Nobility

Nobility is a social class which possesses more acknowledged privileges or eminence than members of most other classes in a society, membership therein typically being hereditary. The privileges associated with nobility may constitute substantial advantages over or relative to non-nobles, or may be largely honorary (e.g. precedence), and vary from country to country and era to era. Traditionally membership in the nobility has been regulated or acknowledged by the government. There is often a variety of ranks within the noble class. Legal recognition of nobility is more common in monarchies, but nobility also existed in such republics as the Dutch Provinces, Genoa and Venice, and remains part of the legal social structure of some non-hereditary regimes, e.g. San Marino and Vatican City in Europe. Hereditary titles often distinguish nobles from non-nobles, although in many nations most of the nobility have been un-titled, and a hereditary title need not indicate nobility.

Sourced

• Il sangue nobile è un accidente della fortuna; le azioni nobili caratterizzano il grande.
  • Noble blood is an accident of fortune; noble actions characterize the great.
  • Carlo Goldoni, Pamela (c. 1750), I. 6.

• Be noble in every thought
  And in every deed!
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Christus, The Golden Legend (1872), Part II.

• Noble by birth, yet nobler by great deeds.
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863-1874), Part III. The Student's Tale. Emma and Eginhard, line 82.

• Be aristocracy the only joy:
  Let commerce perish—let the world expire.
  • Modern Gulliver's Travels (Ed. 1796), p. 192.

• His nature is too noble for the world:
  He would not flatter Neptune for his trident,
  Or Jove for's power to thunder.
  • William Shakespeare, Coriolanus (c. 1607-08), Act III, scene 1, line 255.

• This was the noblest Roman of them all:
  All the conspirators save only he
  Did that they did in envy of great Cæsar;
  He only, in a general honest thought
  And common good to all, made one of them.
  • William Shakespeare, Julius Cæsar (1599), Act V, scene 5, line 68.

• Better not to be at all
  Than not be noble.
  • Alfred Tennyson, The Princess (1847), Part II, line 79.

• Titles are marks of honest men, and wise:
  The fool or knave that wears a title lies.
  • Edward Young, Love of Fame (1725-28), Satire I, line 145.

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 559-60.

• If there is anything good about nobility it is that it enforces the necessity of avoiding degeneracy.
  • From the Latin of Böethius.

• Inquinat egregios adjuncta superbia mores.
  • The noblest character is stained by the addition of pride.
  • Claudianus, De Quarto Consulatu Honorii Augustii Panegyris, 305.

• Ay, these look like the workmanship of heaven;
  This is the porcelain clay of human kind,
  And therefore cast into these noble moulds.
  • John Dryden, Don Sebastian, Act I, scene 1.

• O lady, nobility is thine, and thy form is the reflection of thy nature!
  • Euripides, Ion, 238.

• There are epidemics of nobleness as well as epidemics of disease.
  • James Anthony Froude, Short Studies on Great Subjects, Calvinism.

• Ein edler Mensch zieht edle Menschen an,
  Und weiss sie fest zu halten, wie ihr thut.
  • A noble soul alone can noble souls attract;
    And knows alone, as ye, to hold them.
  • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Torquato Tasso, I. 1. 59.

• Par nobile fratrum.
  • A noble pair of brothers.
  • Horace, Satires, II. 3. 243.

• Fond man! though all the heroes of your line
  Bedeck your halls, and round your galleries shine
  In proud display; yet take this truth from me—
  Virtue alone is true nobility!
  • Juvenal, Satire VIII, line 29. Gifford's translation. "Virtus sola nobilitat," is the Latin of last line.

• Noblesse oblige.
  • There are obligations to nobility.
  • Comte de Laborde, in a notice to the French Historical Society in 1865, attributes the phrase to Duc de Levis, who used it in 1808, apropos of the establishment of the nobility.

• Be noble! and the nobleness that lies
  In other men, sleeping, but never dead,
  Will rise in majesty to meet thine own.
  • James Russell Lowell, Sonnet IV.

• Let wealth and commerce, laws and learning die,
  But leave us still our old nobility.
  • Lord John Manners, England's Trust, Part III, line 227.

• 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, Act III, scene 3.