3. "Amazing what the British do with language; the nuances of politeness. The world's great diplomats, surely."
Author: Anne Rice

4. "The last introvert in a world of extroverts. Silence: my response to both emptiness and saturation. But silence frightens people. I had to learn how to talk. Out of politeness."
Author: Ariel Gore

5. "It is a wise thing to be polite; consequently, it is a stupid thing to be rude. To make enemies by unnecessary and willful incivility, is just as insane a proceeding as to set your house on fire. For politeness is like a counter--an avowedly false coin, with which it is foolish to be stingy."
Author: Arthur Schopenhauer

6. "No use to preach to the working-man courtesy & politeness when at the same time the working-man is not given working conditions under which he can stay polite and soft-mannered."
Author: B. Traven

7. "The need of politeness is at its maximum in speaking with foreigners, and is so irksome as to be paralysing to those who are only accustomed to compatriots."
Author: Bertrand Russell

8. "Politeness is okay, but it gets old and boring. You want to attack life with a passion, not a politeness, you want people to think about you and remember you and say "she is so passionate" you don't want people to think about you and remember you and say "she is so polite," because, who cares about polite?"
Author: C. JoyBell C.

9. "You mightn't think it, but Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices'The visitors again considered it a point of politeness to look at Sloppy, who, looking at them, suddenly threw back his head, extended his moth to the utmost width, and laughed loud and long. At this the two innocents, with their brains in that apparent danger, laughed, and Mrs. Higden laughed, and the orphan laughed, and then the visitors laughed. Which was more cheerful than intelligible."
Author: Charles Dickens

10. "That survival instinct, that will to live, that need to get back to life again, is more powerful than any consideration of taste, decency, politeness, manners, civility. Anything. It's such a powerful force."
Author: Danny Boyle

11. "But to be included in Dick Diver's world for a while was a remarkable experience: people believed he made special reservations about them, recognizing the proud uniqueness of their destinies, buried under the compromises of how many years. He won everyone quickly with an exquisite consideration and a politeness that moved so fast and intuitively that it could be examined only in its effect. Then, without caution, lest the first bloom of the relation wither, he opened the gate to his amusing world. So long as they subscribed to it completely, their happiness was his preoccupation, but at the first flicker of doubt as to its all- inclusiveness he evaporated before their eyes, leaving little communicable memory of what he had said or done."
Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald

12. "How did that saying go? Alexia wondered. Ah, yes, "Brash as an American." Well, they had won their independence somehow, and it was not with politeness."
Author: Gail Carriger

13. "In truth, they were not given to quarrelling. Many couples who love each other more, quarrel more, and with less politeness."
Author: George MacDonald

14. "I want minimum information given with maximum politeness."
Author: Jackie Kennedy

15. "In nothing do we fail more, as a Mission, than in lack of tact and politeness."
Author: James Hudson Taylor

16. "It was always so hot, and everyone was so polite, and everything was all surface but underneath it was like a bomb waiting to go off. I always felt that way about the South, that beneath the smiles and southern hospitality and politeness were a lot of guns and liquor and secrets."
Author: James McBride

17. "La clarté est la souveraine politesse de qui manie une plume.(Clarity is the sovereign politeness of the one who wields a pen.)"
Author: Jean Henri Fabre

18. "E-mail has some magical ability to turn off the politeness gene in a human being."
Author: Jeff Bezos

19. "Be not intimidated...nor suffer yourselves to be wheedled out of your liberties by any pretense of politeness, delicacy, or decency. These, as they are often used, are but three different names for hypocrisy, chicanery and cowardice."
Author: John Adams

20. "Your first reaction is the characteristic one of your contrasuggestible century: to disbelieve, to disprove. I see this very clearly underneath your politeness."
Author: John Fowles

21. "The sweetness and generosity and politeness and gentleness and humanity of the French had shown me how lovely life can be if one takes time to be friendly."
Author: Julia Child

22. "No cook can ignore the opinion of a man who asks for three helpings. One is politeness, two is hunger, but three is a true and cherished compliment."
Author: Kerry Greenwood

23. "...thanks for good deeds do not amount to much except to prove one's politeness."
Author: L. Frank Baum

24. "The steward, according to custom, had stopped all the clocks. This, in the language of Narouz, said, "Your stay with us is so brief, let us not be reminded of the flight of the hours. God made eternity. Let us escape from the despotism of time altogether." These ancient and hereditary politenesses filled Nessim with emotion."
Author: Lawrence Durrell

25. "It isn't very nice to admit, but domestic violence has its uses. So raw and unleashed, it tears away the veil of civilization that comes between us as much as it makes life possible. A poor substitute for the sort of passion we like to extol perhaps, but real love shares more in common with hatred and rage than it does with geniality or politeness."
Author: Lionel Shriver

26. "The bonds between ourselves and another person exists only in our minds. Memory as it grows fainter loosens them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we want to be duped and which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we dupe other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying."
Author: Marcel Proust

