61 Genteel Quotes
Following is our list of the most famous genteel quotations and slogans. We've compiled this selection of inspirational genteel quotes. Hopefully, these genteel quotes will keep you motivated not only during hard times but to expand your genteel knowledge!
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Famous Genteel Quotes
Gentility is what is left over from rich ancestors after the money is gone. — John Ciardi
Thoughtfulness for others, generosity, modesty, and self-respect are the qualities which make a real gentleman or lady. — Thomas Huxley
The gentleman is generous and treats all men as his equals, especially those whom he feels to be inferior in rank and wealth. — Hilaire Belloc
I am at heart a gentleman. — Marlene Dietrich
A gentleman considers what is right; the vulgar consider what will pay. — Confucius
The characteristic of a well-bred man is, to converse with his inferiors without insolence, and with his superiors with respect and with ease. — Doug Stanhope
When suave politeness, tempering bigot zeal, corrected 'I believe' to 'one does feel'. — Ronald Knox
The sign of a person who has had an education is good manners. — Sai Baba
The well dressed man never stands out in a crowd; his elegance sets him apart. — Oscar de la Renta
Good manners make any man a pleasure to be with. Ask any woman. — Peter Mayle
A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone's feelings unintentionally. — Oscar Wilde
Modesty; the gentle art of enhancing your charm by pretending not to be aware of it. — Oliver Herford
A gentleman is a man who can disagree without being disagreeable. — Unknown
Courtesy is as much a mark of a gentleman as courage. — Theodore Roosevelt
Be civil to all; sociable to many; familiar with few. — Benjamin Disraeli
Short Genteel Quotes
- Writing is not a genteel profession. It's quite nasty and tough and kind of dirty. — Rosemary Mahoney
- Dialect words are those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel. — Thomas Hardy
- A good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read. — Terry Pratchett
- Franchot Tone is nuttier than a fruitcake, so don't let the genteel frosting fool you. — Burgess Meredith
- But we are more than genteel or civilized/ we are an idea in the process of being realized. — Shane Koyczan
- Confound my genteel upbringing! I could not think of any name foul enough to call him. — Nancy Springer
People Writing About Genteel
| Name | Quotes | Likes |
|---|---|---|
 John Ciardi |
52 | 263 |
 Thomas Huxley |
244 | 1553 |
 Hilaire Belloc |
136 | 1158 |
 Marlene Dietrich |
94 | 2108 |
 Confucius |
911 | 18025 |
 Doug Stanhope |
215 | 2063 |
More Genteel Quotes
The very sight of a teapot puts a smile on the face of most people. One cannot help but think of more serene and genteel times. From a whimsical child's teapot to an elegant English Teapot, to collectible teapots that adorn some homes, they are a subtle reminder of all that is good in this world. — Barbara Roberts
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
It's worth living abroad to study up on genteel and delicate manners. The maid smiles continuously; she smiles like a duchess on a stage, while at the same time it is clear from her face that she is exhausted from overwork. — Anton Chekhov
I am a journalist in the field of etiquette. I try to find out what the most genteel people regularly do, what traditions they have discarded, what compromises they have made. — Amy Vanderbilt
A rude nature is worse than a brute nature by so much more as man is better than a beast: and those that are of civil natures and genteel dispositions are as much nearer to celestial creatures as those that are rude and cruel are to devils. — Margaret Cavendish
Twenty years ago I might have hired a professional listener, but somewhere along the way I had lost faith in the talking cure. A genteel fraud in my view. — Ian McEwan
Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism. — Leslie Fiedler
The genteel is a mighty catafalque of service-with-a-smile and flattering solicitude smothering every spontaneous movement of thought or feeling. — Marshall McLuhan
By adherence to a special set of rules, the child of the shabby-genteel can sometimes leap across the time which has passed by his family and function in the real world without doing violence to the hopes his mother held out for him. But those who cannot live within this pattern are the freaks and poets, and they travel a different road to peace. — Murray Kempton
I could've totally cut out your heart before you knew what was happening." "What stopped you?" "I thought Montgomery might've been pissed off at all the blood on the sheets." "Montgomery would never be something as uncouth as pissed off. Annoyed in an icily genteel manner, perhaps. — Nalini Singh
The Australian form of self-respect, however rough-and-ready, heart-of-gold, come-and-take-pot-luck-with-us, and matily extrovert it is, essentially, genteel, ingrowing, self-pitying, vanilla-ice-cream hearted, its central fear a fear of intellect. — Hal Porter
The liberal holds that he is true to the republic when he is true to himself. (It may not be as cozy an attitude as it sounds.) He greets with enthusiasm the fact of the journey, as a dog greets a man's invitation to take a walk. And he acts in the dog's way too, swinging wide, racing ahead, doubling back, covering many miles of territory that the man never traverses, all in the spirit of inquiry and the zest for truth. He leaves a crazy trail, but he ranges far beyond the genteel old party he walks with and he is usually in a better position to discover a skunk. — E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White
I must say that I am not very genteel and I feel that gentility has a stranglehold: the neatness, the wonderful tidiness, which is so evident everywhere in England is perhaps more dangerous than it would appear on the surface. — Sylvia Plath
