Nobility Quotes - Page 11

• Nobility is often no more than the inner aspect which our egotistical feelings assume when we have not yet named and classified them.

  Marcel Proust

  Feelings, Assuming, Egotistical

  Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume II: Within a Budding Grove (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.82, Modern Library

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• To Harmodius, descended from the ancient Harmodius, when he reviled Iphicrates [a shoemaker's son] for his mean birth, "My nobility," said he, "begins in me, but yours ends in you.

  Plutarch

  Mean, Son, Birth

  Plutarch (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Plutarch (Illustrated)”, p.2166, Delphi Classics

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• Whatever I had read as a child about the saints had thrilled me. I could see the nobility of giving one's life for the sick, the maimed, the leper. But there was another question in my mind. Why was so much done in remedying the evil instead of avoiding it in the first place? Where were the saints to try to change the social order, not just to minister to the slaves, but to do away with slavery?

  Dorothy Day

  Children, Order, Evil

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• Nietzsche, driven by the absolute demand of his existential truthfulness, could not abide the bourgeois world, even when its representative had human nobility.

  Karl Jaspers

  Demand, World, Existential

  Karl Jaspers (1997). “Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Understanding of His Philosophical Activity”, p.60, JHU Press

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• It isnecessary to destroy the pretended nobility, entirely literaryand traditional, of marble and bronze? The sculptor can use twenty different materials, or even more, in a single work, provided that the plastic emotion requires it.

  Umberto Boccioni

  Twenties, Different, Use

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• Boxing was on the one hand barbaric, unconscionable, out of place in modern society. But then, so are war, racism, poverty, and pro football. Men died boxing, yet there was nobility in defending oneself.

  Ralph Wiley

  Football, War, Men

  Ralph Wiley (2000). “Serenity: A Boxing Memoir”, p.31, U of Nebraska Press

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• I was attracted to poetry, which is perhaps the purest of the art forms, where love is the medium of exchange and the nobility of love is considered. It's a land of higher ideals.

  Frederick Lenz

  Art, Love Is, Land

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• Any man's greatness is a tribute to the nobility of all mankind, so when we celebrate the genius of [Leo] Tolstoy, we say, "Look! One of our boys made it! Look what we're capable of!"

  Mel Brooks

  Boys, Greatness, Men

  "Mel Brooks Is Always Funny and Often Wise in This 1975 Playboy Interview". Interview with Alex Belth, www.thedailybeast.com. February 16, 2014.

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• The pride of ancestry is a superstructure of the most imposing height, but resting on the most flimsy foundation. It is ridiculous enough to observe the hauteur with which the old nobility look down on the new. The reason of this puzzled me a little, until I began to reflect that most titles are respectable only because they are old; if new, they would be despised, because all those who now admire the grandeur of the stream would see nothing but the impurity of the source.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Pride, Foundation, Titles

  Charles Caleb Colton (1823). “Remarks on the Talents of Lord Byron and the Tendencies of Don Juan”

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• Noble hearts are neither jealous nor afraid because jealousy spells doubt and fear spells pettiness.

  Honore de Balzac

  Jealousy, Fear, Heart

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• The secret of the nobility and beauty of great ladies lies in the art with which they can shed their veils. In such situations, they become like ancient statues. If they kept the merest scarf on, they would be lewd. Your bourgeois woman will always try to cover her nakedness.

  Honore de Balzac

  Art, Lying, Secret

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• Today nobility is gone: there is only a peerage.

  Honore de Balzac

  Gone, Today

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• The essence of true nobility is neglect of self. Let the thought of self pass in, and the beauty of a great action is gone, like the bloom from a soiled flower.

  James Anthony Froude

  Flower, Essence, Self

  James Anthony Froude (1871). “Short Studies on Great Subjects”, p.24

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• I am one who finds within me a nobility that spurns the idle pratings of the great, and their mean boasts of what their fathers were, while they themselves are fools effeminate.

  James Gates Percival

  Father, Mean, Fool

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• Literature, like nobility, runs in the blood.

  William Hazlitt

  Running, Blood, Literature

  William Hazlitt (1859). “Table talk”

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• What can rulers, nobility and all the lords of the earth say to justify the horrible killing and maiming of twenty or thirty million valuable men who a short while ago ploughed, dug, wove, built, guided the traffic of the world, took their pleasure, loved their fellows, cherished their families, and feared naught?

  Helen Keller

  Men, Twenties, World

  Helen Keller (2000). “To Love this Life: Quotations”, p.69, American Foundation for the Blind

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• Virtue is the only and true nobility.
  [Lat., Nobilitas sola est atque unica virtus.]

  Juvenal

  Virtue

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• I am eighty years old. There seems to be nothing to add to this statement. I have reached the age of undecorated facts - facts that refuse to be softened by sentiment, or confused by nobility of phrase.

  Agnes Repplier

  Confused, Years, Age

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• It's the perpetually unfinished quality of housework that makes it oppressive - it never ends, like bad psychoanalysis, or a dream interrupted. It is paradoxically true that it is exactly this daily re-creation of the world that lends housekeeping its nobility and romance.

  Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

  Dream, Romance, Quality

  Barbara Grizzuti Harrison (1997). “An Accidental Autobiography”, Mariner Books

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• If antiquity be the only test of nobility, then cheese is a very noble thing ... The lineage of cheese is demonstrably beyond all record.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Food, Cooking, Noble

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• Red has been praised for its nobility of the color of life. But the true color of life is not red. Red is the color of violence, or of life broken open, edited, and published. Or if red is indeed the color of life, it is so only on condition that it is not seen. Once fully visible, red is the color of life violated, and in the act of betrayal and of waste.

  Alice Meynell

  Betrayal, Color, Broken

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• Nobility of birth is like a cipher; it has no power in itself, like wealth or talent; but, it tells with all the power of a cipher when added to either of the other two.

  John Frederick Boyes

  Two, Ciphers, Ancestry

  John Frederick Boyes (1859). “Life and Books: Or, Records of Thought and Reading”, p.58

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• Life flows on over death as water closes over a stone dropped into a pool. ... Fate is certain; death is certain; but the courage and nobility of men and women matter more than these.

  Winifred Holtby

  Fate, Men, Life And Death

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• There is no doubt of the essential nobility of that man who pours into life the honest vigor of his toil, over those who compose the feathery foam of fashion that sweeps along Broadway; who consider the insignia of honor to consist in wealth and indolence; and who, ignoring the family history, paint coats of arms to cover up the leather aprons of their grandfathers.

  Edwin Hubbel Chapin

  Fashion, Men, Doubt

  "Humanity in the city". Book by Edwin Hubbell Chapin, 1854.

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• If one drops dead in the street, friends and loved ones are shocked, stricken, but a long lingering death loses all nobility and drama, while relatives and friends await the inevitable end in a succession of weary anti-climaxes.

  Alanna Knight

  Death, Drama, Relatives And Friends

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