Decorum Quotes - Page 2

The fabliau, then, is a short story that is a tall story. It combines a burly blurting of dirty words with a reveling in humiliations that are good unclean fun. A popular venture that is keen to paste—épater—everybody (not just the bourgeoisie), it is the art of the single entendre. Highly staged low life, it guffaws at the pious, the prudish, and the priggish. High cockalorum versus high decorum…. The introduction here, like the translator’s note, tells well the story of the comic tales, anonymous for the most part, usually two or three hundred lines long, of which about 160 exist.

Christopher Ricks

Art, Fun, Dirty

7 Copy quote
Gaming is the destruction of all decorum; the prince forgets at it his dignity, and the lady her modesty.

Jean le Rond d'Alembert

Gambling, Modesty, Dignity

18 Copy quote
Through an arrow loop in the wall she saw a familiar horse and rider tearing across the camp toward the healing rooms. Brigan pulled up at Nash's feet and dropped from the saddle. The two brothers threw their arms around each other and embraced hard. Shortly thereafter he stepped into the healing rooms and leaned in the doorway, looking across at her quietly. Brocker's son with the gentle gray eyes. She abandoned all pretense of decorum and ran at him.

Kristin Cashore

Brother, Horse, Wall

8 Copy quote
Politeness requires this thing; decorum that; ceremony has its forms, and fashion its laws, and these must always follow, never the promptings of our own nature.

Henri Rousseau

Fashion, Law, Courtesy

11 Copy quote
Another soldier has been killed. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

William C. Brown

Art, Soldier, Has Beens

4 Copy quote
Any girl that's in a professional setting has to have a certain amount of decorum, but there's always a different story going on, when she goes home.

Stana Katic

Girl, Home, Different

"Stana Katic Interview CASTLE". Interview with Christina Radish, collider.com. September 21, 2010.

13 Copy quote

Show source
All fear of 'offensive' speech is bourgeois and reactionary. Historically, profane or bawdy language was common in both the upper and the lower classes, who lived together in rural areas amid the untidy facts of nature. Notions of propriety and decorum come to the fore in urbanized periods ruled by an expanding middle class, which is obsessed with cleanliness, respectability, and conformism.

Camille Paglia

Class, Together, Rural Areas

4 Copy quote
... it was not very unusual at Washington for a lady to take the arm of a gentleman, who was neither her husband, her father, norher brother. This remarkable relaxation of American decorum has been probably introduced by the foreign legations.

Frances Trollope

Brother, Husband, Father

6 Copy quote
To a high degree we are, through art and science, cultured. We are civilized - perhaps too much for our own good - in all sorts of social grace and decorum. But to consider ourselves as
having reached morality - for that, much is lacking.

Immanuel Kant

Art, Grace, Degrees

Immanuel Kant (1986). “Philosophical Writings”, Continuum

14 Copy quote

Show source
Don't limp in front of the lame.

Francois Rabelais

Lame, Fronts, Circumspection

8 Copy quote
Things that are in "bad taste" are often renegade and rebellious. They go against the status quo, and the laws of decorum and modesty. And that can be really thrilling.

Margaret Cho

Law, Taste, Modesty

Source: www.guernicamag.com

4 Copy quote

Show source
In the woods, too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods we return to reason and faith.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Children, Men, Years

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1983). “Essays and Lectures”, p.10, Library of America

4 Copy quote

Show source
I wish to speak with all respect of persons, but sometimes I must pinch myself to keep awake, and preserve the due decorum. They melt so fast into each other, that they are like grass and trees, and it needs an effort to treat them as individuals.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Respect, Boredom, Effort

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald A. Bosco, Joel Myerson (2015). “Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.255, Harvard University Press

4 Copy quote

Show source
It is shaming sometimes how the body will not, or cannot, lie about emotions. Who, for decorum’s sake, has ever slowed his heart, or muted a blush?

Ian Mcewan

Lying, Heart, Body

8 Copy quote
Maybe, he said hesitantly, maybe there is a beast. The assembly cried out savagely and Ralph stood up in amazement. You, Simon? You believe in this? I don't know, said Simon. His heartbeats were choking him. [...] Ralph shouted. Hear him! He's got the conch! What I mean is . . . maybe it's only us. Nuts! That was from Piggy, shocked out of decorum.

William Golding

Believe, Mean, Nuts

9 Copy quote
As Sokrates tells it, your story begins the moment Eros enters you. That incursion is the biggest risk of your life. How you handle it is an index of the quality, wisdom, and decorum of the things inside you. As you handle it you come into contact with what is inside you, in a sudden and startling way. You perceive what you are, what you lack, what you could be.

Anne Carson

Risk, Quality, Stories

40 Copy quote
Naturally Shirley had known, as they slid stock words and phrases back and forth between them like beads on an abacus, that Howard must be as brimful of ecstasy as she was; but to express these feelings out loud, when the news of death was still fresh in the air, would have been tantamount to dancing naked and shrieking obscenities, and Howard and Shirley were clothed, always, in an invisible layer of decorum that they never laid aside.

J. K. Rowling

Air, Dancing, Feelings

8 Copy quote
Oftentimes, if you're talking to a seasoned interviewer who asks you a question, they may do a follow-up if they didn't quite get it. It's rare that they'll do a third or fourth or fifth or sixth follow-up, because there's an implicit, agreed-upon decorum that they move on. Kids don't necessarily move on if they don't get it.

Brian Greene

Moving, Kids, Talking

4 Copy quote
Gracefulness is a correct life: sensuality which contemplates and forms itself.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Form, Sensuality, Contemplating

11 Copy quote
It is difficult to attack me directly on religion because I never speak of it. Formally I am a strict observer of decorum and in public affairs it is my principle to uphold religion.

Etienne Francois, duc de Choiseul

Political, Principles, Speak

5 Copy quote
Howard and Shirley were clothed, always, in an invisible layer of decorum that they never laid aside.

J. K. Rowling

Layers, Invisible, Abacus

12 Copy quote
They [the mathematicians of the Enlightenment] defined their terms vaguely and used their methods loosely, and the logic of their arguments was made to fit the dictates of their intuition. In short, they broke all the laws of rigor and of mathematical decorum. The veritable orgy which followed the introduction of the infinitesimals... was but a natural reaction. Intuition had too long been held imprisoned by the severe rigor of the Greeks. Now it broke loose, and there were no Euclids to keep its romantic flight in check.

Tobias Dantzig

Law, History, Long

4 Copy quote
An up-close portrait of middle-class Nigeria exploring the boundaries of morals and public decorum. Pitched between humor and despair, with stripped-down, evocative prose, A Bit of Difference bristles with penknife-sharp dialogue, but its truths are more subtle, hiding in the unspoken. Ultimately, A Bit of Difference explores – with a hint of mischief–the problem of how to look like you have no problems when you have abundant problems–the universal problem of the socially-motivated classes.

Nii Parkes

Class, Differences, Despair

8 Copy quote
I've always felt, as a writer, that radicals are fascinating because they're relations, they have a place in the American family. They're the relatives everyone wishes would go away. They're the embarrassments to decorum and good taste.

E. L. Doctorow

Wish, Going Away, Radicalism

5 Copy quote
The movie cheerfully offends all civilized notions of taste, decorum, manners and hygiene... The movie is vulgar? Vulgarity is when we don't laugh. When we laugh, it's merely human nature.

Roger Ebert

Vulgarity Is, Hygiene, Laughing

Roger Ebert's review of "American Wedding", www.rogerebert.com. August 1, 2003.

8 Copy quote

Show source