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• The taste of beauty, and the relish of what is decent, just and amiable, perfects the character of the gentleman and the philosopher. And the study of such a taste or relish will, as we suppose, be ever the great employment and concern of him who covets as well to be wise and good, as agreeable and polite.
  • Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), "Miscellany III".

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• Propriety of manners, and consideration for others, are the two main characteristics of a gentleman.
  • Benjamin Disraeli

• To be a gentleman does not depend upon the tailor or the toilet. Good clothes are not good habits. A gentleman is just a gentle-man,—no more, no less; a diamond polished, that was first a diamond in the rough.
  • Bishop Doane

• What is it to be a gentleman? Is it to be honest, to be gentle, to be generous, to be brave, to be wise, and, possessing all these qualities, to exercise them in the most graceful outward manner? Ought a gentleman to be a loyal son, a true husband, an honest father? Ought his life to be decent, his bills to be paid, his taste to be high and elegant, his aims in life lofty and noble?
  • William Thackeray

• Education begins the gentleman, but reading, good company, and reflection must finish him.
  • John Locke

• You may depend upon it, religion is, in its essence, the most gentlemanly thing in the world. It will alone gentilize, if unmixed with cant; and I know nothing else that will, alone. Certainly not the army, which is thought to be the grand embellisher of manners.
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

• He is the best gentleman that is the son of his own deserts, and not the degenerated heir of another's virtue.
  • Victor Hugo

• Perhaps propriety is as near a word as any to denote the manners of the gentleman; elegance is necessary to the fine gentleman; dignity is proper to noblemen; and majesty to kings.
  • William Hazlitt

• He is gentle that doth gentle deeds.
  • Anonymous

• Gentleman is a term which does not apply to any station, but to the mind and the feelings in every station.
  • Talfourd

• Of the offspring of the gentilman Jafeth, came Habraham, Moyses, Aron and the profettys; and also the kyng of the right line of Mary, of whom that gentilman Jhesus was borne.
  • Juliana Berners

• If you are a Gentleman, then nothing else matters. And, if you aren't a Gentleman, then nothing else matters.
  • Commandant, Indian Military Academy, Dehradun (2005)