Proprieties Quotes & Sayings

The divine mandate to use the world justly and charitably, then, defines every person's moral predicament as that of a steward. But this predicament is hopeless and meaningless unless it produces an appropriate discipline: stewardship. And stewardship is hopeless and meaningless unless it involves long-term courage, perseverance, devotion, and skill. This skill is not to be confused with any accomplishment or grace of spirit or of intellect. It has to do with everyday proprieties in the practical use and care of the created things - with right livelihood. — Wendell Berry

The world needs a strong America. — Michael Mandelbaum

The greatest gift of education, Korya, is the years of shelter provided when learning. Do not think to reduce that learning to facts and the utterances of presumed sages. Much of what one learns in that time is in the sphere of concord, the ways of society, the proprieties of behaviour and thought. Haut would tell you that this is another hard-won achievement of civilization: the time and safe environment in which to learn how to live. When this is destroyed, undermined or discounted, then that civilization is in trouble. — Steven Erikson

For much of the twentieth century, American visitors to Britain found that everything was the wrong temperature: cold, drafty rooms; warm beer and milk; rancid butter and sweating cheese. — Bee Wilson

her mother had never done what was expected of her, had seemed determined to ignore proprieties. In so doing she had broken the glass ceiling. And it was not all that she had broken. — Brian McGilloway

I don't think there is any end to translucence. It's an endless journey, rather like playing the violin. — Arjuna Ardagh

Let the girl be thoroughly developed in body and soul, not modeled, like a piece of clay, after some artificial specimen of humanity, with a body like some plate in Godey's book of fashion, and a mind after the type of Father Gregory's pattern daughters, loaded down with the traditions, proprieties, and sentimentalities of generations of silly mothers and grandmothers, but left free to be, to grow, to feel, to think, to act. Development is one thing, that system of cramping, restraining, torturing, perverting, and mystifying, called education, is quite another. — Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Rather than the uniform concern to hide sex, rather than a general prudishness of language, what distinguishes these last three centuries is the variety, the wide dispersion of devices that were invented for speaking about it, for having it be spoken about, for inducing it to speak of itself, for listening, recording, transcribing, and redistributing what is said about it: around sex, a whole network of varying, specific, and coercive transpositions into discourse. Rather than a massive censorship, beginning with the verbal proprieties imposed by the Age of Reason, what was involved was a regulated and polymorphous incitement to discourse. — Michel Foucault

There was a difference, I had decided, between knowing and believing. And I wanted both. — Laura Bickle

We are disgusted by gossip; yet it is of importance to keep the angels in their proprieties. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

You cannot believe everything you hear — Jude Morgan

The true misfits are the ones who don't think they are.

Sometimes the concepts that ground us in quiescent certainty are the same ones that cast us into pelting hailstorms of insurmountable disbelief. — Robyn Alana Engel

One moment it's a cathedral, at another time there is no words to describe it when it ceases, for short periods of time, to have any regard for the proprieties that constitute not only Parliament, but its tradition. I've seen it in all its greatness. I have inwardly wept over it when it is degraded. — John Diefenbaker

While China succeeded in transferring nearly 150 million people from agriculture to manufacturing, we could not do so, due to lack of skilled manpower. — Pallam Raju

It is almost impossible to translate verbally and well at the same time; for the Latin (a most severe and compendious language) often expresses that in one word which either the barbarity or the narrowness of modern tongues cannot supply in more ... But since every language is so full of its own proprieties that what is beautiful in one is often barbarous, nay, sometimes nonsense, in another, it would be unreasonable to limit a translator to the narrow compass of his author's words; it is enough if he choose out some expression which does not vitiate the sense. — John Dryden

I shall produce nothing that will offend the proprieties, whether applied to children or grownups. My pictures are turned out with clean hands and, therefore, with a clear conscience which, like virtue, is its own reward. — Fatty Arbuckle

