Quotes & Sayings About Gentility

To think of playing cricket for hard cash! Money and gentility would ruin any pastime under the sun. — Mary Russell Mitford

We may daily discover crowds acquire sufficient wealth to buy gentility, but very few that possess the virtues which ennoble human nature, and (in the best sense of the word) constitute a gentleman. — William Shenstone

There we were, filled with pure animal need, as he pinned me to the wooden table, and cruelly whipped my naked bottom; the two of us sweaty and panting, me screaming, him grunting, our primal sexual natures overprinting the tea room's pretence at gentility, and refinement. — Fiona Thrust

In [The New Poetry] I had attacked the British poets' nervous preference for gentility above all else, and their avoidance of the uncomfortable, destructive truths both of the inner life and of the present time. — Al Alvarez

the ancient saying that force outdoes inferiors while gentility outdoes superiors. — Liezi

Difficult times do not produce gentility, as if there is an angle hovering over the world of the oppressed. — Jonny Steinberg

Gentility is what is left over from rich ancestors after the money is gone. — John Ciardi

When you want to talk about honor, they want to talk about money. When you want to talk about money, they want to talk about gentility. They either get the notion of honor or they don't. And if they don't, you probably shouldn't be fucking with them. — Liam Rector

There's such a thing as too much point on a pencil. — H. Allen Smith

There is such a thing as too much couth. — S.J Perelman

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

Sally, or rather Sarah (for what young lady of common gentility will reach the age of sixteen without altering her name as far as she can?) must from situation be at this time the intimatre friend and confidante of her sister. — Jane Austen

The perpetual danger which besets religion is that it may substitute gentility and aestheticism for prophetic insight and power. — Georgia Harkness

Southern gentility is evocative to me. — Rosanne Cash

I loved England's gentility and its civility. I'm from the Bronx, with a Bronx accent. I love the beauty of its language, the ways it's spoken. I love the green grass of England and the flowers. — Sid Bernstein

The Albion was a spacious pub, built in the days when a public house with any pretensions to gentility had to have fourteen foot ceilings, brass taps and a polished wooden bar you skate down ... Bert, in his reflective moments, considered that if heaven didn't have a well-appointed pub where a man could sit down over a beer for a yarn with the other angels, then he didn't want to go there. — Kerry Greenwood

Baseball is a game, yes. It is also a business. But what is most truly is is disguised combat. For all its gentility, its almost leisurely pace, baseball is violence under wraps. — Willie Mays

Is man a savage at heart, skinned o'er with fragile Manners? Or is savagery but a faint taint in the natural man's gentility, which erupts now and again like pimples on an angel's arse? — John Barth

Spring, if it lingers more than a week beyond its span, starts to hunger for summer to end the days of perpetual promise. Summer in its turn soon begins to sweat for something to quench its heat, and the mellowest of autumns will tire of gentility at last, and ache for a quick sharp frost to kill its fruitfulness. Even winter - the hardest season, the most implacable - dreams, as February creeps on, of the flame that will presently melt it away. Everything tires with time, and starts to seek some opposition, to save it from itself. — Clive Barker

Indeed. And here is a new one for you: I love you, Alexander Cameron. More than common sense or decency should allow. Your strength frightens me and your stubbornness angers me, and I believe you to be a truly dangerous threat to a woman's inbred gentility, but there you have it. And unless you are prepared to give me several honest and convincing reasons why I should do otherwise, I intend to remain here at Achnacarry as your wife, as your lover if you will have me, as the mother of your sons, of which -please God- there will be many. — Marsha Canham

Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames. Dalton Shirts. I thought all the time they were khaki, army issue khaki, until I saw they were of heavy Chinese silk or finest flannel because they made his face so brown his eyes so blue. Dalton Ames. It just missed gentility. Theatrical fixture. Just papier-mache, then touch. Oh. Asbestos. Not quite bronze. — William Faulkner

Very strange things comes to our knowledge in families, miss; bless your heart, what you would think to be phenomenons, quite ... Aye, and even in gen-teel families, in high families, in great families ... and you have no idea ... what games goes on! — Charles Dickens

even if a gentleman should lose his whole substance, he must never give way to annoyance. Money must be so subservient to gentility as never to be worth a thought. Of course, the SUPREMELY aristocratic thing is to be entirely oblivious of the mire of rabble, with its setting; but sometimes a reverse course may be aristocratic to remark, to scan, and even to gape at, the mob (for preference, through a lorgnette), even as though one were taking the crowd and its squalor for a sort of raree show which had been organised specially for a gentleman's diversion. Though — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

For you cannot have gentility without paying for it. — E. M. Forster

Though at times interested in reforms, notably prohibition (I have never tasted alcoholic liquor), I was inclined to be bored by ethical casuistry; since I believed conduct to be a matter of taste and breeding, with virtue, delicacy, and truthfulness as symbols of gentility. Of my word and honour I was inordinately proud, and would permit no reflections to be cast upon them. I thought ethics too obvious and commonplace to be scientifically discussed, and considered philosophy solely in its relation to truth and beauty. I was, and still am, pagan to the core. — H.P. Lovecraft

Big wave surfers are human beings that have powers. They are men of enormous gentility. — Dorian "Doc" Paskowitz

