Excepting a religious ceremonial, there is no occasion where greater dignity of manner is required of ladies and gentlemen both, than in occupying a box at the opera. For a gentleman especially no other etiquette is so exacting.
Ideal conversation must be an exchange of thought, and not, as many of those who worry most about their shortcomings believe, an eloquent exhibition of wit or oratory.
Etiquette requires the presumption of good until the contrary is proved.
To the old saying that man built the house but woman made of it a ‘home’ might be added the modern supplement that woman accepted cooking as a chore but man has made of it a recreation.
Manners are made up of trivialities of deportment which can be easily learned if one does not happen to know them.
Alas! it is true: “Be polite to bores and so shall you have bores always round about you.”
In popular houses where visitors like to go again and again, there is always a happy combination of some attention on the part of the hostess and the perfect freedom of the guests to occupy their time as they choose.
To do exactly as your neighbors do is the only sensible rule.
The good guest is almost invisible, enjoying him or herself, communing with fellow guests, and, most of all, enjoying the generous hospitality of the hosts.
Never so long as you live, write a letter to a man – no matter who he is – that you would be ashamed to see in a newspaper above your signature.
Unconsciousness of self is not so much unselfishness as it is the mental ability to extinguish all thought of one’s self – exactly as one turns out the light.
It is impossible for a hatless woman to be chic.
The most vulgar slang is scarcely worse than the attempted elegance which those unused to good society imagine to be the evidence of cultivation.
There is a big deposit of sympathy in the bank of love, but don’t draw out little sums every hour or so – so that by and by, when perhaps you need it badly, it is all drawn out and you yourself don’t know how or on what it was spent.
Training a child is exactly like training a puppy; a little heedless inattention and it is out of hand immediately; the great thing is not to let it acquire bad habits that must afterward be broken.
Houses without personality are a series of walled enclosures with furniture standing around in them. Other houses are filled with things of little intrinsic value, even with much that is shabby and yet they have that inviting atmosphere...
Never do anything that is unpleasant to others.
Elbows are never put on the table while one is eating.
The eleventh commandment, “Thou shalt not be found out” is despicable, but nevertheless, it is the one thing you can never get away from.
The letter we all love to receive is one that carries so much of the writer’s personality that she seems to be sitting beside us, looking at us directly and talking just as she really would, could she have come on a magic carpet, instead of sending her proxy in ink-made characters on mere paper.