"All nobility in its beginnings was somebody's..." - Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson
All nobility in its beginnings was somebody's natural superiority.
More by Ralph Waldo Emerson
“'Well,' said Red Jacket [to someone complaining that he had not enough time], 'I suppose you have all there is.'”
“Yet these uneasy pleasures and fine pains are for curiosity, and not for life.”
“Let no one honour me with tears, or bury me with lamentation. Why? Because I fly hither and thither, living in the mouths of me.”
More on Nobility
“The artificial noble shrinks into a dwarf before the noble of nature; and in the few instances (for there are some in all countries) in whom nature, as by a miracle, has survived in aristocracy, those men despise it.”
“O lady, nobility is thine, and thy form is the reflection of thy nature!”
“The nobler a man, the harder it is for him to suspect inferiority in others.”
More on Greatness
“The great man is always the man of mighty effort.”
“I cannot truly imagine a truly great person who hasn't suffered.”
“What I must do is all that concerns me, not what people think. This rule,equally arduous in actual and intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”