The Oscar Wilde of Welfare State gentility. — Joe Orton

When you meet dishonest people, move them with sincerity. When you meet violent people, affect them with gentility. When you meet warped people, inspire them with justice. Then the whole world enters your forge. — Zicheng Hong

I have never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from other men. There is not much harm in a lion. He has no ideals, no religion, no politics, no chivalry, no gentility; in short, no reason for destroying anything that he does not want to eat — George Bernard Shaw

Wicked ecclesiastics who show the worst example to the people," and, above all, nobles who empty the purses of the poor by their extravagance, and disdain them for "lowness of blod or foulenesse of body," for deformed shape of body or limb, for dullness of wit and uncunning of craft, and deign not to speak to them, and who are themselves stuffed with pride - of ancestry, fortune, gentility, possessions, power, comeliness, strength, children, treasure - "prowde in lokynge, prowde in spekyng, ... prowde in goinge, standynge and sytting." All would be drawn by fiends to Hell on the Day of Judgment. — Barbara W. Tuchman

He had not an ounce of superfluous flesh on his bones, and leanness goes a great way towards gentility. — Elizabeth Gaskell

A man can buy nothing in the market with gentility. — William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley

It often horrified the English community that she spent her time with local farmers and horse traders, eccentrics and mystics, but she valued expertise over convention and had long believed if you were going to make discoveries in the world you must first quit your Englishness and open your eyes. — Sara Sheridan

Yes; even if a gentleman should lose his whole substance, he must never give way to annoyance. Money must be so subservient to gentility as never to be worth a thought. Of course, the SUPREMELY aristocratic thing is to be entirely oblivious of the mire of rabble, with its setting; but sometimes a reverse course may be aristocratic to remark, to scan, and even to gape at, the mob (for preference, through a lorgnette), even as though one were taking the crowd and its squalor for a sort of raree show which had been organised specially for a gentleman's diversion. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The world of shabby gentility is like no other; its sacrifices have less logic, its standards are harsher, its relation to reality is dimmer than comfortable property or plain poverty can understand. — Murray Kempton

He was one of the masters of the thriller and he really was one of the great signposts, because he took the spy thriller out of the gentility of the drawing room and into the back streets of Istanbul and where it all really happened, ... The Day of the Jackal. — Frederick Forsyth

Fashion is gentility running away from vulgarity and afraid of being overtaken — William Hazlitt

Gentility is nothing but Ancient Riches. — George Herbert

She had begun to read in the beginning as a protection from the frightening and unpleasant things. She continued because, apart from the story, literature brought with it a kind of gentility for which she craved. — Patrick White

Love is a beautiful image Imagined or seen within the heart, The friend of virtue and gentility. — Michelangelo

But here in my hometown, history was like a fine dust that settled out on everything. There was nothing to counter it. The culture had been hardened by a religion suspect of joy, yet fascinated by sin. Its moral acceptance of slavery eroded compassion. And gentility became a necessary pretense to cover the resentment created long ago when the North's industrial prestige trumped the agrarian South. It was not an easy place to feel lighthearted or triumphant. Nor was it an easy place to remember the beauty of wonder and awe. — Christina Carson

I was already well schooled in looking away, the jungle-craft of gentility. — Amitav Ghosh

Unlike most women I have known, she placed no value on shallow pretensions or hypocritical displays of gentility. — Pat Conroy

Until changing economic conditions made the thing actually happen, struggling early society would hardly have guessed that woman's road to gentility would lie through doing nothing at all. — Emily James Smith Putnam

Touch. It is touch that is the deadliest enemy of chastity, loyalty, monogamy, gentility with its codes and conventions and restraints. By touch we are betrayed and betray others ... an accidental brushing of shoulders or touching of hands ... hands laid on shoulders in a gesture of comfort that lies like a thief, that takes, not gives, that wants, not offers, that awakes, not pacifies. When one flesh is waiting, there is electricity in the merest contact. — Wallace Stegner

Marcel was from Louisiana, so for four years Emily had been southern by association. She insisted on Lynchburg Lemonades. She scheduled interviews around the Gators. She championed gentility. Anyone at a dinner party who thought they could tell a joke making fun of the region encountered a faceful of Emily, quick and ferocious as a convert, as a woman who loved a man.
Emily now had no claim to the South. The region and its interests would proceed without her. — Marie-Helene Bertino

It is to be regretted that the niceties of modern singing frighten our congregations from joining lustily in the hymns. For our part we delight in full bursts of praise, and had rather discover the ruggedness of a want of musical training than miss the heartiness of universal congregational song. The gentility which lisps the tune in well bred whispers, or leaves the singing altogether to the choir, is very like a mockery of worship. The gods of Greece and Rome may be worshipped well enough with classical music, but Jehovah can only be adored with the heart, and that music is the best for his service which gives the heart most play. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Penny Tweedy took over the running of The Meadow as a businesswoman, with a tough attitude...Behind the Cheer smile and the porcelain sparkle of her teeth, behind the radiance and the friendliness and the warmth--behind all the charm, gentility, and good Episcopalianism--was a mind with a thermostat idling at sixty degrees. — William Nack