Sourced

• Etiquette...means behaving yourself a little better than is absolutely essential.
  • Will Cuppy, How to Be a Hermit, 1929

• Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices.
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, Letters and Social Aims

• Life is not so short but that there is always time enough for courtesy.
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, Letters and Social Aims

• Politeness is the art of choosing among one's real thoughts.
  • Abel Stevens, Life of Mme. de Sta

• Be not deceived: Evil communications corrupt good manners.

• All Politeness is owing to Liberty. We polish one another, and rub off our Corners and rough Sides by a sort of amicable Collision. To restrain this, is inevitably to bring a Rust upon Mens Understandings.
  • Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), "Sensus Communis"

Unsourced

• ""To extend consideration towards neighbors and send them presents are charitable acts(GOOD MANNERS). "
  • Muhammad (P.B.U.H)

• "Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves, and how little we think of the other person". ~ Mark Twain

• Social niceties are insincere, and thus, degrading.
  • Gregory House, House M.D.

• "The person who screams, or uses the superlative degree, or converses with heat puts whole drawing-rooms to flight. If you wish to be loved, love measure."
  • Emerson

• "Good manners is the art of making those people easy with whom we converse."
  • Swift

• "I really think next to the consciousness of doing a good action, that of doing a civil one is the most pleasing; and the epithet which I should covet the most next to that of Aristides, would be that of well-bred."
  • Chesterfield

• "A man's worth is estimated in this world according to his conduct."
  • La Bruyère

• "There is certainly something of exquisite kindness and thoughtful benevolence in that rarest of gifts,—fine breeding"
  • Lytton

• "In the society of ladies, want of sense is not so unpardonable as want of manners."
  • Lavater

• "Good manners are a part of good morals."
  • Whatley

• "One principal part of good breeding is to suit our behavior to the three several degrees of men: our superiors, our equals, and those below us."
  • Swift

• "As a man's salutations, so is the total of his character; in nothing do we lay ourselves so open as in our manner of meeting and salutation."
  • Lavater

• "Grace is to the body what good sense is to the mind."
  • La Rochefoucauld

• "Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each one a stroke of genius or of love, now repeated and hardened into usage, they form at last a rich varnish, with which the routine of life is washed, and its details adorned. If they are superficial, so are the dew-drops which give such a depth to the morning meadows."
  • Emerson

• "Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe in. They give their whole form and colors to our lives. According to their quality they aid morals, they supply them, or they totally destroy them."
  • Burke

• "Good breeding is the result of much good sense, some good nature, and a little self-denial for the sake of others, and with a view to obtain the same indulgence from them."
  • Chesterfield

• "To be good and disagreeable is high treason against the royalty of virtue."
  • Hannah More

• "A man's own good breeding is the best security against other people's ill manners."
  • Chesterfield

• "The distinguishing trait of people accustomed to good society is a calm, imperturbable quiet which pervades all their actions and habits, from the greatest to the least. They eat in quiet, move in quiet, live in quiet, and lose their wife, or even their money, in quiet; while low persons cannot take up either a spoon or an affront without making such an amazing noise about it."
  • Lytton