Noblest Quotes & Sayings

Father asked us what was God's noblest work. Anna said men, but I said babies. Men are often bad, but babies never are. — Louisa May Alcott

Clearly, Channing had not taught her young charges that the Declaration and Constitution, while two of the noblest documents in the history of humankind, were also, naturally, products of their time that reflected the limitations of their time (which, needless to say, is why the Constitution has been amended so many times since its ratification); no, she had taught them to revile the founding fathers - men whose vision, courage, and sacrifice made possible the freedom these students have known (and taken for granted) all their lives. These young women were incapable of grasping that the very criteria by which they presumed to judge the author of the Declaration and Constitution would not be available to them if not for those men's efforts. To say this, of course, is not to blame these students for their ignorance, but to underscore just how profoundly ill-served they are by courses of this sort. — Bruce Bawer

Are not our noblest feelings as it were the poems of our will. — Honore De Balzac

In God's intention, a meet and happy conversation is the chiefest and noblest end of marriage. — John Milton

There is no man but for his own interest hath an obligation to be honest. There may be sometimes temptations to be otherwise; but, all cards cast up, he shall find it the greatest ease, the highest profit, the best pleasure, the most safety, and the noblest fame, to hold the horns of this altar, which, in all assays, can in himself protect him. — Owen Feltham

Man is a marvelous curiosity. When he is at his very very best he is a sort of low grade nickel-plated angel; at is worst he is unspeakable, unimaginable; and first and last and all the time he is a sarcasm. Yet he blandly and in all sincerity calls himself the noblest work of God. — Mark Twain

Perhaps the noblest private act is the unheralded effort to ... open our hearts once they've closed, to open our souls once they've shied away. — Mark Nepo

Sincere and unspiteful laughter is mirth, but where is there any mirth in our time, and do people know how to be mirthful? ... A man's mirth is a feature that gives away the whole man, from head to foot. Someone's character won't be cracked for a long time then the man bursts out laughing somehow quite sincerely, and his whole character suddenly opens up as if on the flat of your hand. Only a man of the loftiest and happiest development knows how to be mirthful infectiously, that is, irresistibly and goodheartedly. I'm not speaking of his mental development, but of his character, of the whole man. And so, if you want to discern a man and know his soul, you must look, not at how he keeps silent, or how he speaks, or how we weeps, or even how he is stirred by the noblest ideas, but you had better look at him when he laughs. If a man has a good laugh, it means he's a good man. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst. - Aristotle — Greg Iles

Love is a command to rise to one's highest potential ... the best and noblest vision of ourselves. Love is a reward. The greatest we can earn. Granted to us for the moral qualities we have achieved in our lives. — Helen Mirren

If ever you have had a romantic, uncalculating friendship, - a boundless worship and belief in some hero of your soul, - if ever you have so loved, that all cold prudence, all selfish worldly considerations have gone down like drift-wood before a river flooded with new rain from heaven, so that you even forgot yourself, and were ready to cast your whole being into the chasm of existence, as an offering before the feet of another, and all for nothing, - if you awoke bitterly betrayed and deceived, still give thanks to God that you have had one glimpse of heaven. The door now shut will open again. Rejoice that the noblest capability of your eternal inheritance has been made known to you; treasure it, as the highest honor of your being, that ever you could so feel, -that so divine a guest ever possessed your soul. — Harriet Beecher Stowe

Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives. — Oscar Wilde

A man's life is worth much more than any sacrifice, no matter how great. For the greatest, the most just, the noblest cause on earth is the right to live ... — Yasmina Khadra

The noblest search is the search for excellence — Lyndon B. Johnson

The best and noblest parts of man depend precious little on culture, education, and whatever else it is called. One can never have enough respect for true humanity as it is visible in the persons of the totally uneducated classes, and never enough humility if one sometimes believes one is superior to them. — Wilhelm Von Humboldt

There are few things in politics more annoying than the Right's utter conviction that it owns the patent on the word 'freedom' that when its leaders stand up for the rights of banks to be unregulated or capital gains to be untaxed, that it is actually and obviously standing up for human liberty, the noblest cause of them all. — Thomas Frank

It would be more in keeping with the intention of the noblest man in this world if our two Christian churches, instead of annoying Negroes with missions which they neither desire nor understand, would kindly, but in all seriousness, teach our European humanity that where parents are not healthy it is a deed pleasing to God to take pity on a poor little healthy orphan child and give him father and mother, than themselves to give birth to a sick child who will only bring unhappiness and suffering on himself and the rest of the world. — Adolf Hitler

