The Real Gentleman Quotes

“Is that a fact, Miss Georgia Cracker? Maybe a gentleman does, but not a cowboy. The only time a real cowboy removes his hat is for a funeral, a wedding, or church. A cowboy likes to keep his hat close by in case he needs to get out in a real hurry. That thing you call a hat on your head is big enough for two barnyard owls to roost in.”

— Maggie Brendan

“What is that big book?" said the little prince. "What are you doing?"
"I am a geographer," said the old gentleman.
"What is a geographer?" asked the little prince.
"A geographer is a scholar who knows the location of all the seas, rivers, towns, mountains, and deserts."
"That is very interesting," said the little prince. "Here at last is a man who has a real profession!”

— Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

“I think I can understand that feeling about a housewife's work being like that of Sisyphus (who was the stone rolling gentleman). But it is surely in reality the most important work in the world. What do ships, railways, miners, cars, government etc exist for except that people may be fed, warmed, and safe in their own homes? As Dr. Johnson said, "To be happy at home is the end of all human endeavour". (1st to be happy to prepare for being happy in our own real home hereafter: 2nd in the meantime to be happy in our houses.) We wage war in order to have peace, we work in order to have leisure, we produce food in order to eat it. So your job is the one for which all others exist ...”

— C.S. Lewis

“A real gentleman, even if he loses everything he owns, must show no emotion. Money must be so far beneath a gentleman that it is hardly worth troubling about.”

— Fyodor Dostoevsky

“I happen to be of an almost extinct breed, an old-fashioned gentleman
which means I can be a real revolving son of a bitch when it suits me.”

— Robert A. Heinlein

“I have an image of what a British gentleman looks like, and that image finds real expression in Prince Charles. He is beyond fashion - he is an archetype of style.”

— Donatella Versace

“No real English gentleman, in his secret soul, was ever sorry for the death of a political economist.”

— Walter Bagehot

“A real gentleman is as polite to a little girl as to a woman.”

— Louisa May Alcott

“You're a real prince. You're a gentleman and a scholar, kid.”

— J.D. Salinger

“As a people, we have been tolled farther and farther away from the facts of what we have done by the romanticizers, whose bait is nothing more than the wishful insinuation that we have done no harm. Speaking a public language of propaganda, uninfluenced by the real content of our history which we know only in a deep and guarded privacy, we are still in the throes of the paradox of the "gentleman and soldier."
However conscious it may have been, there is no doubt in my mind that all this moral and verbal obfuscation is intentional. Nor do I doubt that its purpose is to shelter us from the moral anguish implicit in our racism-an anguish that began, deep and mute, in the minds of Christian democratic freedom-loving owners of slaves.”

— Wendell Berry

“Adrian (not sure if real Christian name?) was a PTI in Perth Prison before he came to work in the special units with us. Adrian was a gentleman, but he was also a very, very hard man that didn't take any shit. He is now working up in Inverness Prison, but I can tell you, this man can go for fun. I have witnessed him in action, I have been about all the diggers in Scotland ten times over and I would put this man up there with the best of them for a roll about with the prisoner.”

— Stephen Richards

“Frost's face darkened. "What gives you the right to speak for Miss Hathaway and her family?"
Cam saw no reason to be discreet. "I'm going to marry her."
Frost nearly dropped the iron bar. "Don't be absurd. Amelia would never marry you."
"Why not?"
"Good God," Frost exclaimed incredulously, "how can you ask that? You're not a gentleman of her class, and ... hell and damnation, you're not even a real Gypsy. You're a mongrel."
"All the same, I'm going to marry her."
"I'll see you in hell first!" Frost cried, taking a step toward him.
"Either drop that bar," Cam said quietly, "or I'll dislocate your arm." He sincerely hoped Frost would take a swing at him. To his disappointment, Frost set the bar on the ground.”

— Lisa Kleypas

“In short, our gentleman became so immersed in his reading that he spent whole nights from sundown to sunup and his days from dawn to dusk in poring over his books, until, finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind. He filled his imagination with everything he had read, with enchantments, knightly encounters, battles, challenges, wounds, with tales of love and its torments, and all sorts of impossible things, and as a result had come to believe that all these fictitious happenings were true; they were more real to him than anything else in the world.”

— Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

“Dave Mackay was the kind of footballer that legends are built around. He was simply the greatest - tough as teak on the pitch and a real gentleman off it.”

— Alex Salmond

“Many a real genius is lost in the fictitious character of the Gentleman. I am the most inconsistent, changeable being so full of fits and starts.”

— Thomas Gainsborough

“I've always been very chauvinistic, even in my boy-obsessed days. But I was always a gentleman. I alwaysd treated my boys like real ladies. Always escorted them properly and, in fact, I suppose if I were a lot older - like 40 or 50 - I'd be a wonderful sugar daddy to some little queen down in Kensington. I'd have a houseboy named Richard to order around.”

— David Bowie

“No real gentleman will tell the naked truth in the presence of ladies.”

— Mark Twain

“Ladies and gentleman of Florida, this is the real Jeff Ament ... take a very good look because there's an imposter running around ... if someone comes up to you and says he's Jeff Ament and says he wants to take your pot or wants to take you to a strip club, it's probably not him.”

— Eddie Vedder

“He's a real gentleman. I bet he takes the dishes out of the sink before he pees in it.”

— Shirley Maclaine

“The British have their own conception of what constitutes the typical American. He must have a flavor of the Wild West about him. He must do spectacular things. He must not be punctilious about dignity, decorum and other refinements characteristic of the real British gentleman. The Yankee pictured by the Briton must be a bustler. If he is occasionally flagrantly indiscreet in speech and action, then he is so much more surely stamped the genuine article. The most typical American the British ever set their eyes on was, in their judgment, Theodore Roosevelt.”

— B.C. Forbes

“One learned gentleman, "a sage grave man," Talk'd of the Ghost in Hamlet, "sheath'd in steel"- His well-read friend, who next to speak began, Said, "That was poetry, and nothing real;" A third, of more extensive learning, ran To Sir George Villiers' Ghost, and Mrs. Veal; Of sheeted Spectres spoke with shorten'd breath, And thrice he quoted Drelincourt on Death.”

— Bill Vaughan

“Thoughtfulness for others, generosity, modesty, and self-respect are the qualities which make a real gentleman or lady.”

— Thomas Huxley

“When you get that person out of that dude, that's the real person, you know. And I don't think its dead, but it needs to be more examples, of what a true gentleman and what a true man in every sense of the word is, and that's what I try to be.”

— Ginuwine

“In this real world of sweat and dirt, it seems to me that when a view of things is 'noble,' that ought to count as presumption against its truth, and as a philosophic disqualification. The prince of darkness may be a gentleman, as we are told he is, but whatever the God of earth and heaven is, he can surely be no gentleman.”

— William James