Quotes & Sayings About Sociability

One's desire to be alone, biologists have found, is partially genetic and to some degree measurable. If you have low levels of the pituitary peptide oxytocin--sometimes called the master chemical of sociability-- and high quantities of the hormone vasopressin, which may suppress your need for affection, you tend to require fewer interpersonal relationships. — Michael Finkel

Cultivate truth, good faith, experience, cleverness, sociability, and industry. — Pittacus Of Mytilene

If you look at a column of ants on the march you will see that there are some who are stragglers or have lost their way. The column has no time for them; it goes on. Sometimes the stragglers die. But even this has no effect on the column. There is a little disturbance around the corpse, which is eventually carried off - and then it appears so light. And all the time the great busyness continues, and that apparent sociability, that rite of meeting and greeting which ants travelling in opposite directions, to and from their nest, perform without fail. So — V.S. Naipaul

The sociability of artists is a paradoxical and precarious thing, and ceases the instant they begin their actual artistic work. — Robin G. Collingwood

Take a shot in front of D.L. Probing for a vein in my dirty bare foot ... Junkies have no shame ... They are impervious to the repugnance of others. It is doubtful if shame can exist in the absence of sexual libido ... The junky's shame disappears with his nonsexual sociability which is also dependent on libido ... — William S. Burroughs

Coffee is a product favouring sociability, friendship, and conversation and it should always be consumed with someone else. — Ernesto Illy

The British attendees reported a similar difficulty identifying introverts in America because "U.S. Introverts exhibited behavior that in the United Kingdom was associated with Extroversion: sociability, comfort with small talk, disclosure of personal information, energetic and fast-paced conversation, and so forth." Most Americans, whether introverted or extroverted, have learned to look like extroverts. — Laurie A. Helgoe

It is, indeed, a fact that, in the midst of society and sociability every evil inclination has to place itself under such great restraint, don so many masks, lay itself so often on the procrustean bed of virtue, that one could well speak of a martyrdom of the evil man. In solitude all this falls away. He who is evil is at his most evil in solitude: which is where he is at his best - and thus to the eye of him who sees everywhere only a spectacle also at his most beautiful. — Friedrich Nietzsche

[On sociability in Italy:] You may be a hermit or an innkeeper. — Elizabeth Hardwick

In reading, friendship is restored immediately to its original purity. With books there is no forced sociability. If we pass the evening with those friends - books - it's because we really want to. When we leave them, we do so with regret and, when we have left them, there are none of those thoughts that spoil friendship: "What did they think of us?" - "Did we make a mistake and say something tactless?" - "Did they like us?" - nor is there the anxiety of being forgotten because of displacement by someone else. All such agitating thoughts expire as we enter the pure and calm friendship of reading. — Marcel Proust

Unorganized morality is called sociability. Organized morality is called civilization. Unorganized immorality is called barbarity. Organized immorality is called statism. — Jakub Bozydar Wisniewski

Writers are painful friends, and they are seldom friendly with others. They are insecure in the presence of other writers. Composers of certain kinds of music are the same
tormented and intolerant. Yet some arts not only make the artist social but make him depend upon sociability in order to succeed. Painting is one. — Paul Theroux

Every moment of life wants to tell us something, but we do not want to hear what it has to say: when we are alone and quiet we are afraid that something will be whispered into our ear and hence we despise quiet and drug ourselves with sociability. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Wine always inspires sociability. — Robert Mondavi

We are born to talk to other people, ... we are born to be sociable and to sit together with others in the shade of the acacia tree and talk about things that happened the day before. We were not born to sit in kitchens by ourselves, with nobody to chat to. Mma Ramotswe — Alexander McCall Smith

I was very inventive. I lived in my own world - my dad said I was a loner. Not lonely, just happy in my own company. It's the same now. I need time alone, which is maybe why I love to write. Having said that, I love the sociability of telly. It's a nice contrast. — Alan Titchmarsh

Above them, in ten successive layers of dormitory, the little boys and girls who were still young enough to need an afternoon sleep were as busy as every one else, though they did not know it, listening unconsciously to hypnopaedic lessons in hygiene and sociability, in class-consciousness and the toddler's love-life. — Aldous Huxley