Beware of every hour and how it passes, and only spend it in the best possible way, do not neglect yourself, but render it accustomed to the noblest and best of actions, and send to your grave that which will please you when you arrive to it. — Ibn Qayyim Al-Jawziyya

Geometry is the noblest branch of physics. — William Fogg Osgood

The Bible holds up before us ideals that are within sight of the weakest and the lowliest, and yet so high that the best and the noblest are kept with their faces turned ever upward. It carries the call of the Saviour to the remotest corners of the earth; on its pages are written the assurances of the present and our hopes for the future — William Jennings Bryan

Teaching is a sacred art. This is why the noblest druid is not the one who conjures fires and smoke but the one who brings the news and passes on the histories. The teacher, the bard, the singer of tales is a freer of men's minds and bodies, especially when he roams without allegiance to one chieftain or another. But he is also a danger to the masters if he insists upon telling the truth. The truth will inevitably cause tremors in those who cling to power without honoring justice. — Kate Horsley

Hinduism advises such people not to try to think of God as the supreme instance of abstractions like being or consciousness, and instead to think of God as the archetype of the noblest reality they encounter in the natural world. — Huston Smith

For my part I love sleepy fellows, and the more ignorant the better. Damn your wide-awake and knowing chaps. As for sleepiness, itis one of the noblest qualities of humanity. There is something sociable about it, too. Think of those sensible & sociable millions of good fellows all taking a good long friendly snooze together, under the sod
no quarrels, no imaginary grievances, no envies, heart-burnings, & thinking how much better that other chap is off
none of this: but all equally free-&-easy, they sleep away & reel off their nine knots an hour, in perfect amity. — Herman Melville

While illusion distorts reality for a moment, error can reign for a millennia in abstractions, throw its iron yoke over whole peoples and stifle the noblest impulses of humanity; those it cannot deceive are left in chains by those it has, by its slaves. — Arthur Schopenhauer

For a man to conquer himself is the first and noblest of all victories. — Plato

The Bible is the greatest of all books; to study it is the noblest of all pursuits; to understand it, the highest of all goals. — Charles C. Ryrie

Birth and Death are the two noblest expressions of bravery. — Khalil Gibran

Our noblest purpose in life is to remember our spiritual nature in the face of suggestions that we are a material society. — Alan Cohen

I truly believed that the creation of hope was the greatest of all the arts, the noblest of all the lies. — Karen Maitland

The noblest mind the best contentment has — Edmund Spenser

Alas, I have done nothing this day! What?! Have you not lived? It is not only the fundamental but the noblest of your occupations. — James O'Donnell Bennett

The creative impulse can be killed, but it cannot be taught ... What a teacher can do ... in working with children, is to give the flame enough oxygen so that it can burn. As far as I'm concerned, this providing of oxygen is one of the noblest of all vocations. — Madeleine L'Engle

He is an Englishman, and in the midst of national and professional prejudices, unsoftened by cultivation, retains some of the noblest endowments of humanity. — Mary Shelley

We have no right to pick out all that is noblest and fairest in man, to project these qualities into space, and to call them God. We only thus create an ideal figure, a purified, ennobled, 'magnified' Man. — Annie Besant

We have chosen to fill our hives with honey and wax; thus furnishing mankind with the two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light. — Jonathan Swift

Love is our response to our highest values. The noblest love is born out of admiration of another's values. — Ayn Rand

You may count on Mexico's support, since your commitment to the noblest causes of mankind and your vast experience are and will be invaluable in enabling us, together, to achieve a better world. — Vicente Fox

The noblest motive is the public good. — Virgil

For the Humanist, ... head and heart ... must function together ... The constitution of the Phillips Exeter Academy reads: 'Though goodness without knowledge ... is weak and feeble, yet knowledge without goodness is dangerous ... Both united form the noblest character and lay the surest foundation of usefulness to mankind.' — Corliss Lamont

Those who love much, do much and accomplish much, and whatever is done with love is done well ... Love is the best and noblest thing in the human heart, especially when it is tested by life as gold is tested by fire. Happy is he who has loved much, and although he may have wavered and doubted, he has kept that divine spark alive and returned to what was in the beginning and ever shall be.
If only one keeps loving faithfully what is truly worth loving and does not squander one's love on trivial and insignificant and meaningless things then one will gradually obtain more light and grow stronger. — Vincent Van Gogh

