Every ceremony or rite has a value if it is performed without alteration. A ceremony is a book in which a great deal is written. Anyone who understands can read it. One rite often contains more than a hundred books. George Gurdjieff
A certain degree of ceremony is a necessary outwork of manners, as well as of religion; it keeps the forward and petulant at a proper distance, and is a very small restraint to the sensible and to the well-bred part of the world. Lord Chesterfield
We are nothing but ceremony; ceremony carries us away, and we leave the substance of things; we hang on to the branches and abandon the trunk and body. Michel de Montaigne
Names are changed more readily than doctrines, and doctrines more readily than ceremonies. Thomas Love Peacock
We must learn which ceremonies may be breached occasionally at our convenience and which ones may never be if we are to live pleasantly with our fellow man. Amy Vanderbilt.
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. William Hazlitt
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. Sir Richard Steele