Gentility Quotes

• Fashion is gentility running away from vulgarity and afraid of being overtaken

  William Hazlitt

  Running, Fashion, Vulgarity

  William Hazlitt (1856). “Criticisms on Art”, p.92

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• 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

  Moving, People, Justice

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• Gentility is what is left over from rich ancestors after the money is gone.

  John Ciardi

  Modern Life, Gone, Rich

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

  Elizabeth Gaskell

  Body, Flesh, Way

  Elizabeth Gaskell (2015). “Wifes And Daughters”, p.39, Elizabeth Gaskell

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• 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

  Gentleman, Crowds, May

  William Shenstone (1804). “Essays on Men and Manners”, p.38

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• 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

  Baseball, Games, Pace

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

  Mary Russell Mitford

  Sports, Thinking, Cash

  1823 Letter to R B Haydon, 24 Aug.

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• 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

  Men, Doe, Lions

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

  Michelangelo

  Beautiful, Heart, Love Is

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• Big wave surfers are human beings that have powers. They are men of enormous gentility.

  Dorian "Doc" Paskowitz

  Men, Surfer, Wave

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• There is such a thing as too much couth.

  S. J. Perelman

  Civilization, Too Much

  1971 In the Observer, 24 Sep.

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• There cannot be a surer proof of low origin, or of an innate meanness of disposition, than to be always talking and thinking of being genteel.

  William Hazlitt

  Thinking, Talking, Proof

  William Hazlitt (1859). “Table talk”

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• English life, while very pleasant, is rather bland. I expected kindness and gentility and I found it, but there is such a thing as too much couth.

  S. J. Perelman

  Kindness, Too Much, Found

  1971 In the Observer, 24 Sep.

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• 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

  Summer, Dream, Spring

  Clive Barker (1991). “The Hellbound Heart”, Voyager

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• 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

  Nervous, Poet, British

  Al Alvarez (2013). “The Savage God: A Study of Suicide”, p.40, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• 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

  Istanbul, Drawing, Spy

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• The Oscar Wilde of Welfare State gentility.

  Joe Orton

  Oscars, Welfare, Wilde

  Joe Orton (1998). “The Visitors: Fred and Madge : Two Plays”, p.13, Grove Press

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• I never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from people.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Courage, People, Lions

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• 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

  Heart, Angel, Men

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• 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

  Sacrifice, Reality, World

  Murray Kempton (2012). “Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties”, p.16, New York Review of Books

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• 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

  Loyalty, Lying, Hands

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• There's such a thing as too much point on a pencil.

  H. Allen Smith

  Too Much, Moderation, Pencils

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• American gentlemen are a cross between English and French men, and yet really altogether like neither. They are more refined and modest than Frenchmen, and less manly, shy, and rough, than Englishmen. Their brains are finer and flimsier, their bodies less robust and vigorous than ours. We are the finer animals, and they the subtler spirits. Their intellectual tendency is to excitement and insanity, and ours to stagnation and stupidity.

  Fanny Kemble

  Animal, Men, Stupidity

  Fanny Kemble (1890). “Further Records, 1848-1883: A Series of Letters”

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

  Georgia Harkness

  Religion, May, Danger

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• 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

  Stories, Literature, Kind

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