The noblest ideals, but only on condition that they be attained by themselves, that they fall on our plate from the sky, and, above all, gratuitously, gratuitously, so that we need pay nothing for them. We like very much to get things, but terribly dislike having to pay for them, and so it is with everything. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Prayer is my chief work; by it I carry on all else. Prayer is the nearest approach to God and the highest enjoyment of him that we are capable of in this life. It is the noblest exercise of the soul. It is the most exalted use of our best faculties. It is the highest imitation of the blessed beings of heaven. — William Laws

The noblest of all studies is the study of what man is and of what life he should live. — Plato

This surface good-nature which captivates a new acquaintance and is no bar to treachery, which knows no scruple and is never at fault for an excuse, which makes an outcry at the wound which it condones, is one of the most distinctive features of the journalist. This camaraderie (the word is a stroke of genius) corrodes the noblest minds; it eats into their pride like rust, kills the germ of great deeds, and lends a sanction to moral cowardice. — Honore De Balzac

If God be God and man a creature made in image of the divine intelligence, his noblest function is the search for truth. — Morris West

America's support for human rights and democracy is our noblest export to the world. — William Bennett

Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relationships, this creates an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that paralyzes a person's noblest impulses. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The bicycle is the noblest invention of mankind. — William, Saroyan

I think the noblest thing you can do is ask for help. And I mean that about therapy. I mean that about dieting. — Ginnifer Goodwin

Sight is the noblest sense of man. — Albrecht Durer

I think it must be apparent to every thinking mind that the noblest of all professions is that of teaching, and that upon the effectiveness of that teaching hangs the destiny of nations. — David O. McKay

And love's the noblest frailty of the mind. — John Dryden

Lovely sweetness is the noblest power of woman, and is far fitter to prevail by parley than by battle. — Philip Sidney

The ineffable utterance of one solitary man, absent, perhaps dead (Swann did not know whether Vinteuil were still alive), breathed out above the rites of those two hierophants, sufficed to arrest the attention of three hundred minds, and made of that stage on which a soul was thus called into being one of the noblest altars on which a supernatural ceremony could be performed. — Marcel Proust

An honest man's the noblest work of God — Alexander Pope

Angels are endowed with the noblest created Attributes. They are endowed with wonderful Power. This perfection of Angels is forcibly indicated by the fact that the name Power, or Might, is in several places given to them in the Gospel. No stronger testimony of their high possession of this attribute can be conveyed by a single word; for it is a direct declaration that their nature is power itself. — Timothy Dwight V

THE SLOW ARROW OF BEAUTY. The noblest kind of beauty is that which does not transport us suddenly, which does not make stormy and intoxicating impressions such a kind easily arouses disgust but that which slowly filters into our minds. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Noblest of all dogs is the hot-dog; it feeds the hand that bites it. — Laurence J. Peter

Music is one of the noblest callings I can think of. It's the highest of all the art forms to me. For example, if my kid said to me, 'I want to give it all up,' whatever it is that they're doing, 'and I want to take my saxophone and go out,' I would say, 'May God go with you. This is a great and noble thing that you're doing.' — Hugh Laurie

The love of God has been described as the highest, noblest, strongest kind of love and the most joyous to the soul. — Bonnie L. Oscarson

This was the noblest Roman of them all. All the conspirators save only he Did that they did in envy of great Caesar; [70] He only in a general honest thought And common good to all made one of them. His — William Shakespeare

I will far rather see the race of man extinct than that we should become less than beasts by making the noblest of God's creation, woman, the object of our lust. — Mahatma Gandhi

We have three ways to act wisely. First by thinking. That's the noblest. Second by imitating. That's the easiest. And third by experience. This is the bitterest. — Anonymous

Acting is not the noblest profession in the world, but there are things lower than acting. Not many, mind you - but politicians give you something to look down on from time to time. — Spencer Tracy

This sight ... is by far the noblest astronomy affords. — Edmond Halley

I believe that dance is the oldest, noblest and most cogent of the arts. I believe that dance is the most perfect symbol of the activity of God and His angels. I believe that dance has the power to heal, mentally and physically. I believe that true education in the art of dance is education of the whole man. — Ted Shawn

Freedom is one of the deepest and noblest aspirations of the human spirit. — Ronald Reagan

That man is the noblest creature may also be inferred from the fact that no other creature has yet contested this claim. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

