Gentility quotes:

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Gentility is what is left over from rich ancestors after the money is gone. -- John Ciardi
Gentility is nothing but Ancient Riches. -- George Herbert
Fashion is gentility running away from vulgarity and afraid of being overtaken -- William Hazlitt
Southern gentility is evocative to me. -- Rosanne Cash
The Oscar Wilde of Welfare State gentility. -- Joe Orton
For you cannot have gentility without paying for it. -- E. M. Forster
A man can buy nothing in the market with gentility. -- William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley
Big wave surfers are human beings that have powers. They are men of enormous gentility. -- Dorian "Doc" Paskowitz
Love is a beautiful image Imagined or seen within the heart, The friend of virtue and gentility. -- Michelangelo
To think of playing cricket for hard cash! Money and gentility would ruin any pastime under the sun. -- Mary Russell Mitford
He had not an ounce of superfluous flesh on his bones, and leanness goes a great way towards gentility. -- Elizabeth Gaskell
The perpetual danger which besets religion is that it may substitute gentility and aestheticism for prophetic insight and power. -- Georgia Harkness
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
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
Until changing economic conditions made the thing actually happen, struggling early society would hardly have guessed that woman's road to gentility would lie through doing nothing at all. -- Emily James Smith Putnam
Insofar as he'd formed any opinion of her, it was that she suffered from misplaced gentility and the mistaken belief that etiquette meant good breeding. She mistook mannerisms for manners. -- Terry Pratchett
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Difficult times do not produce gentility, as if there is an angle hovering over the world of the oppressed. -- Jonny Steinberg
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

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