Table Manners Quotes

• The dinner table is the center for the teaching and practicing not just of table manners but of conversation, consideration, tolerance, family feeling, and just about all the other accomplishments of polite society except the minuet.

  Judith Martin

  Food, Teaching, Accomplishment

  Judith Martin (1990). “Miss Manners' Guide for the Turn-of-the-Millennium”, p.245, Simon and Schuster

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• On the Continent people have good food; in England people have good table manners.

  George Mikes

  Food, People, Cooking

  How to Be an Alien (1946)

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• Good manners are just a way of showing other people that we have respect for them.

  Bill Kelly

  People, Good Man, Way

  51 Copy quote

• Manners are a sensitive awareness of the feelings of others. If you have that awareness, you have good manners, no matter what fork you use.

  Emily Post

  Feelings, Awareness Of Others, Behaviour

  Reader's Digest, Volume 68, 1956.

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• Etiquette means behaving yourself a little better than is absolutely essential.

  Will Cuppy

  Mean, Essentials, Littles

  Will Cuppy (1929). “How to be a Hermit: Or, A Bachelor Keeps House”, Castrovilli Giuseppe

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• Friends and good manners will carry you where money won't go.

  Margaret Walker

  Love, Inspirational, Friendship

  Margaret Walker (2016). “Jubilee (50th Anniversary Edition)”, p.496, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Eating is aggressive by nature, and the implements required for it could quickly become weapons; table manners are, most basically, a system of taboos designed to ensure that violence remains out of the question.

  Margaret Visser

  Tables, Weapons, Violence

  Margaret Visser (2015). “The Rituals of Dinner: The Origins, Evolution, Eccentricities, and Meaning of Table Manners”, p.10, Open Road Media

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• The hardest job kids face today is learning good manners without seeing any.

  Fred Astaire

  Inspirational, Jobs, Athlete

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Fashionably amusing table manners are a matter of breaking the right rule at the right time.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Tables, Matter, Amusing

  P. J. O'Rourke (2007). “Modern Manners: An Etiquette Book for Rude People”, p.40, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• The world was my oyster but I used the wrong fork.

  Oscar Wilde

  Oysters, World, Used

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• The test of good manners is to be patient with the bad ones.

  Solomon Ibn Gabirol

  Patience, Tests, Patient

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• The only way to have a funeral is to invite everyone who ever knew the person and just wait for the accident to happen-somebody who comes in out of the blue and says the truth. Everything else is table manners.

  Philip Roth

  Blue, Funeral, Waiting

  Philip Roth, Ross Miller (2008). “Novels & other narratives, 1986-1991”

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• History is about life. It's awful when the life is squeezed out of it and there's no flavor left, no uncertainties, no horsing around. It always disturbed me how many biographers never gave their subjects a chance to eat. You can tell a lot about people by how they eat, what they eat, and what kind of table manners they have.

  David McCullough

  People, Flavor, Tables

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• I am single because I am allergic for cursing words and bad table manners

  Hiroko Sakai

  Dating, Tables, Cursing

  18 Copy quote

• What was created by the era of the proper gentleman was excellent table manners and genocide over most of the surface of the planet.

  Terence McKenna

  Gentleman, Tables, Eras

  5 Copy quote

• I'm a child of the 50s. I was expected to have table manners. There needs to be some expectations for behavior. I'm seeing some children today, they don't push them enough.

  Temple Grandin

  Children, Expectations, Needs

  Source: www.kshb.com

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• I think to be oversensitive about cliches is like being oversensitive about table manners.

  Evelyn Waugh

  Thinking, Tables, Cliche

  Evelyn Waugh (1983). “The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh”, Methuen

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• I don't know why people would want to have lunch with writers. I've eaten with writers. We have appalling table manners, and rarely say anything other than 'Pass the salt' or 'If you're not going to eat that, can I have it?'

  Neil Gaiman

  Lunch, People, Say Anything

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• I was every Londoner's stereotypical idea of a brash, vulgar American. When I got here, it turned out that London was the Wild West, and New York was like London at the height of the Victorian era, in which everyone was far more obsessed with table manners and status-climbing than they are in London. In London, everyone was just crawling over this blizzard of cocaine. Here, if you have more than a glass of wine with your meal, people refer you to Alcoholics Anonymous.

  Toby Young

  New York, Wine, Ideas

  Source: wwd.com

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• Barbarism? That's ironic coming from a woman helping to prepare us for slaughter. And what's she basing our success on? Our table manners?

  Suzanne Collins

  Ironic, Tables, Helping

  Suzanne Collins (2009). “The Hunger Games”, p.69, Scholastic Inc.

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• They didn't know why these things were funny. Sometimes you laugh because you've got no more room for crying. Sometimes you laugh because table manners on a beach are funny. And sometimes you laugh because you're alive, when you really shouldn't be.

  Terry Pratchett

  Beach, Laughing, Alive

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• Acceptable rules of conduct were suspended when it came to the spoon shortage. The deficit had gotten so bad that prices were all but unaffordable, and dynastic spoon succession had become a matter of considerable interest. Spoons were even postcode engraved and carried on one's person to eliminate theft, and good table manners, one of the eight pillars upon which the Collective was built, had been relaxed to allow tea to be stirred - shockingly - with the handle of a fork.

  Jasper Fforde

  Eight, Tea, Pillars

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• The usual sniggering examples of animal behaviour were brought in to explain cheating. Funny how the behaviour of shrews and gibbons is never used to explain table manners or road safety or gardening, only sex. Anyway, it was bad Darwinism. Taking the example of a monkey and applying it to yourself misses the point that animal behaviour is made for the benefit of the species, not as an excuse for the individual. Being incapable of sustaining a stable pair and supporting children is really not in the interests of our species. Neither is it really in the best interests of the philanderer.

  A. A. Gill

  Cheating, Sex, Children

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• What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms. To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us. We live, true, we breathe, true; we walk, we go downstairs, we sit at a table in order to eat, we lie down on a bed on order to sleep. How? Where? When? Why? Describe your street. Describe another. Compare.

  Georges Perec

  Lying, Sleep, Glasses

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• Basil Stag Hare tut-tutted severely as he remarked to Ambrose Spike, 'Tch, tch. Dreadful table manners. Just look at those three wallahs, kicking up a hullaballoo like that! Eating's a serious business.

  Brian Jacques

  Three, Kicking, Looks

  Brian Jacques (2013). “Redwall”, p.160, Random House

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