Nobility Quotes

Rascals are always sociable, more's the pity! and the chief sign that a man has any nobility in his character is the little pleasure he takes in others' company. (Arthur Schopenhauer)
It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now. View quote
Stendhal
Many things about our bodies would not seem to us so filthy and obscene if we did not have the idea of nobility in our heads. View quote
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
What's madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance? View quote
Theodore Roethke
Life ought to be a struggle of desire toward adventures whose nobility will fertilize the soul. View quote
Rebecca West
Chivalry!---why, maiden, she is the nurse of pure and high affection---the stay of the oppressed, the redresser of grievances, the curb of the power of the tyrant ---Nobility were but an empty name without her, and liberty finds the best protection in her lance and her sword. View quote
Walter Scott
Now, my father Matthias was not only eminent on account of is nobility, but had a higher commendation on account of his righteousness, and was in great reputation in Jerusalem, the greatest city we have. View quote
Flavius Josephus
You have the right to kill me, but you don't have the right to judge me. That's life. There's nobility in that. There's focus. It's genuine. It's crystal and it's pure and it's available to everybody, so just shut your traps and put down your McDonalds, your vaccines, your Us Weekly, your TMZ and the rest of it. View quote
Charlie Sheen
Virginia was in fact a landowning aristocracy, without nobility or merchant class, or any considerable small peasant farming class; and the other Southern colonies, except North Carolina, were on the whole similar to Virginia in these respects. View quote
Carl L. Becker
Once a sage asked why scholars always flock to the doors of the rich, whilst the rich are not inclined to call at the doors of scholars. "The scholars" he answered, "are well aware of the use of money, but the rich are ignorant of the nobility of science". View quote
Al-Biruni
In reality, the likelihood of reaching the pinnacle of capitalist society today is only marginally better than were the chances of being accepted into the French nobility four centuries ago, though at least an aristocratic age was franker, and therefore kinder, about the odds. It did not relentlessly play up the possibilities open to all, and so, in turn, did not cruelly equate an ordinary life with a failed one. (Alain de Botton)
Put more trust in nobility of character than in an oath. View quote
Solon
Whatever the practical origins of aesthetic discernment may have been, it has been used to create great works of art. When the very loftiest human creations are seen to derive from humble origins and functions, what needs revision is not our esteem for these creations but our notion of nobility. View quote
Robert Nozick
The human element, the human flaw and the human nobility - those are the reasons that chess matches are won or lost. View quote
Viktor Korchnoi
The ancient nobility and gentry of the kingdom...have been thrust out of all public employment...a race of merchants, and manufacturers and bankers and loan-jobbers and contractors have usurped their place. View quote
William Cobbett
Perhaps you don't desire poetry as much as you would like to have my torchy knowledge of your possible futures, but I dare say poetry will do you far more good. For knowing the future only makes you timid and complacent by turns, while poetry can shape you into the kind of souls who can face any future with boldness and wisdom and nobility, so that you need not know the future at all, so that any future will be an opportunity for greatness, if you have greatness in you. View quote
Orson Scott Card
There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self. View quote
Ernest Hemingway
Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer; there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness. View quote
George Santayana
Idleness is an appendix to nobility. View quote
Robert Burton
I was no Marie Antoinette. I was not born to nobility, but I had a human right to nobility. View quote
Imelda Marcos
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)
O lady, nobility is thine, and thy form is the reflection of thy nature! View quote
Euripides
The only thing in the world worth a damn is the strange, touching, pathetic, awesome nobility of the individual human spirit. View quote
John D. MacDonald
Nietzsche, driven by the absolute demand of his existential truthfulness, could not abide the bourgeois world, even when its representative had human nobility. View quote
Karl Jaspers
There is something in human history like retribution; and it is a rule of historical retribution that its instrument be forged not by the offended, but by the offender himself. The first blow dealt to the French monarchy proceeded from the nobility, not from the peasants. The Indian revolt does not commence with the ryots, tortured, dishonoured and stripped naked by the British, but with the sepoys, clad, fed and petted, fatted and pampered by them. View quote
Karl Marx