A Quote by Jonathan Swift

Nothing is so great an instance of ill-manners as flattery. — © Jonathan Swift
Nothing is so great an instance of ill-manners as flattery.
Nothing is so great an example of bad manners as flattery. If you flatter all the company, you please none; If you flatter only one or two, you offend the rest.
Pride, ill nature, and want of sense, are the three great sources of ill manners.
Pride, ill nature, and want of sense are the three great sources of ill manners; without some one of these defects, no man will behave himself ill for want of experience, or what, in the language of fools, is called knowing the world.
Manners are of such great consequence to the novelist that any kind will do. Bad manners are better than no manners at all, and because we are losing our customary manners, we are probably overly conscious of them; this seems to be a condition that produces writers.
The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth nothing.
A little wit and a great deal of ill-nature will furnish a man for satire; but the greatest instance of wit is to commend well.
Manners are the root, laws only the trunk and branches. Manners are the archetypes of laws. Manners are laws in their infancy; laws are manners fully grown,--or, manners are children, which, when they grow up, become laws.
The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls: in short, behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there are no thirdclass carriages, and one soul is as good as another.
Sheer flattery got me into the theater. Flattery always works with me, particularly the flattery of women.
There is nothing in the world more difficult than candor, and nothing easier than flattery. If there is a hundredth of a fraction of a false note to candor, it immediately produces dissonance, and as a result, exposure. But in flattery, even if everything is false down to the last note, it is still pleasant, and people will listen not without pleasure; with coarse pleasure, perhaps, but pleasure nevertheless.
Frequent and loud laughter is the characteristic of folly and ill manners.
It is ill-manners to silence a fool and cruelty to let him go on
The ignorant are afraid to betray surprise or admiration...they think it ill manners.
The great secret...is not having bad manners or good manners...but having the same manner for all human souls.
There are two qualities that make fiction. One is the sense of mystery and the other is the sense of manners. You get the manners from the texture of existence that surrounds you. The great advantage of being a Southern writer is that we don't have to go anywhere to look for manners; bad or good, we've got them in abundance. We in the South live in a society that is rich in contradiction, rich in irony, rich in contrast, and particularly rich in its speech
A man's own good breeding is the best security against other people's ill manners.
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