Ignoble Quotes - Page 3

• The student who secures his coveted leisure and retirement by systematically shirking any labor necessary to man obtains but an ignoble and unprofitable leisure, defrauding himself of the experience which alone can make leisure fruitful.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Education, Retirement, Leisure

  Henry David Thoreau (2009). “Walden”, p.33, Cosimo, Inc.

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• It is my conviction that in general women are more snobbish and class conscious than men and that these ignoble traits are a product of men's attitude toward women and women's passive acceptance of this attitude.

  Mary Barnett Gilson

  Attitude, Women, Acceptance

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• Everybody's got a worldview, whether they know they have it or they don't. They might even get it when they are little tiny kids. Suppose they get it when they are in college, which is often the case, or in high school, whatever. Everything they learn after that or every thing they see after that, they fit it into that worldview. And they are making coherence of what's good, what's bad, what will work, what won't work, what's noble, what's ignoble, and so on... all through this filter.

  Jane Jacobs

  School, Kids, College

  Source: www.metropolismag.com

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• A rake is a composition of all the lowest, most ignoble, degrading, and shameful vices; they all conspire to disgrace his character, and to ruin his fortune; while wine and the pox content which shall soonest and most effectually destroy his constitution.

  Lord Chesterfield

  Drinking, Wine, Character

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• Did chemistry theorems exist? No: therefore you had to go further, not be satisfied with the quia, go back to the origins, to mathematics and physics. The origins of chemistry were ignoble, or at least equivocal: the dens of the alchemists, their abominable hodgepodge of ideas and language, their confessed interest in gold, their Levantine swindles typical of charlatans and magicians; instead, at the origin of physics lay the strenuous clarity of the West-Archimedes and Euclid.

  Primo Levi

  Ideas, Alchemist, Gold

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• Expect neither reward nor beatitude. Return noble waves for ignoble.

  Jean Cocteau

  Noble, Rewards, Return

  "Diary of an Unknown". Book by Jean Cocteau, 1988.

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• The sole fact of having a school to train creative people is absolute lunacy... The idea of 'pedagogical vision' is ignoble, it has nothing to do with art, it's contrary to art. I really believe in teaching, despite what I say.

  Christian Boltanski

  Education, Art, Believe

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• He [Gen. Douglas MacArthur] was a great thundering paradox of a man, noble and ignoble, inspiring and outrageous, arrogant and shy, the best of men and the worst of men, the most protean, most ridiculous, and most sublime.

  William Manchester

  Men, Sublime, Noble

  William Manchester (1979). “American Caesar”

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• No matter what the cause, even though it be to conquer with tanks and planes and modern artillery some defenseless black population, there will be no lack of poets and preachers and essayists and philosophers to invent the necessary reasons and gild the infamy with righteousness. To this righteousness there is, of course, never an adequate reply. Thus a war to end poverty becomes an unanswerable enterprise. For who can decently be for poverty? To even debate whether the war will end poverty becomes an exhibition of ugly pragmatism and the sign of an ignoble mind.

  John T. Flynn

  War, Black, Mind

  John Thomas Flynn (1944). “As We Go Marching”, p.122, Ludwig von Mises Institute

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• The Church has surrendered her once lofty concept of God and has substituted for it one so low, so ignoble, as to be utterly unworthy of thinking, worshiping men. This she has not done deliberately, but little by little and without her knowledge; and her very unawareness only makes her situation all the more tragic.

  Aiden Wilson Tozer

  Men, Thinking, Church

  Aiden Wilson Tozer (1975). “The Knowledge of the Holy: The Attributes of God: Their Meaning in the Christian Life”

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• King Henry: But what a point, my lord, your falcon made, And what a pitch she flew above the rest! To see how God in all his creatures works! Yea, man and birds are fain of climbing high. Suffolk: No marvel, an it like your majesty, My lord protectors hawks do tower so well; They know their masters loves to be aloft, And bears his thoughts above his falcon's pitch. Gloucester: My lord, 'tis but a base ignoble mind That mounts no higher than a bird can soar.

  William Shakespeare

  Kings, Men, Climbing

  William Shakespeare (1838). “Complete Works: With Dr. Johnson's Preface, a Glossary, and an Account of Each Play, and a Memoir of the Author by William Harness”, p.478

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• Man indeed is the most noble, by creation, of all the creatures in the visible World; but by sin he has made himself the most ignoble.

