nobility

It isnecessary to destroy the pretended nobility, entirely literaryand traditional, of marble and bronze† The sculptor can use twenty different materials, or even more, in a single work, provided that the plastic emotion requires it.

—Boccioni, Umberto

And every warrior that is rapt with love Of fame, of valour, and of victory, Must needs have beauty beat on his conceits: I thus conceiving and subduing both, That which hath stopped the tempest of the gods, Even from the fiery-spangled veil of heaven, To feel the lovely warmth of shepherds'flames, And march in cottages of strowe'  d weeds, Shall give the world to note, for all my birth, That virtue solely is the sum of glory, And fashions men with true nobility.

—Marlowe, Christopher

New nobility is but the act of power, but ancient nobility is the act of time.

—Bacon, Francis,Viscount St Albans

Noblesse oblige. Nobility brings obligations.

—Le¤  vis, Duc de

The order of nobility is of great use, too, not only in what it creates, but in what it prevents. It prevents the rule of wealthöthe religion of gold. This is the obvious and natural idol of the Anglo-Saxon† From this our aristocracy preserves us.

—Bagehot,Walter

If there be no nobility of descent in a nation, it is all the more indispensable that there should be nobility of ascent; a character in them that bear rule, so fine and high and pure, that as men come within the circle of its influence, they involuntarily pay homagetothat which is the one pre-eminent distinctionöthe royalty of virtue.

—Potter, Henry Codman

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.

—Baudelaire, Charles

War alone can carry to the maximum tension all human energies and imprint with the seal of nobility those people who have the courage to confront it; every other test is a mere substitute.

—Mussolini, Benito also called Il Duce [the Leader]