The social hammers

The greatest talent is the ability to make all people love you, including your enemies.

The most important skill for social communication: the smile.

The nuisance is a person who refuses to offer people a simple courtesy, like laughing at their jokes, the stale ones and the good ones.

The simplest and most important element of good taste is to answer everyone who wants to talk to you and give them your full attention, or as they say in English: your undivided attention.

“Difference of opinion does not spoil affection,” but for many people it shakes dialogue and communication from their very foundations.

Some people’s methods of criticism are like someone spitting, sometimes worse, in people’s faces, thinking this is the ideal way to remove dirt. Then they consider people’s disgust at such criticism to be subjectivity, hatred, and disregard for the other.

The wisest things said about speech: “For every occasion, its proper words,” and “The more one talks, the more one errs.”

Please stop frowning at my face, or tell me what crime I committed against you to deserve this. Being in a bad mood does not prevent you from paying me the courtesy of a smile; at least I do this with you all the time, and no person is free of worries.

Do not congratulate someone on a sad thing merely because he did it, and do not console someone over an outcome he was happy to achieve.

People always take your apology in the form of “I was wrong” as an admission of weakness and misguidance, and then it becomes a permanent point from which they attack you. Avoid this and apologize by saying, “I am sorry that what I did made you feel this and that,” and “I am sorry this somehow led to that and that,” or anything except saying that you were wrong.

It does not matter to me that she be beautiful as much as it matters that her smile be beautiful.

Somehow, the phrase “nice young man” became an insult, and “streetwise young man” became praise.

Tell them what they want to hear, then do what you want. This way you save yourself one of two troubles: instead of the trouble of fighting over everything you say and everything you do, you keep only the trouble of fighting over your actions.

Do not exhaust yourself fabricating a clever lie, my dear; they will call you a liar anyway. Spare yourself and tell the truth.

Tell them a fabricated, disastrous piece of bad news, then the real bad news that is less disastrous. A perfect method that never fails. Just make sure your neck does not fly off with the first item.