#nobility

It's easy to run to others. It's so hard to stand on one's own record. You can fake virtue for an audience. You can't fake it in your own eyes. Your ego is your strictest judge. They run from it. They spend their lives running. It's easier to donate a few thousand to charity and think oneself noble than to base self-respect on personal standards of personal achievement. It's simple to seek substitutes for competence--such easy substitutes: love, charm, kindness, charity. But there is no substitute for competence. ↗

— Ayn Rand

#competence #nobility #self-respect #virtue #love

You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him. ↗

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

#misattributed #nobility #character

To do good is noble. To tell others to do good is even nobler and much less trouble. ↗

— Mark Twain

#sharing #noble

We care about moral issues, nobility, decency, happiness, goodness—the issues that matter in the real world, but which can only be addressed, in their purity, in fiction. ↗

— Orson Scott Card

#literature #morality #on-fiction #nobility

There’s more to being a warrior than killing. A true warrior — the best warrior — isn’t cruel or mean. He doesn’t claw an enemy who can’t fight back. Where’s the honor in that? ↗

— Erin Hunter

#mercy #nobility #warrior #warrior-cats #nobility

Why do you look like cheese, Beka?" Nestor asked me quietly. "We've got help." I was too flummoxed to tell him I hadn't expected help to come so fast. Miracles aren't for the likes of me, didn't Nestor know that? Only the nobility gets them. ↗

— Tamora Pierce

#speechless #stunned #nobility

I am a Count, Not a Saint. ↗

— Alexandre Dumas

#nobility

True worth is being not seeming ↗

— Alice Cary; Nobility

#nobility

Nobleness was one word for making a fuss about the trivial inevitabilities of life, but there were others. ↗

— Douglas Adams

#life

Fransisco, you're some kind of very high nobility, aren't you?" He answered, "Not yet. The reason my family has lasted for such a long time is that none of us has ever been permitted to think he is born a d'Anconia. We are expected to become one. ↗

— Ayn Rand

#aristocracy #birthright #meritocracy #nobility #talent