Quotes & Sayings About Noblesse Oblige

The Sikh gave him the money. When Menon asked for his address so that he could repay the man, the Sikh said that Menon owed the debt to any stranger who came to him in need, as long as he lived. The help came from a stranger and was to be repaid to a stranger. — Robert Fulghum

(P)ersonality...is perhaps the very most important thing in the world. Yet we know only one or two things about it. We know that anybody's personality is made up of the sum total of all the actions and thoughts and desires of his life. And we know that though there aren't any words or any figures in any languages to set down that sum total accurately, still it is one of the first things that everybody knows about anybody else. And that really is all we know! — Dorothy Canfield Fisher

As they say, with great power comes great responsibility."
"Are you screwin' with me, man?" Taylor asked bluntly. — David Estes

If I like a song, I'll just keep playing it, and it never gets old. — Bradley Cooper

There is possibly no insult so calculated to sting the English as the suggestion that they may at any time be considered foreign, as this flies in the face of the obvious truth that the whole of Creation actually belongs to the English, and that they are just allowing everybody else to camp out on bits of it from a national sense of noblesse oblige. — Jonathan L. Howard

Mmm, being irresistibly likeable is such a trial,' she drawled in an impeccable aristocratic whine. 'One is constantly in demand, but one must do one's duty, mustn't one, dear chap? Noblesse oblige and all that ... — Susan Napier

Quotations can be valuable, like raisins in the rice pudding, for adding iron as well as eye appeal. — Peg Bracken

No, no, it's not me, it's them - that old time that I've tried to have live in me. These were just men, unimportant evidently or they wouldn't have been 'unknown'; but they died for the most beautiful thing in the world - the dead South. You see," she continued, her voice still husky, her eyes glistening with tears, "people have these dreams they fasten onto things, and I've always grown up with that dream. It was so easy because it was all dead and there weren't any disillusions comin' to me. I've tried in a way to live up to those past standards of noblesse oblige - there's just the last remnants of it, you know, like the roses of an old garden dying all round us - streaks of strange courtliness and chivalry in some of these boys an' stories I used to hear from a Confederate soldier who lived next door, and a few old darkies. Oh, Harry, there was something, there was something! I couldn't ever make you understand but it was there. — F Scott Fitzgerald

According to an old French motto, Noblesse oblige - one must live up to one's name. The Rothschilds' condition of life has imposed on them a second motto: Richesse oblige - one must live up to one's fortune. — Guy De Rothschild

I think my sense of right and wrong, my feeling of noblesse oblige, and any thought I may have against the oppressor and for the oppressed came from [Le Morte d'Arthur] ... It did not seem strange to me that Uther Pendragon wanted the wife of his vassal and took her by trickery. I was not frightened to find that there were evil knights, as well as noble ones. In my own town there were men who wore the clothes of virtue whom I knew to be bad ... If I could not choose my way at the crossroads of love and loyalty, neither could Lancelot. I could understand the darkness of Mordred because he was in me too; and there was some Galahad in me, but perhaps not enough. The Grail feeling was there, however, deep-planted, and perhaps always will be. — John Steinbeck

Jackie smiled graciously and did her part, the noblesse oblige she had talked about. I almost wished she'd been rude to them, since I had to hold the elevator door open for a long minute while she signed one of the briefcases with a Magic Marker. There were distant chimes, indicating that somebody else wanted the elevator, and the door kept thumping me as it tried to close and answer the call. — Jeff Lindsay

The Masked Man's son, — Chris Colfer

It is the people who control the Government, not the Government the
people. — Winston S. Churchill

The Global Financial Crisis (2008-?); it is not a matter of noblesse oblige as of vitesse oblige. — Kristian Goldmund Aumann

The essential things in life are seen, not with the eyes but with the heart. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

Usually when I start a new project there's a fear of the unknown; maybe it's a band I've never been in the studio with before. People are so different. It's almost like you need to go through the process, discover and unlock what it is that makes that band that band. And a lot of times they don't know it. — Rick Rubin

If you're in the luckiest one per cent of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99 per cent. — Warren Buffett

I was to grow used to hearing, around New York, the annoying way in which people would say: 'Edward Said, such a suave and articulate and witty man,' with the unspoken suffix 'for a Palestinian.' It irritated him, too, naturally enough, but in my private opinion it strengthened him in his determination to be an ambassador or spokesman for those who lived in camps or under occupation (or both). He almost overdid the ambassadorial aspect if you ask me, being always just too faultlessly dressed and spiffily turned out. Fools often contrasted this attention to his tenue with his membership of the Palestine National Council, the then-parliament-in-exile of the people without a land. In fact, his taking part in this rather shambolic assembly was a kind of noblesse oblige: an assurance to his landsmen (and also to himself) that he had not allowed and never would allow himself to forget their plight. The downside of this noblesse was only to strike me much later on. — Christopher Hitchens