Technology was once a substitute for dealing with people, but today it is at the heart of sociability. — Mark Penn

Among people, particularly those I love, I so easily get talking and give out everything possible in conversation, so that it is not available for my work. It is a stupid piece of clumsiness that I am so wanting in the gift of sociability, the talent for easy but at the same time recreative conversations, in which one does not exert and expend oneself (Letters 1906-1907, p. 118). — Rainer Maria Rilke

The real amateur of wine can only enjoy it along with friends, sharing with them the art of conversation and the art of drinking. Wine is indeed essentially a sign of civilization, a factor of sociability, friendship. — Jean Drapeau

The contrast is striking," writes Michael Harris Bond, a cross-cultural psychologist who focuses on China. "The Americans emphasize sociability and prize those attributes that make for easy, cheerful association. The Chinese emphasize deeper attributes, focusing on moral virtues and achievement." Another — Susan Cain

Loss of time through sociability, idle talk, luxury, even more sleep than is necessary for health, six to at most eight hours, is worthy of absolute moral condemnation. It — Max Weber

If you want to protect your pride, you don't need people to like you! — Wataru Watari

When all by myself, I can think of all kinds of clever remarks, quick comebacks to what no one said, and flashes of witty sociability with nobody. But all of this vanishes when I face someone in the flesh: I lose my intelligence, I can no longer speak, and after half an hour I just feel tired. Talking to people makes me feel like sleeping. Only my ghostly and imaginary friends, only the conversations I have in my dreams, are genuinely real and substantial. — Fernando Pessoa

He wanted to instill that sociability in his son; he believed that being curious about people was one of the few crucial life skills that could be fully nurtured in a place like East Orange. — Jeff Hobbs

My extroversion is a way of managing my introversion. — Carrie Fisher

Poems, for me, begin as a social engagement. I want to establish a kind of sociability or even hospitality at the beginning of a poem. The title and the first few lines are a kind of welcome mat where I am inviting the reader inside. — Billy Collins

[Emilio's dinner with FM Banier]
Gradually I abandon the conversation (suffering because the others might suppose I am doing so for reasons of contempt.) FMB (supported by Youssef) embodies a strong (and ingenious) system of values, codes, seductions, styles; but even as the system gains in consistency, I feel excluded from it. And little by little I cease struggling, I withdraw, without concern for how I appear to the others. Thus it begins by an initially slight disaffection for sociability which becomes quite radical. As it develops, it gradually combines with a hostalgia for what remains living for me: maman. And ultimately I fall into an abyss of suffering. — Roland Barthes

By one estimate, the number of different products that you can buy in New York or London tops ten billion.
This should not need saying, but it does. There are people today who think life was better in the past. They argue that there was not only a simplicity, tranquility, sociability and spirituality about life in the distant past that has been lost, but a virtue too. This rose-tinted nostalgia, please note, is generally confined to the wealthy. It is easier to wax elegiac for the life of a peasant when you do not have to use a long-drop toilet. — Matt Ridley

Imagination must first be filled to the point of saturation with life of every kind before the moment arrives when the friction of free sociability electrifies it to such an extent that the most gentle stimulus of friendly or hostile contact elicits from it lightning sparks, luminous flashes, or shattering blows. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

The 'gens du monde' [for whom Boucher painted] celebrated an ideal of sociability, politesse, and reciprocity that insisted on the equality of men and women and de-emphasized sexual difference. In its entertainments, in its art, and even in its social reality, 'le monde' delighted in gender play - in mistaken identities, in cross-dressing disguise, in unresolved ambiguities and dualities. — Melissa Hyde

When you are alone in the wilderness, opinions or beliefs of any kind are dropped as the absurd accoutrements they are. But after being in the wilderness for a while, you may come around to feeling sociable. Maybe you could try living in a community of "like-minded" social deviants. However, they had better be so alike that they are clones of one another or the day will come when someone steps over the line and factions begin to teem. Our brains will always discriminate - that is their nature. They fix on superficial differences we spy in one another, redundantly speaking, since all differences among us are superficial. — Thomas Ligotti

