quotations about nobility
Having problems doesn't make you noble or virtuous, it makes you human. Nobility and virtue comes from the way that you handle your problems and either learn to move past them or live with them if out of your control.
OLI ANDERSON
Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness
Oddly enough, only when Nobility is removed do some people ever come to miss it. It is an acquired taste, after all.
TIM DANIEL
The Pursuit of Nobility: Living a Life That Matters
Noble persons have the best capacities; for whether they give themselves to goodness or ungraciousness, they do in either excel, as none of the common sort of people can come anything nigh them.
CICERO
attributed, Day's Collacon
Persons of noble blood, are less envied in their rising. For it seemeth but right done to their birth. Besides, there seemeth not much added to their fortune; and envy is as the sunbeams, that beat hotter upon a bank, or steep rising ground, than upon a flat. And for the same reason, those that are advanced by degrees, are less envied than those that are advanced suddenly and per saltum.
FRANCIS BACON
"Of Envy", The Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral
Nobility is the irregularity that runs through the base material of humanity. The base material is the way in which humans normally behave. Without the contrast, there would be nothing interesting to talk about. Without the pale blue sky behind it, a rainbow would not stand out. The rainbow does not resent the sky; it uses it to put on a spectacular display.
TIM DANIEL
The Pursuit of Nobility: Living a Life That Matters
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. He prefers solitude more and more, and, in course of time, comes to see that, with few exceptions, the world offers no choice beyond solitude on one side and vulgarity on the other.
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
Collected Essays
The nobly born must nobly meet his fate.
EURIPIDES
fragment, Alcmene
Noble by birth, yet nobler by great deeds.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Tales of a Wayside Inn
To men and women there falls the task of exploring truth with their reason, and in this their nobility consists.
POPE JOHN PAUL II
Encyclical, Fides et Ratio, September 14, 1998
It's easier to donate a few thousand to charity and think oneself noble than to base self-respect on personal standards of personal achievement.
AYN RAND
The Fountainhead
And in the wreck of noble lives
Something immortal still survives.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
"The Building of the Ship"
If the human race has ever invented an institution more effective in the propagation of intellectual and ethical cripples than the nobility, I have yet to stumble across it.
DANIEL POLANSKY
Low Town
She had possessed a kind of nobility, a kind of purity, simply because the standards that she obeyed were private ones. Her feelings were her own, and could not be altered from outside.
GEORGE ORWELL
1984
Whoe'er amidst the sons
Of reason, valor, liberty, and virtue
Displays distinguished merit, is a noble
Of Nature's own creating.
JAMES THOMSON
Coriolanus
Let states that aim at greatness, take heed how their nobility and gentlemen do multiply too fast. For that maketh the common subject, grow to be a peasant and base swain, driven out of heart, and in effect but the gentleman's laborer.
FRANCIS BACON
"Of the True Greatness Of Kingdoms And Estates", The Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral
Nobility is pre-eminent as a value which distinguishes between man and man, and indeed even in the ethos itself, in the fundamental disposition. Its opposite is the usual, the ordinary, the well-worn track, in so far as upon it goodness as well as badness can be found. By its very nature the noble is not everybody's concern. It divides men--not indeed according to birth and social status, but according to their innermost disposition.
NICOLAI HARTMANN
Moral Values