Why all this toil for triumphs of an hour? What tho' we wade in Wealth, or soar in Fame? Earth's highest station ends in 'Here he lies;' and 'Dust to dust' concludes the noblest songs. — Edward Young

There is that indescribable freshness and unconsciousness about an illiterate person that humbles and mocks the power of the noblest expressive genius. — Walt Whitman

Emotion is not a defect in an otherwise perfect reasoning machine. Reason, unfettered from human feeling, has led to as many horrors as any crusader's zeal. What use is pity in a world devoted to maximizing efficiency and productivity? Scientific husbandry tells us to weed out the sick, the infirm, the weak. The ruthless efficiency of euthanasia initiatives and ethnic cleansing are but the programmatic application of Nietzsche's point: from any quantifiable cost-benefit analysis, the principles of animal husbandry should apply to the human race. Charles Darwin himself acknowledged that strict obedience to "hard reason" rather than sympathy for fellow humans would represent a sacrifice of "the noblest part of our nature."6 It is the human heart resonating with empathy, not the logical brain attuned to the mathematics of efficiency, that revolts at cruelty and inhumanity. In — Terryl L. Givens

In thinking of America, I sometimes find myself admiring her bright blue sky - her grand old woods - her fertile fields - her beautiful rivers - her mighty lakes, and star-crowned mountains. But my rapture is soon checked, my joy is soon turned to mourning. When I remember that all is cursed with the infernal actions of slaveholding, robbery and wrong, - when I remember that with the waters of her noblest rivers, the tears of my brethren are borne to the ocean, disregarded and forgotten, and that her most fertile fields drink daily of the warm blood of my outraged sisters, I am filled with unutterable loathing. — Frederick Douglass

The Greatest Generation?
They tell me I am a member of the greatest generation. That's because I saw combat duty as a bombardier in World War 11. But I refuse to celebrate "the greatest generation" because in so doing we are celebrating courage and sacrifice in the cause of war. And we are miseducating the young to believe that military heroism is the noblest form of heroism, when it should be remembered only as the tragic accompaniment of horrendous policies driven by power and profit. The current infatuation with World War 11 prepares us
innocently on the part of some, deliberately on the part of others
for more war, more military adventures, more attempts to emulate the military heroes of the past. — Howard Zinn

I had always looked upon the search for the absolute as the noblest and most worth while task of science. — Max Planck

Maud chuckled proudly and Erich shouted, "Welcome back from the Void, Kamerad," and then, because he's German and thinks all parties have to be noisy and satirically pompous, he jumped on a couch and announced, "Heren und Damen, permit me to introduce the noblest Roman of them all, Marcus Vipsalus Niger". — Fritz Leiber

Gnosis is lived upon facts, withers away in abstractions, and is difficult to find even in the noblest of thoughts. — Samael Aun Weor

To secure approval one must remain within the bounds of conventional mediocrity. Whatever lies beyond, whether it be greater insight and virtue, or greater stolidity and vice, is condemned. The noblest men, like the worst criminals, have been done to death. — John Lancaster Spalding

The search for truth is, as it always has been, the noblest expression of the human spirit. Man's insatiable desire for knowledge about himself, about his environment and the forces by which he is surrounded, gives life its meaning and purpose, and clothes it with final dignity ... And yet we know, deep in our hearts, that knowledge is not enough ... Unless we can anchor our knowledge to moral purposes, the ultimate result will be dust and ashes- dust and ashes that will bury the hopes and monuments of men beyond recovery. — Raymond B. Fosdick

The first contributing factor to a happy home is the sublime virtue of loyalty, one of the noblest attributes of the human soul. — David O. McKay

Of all the possessions of this life fame is the noblest; when the body has sunk into the dust the great name still lives. — Friedrich Schiller

The noblest revenge is to forgive — Thomas Fuller

Evolutionary psychologists seem to want to unmask our noblest motives as ultimately self-interested - to show that our love for children, compassion for the unfortunate and sense of justice are just tactics in a Darwinian struggle to perpetuate our genes. — Steven Pinker

I ought to spend the best hours of the day in communion with God. It is my noblest and most fruitful employment, and is not to be thrust into any corner. — Robert Murray M'Cheyne

The Noblest form of Affection — Oscar Wilde

For what are the classics but the noblest thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old. — Henry David Thoreau

Every choice closes doors ," I said, "and at some point you are left in the little room of yourself. I think most people who get to that room go crazy because they're surrounded with missed possibilities and no principle to explain or justify why they made the choices they did. I don't invite unhappiness, Aaron. Avoiding conflict may not be the noblest principle, but it works for me. — Michael Nava

