Nobility Quotes - Page 12

I have seen soldiers panic at the first sight of battle, and a squire pulling arrows from his body to fight and save his dying horse. Nobility is not a birthright, but is defined by one's actions.

Kevin Costner

Horse, Fighting, Sight

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There are many true ladies, and they differ somewhat from society generally. So does a true gentleman, on the same principle of refinement and nobility of character.

Maria Jane McIntosh

Character, Gentleman, Principles

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Each person decides in early childhood how he will live and how he will die... His trivial behavior may be decided by reason, but his important decisions have already been made: what kind of person he will marry, how many children he will have, what kind of bed he will die in... It is incredible to think, at first, that man's fate, all his nobility and all his degradation, is decided by a child no more than six years old, and usually three... (but) it is very easy to believe by looking at what is happening in the world today, and what happened yesterday, and seeing what will happen tomorrow.

Eric Berne

Children, Believe, Fate

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Our football belongs to the working class and has the size, nobility and generosity to allow everyone to enjoy it as a spectacle.

Cesar Luis Menotti

Football, Class, Generosity

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Human affairs inspire in noble hearts only two feelings-admiration or pity.

Anatole France

Respect, Heart, Two

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An age deficient in idealism has ever been one of immorality and superficial attainment, since without the sense of ideas, nobility of character becomes of rare attainment, if possible.

Amos Bronson Alcott

Character, Ideas, Age

Amos Bronson Alcott (1877). “Table-talk”

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Nothing you can lose by dying is half as precious as the readiness to die, which is man's charter of nobility.

George Santayana

Men, Funeral, Dying

George Santayana (1937). “The Works of George Santayana: Soliloquies in England and Later soliloquies”

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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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It is as we respond to the understandings and feelings inherent in . . . art that we acquire much of our truth, much of our nobility and grace, and much of our pleasure.

Ursula Goodenough

Art, Grace, Understanding

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The Islamic teachings have left great traditions for equitable and gentle dealings and behavior, and inspire people with nobility and tolerance. These are human teachings of the highest order and at the same time practicable. These teachings brought into existence a society in which hard-heartedness and collective oppression and injustice were the least as compared with all other societies preceding it....Islam is replete with gentleness, courtesy, and fraternity.

H. G. Wells

Teaching, Islamic, Order

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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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A conservative, I take it, is a man who despises vulgarity; but the argument which is concerned exclusively with calculations of success, and is based on blindness to the nobility of the effort, is vulgar.

Leo Strauss

Men, Effort, Conservative

Leo Strauss (2012). “Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought”, p.414, SUNY Press

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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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Our reverence for the nobility of manhood will not be lessened by the knowledge that man is in substance and in structure, one with the brutes; for he alone possesses the marvellous endowment of intelligible and rational speech whereby he has slowly accumulated and organized the experience which is almost wholly lost with the cessation of individual life in other animals; so that he now stands raised above it as on a mountain-top, far above the level of his humble fellows, and transfigured from his grosser nature by reflecting, here and there, a ray from the infinite source of truth.

Thomas Huxley

Humble, Animal, Men

1880 Man's Place in Nature.

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Where in this wide world can man find nobility without pride, friendship without envy, or beauty without vanity?

Bantu Holomisa

Horse, Pride, Men

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Adversity often hatches out the true nobility of character.

George Ade

Character, Adversity

George Ade (1904). “True bills”

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Many men absorbed in business show such a rare quality of culture that we are surprised at it. The reason invariably is partly because hard work and even the weariness it leaves carry a nobility with them, but also because there is no room in such lives for inferior mental occupation.

Ernest Dimnet

Life, Business, Hard Work

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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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Do not think it wasted time to submit yourselves to any influence which may bring upon you any noble feeling.

John Ruskin

Time, Thinking, Feelings

"Selected writings: Edited and introduced by Peter Quennell".

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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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Never complain, about the number of hours you have put in, to do a job, Your nobility must estimate how much of you Was put into each hour of your daily work

Chinmayananda Saraswati

Jobs, Numbers, Complaining

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Everyone should be taught the nobility of labor, the heroism and splendor of honest effort. As long as it is considered disgraceful to labor, or aristocratic not to labor, the world will be filled with idleness and crime, and with every possible moral deformity.

Robert Green Ingersoll

Work, Long, Effort

Robert Green Ingersoll (1907). “The works of Robert G. Ingersoll”, p.2807, Library of Alexandria

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He who harms living beings is, for that reason, not an ariya (a Noble One); he who does not harm any living being is called an ariya.

Gautama Buddha

Life, Buddhist, Doe

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War is awful. Nothing, not the valor with which it is fought nor the nobility of the cause it serves, can glorify war. War is wretched beyond description and only a fool or a fraud could sentimentalize its cruel reality. Whatever is won in war, it is loss the veteran remembers.

John McCain

War, Loss, Reality

"Mark Shields: A much different war for a changed nation", www.cnn.com. September 16, 2002.

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