Nobility Quotes - Page 14

• There's a nobility in his eye, a regal serenity about him. Does he not personify all that men try to be and never can be?

  Michael Morpurgo

  Eye, Men, Serenity

  Michael Morpurgo (2012). “War Horse”, p.84, Scholastic Inc.

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• Any fool can try to defend his or her mistakes- and most fools do- but it raises one above the herd and gives one a feeling of nobility and exultation to admit one's mistakes.

  Dale Carnegie

  Mistake, Giving, Feelings

  Dale Carnegie (2010). “How To Win Friends and Influence People”, p.131, Simon and Schuster

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• A martial nobility and stubborn commons, possessed of arms, tenacious of property, and collected into constitutional assemblies form the only balance capable of preserving a free constitution against the enterprise of an aspiring prince

  Edward Gibbon

  Freedom, Balance, Arms

  Edward Gibbon (1787). “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, p.78

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• It becomes possible to admit that plainness may coexist with nobility of nature, and fine features with baseness; and yet to hold that mental and physical perfection are fundamentally connected, and will, when the present causes of incongruity have worked themselves out, be ever found united.

  Herbert Spencer

  Beauty, Perfection, May

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• There was a nobility in poverty when I was growing up. My mom was poor but she was planting roses and she was cleaning the steps, you know what I mean. You didn't feel sorry for yourself.

  Ricky Gervais

  Mom, Sorry, Growing Up

  "Ricky Gervais Calls CEMETERY JUNCTION His SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER. Plus Info on His New HBO Animated Series". Interview with Steve "Frosty" Weintraub, collider.com. September 16, 2009.

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• 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.

  Orson Scott Card

  Opportunity, Greatness, Knowing

  Orson Scott Card (2009). “Prentice Alvin: The Tales of Alvin Maker”, p.213, Macmillan

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• 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.

  Karl Marx

  Blow, Historical, Firsts

  Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Ilʹich Lenin (1986). “India, National Liberation and Class Struggles: A Collection of Classical Marxist Writings”

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• Je sais la douleur est la noblesse unique O  u' ne mordront jamais la terre et les enfers. I know that pain is the one nobility upon which Hell itself cannot encroach.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Pain, Unique, Hell

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• It is often asserted that as woman has always been man's slave--subject--inferior--dependent, under all forms of government and religion, slavery must be her normal condition. This might have some weight had not the vast majority of men also been enslaved for centuries to kings and popes, and orders of nobility, who, in the progress of civilization, have reached complete equality.

  Susan B. Anthony

  Kings, Women, Government

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• 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.

  George Santayana

  Long, Lasts, Firsts

  George Santayana (1937). “The Works of George Santayana: Scepticism and animal faith. Some meanings of the word "is". Literal and symbolic knowledge. The unknowable”

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• Pride is always a better lever against the nobility than reason.

  Patrick Rothfuss

  Pride, Levers, Reason

  Patrick Rothfuss (2011). “The Wise Man's Fear: The Kingkiller Chronicle: Day Two”, p.390, Penguin

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• What nobility of feeling! To sacrifice your own pleasure to preserve the comfort of others! It is a thing, I confess, that would never occur to me.

  Susanna Clarke

  Sacrifice, Feelings, Comfort

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• To act well in this world, one must sacrifice all personal desires. The people who become missionaries of religious thought have no other Fatherland than this thought. Man is not on Earth merely to be happy, nor even simply to be honest. He is here to realize great things for humanity, to attain nobility, and to surmount the vulgarity of nearly every individual.

  Ernest Renan

  Religious, Sacrifice, Men

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• Something very beautiful happens to people when their world has fallen apart: a humility, a nobility, a higher intelligence emerges at just the point when our knees hit the floor. Perhaps, in a way, that's where humanity is now: about to discover we're not as smart as we thought we were, will be forced by life to surrender our attacks and defenses which avail us of nothing, and finally break through into the collective beauty of who we really are.

  Marianne Williamson

  Beautiful, Smart, Humility

  FaceBook post by Marianne Williamson from Aug 31, 2013

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• But the closer we study their lives, and the better we know their deeds, the more profound is our admiration and the greater our reverence for the Pilgrim fathers. Between the drafting of their immortal charter of liberty in the cabin of the Mayflower and the fruition of their principles in the power and majesty of the republic of the United States of to-day is but a span in the records of the word, and yet it is the most important and beneficent chapter in history. To be able to claim descent from them, either by birth or adoption, is to glory in kinship with God's nobility.

  Chauncey Depew

  Father, Profound, Adoption

  Chauncey Mitchell Depew (1910). “Club and society addresses”

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• It would need someone very remarkable to recover your name, Stephen, someone of rare perspicacity, with extraordinary talents and incomparable nobility of character. Me, in fact.

  Susanna Clarke

  Character, Names, Needs

  Susanna Clarke (2009). “Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell”, p.405, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• The devotion of such titans of spirit as Lenin to an Ideal must bear fruit. The nobility of his selflessness will be an example through centuries to come, and his Ideal will reach perfection.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Perfection, Fruit, Bears

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• 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.

  William Cobbett

  Race, Bankers, Employment

  Political Register, July 10-17, 1802.

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• ‎Honoured sir, poverty is not a vice, that's a true saying. Yet I know too that drunkeness is not a virtue, and that's even truer. But beggary, honoured sir, beggary is a vice. In poverty you may still retain your innate nobility of soul, but in beggary--never--no one. For beggary a man is not chased out of human society with a stick, he is swept out with a broom, so as to make it as humiliating as possible; and quite right, too, forasmuch as in beggary as I am ready to be the first to humiliate myself.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Men, Soul, Vices

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• If ancient descent could confer nobility, the lower forms of life would possess it in a greater degree than man.

  John Lancaster Spalding

  Men, Degrees, Ancient

  John Lancaster Spalding (1901). “Aphorisms and Reflections: Conduct, Culture and Religion”

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• Muhammad sets the model for being a good statesman. He also sets the model for being a good warrior, for chivalry, of nobility, of all the things which the Quran and Hadith [The recorded collections of the sayings and traditions of the Prophet] says of treating your enemy with dignity and kindness.

  Seyyed Hossein Nasr

  Kindness, Warrior, Enemy

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• What an unfortunate instrument the guitar is! An instrument of such great nobility, a genuine monarch of music-- reduced to a pitiful lump of wood with six strings, constantly abused by people with no ear and no voice.

  Sergei Lukyanenko

  Guitar, Voice, People

  Sergei Lukyanenko, Vladimir Nikolaevich Vasilʹev (2007). “Day watch”, Miramax

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• "I am Sa’kagé a lord of shadows. I claim the shadows that the Shadow may not." [...] "I am the strong arm of deliverance. I am Shadowstrider. I am the Scales of Justice. I am He-Who-Guards-Unseen. I am Shadowslayer. I am Nameless." [...]
  "The coranti shall not go unpunished." [...]
  "My way is hard but I serve unbroken. In ignobility, nobility. In shame, honor. In darkness, light. I will do justice and love mercy."

  Brent Weeks

  Strong, Kings, Light

  "Perfect Shadow: A Night Angel Novella". Book by Brent Weeks, June 1, 2011.

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• We hunger for nobility: the rare words and acts that harmonize simplicity and truth.

  J. Robert Oppenheimer

  Simplicity, Hunger

  J. Robert Oppenheimer (2013). “Uncommon Sense”, p.137, Springer Science & Business Media

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• 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.

  Carl L. Becker

  Virginia, Class, Southern

  "Search Results The United States: An Experiment in Democracy". Book by Carl L. Becker, 1920.

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