Extraverts ... cannot understand life until they have lived it. Introverts ... cannot live life until they understand it. — Isabel Briggs Myers

The issue is not whether people are "good enough" for a particular type of society; rather it is a matter of developing the kind of social institutions that are most conducive to expanding the potentialities we have for intelligence, grace, sociability and freedom. — Paul Goodman

I love sharing photographs and websites, I'm for all of these things. I'm for Facebook. But to say that this is sociability? We begin to define things in terms of what technology enables and technology allows. — Sherry Turkle

All sentient beings developed through natural selection in such a way that pleasant sensations serve as their guide, and especially the pleasure derived from sociability and from loving our families. - Charles Darwin — Rick Hanson

Extreme cold when it first arrives seems to generate cheerfulness and sociability. For a few hours all life's dubious problems are dropped in favor of the clear and congenial task of keeping alive. — E.B. White

I'm fond of human beings, but only one at a time. — Natalie Clifford Barney

Oh my God, sociability is just a big smile and a big smile is nothing but teeth, I wish I could just stay up here and rest and be kind. But somebody brought up some wine and that started me off. — Jack Kerouac

I loved taking off. In my own house, I seemed to be often looking for a place to hide - sometimes from the children but more often from the jobs to be done and the phone ringing and the sociability of the neighborhood. I wanted to hide so that I could get busy at my real work, which was a sort of wooing of distant parts of myself. — Alice Munro

Sociability is just a big smile and a big smile is nothing but teeth, — Anonymous

Sociability belongs to the most dangerous, even destructive inclinations, since it brings us into contact with beings the great majority of whom are morally bad and intellectually dull or perverted. — Arthur Schopenhauer

In Steiger's case, of course, his high connectedness is a function of his versatility as an actor and, in all likelihood, some degree of good luck. But in the case of Connectors, their ability to span many different worlds is a function of something intrinsic to their personality, some combination of curiosity, self-confidence, sociability, and energy. — Malcolm Gladwell

Speaking generally, sociability stands in inverse ratio with age. A little child raises a piteous cry of fright if it is left alone for only a few minutes; and later on, to be shut up by itself is a great punishment. Young people soon get on very friendly terms with one another; it is only the few among them of any nobility of mind who are glad now and then to be alone; - but to spend the whole day thus would be disagreeable. A grown-up man can easily do it; it is little trouble to him to be much alone, and it becomes less and less trouble as he advances in years. An old man who has outlived all his friends, and is either indifferent or dead to the pleasures of life, is in his proper element in solitude; and in individual cases the special tendency to retirement and seclusion will always be in direct proportion to intellectual capacity. For — Arthur Schopenhauer

compatriots needed to weave into the social fabric bakeries close to home or bread trucks that deliver; like a sort of societal gluten, sources of bread constitute networks of sociability that structure daily life. — Steven Laurence Kaplan

The first thing which philosophy undertakes to give is fellow-feeling with all men; in other words, sympathy and sociability. — Seneca.

There was in him a slumbering spark of sociability which the long Starkfield winters had not yet extinguished. By nature grave and inarticulate, he admired recklessness and gaiety in others and was warmed to the marrow by friendly human intercourse. — Edith Wharton

I see more genuine sociability between the races in Mississippi than I see in Michigan. No question. — Jim Harrison

Open your eyes and look for some man, or some work for the sake of men, which needs a little time, a little friendship, a little sympathy, a little sociability, a little human toil ... It is needed in every nook and corner. Therefore search and see if there is not some place where you may invest your humanity. — Albert Schweitzer

A constitution founded on these principles introduces knowledge among the people, and inspires them with a conscious dignity becoming freemen; a general emulation takes place, which causes good humor, sociability, good manners, and good morals to be general. That elevation of sentiment inspired by such a government, makes the common people brave and enterprising. That ambition which is inspired by it makes them sober, industrious, and frugal. — John Adams

