This laudable quality is commonly known by the name of Manners and Good-breeding, and consists in a Fashionable Habit, acquir'd by Precept and Example, of flattering the Pride and Selfishness of others, and concealing our own with Judgment and Dexterity.
The Fashionable World is grown free and easie; our Manners sit more loose upon us: Nothing is so modish as an agreeable Negligence. In a word, Good Breeding shows it self most, where to an ordinary Eye it appears the least.
Good breeding consists in having no particular mark of any profession, but a general elegance of manners.
Good manners come, as we say, from good breeding or rather are good breeding; and breeding is acquired by habitual action, in response to habitual stimuli, not by conveying information.
Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.
Our enemies are our evil deeds and their memories, our pride, our selfishness, our malice, our passions, which by conscience or by habit pursue us with a relentlessness past the power of figure to express.
Now, it is well known, that a man may with more impunity be guilty of an actual breach either of real good breeding or of good morals, than appear ignorant of the most minute point of fashionable etiquette.
A man's own good breeding is the best security against other people's ill manners.
Architecture, like dress, is an exercise in good manners, and good manners involve the habit of skillful insincerity - the habit of saying "good morning" to those whose mornings you would rather blight, and of passing the butter to those you would rather starve.
Good breeding differs, if at all, from high breeding only as it gracefully remembers the rights of others, rather than gracefully insists on its own rights.
It is for the most part in our skill in manners, and in the observations of time and place and of decency in general, that what is called taste by way of distinction consists; and which is in reality no other than a more refined judgment.
We are justified in enforcing good morals, for they belong to all mankind; but we are not justified in enforcing good manners, for good manners always mean our own manners.
The precept, "Know yourself," was not solely intended to obviate the pride of mankind; but likewise that we might understand our own worth.
In the fallen there is danger of pride and vainglory, since they prefer their own judgment to the judgment of everyone else, usurping what is not their own by setting themselves up as judges in their own cause when the rightful judge is their superior.
There are cultures in which it is believed that a name contains all a persons mystical power. That a name should be known only to God and to the person who holds it and to very few privileged others. To pronounce such a name either ones own or someone else's is to invite jeopardy. This it seemed was such a name.
That which we call wit consists much in quickness and tricks, and is so full of lightness that it seldom goes with judgment and solidity; but when they do meet, it is commonly in an honest man.
The major threats to our survival no longer stem from nature without but from our own human nature within. It is our carelessness, our hostilities, our selfishness and pride and willful ignorance that endanger the world.