I have loved ye since I saw you, Sassenach," he said very quietly, holding my eyes with his own, bloodshot and lined with tiredness but very blue. "I will love ye forever. It doesna matter if ye sleep with the whole English army - well, no," he corrected himself, "it would matter, but it wouldna stop me loving you. — Diana Gabaldon

We should be too big to take offense and too noble to give it. — Abraham Lincoln

Man is by nature a pragmatic materialist, a mechanic, a lover of gadgets and gadgetry; and these are the qualities that characterize the "establishment" which regulates modern society: pragmatism, materialism, mechanization, and gadgetry. Woman, on the other hand, is a practical idealist, a humanitarian with a strong sense of noblesse oblige, an altruist rather than a capitalist. — Elizabeth Gould Davis

They were inculcated with a firm sense of noblesse oblige, as with a respect for hierarchy; the Slonim girls knew well how to decode a social situation, and what they could rightfully expect from one. In part these seemed to be survival tactics for living in an uncertain time. — Stacy Schiff

I challenge you to come find us.' 'This is Penryn Young, Daughter of Man, Killer of Angels." Penryn — Susan Ee

This is the white man's burden, the noblesse oblige of the missionary, colonist and development professional, who feel a duty to shepherd those unfortunate enough to be trapped in unenlightenment. — Alex Perry

Your life follows your attention. Wherever you look, you end up going. — Martha Beck

I've never been a social bunny. I thrive on work. — Michelle Ryan

Bu-shi-do means literally Military-Knight-Ways - the ways which fighting nobles should observe in their daily life as well as in their vocation; in a word, the "Precepts of Knighthood," the noblesse oblige of the warrior class. — Inazo Nitobe

A quiet city is a contradiction in terms. It is a thing uncanny, spectral. — Max Beerbohm

Great power involves great responsibility — Franklin D. Roosevelt

I'll be out with my friends and be recognized, and little girls will ask me for my autograph. It is so much fun living out your dream. It, like, totally reflects me 100%. — Miley Cyrus

Where the establishment emphasized humility, prudence, lineage, meritocracy celebrates ambition, achievement, brains&self-betterment — Christopher Hayes

Schools and universities are (as in a body) the noble and vital parts, which being vigorous and sound send good blood and active spirits into the veins and arteries, which cause health and strength; or, if feeble or ill-affected, corrupt all the vital parts; whereupon grow diseases, and in the end, death itself. — Thomas Hughes

Noblesse oblige; or, superior advantages bind you to larger generosity. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Some of the best memories of my childhood that I have are the times that I played hooky from school so I could spend my days in the public library reading all the wonderful books at my disposal. — Woody Allen

Britta wanted to try to turn a guard. Tamara thought it was idiotic.
"What are you going to do? Buy him beer and tell him about Kropotkin?"
I envisioned the conversation:
Vanguard: Wage Slave, are you aware that you are but a wire nail in the toolbox of capitalism?
Wage Slave: I thought I was a chisel.
Vanguard: No, the petit bourgeois are the chisels.
Wage Slave: What about a washer set? Can I be a washer set?
Vanguard: No, my ferret, run free! For I have unlocked your collar with knowledge!
Wage Slave: I want to be a chisel.
Vanguard pushes screaming ferret through hole in fence cut by the clippers of noblesse oblige.
"Well, maybe we could bribe him," said Britta. Tamara laughed.
"With what? Health insurance? — Vanessa Veselka

[I]f you don't feel or look rich, you don't necessarily feel the same sense of obligation that a traditional rich person does or should: Noblesse oblige is, after all, dependent on a classical idea of who is and is not the nobility. As that starts to fall away, obligation
to culture, to the future, to each other
begins to disappear too. — Ellen Cushing

For, quite literally, the whole world today is looking for us to take the lead in carrying out those obligations imposed on the American people as a whole by the beautiful, compassionate and courageous principle of noblesse oblige. — Robert W. Welch Jr.

Service, which is nothing other than a modern echo of noblesse oblige, and generally undertaken in the same spirit of benign condescension. — William Deresiewicz

In the theater you rehearse in order to do the performance. And in the movies the rehearsal and the performance are kind of the same thing. You're figuring it out and hopefully the camera is pointed at you when you're doing it. — Christopher Walken

If you happened to be born on third base, you didn't rub it in the face of the guy who wasn't even born in the stadium. Self-interest was generally checked at the door with your coat and hat. — Ron Suskind