The greatest tyrannies are always perpetuated in the name of the noblest causes. — Thomas Paine

We humans think we are smart, but an orchid, for example,
knows how to produce noble, symmetrical flowers,
and a snail knows how to make a beautiful, well-proportioned shell.
Compared with their knowledge, ours is not worth much at all.
We should bow deeply before the orchid and the snail
and join our palms reverently before the monarch butterfly and the magnolia tree.
The feeling of respect for all species will help us recognize the noblest nature in ourselves.
Thich Nhat Hanh — Thich Nhat Hanh

Associate with the noblest people you can find; read the best books; live with the mighty; but learn to be happy alone. — Saul Bellow

The noblest part of a friend is an honest boldness in the notifying of errors. He that tells me of a fault, aiming at my good, I must think him wise and faithful
wise in spying that which I see not; faithful in a plain admonishment, not tainted with flattery. — Owen Feltham

The best and simplest cosmetic for women is constant gentleness and sympathy for the noblest interests of her fellow-creatures. This preserves and gives to her features an indelibly gay, fresh, and agreeable expression. If women would but realize that harshness makes them ugly, it would prove the best means of conversion. — Berthold Auerbach

It was a piece of advice only, and aimed at myself as much, I suppose, as at you. - For those of easy tongues, she said. Remember, some live all their lives without discovering this truth; that the noblest and most terrible power we possess is the power we have, each of us, over the chance-met, the stranger, the passer-by outside your life and your kin. Speak, she said, as you would write: as if your words were letters of lead, graven there for all time, for which you must take the consequences. And take the consequences. — Dorothy Dunnett

Our starting-point must be the fact that God cannot be named ... no mind has yet contained or language embraced God's substance in its fullness. No, we use facts connected with Him to outline qualities that correspond with Him, collecting a faint and feeble mental image from various quarters. Our noblest theologian is not one who has discovered the whole - our earthly shackles do not permit us the whole - but one whose mental image is by comparison fuller, who has gathered in his mind a richer picture, outline, or whatever we call it, of the truth. — Gregory Of Nazianzus

Nothing, not even the best and noblest, can go on as it now is. Nothing, not even what is lowest and most bestial, will not be raised again if it submits to death. It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. Flesh and blood cannot come to the Mountains [heaven]. Not because they are too rank, but because they are too weak. What is a Lizard compared with a stallion? Lust is a poor, weak, whimpering whispering thing compared with that richness and energy of desire which will arise when lust has been killed. — C.S. Lewis

There is a profound difference between fighting to avoid death and fighting in order to live. Men who fight to avoid death preserve their dignity and one and all - men, women and children - defend it jealously, tenaciously, fiercely ... When men fight to avoid death they cling with a tenacity born of desperation to all that constitutes the living and eternal part of human life, the essence, the noblest and purest element of life: dignity, pride, freedom of conscience. They fight to save their souls. But after the liberation men had to fight in order to live ... It is a humiliating, horrible thing, a shameful necessity, a fight for life. Only for life. Only to save one's skin. — Curzio Malaparte

Do not think me mad. It is not to make money that I believe a Christian should live. The noblest thing a man can do is, just humbly to receive, and then go amongst others and give. — David Livingstone

The bitterest satires and noblest eulogies on married life have come from poets. — Edwin Percy Whipple

But she could not breathe long on the heights; there had been nothing in her training to develop any continuity of moral strength: what she craved, and really felt herself entitled to, was a situation in which the noblest attitude should also be the easiest. Hitherto her intermittent impulses of resistance had sufficed to maintain her self-respect. — Edith Wharton

Men are just men - it is what they do, or refuse to do, that links them to good and evil. The truth is that an instant of real love, in the heart of anyone - the noblest man alive or the most wicked - has the whole purpose and process and meaning of life within the lotus-folds of its passion. — Gregory David Roberts

The truth is that there are no good men, or bad men,' he said. 'It is the deeds that have goodness or badness in them. There are good deeds, and bad deeds. Men are just men - it is what they do, or refuse to do, that links them to good and evil. The truth is that an instant of real love, in the heart of anyone - the noblest man alive or the most wicked - has the whole purpose and process and meaning of life within the lotus-folds of its passion. The truth is that we are all, every one of us, every atom, every galaxy, and every particle of matter in the universe, moving toward God. — Gregory David Roberts