There is a certain class of people who prefer to say that their fathers came down in the world through their own follies than to boast that they rose in the world through their own industry and talents. It is the same shabby-genteel sentiment, the same vanity of birth which makes men prefer to believe that they are degenerated angels rather than elevated apes. — W. Winwood Reade
Professors of literature, who for the most part are genteel but mediocre men, can make but a poor defense of their profession, and the professors of science, who are frequently men of great intelligence but of limited interests and education — Yvor Winters
Sir, money, money, the most charming of all things; money, which will say more in one moment than the most elegant lover can in years. Perhaps you will say a man is not young; I answer he is rich. He is not genteel, handsome, witty, brave, good-humored, but he is rich, rich, rich, rich, rich --that one word contradicts everything you can say against him. — Henry Fielding
Do not conceive that fine clothes make fine men, any more than fine feathers make fine birds. A plain, genteel dress is more admired, obtains more credit in the eyes of the judicious and sensible. — George Washington
Genteel women suppose that those things do not really exist about which it is impossible to talk in polite company. — Friedrich Nietzsche
I love books, food, music, sleep, people who work, heated arguments, the United States of America, and my wife and children. I dislike politicians, preachers, genteel persons, people who do not work or are on vacation, closed minds, movies, loud noises, and oiliness. — Rex Stout
Next to clothes being fine, they should be well made, and worn easily; for a man is only the less genteel for a fine coat, if, in wearing it, he shows a regard for it, and is not as easy in it as if it was a plain one. — Lord Chesterfield
A gentleman has ease without familiarity, is respectful without meanness; genteel without affectation, insinuating without seeming art. — Lord Chesterfield
The soul and body are joint-sharers in every thing they get: A man cannot dress, but his ideas get cloath'd at the same time; andif he dresses like a gentleman, every one of them stands presented to his imagination, genteelized along with him. — Laurence Sterne
It was the ponderous battering ram of his novels that opened the way through the genteel reticences of American nineteenth-century fiction. . . Without [Theodore] Dreiser's treading out a path for naturalism none of us would have had a chance to publish. — John Dos Passos
... in no part of the world is genteel visiting founded on esteem, in the absence of suitable furniture and complete dinner-service. — George Eliot
Look at your [English] ladies of quality are they not forever parting with their husbands - forfeiting their reputations - and is their life aught but dissipation? In common genteel life, indeed, you may now and then meet with very fine girls - who have politeness, sense and conversation - but these are few - and then look at your trademen's daughters - what are they? poor creatures indeed! all pertness, imitation and folly. — Fanny Burney
Acting is not a genteel profession. Actors used to be buried at a crossroads with a stake through the heart. Those people's performances so troubled the onlookers that they feared their ghosts. An awesome compliment. Those players moved the audience not such that they were admitted to a school, or received a complimentary review, but such that the audience feared for their soul. Now that seems to me something to aim for. — David Mamet
There's an obsession, within our culture, with the genteel thief. Somebody who commits a crime, but does it in a classy way. — Geoffrey Gray
There is a certain class of people who prefer to say that their fathers came down in the world through their own follies than to boast that they rose in the world through their own industry and talents. It is the same shabby-genteel sentiment, the same vanity of birth which makes men prefer to believe that they are degenerated angels rather than elevated apes. — William Winwood Reade
A lot of people say, 'I always knew Lucky Luciano as a very smooth, very elegant, very powerful man.' All the accounts of him as an older man were that he was very genteel but he still had the look of smothered violence behind his eyes. — Vincent Piazza
I think we are all disgusted by the way George W. Bush's administration has allowed honesty and candor to seep into the genteel world of international affairs. — David Brooks
Every man who has reached even his intellectual teens begins to suspect that life is no farce; that it is not genteel comedy even; that it flowers and fructifies on the contrary out of the profoundest tragic depths of the essential dearth in which its subject's roots are plunged. The natural inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters. — Henry James, Sr.
The genteel thing is the genteel thing any time, if as be that a gentleman bees in a concatenation accordingly. — Oliver Goldsmith
I have read that the secret of gallantry is to accept the pleasures of life leisurely, and its inconveniences with a shrug; as well as that, among other requisites, the gallant person will always consider the world with a smile of toleration, and his own doings with a smile of honest amusement, and Heaven with a smile which is not distrustful — being thoroughly persuaded that God is kindlier than the genteel would regard as rational. — James Branch Cabell
There are dozens of young poets and fictioneers most of them a little insane in the tradition of James Joyce, who, however insane they may be, have refused to be genteel and traditional and dull. — Sinclair Lewis
In Conclusion
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