Our brain comes hard-wired with an urge to play, one that hurls us into sociability. A child's play both demands and creates its own safe space, one in which she can confront threats, fears, and dangers, but always come through whole. Play offers a child a natural way to manage feared separations or abandonment, rendering them instead opportunities for mastery and self-discovery. — Daniel Goleman

The need for sociability induce man to be in touch with his fellow men. However, this need might not ("ne saurait", Fr.) find its full (or complete) satisfaction in the conventional (or superficial, - "conventionnel", Fr.) and deceitful world, in which (or where) everyone is mainly (or mostly) trying to assert oneself in front of others ("devant les autres", Fr.), to appear, and hoping to find in society ("mondaine", Fr.) relationships some advantages for his interest and vanity (or vainglory or conceit", Fr.). — African Spir

The Princess of Parma was a Courvoisier in that she was incapable of innovation in social matters, but unlike the Courvoisiers in that the surprises the Duchesse de Guermantes perpetually held in store for her engendered in her not, as in them, antipathy but a sense of wonder. — Marcel Proust

It was nothing more than the instinct of sociability, but it made me realise how long it had been since I'd been smiled at by a stranger. How long since I'd had someone to smile back to. — Alexis Hall

The existence of other people is essentially awkward. — Lionel Shriver

There is only one solitude, and it is vast, heavy, difficult to bear, and almost everyone has hours when he would gladly exchange it for any kind of sociability, however trivial or cheap, for the tiniest outward agreement with the first person who comes along ... — Rainer Maria Rilke

Why not a new village of farmers, citizens of the world through schools and radio and space-consuming transportation, grouped together in friendly sociability, building directly upon the soil? — Angie Debo

If networks of women are formed, they should be job related and task related rather than female-concerns related. Personal networks for sociability in the context of a work organization would tend to promote the image of women contained in the temperamental model - that companies must compensate for women's deficiencies and bring them together for support because they could not make it on their own. But job-related task forces serve the social-psychological functions while reinforcing a more positive image of women. — Rosabeth Moss Kanter

The village lay in the hollow, and climbed, with very prosaic houses, the other side. Village architecture does not flourish in Scotland. The blue slates and the grey stone are sworn foes to the picturesque; and though I do not, for my own part, dislike the interior of an old-fashioned pewed and galleried church, with its little family settlements on all sides, the square box outside, with its bit of a spire like a handle to lift it by, is not an improvement to the landscape. Still, a cluster of houses on differing elevations - with scraps of garden coming in between, a hedgerow with clothes laid out to dry, the opening of a street with its rural sociability, the women at their doors, the slow waggon lumbering along - gives a centre to the landscape. It was cheerful to look at, and convenient in a hundred ways. ("The Open Door") — Mrs. Oliphant

Soup is cuisine's kindest course. It breathes reassurance; it steams consolation; after a weary day it promotes sociability, as the five o'clock cup of tea or the cocktail hour. — Louis Pullig De Gouy

I turned off the projector and Alex mumbled something in her sleep and turned over. I said, "Everything is fine, I'm going home now," and said it just so I could say I'd said it in case she was upset later that I'd left without telling her. I thought about kissing her on the forehead but rejected the idea immediately; whatever physical intimacy had opened up between us had dissolved with the storm; even that relatively avuncular gesture would be strange for both of us now. More than that: it was as though the physical intimacy with Alex, just like the sociability with strangers or the aura around objects, wasn't just over, but retrospectively erased. Because those moments had been enabled by a future that had never arrived, they could not be remembered from this future that, at and as the present, had obtained; they'd faded from the photograph. — Ben Lerner

Boredom is certainly not an evil to be taken lightly: it will ultimately etch lines of true despair onto a face. It makes beings with as little love for each other as humans nonetheless seek each other with such intensity, and in this way becomes the source of sociability. — Arthur Schopenhauer

I certainly have not the talent which some people possess," said Darcy, "of conversing easily with those I have never seen before. I cannot catch their tone of conversation, or appear interested in their concerns, as I often see done. — Jane Austen

Human beings are social creatures - not occasionally or by accident but always. Sociability is one of our lives as both cause and effect. — Clay Shirky