#politeness

Politeness. Now there's a poor man's virtue if ever there was one. What's so admirable about inoffensiveness, I should like to know. After all, it's easily achieved. One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is what's left when you've failed at everything else. People with ambition don't give a damn what other people think about them. ↗

— Diane Setterfield

#inoffensiveness #politeness #poor

Woah,' I said, blocking the doorway. 'You can't come in here. This is the girls' room.' Even as it came out of my mouth, I knew it sounded dumb. Dumb, I thought and maybe even wrong. You...are a boy, aren't you?' I asked. 'I mean, don't take that the wrong way or anything -' J.Lo is a boy, yes.' I let that go. So...you Boov have boys and girls...just like us?' Of course,' said J.Lo. 'Do not be ridicumlous.' I smiled a wan little smile. 'Sorry.' The Boov have seven magnificent genders. There is boy, girl, girlboy, boygirl, boyboy, boyboygirl, and boyboyboyboy.' I had absolutely no response to this. ↗

— Adam Rex

#gender #humor #politeness #humor

Politeness, n. The most acceptable hypocrisy. ↗

— Ambrose Bierce

#devil

As I am sure you know, when people say 'It's my pleasure,' they usually mean something along the lines of, 'There's nothing on Earth I would rather do less.' [...] ↗

— Lemony Snicket

#politeness #humor

A gentleman is someone who does not what he wants to do, but what he should do. ↗

— Haruki Murakami

#gentleman #gentlemen #inspirational #manners #motivational

Kant provides a more helpful answer. For him, these first semblances of virtue can be explained in terms of discipline, in other words, as a product of external constraint: what the child cannot do on his own because he has no instinct for it “others have to do … for him,” and in this way “one generation educates the next. ↗

— André Comte-Sponville

#education

When your family is twice as weird as normal, you have to be twice as polite to authority, because authority hates weird. ↗

— Rosemary Clement-Moore

#politeness #family

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. ↗

— Arthur Schopenhauer

#politeness #rudeness #life

Piety is a discipline of the will through respect. It admits the right to exist of things larger than the ego, of things different from the ego. ↗

— Richard M. Weaver

#piety #politeness #rectitude #respect

Be polite; write diplomatically; even in a declaration of war one observes the rules of politeness. ↗

— Otto von Bismarck

#even #observes #polite #politeness #rules