Quotes About Ignoble

She felt that in everything, sublime or ignoble, there was hidden a turbulent, a vital force, a significance and beauty which art, however glorious, was but a pale refection. "I want to live!" she muttered wildly. "I want to live!

Chickenshit is so called - instead of horse- or bull- or elephant shit - because it is small-minded and ignoble and takes the trivial seriously.

My anger thought you too ignoble for my love, and close examination finds you too magnificent, and only equals are joined together smoothly.

Meaning lies in the confrontation of contradiction - the coincidencia apositorum. That's what we really feel, not these rational schemes that are constantly beating us over the head with the "thou shalts" and "thou should", but rather a recovery of the real ambiguity of being and an ability to see ourselves as at once powerful and weak, noble and ignoble, future-oriented, past-facing.

T]he superstitions to be feared in the present day are much less religious than political; and of all the forms of idolatry I know none more irrational and ignoble than this blind worship of mere numbers. —William Lecky, Democracy and Liberty

Tis but a base, ignoble mind That mounts no higher than a bird can soar.

Certainly man is of kin to the beasts by his body; and if he be not kin to God by his spirit, he is a base and ignoble creature.

Mr. Pickwick gazed through his spectacles for an instant on the advancing mass, and then fairly turned his back and -- we will not say fled; firstly because it is an ignoble term, and, secondly, because Mr. Pickwick's figure was by no means adapted for that mode of retreat...

You have fallen from a higher world, and you are filled with fierce indignation, when you find that life is cowardly and ignoble. While I…I have come up from a lower world and I am filled with astonishment when I find that people have any redeeming virtue at all.

War and love - they have much in common. You can theorize about them, but until you have experienced them, you cannot know them, for the emotions that they engender are as complicated and as conflicting, as noble and as ignoble, as any that life has to offer.

it was imperative to preserve history—be it noble or ignoble. Truth and learning, in Frazier's mind, swayed the future. Lying about or hiding any event was wrong. Man could only learn through his mistakes.

The more unharmonious and inconsistent your objects of desire, the more inconsequent, inconstant, unquiet, the more ignoble, idiotical, and criminal yourself.

There is not in the world a more ignoble character than the mere money-getting American, insensitive to every duty, regardless of every principle, bent only on amassing a fortune," Roosevelt said just before he became president.

The 'freedom agenda' of George W. Bush's second inaugural was a noble concept - but in practice, it offered ignoble results.

And what was our DNA designed to do for the first few hundred million years, my son? Eat? Kill? Procreate? Were we any less ignoble in our beginnings than the pre-Hegira silicon and DNA-based AIs? As Teilhard would have it, it is consciousness which God has created to accelerate the universe's self-awareness as a means to understanding His will.

How quickly pettiness returns, and that most ignoble form of real estate, the possessive occupation and tyranny over two square inches of human flesh, the wife's cunt.

I used to regard dish-washing merely as an ignoble chore, a kind of hateful discipline which had to be undergone with knitted brow and brazen fortitude. When my wife went away the first time, I erected a reading stand and an electric light over the sink, and used to read while my hands went automatically through base gestures of purification.

Sweet Parthenope nourished me, flourishing in studies of ignoble ease.

Moreover, in fits of anger, in fears, in the disturbances that come over souls in bad fortune and the release from such things that comes with good fortune, in the experiences brought by diseases and wars and poverty, and the experiences brought upon human beings by the opposite circumstances — in all such situations what is noble and what is ignoble in each case must be taught and defined.

SOCRATES: Will you understand my answer? Rhetoric, according to my view, is the ghost or counterfeit of a part of politics. POLUS: And noble or ignoble? SOCRATES: Ignoble, I should say, if I am compelled to answer, for I call what is bad ignoble: though I doubt whether you understand what I was saying before. GORGIAS: Indeed, Socrates, I cannot say that I understand myself.

Not even a God would have the right to deal a blow for the unwarlike: the law decrees that to come safe out of battle is for fighting men, not for those that pray. The harvest comes home not for praying but for tilling...we have no right to complain of the ignoble getting the richer harvest if they are the only workers in the fields, or the best.

Et il n'y a pas d'autre moyen que de faire l'animal (grogner, fouir, ricaner, se convulser) pour échapper à l'ignoble : la pensée même est parfois plus proche d'un animal qui meurt que d'un homme vivant, même démocrate.

I rationalize this by telling myself that while the work might be ignoble, it's not necessarily evil. We're not Hitler - we're just annoying people.

Since all motives at bottom are selfish and ignoble, we may judge acts and qualities only be their effects.