Nobility

Nobility (from Latin nobilitas, the abstract noun of the adjective nobilis, "well-known, famous, notable") refers to 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 word is also often used to indicate such virtues or qualities as are generally associated with social forms of nobility.

Quotes

• 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.
  • Anonymous, in Modern Gulliver's Travels (1796), p. 192

• Almost all the noblest things that have been achieved in the world, have been achieved by poor men; poor scholars, poor professional men, poor artisans and artists, poor philosophers, poets, and men of genius.
  • Albert Pike, in Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871), Ch. XXII : Knight of the Royal Axe, or Prince of Libanus, p. 347

• 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.
  • Variant translation: Nobility brings obligations.
  • 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