  John Bunyan

  Men, Noble, World

  John Bunyan (2011). “Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (Authentic Original Classic)”, p.33, Destiny Image Publishers

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• Wherever snow falls, or water flows, or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds, or sown with stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into celestial space, wherever is danger, and awe, and love, there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and though thou shouldest walk the world over, thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Beauty, Stars, Rain

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2003). “Nature and Other Writings”, p.177, Shambhala Publications

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• My friend, you had horses, and deed of arms, and the free fields; but she, being born in the body of a maid, had a spirit and courage at least the match of yours. Yet she was doomed to wait upon an old man, whom she loved as a father, and watch him falling into a mean dishonoured dotage; and her part seemed to her more ignoble than that of the staff he leaned on. -Gandalf to Eomer, of Eowyn

  J. R. R. Tolkien

  Horse, Father, Fall

  J. R. R. Tolkien (1994). “The Return of the King: Being the Third Part of the Lord of the Rings”, Thorndike Pr

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• In speaking to you men of the greatest city of the West, men of the state which gave to the country Lincoln and Grant, men who preeminently and distinctly embody all that is most American in the American character, I wish to preach not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life.

  Theodore Roosevelt

  Life, Country, Character

  Speech to Hamilton Club, Chicago, Ill., 10 Apr. 1899

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• Up and away for life! be fleet!-
  The frost-king ties my fumbling feet,
  Sings in my ears, my hands are stones,
  Curdles the blood to the marble bones,
  Tugs at the heart-strings, numbs the sense,
  And hems in life with narrowing fence.
  Well, in this broad bed lie and sleep,-
  The punctual stars will vigil keep,-
  Embalmed by purifying cold;
  The winds shall sing their dead-march old,
  The snow is no ignoble shroud,
  The moon thy mourner, and the cloud.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Stars, Kings, Lying

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.234, Delphi Classics

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• Feeling lonely and ignoble indicates that you haven't been patient.

  Rumi

  Lonely, Loneliness, Being Alone

  Rumi (2014). “'Another city'. a selectionf of poems from the Persian”, p.55, Lulu.com

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• It is not races but individuals that are noble and courageous or ignoble and craven or considerate or persistent or philosophical or reasonable. The race gets credit when the percentage of noble individuals is high.

  Edwin Way Teale

  Philosophical, Race, Class

  Edwin Way Teale (1987). “Circle of the seasons: the journal of a naturalist's year”, Olympic Marketing Corp

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• The malignity that never forgets or forgives is found only in base and ignoble natures, whose aims are selfish, and whose means are indirect, cowardly, and treacherous.

  George Stillman Hillard

  Selfish, Mean, Forgiving

  George Stillman Hillard “Life and Campaigns of George B. McClellan, Major-General, U. S. Army”, Charles River Editors

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• Hell is wherever Love is not, and Heaven
  Is Love's location. No dogmatic creed,
  No austere faith based on ignoble fear
  Can lead thee into realms of joy and peace.
  Unless the humblest creatures on the earth
  Are bettered by thy loving sympathy
  Think not to find a Paradise beyond.

  Ella Wheeler Wilcox

  Life, Love Is, Thinking

  Ella Wheeler Wilcox (2012). “Leafs On An Idle Breeze - My Inspirational Poems (Annotated Edition)”, p.1121, Jazzybee Verlag

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• The more ignoble I find life, the more strongly I react by contradiction, in humour and in an outburst of liberty and expansion.

  Joan Miro

  Liberty, Expansion, Contradiction

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• It is perhaps common in the world for individuals and nations to suffer for their noble qualities more than for their ignoble ones. For nobility is an occasion for pride, the most treacherous of sentiments.

  Daniel Patrick Moynihan

  Pride, Suffering, Quality

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• Envy, to which th' ignoble mind's a slave, Is emulation in the learn'd or brave.

  Alexander Pope

  Envy, Brave, Mind

  Alexander Pope (1804). “The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope”, p.71

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• Ways of loving from a distance, mating without even touching-Amor platonicus! The ladder of love one is expected to climb higher and higher, elating the Self and the Other. Plato clearly regards any actual physical contact as corrupt and ignoble because he thinks the true goal of Eros is beauty. Is there no beauty in sex? Not according to Plato. He is after `more sublime pursuits.' But if you ask me, I think Plato's problem, like those of many others, was that he never got splendidly laid.

  Elif Safak

  Sex, Plato, Distance

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• It is common to assume that human progress affects everyone - that even the dullest man, in these bright days, knows more than any man of, say, the Eighteenth Century, and is far more civilized. This assumption is quite erroneous. . . . The great masses of men, even in this inspired republic, are precisely where the mob was at the dawn of history. They are ignorant, they are dishonest, they are cowardly, they are ignoble. They know little if anything that is worth knowing, and there is not the slightest sign of a natural desire among them to increase their knowledge.

  H. L. Mencken

  Men, Knowing, Historical

  Homo Neanderthalensis Baltimore Sun, The Impossible Mencken, June 29, 1925.

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