Oh! St. Patrick was a gentleman,
Who came of decent people. [ Henry Bennett ]

A decent boldness ever meets with friends. [ Homer ]

Expression is the dress of thought, and
Appears more decent as more suitable;
A vile conceit in pompous words expressed,
Is like a clown in regal purple dressed. [ Pope ]

What's a fine person, or a beauteous face,
Unless deportment gives them decent grace?
Blessed with all other requisites to please.
Some want the striking elegance of ease;
The curious eye their awkward movement tires:
They seem like puppets led about by wires. [ Churchill ]

False modesty is the most decent of all falsehoods. [ Chamfort ]

The taste of beauty and the relish of what is decent, just, and amiable perfects the character of the gentleman and the philosopher. [ Shaftesbury ]

Some decent, regulated pre-eminence, some preference (not exclusive appropriation) given to birth, is neither unnatural nor unjust nor impolitic. [ Burke ]

Confidence, as opposed to modesty and distinguished from decent assurance, proceeds from self-opinion, and is occasioned by ignorance and flattery. [ Jeremy Collier ]

We show wisdom by a decent conformity to social etiquette: it is excess of neatness or display that creates dandyism in men, and coquetry in women. [ Robert Adam ]

Beauty is the mark God sets on virtue. Every natural action is graceful. Every heroic act is also decent, and causes the place and the bystanders to shine. [ Emerson ]

Be neither too early in the fashion, nor too long out of it, nor too precisely in it; what custom hath civilized is become decent, till then ridiculous; where the eye is the jury thy apparel is the evidence. [ Quarles ]

Among all the accomplishments of youth there is none preferable to a decent and agreeable behavior among men, a modest freedom of speech, a soft and elegant manner of address, a graceful and lovely deportment, a cheerful gravity and good-humor, with a mind appearing ever serene under the ruffling accidents of human life. [ Watts ]

This is my seventieth birthday, and I wonder if you all rise to the size of that proposition, realizing all the significance of that phrase, seventieth birthday. The seventieth birthday! It is the time of life when you arrive at a new and awful dignity; when you may throw aside the decent reserves which have oppressed you for a generation and stand unafraid and unabashed upon your seven-terraced summit and look down and teach--unrebuked. You can tell the world how you got there. It is what they all do. You shall never get tired of telling by what delicate arts and deep moralities you climbed up to that great place. You will explain the process and dwell on the particulars with senile rapture. I have been anxious to explain my own system this long time, and now at last I have the right. [ Mark Twain, Seventieth Birthday speech ]