Ceremony is all backbone. [ Haliburton ]
Truth and ceremony are two things. [ Marcus Antoninus ]
A great ceremony for a small saint. [ Proverb ]
Ceremony is the smoke of friendship. [ Chinese Proverb ]
Ceremonies are the outworks of manners. [ Chesterfield ]
To feed were best at home;
From thence the sauce to meat is ceremony;
Meeting were bare without it. [ William Shakespeare ]
What art thou, thou idol ceremony?
What kind of god art thou, that suffer'st more
Of mortal griefs than do thy worshippers? [ William Shakespeare ]
The appurtenance of welcome is fashion and ceremony. [ William Shakespeare ]
There are ceremonious bows that repel one like a cudgel. [ Bovee ]
A man without ceremony has need of great merit in its place. [ Proverb ]
When love begins to sicken and decay it useth an enforced ceremony. [ Shakespeare ]
In religion, the sentiment is all; the ritual or ceremony indifferent. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Ceremony and great professing renders friendships as much suspected as it does religion. [ Wycherley ]
Nothing is more estimable then politeness, and nothing more ridiculous or tiresome than ceremony. [ French ]
As ceremony is the invention of wise men to keep fools at a distance, so good breeding is an expedient to make fools and wise men equal. [ Steele ]
O, be sick, great greatness, and bid thy ceremony give thee cure! Thinkest thou the fiery fever will go out with titles blown from adulation? [ William Shakespeare ]
Forms and regularity of proceeding, if they are not justice, partake much of the nature of justice, which, in its highest sense, is the spirit of distributive order. [ Hare ]
If we use no ceremony towards others, we shall be treated without any. People are soon tired of paying trifling attentions to those who receive them with coldness, and return them with neglect. [ Hazlitt ]
The Greeks adored their gods by the simple compliment of kissing their hands; and the Romans were treated as atheists if they would not perform the same act when they entered a temple. This custom, however, as a religious ceremony declined with paganism, but was continued as a salutation by inferiors to their superiors, or as a token of esteem among friends. [ Disraeli ]
Candlesticks and incense not being portable into the maintop, the sailor perceives these decorations to be, on the whole, inessential to a maintop mass. Sails must be set and cables bent, be it never so strict a saint's day; and it is found that no harm comes of it. Absolution on a lee-shore must be had of the breakers, it appears, if at all; and they give plenary and brief without listening to confession. [ Ruskin ]