Marcel Proust Quotes

Aristocracy is a relative thing. And there are plenty of out-of-the-way places where the son of an upholsterer is the arbiter of fashion and reigns over a court like any young Prince of Wales.

Today nobility is gone: there is only a peerage.

Spurn not the nobly born with love affected; nor treat with virtuous scorn the well connected.

I like aristocracy. I like the beauty of aristocracy. I like the hierarchical feeling.

Upper class to me means you are either born into wealth or you're Royalty.

NOBLEMAN, n. Nature's provision for wealthy American minds ambitious to incur social distinction and suffer high life.

Here in England the welfare of the State depends on the conduct of our aristocracy.

These families, you know, are our upper crust, not upper ten thousand.

People are fascinated by the rich: Shakespeare wrote plays about kings, not beggars.

Aristocrats need not be rich, but they must be free, and in the modern world freedom grows rarer the more we prate about it.

I was no Marie Antoinette. I was not born to nobility, but I had a human right to nobility.

'Downton Abbey' about upper-class posh people: of course it is.

It is not so much that I am a blue-blooded oligarch: I just don't feel like an oligarch.

The nobler a man, the harder it is for him to suspect inferiority in others.

What is Aristocracy? A corporation of the best, the bravest.

Privileges tied to nobility, titles and rank may not be enacted.

Our ideas of the life and business of a soldier were drawn chiefly from the adventures of Ivanhoe and Charles O'Malley, two worthies with whose personal history almost every man in the army was familiar. The men who volunteered went to war of their own accord, and were wholly unaccustomed to acting on any other than their own motion…. Their officers were of themselves, chosen by election, and subject, by custom, to enforced resignation upon petition of the men…. There was one sort of rank, however, which was both maintained and respected from the first, namely, that of social life. The line of demarkation between gentry and common people … rests … upon an indeterminate something or other, known as family. To come of a good family is a patent of nobility, and there is no other way whatever by which any man or any woman can find a passage into the charmed circle.

Do the adherents of this mad theory [Evolution] realize the disgrace they are bringing on the most respectable families! There is not an aristocracy in Europe or America that can stand it one moment. For aristocracy is based on the greatness of forefathers…. With a monkey in the background, how can even a Hapsburg or a Guelf put on airs of superiority? How must he hide his face in shame to think, that, as his line lengthens into an obscure antiquity, the foreheads of his house slope, and their jaws project; that he has literally been all his life aping aristocracy, instead of being the real thing; and that, when he has reached his true beginning, his only consolation must be found in the fact that his great skulking, hulking, gibbering baboon of an ancestor rejoices, like himself, in the possession of "the third lobe," "the posterior cornu of the lateral ventricle," and "the hippocampus minor.

I'm not an aristocrat. I have no idea what that is.

I do not understand how an aristocracy can exist, unless it be distinguished by some quality which no other class of the community possesses.

By nature servile, people attempt at first glance to find signs of good breeding in the appearance of those who occupy more exalted stations.

Who am I to myself? Just a feeling of mine.

An aristocracy is the true support of a monarchy.

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.

I like aristocracy. I like the beauty of aristocracy. I like the hierarchical feeling.You could claim that it's due to my military experience. But it came before that. I love their freedom of behavior. They're not constrained by penal attitudes, puritanical attitudes about behavior, both socially and morally. They have a freedom that I admire. An unquestioned freedom.