The act of writing itself is much like the construction of a mirror made of words. Looking at certain illuminated corners of or cracks within the mirror, the author can see fragments of an objective reality that comprise the physical universe, social communities, political dynamics, and other facets of human existence. Looking in certain other corners of the same mirror, he or she may experience glimpses of a True Self sheltered deftly behind a mask of public proprieties. — Aberjhani

Tackling, and that ability to stay on your feet and pressurise a player, is a dying art. — Peter Storey

Up there we see everything, Oakland to the left, El Cerrito and Richmond to the right, Marin forward, over the Bay, Berkeley below, all red rooftops and trees of cauliflower and columbine, shaped like rockets and explosions, all those people below us, with humbler views; we see the Bay Bridge, clunkety, the Richmond Bridge, straight, low, the Golden Gate, red toothpicks and string, the blue between, the blue above, the gleaming white Land of the Lost/Superman's North Pole Getaway magic crystals that are San Francisco. — Dave Eggers

There are no secrets. — John McAfee

For proverbs are the pith, the proprieties, the proofs, the purities, the elegancies, as the commonest so the commendablest phrases of a language. To use them is a grace, to understand them a good. — John Florio

I think of myself as somebody who, in a moment-to-moment way, I'm quite happy. But I think I am a bit doubtful and wary of true happiness, and, like a lot of my friends, there's been a good degree of self-sabotage. — Patrick DeWitt

Proprieties of place, and especially of time, are the bugbears which terrify mankind from the contemplation of the magnificent. — Edgar Allan Poe

And we had our own laws. I mean, I wrote them. And we had our own customs, and traditions, and proprieties. — James Stockdale

English politics is so much more concerned with the proprieties than with defending dogmas. — Jim Crace

Every language is so full of its own proprieties that what is beautiful in one is often barbarous, nay, sometimes nonsense, in another. — John Dryden

All power is in essence power to deny mortality. — Ernest Becker

Reactionary nostalgia for the proprieties of Victorian England is unfortunate, like a whore looking under the bed for her virginity. — Bruce Robinson

Undoubtedly the master enjoys total freedom first as regards the slave, since the latter recognizes him
totally, and then as regards the natural world, since by his work the slave transforms it into objects of
enjoyment which the master consumes in a perpetual affirmation of his own identity. However, this
autonomy is not absolute. The master, to his misfortune, is recognized in his autonomy by a
consciousness that he himself does not recognize as autonomous. Therefore he cannot be satisfied and his
autonomy is only negative. — Albert Camus

In the internal decoration, if not in the external architecture of their residences, the English are supreme. The Italians have but little sentiment beyond marbles and colors. In France, meliora probant, deteriora sequuntur
the people are too much a race of gadabouts to maintain those household proprieties of which, indeed, they have a delicate appreciation, or at least the elements of a proper sense. The Chinese and most of the Eastern races have a warm but inappropriate fancy. The Scotch are poor decorists. The Dutch have, perhaps, an indeterminate idea that a curtain is not a cabbage. In Spain, they are all curtains
a nation of hangmen. The Russians do not furnish. The Hottentots and Kickapoos are very well in their way. The Yankees alone are preposterous. — Edgar Allan Poe

I think about and study people. I think I make people uneasy sometimes by being so curious as to why they do what they do. I find myself thinking about this fairly obsessively, and I can't stop until I've found an answer. — Antonya Nelson

The mermaids came to me finally, in the pink hours of my life. They are my consolation. For them I dove with arms outstretched, my life streaming out behind me, a leap against all proprieties and expectations, but a leap that was somehow saving and necessary. How can I ever explain or account for that? I dove, and a pair of invisible arms simply appeared, unstinting arms, like the musculature of grace suddenly revealing itself. They caught me after I hit the water, bearing me not to the surface but to the bottom, and only then pulling me up. — Sue Monk Kidd

I could spank Constantine and skin him alive afterwards, that I could," she exclaimed bitterly.
"Oh, Susan, I'm surprised at you," said the doctor, pulling a long face. "Have you no regard for the proprieties? Skin him alive by all means but omit the spanking. — L.M. Montgomery