27. "...because he knew that for other people their own social obligations took precedence of the death of afriend, and could put himself in her place by dint of his instinctivepoliteness."
Author: Marcel Proust

28. "The highest perfection of politeness is only a beautiful edifice, built, from the base to the dome, of graceful and gilded forms of charitable and unselfish lying."
Author: Mark Twain

29. "I smiled back, the importance of manners, my mother always said, is inversely related to how inclined one is to use them, or, in other words, sometimes politeness is all that stands between oneself and madness."
Author: Nicole Krauss

30. "Ceremonies are different in every country, but true politeness is everywhere the same."
Author: Oliver Goldsmith

31. "[As part of Camus' refusal to debate his political enemies publicly after their vitriolic responses to the publication of 'The Rebel'] At this point, the least sentence I might say will be used in a way that disgusts me in advance. ... It would be impossible for me in that case to continue expressing myself with academic politeness. I am mistaken for a deliberately polite man whom one may insult in all safety."
Author: Olivier Todd

32. "The exquisite code of politeness of the Woosters prevented me clipping her one on the ear-hole, but I would have given a shilling to be able to do it. There seemed to me something deliberately fat-headed in the way she persisted in missing the gist."
Author: P.G. Wodehouse

33. "Politeness is as much concerned in answering letters within a reasonable time, as it is in returning a bow, immediately."
Author: Philip Stanhope

34. "Good-bye, Mrs Bartholemew," said tom, shaking hands with stiff politeness; "and thank you very much for having me.""I shall look forward to our meeting again," said Mrs Bartholemew, equally primly. Tom went slowly down the attic stairs. Then, at the bottom, he hesitated: he turned impulsively and ran up again - two at a time - to where Hatty Bartholemew still stood...Afterwards, Aunt Gwen tried to describe to her husband that second parting between them. "He ran up to her, and they hugged each other as if they had known each other for years and years, instead of only having met for the first time this morning. There was something else, too, Alan, although I know you'll say it sounds even more absurd...Of course, Mrs Bartholemew's such a shrunken little old woman, she's hardly bigger than Tom; anyway: but, you know, he put his arms right round her and he hugged her good-bye as if she were a little girl."
Author: Philippa Pearce

35. "He opened the first letter, No "Dear Mr. Woods." It was a page full of profanities. There was something oddly refreshing about honest, to-the-point hate mail. No hypocrisy and forced politeness. Too many letters ripped you to shreds, then closed off 'Sincerely yours."
Author: Randy Alcorn

36. "A dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot."
Author: Robert A. Heinlein

37. "I am little acquainted with politeness, but I know a good deal of benevolence of temper and goodness of heart."
Author: Robert Burns

38. "My father believed in toughness, honesty, politeness and being on time. All very important lessons."
Author: Roger Moore

39. "When suave politeness, tempering bigot zeal, corrected 'I believe' to 'one does feel'. "
Author: Ronald A. Knox

40. "I'm making a listI'm making a list of things I must sayFor politeness,And goodness and kindness and gentlenessSweetness and rightness:HelloPardon meHow are you?Excuse meBless youMay I?Thank youGoodbyeIf you know some that I've forgot,Please stick them in you eye!"
Author: Shel Silverstein

41. "Don't mistake politeness for lack of strength."
Author: Sonia Sotomayor

42. "Ironic. I'm here because of my inherent dangerousness, but it's my inherent politeness that makes me put up with this. With him."
Author: Sophie Jordan

43. "Curious how Love destroys every vestige of that politeness which the human race, in its years of evolution, has so painfully acquired."
Author: Stella Gibbons

44. "Politeness [is] a sign of dignity, not subservience."
Author: Theodore Roosevelt

45. "The social dimension of reticence and nonacknowledgment is most developed in forms of politeness and deference. We don't want to tell people what we think of them, and we don't want to hear from them what they think of us, though we are happy to surmise their thoughts and feelings, and to have them surmise ours, at least up to a point. We don't, if we are reasonable, worry too much what they may say about us behind our backs, just as we often say things about a third party that we wouldn't say to his face. Since everyone participates in these practices, they aren't, or shouldn't be, deceptive. Deception is another matter, and sometimes we have reason to object to it, though sometimes we have no business knowing the truth, even about how someone really feels about us."
Author: Thomas Nagel

46. "Kindness and politeness are not overrated at all. They're underused."
Author: Tommy Lee Jones

47. "He also had a kind of helpless politeness, which I took advantage of. He was quite incapable of refusing a direct request, and so, because I asked him to, he invited me to several parties during the month I stayed in Hemgogn."
Author: Ursula K. Le Guin

48. "A little politeness might smooth the way ahead. Knowing it was his turn to be dispatched, the best he could hope for was as swift a death as the one Massetti had so thanklessly received."
Author: Victoria Lamb

49. "The only true source of politeness is consideration."
Author: William Gilmore Simms

50. "Don't you bully me with your politeness! Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe?"
Author: Yann Martel

Politeness Quotes Pictures