Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux Quotes

It is the highest of earthly honors to be descended from the great and good. They alone cry out against a noble ancestry who have none of their own.

Title and ancestry render a good man more illustrious, but an ill one more contemptible.

Oh, it is a boon to have a lineage like mine. Of course there's additional responsibility, and I have to live up to expectations all the time, but that's fine with me.

Thus we have given to man a pedigree of prodigious length, but not, it may be said, of noble quality.

The North African mule talks always of his mother's brother, the horse, but never of his father, the donkey, in favor of others supposedly more reputable.

Some men by ancestry are only the shadow of a mighty name.

Pride in boasting of family antiquity, makes duration stand for merit.

The gentleman will please remember that when his half-civilized ancestors were hunting wild boar in Silesia, mine were princes of the earth.

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 am very aware of my family name. I'm very aware of the legacy that that kind of carries with it. And I think that I didn't want to lose any kind of hold of that. And I think once you're born into something that you're proud of and that you're aware of, you don't take it lightly.

My mother was related to four of Jamaica's oldest families, and to say merely that she was out of the top drawer would not convey the quality of her breeding.

If I changed my name, everyone would have just known that I changed my name. If I had been anonymous, it would have felt pretentious. It would seem like I'm trying to dodge something. I love my family and have such respect for their work, for their career and talents, and I'm very proud to be connected with them.

To Harmodius, descended from the ancient Harmodius, when he reviled Iphicrates [a shoemaker's son] for his mean birth, "My nobility," said he, "begins in me, but yours ends in you.

A well-born man is fortunate, but so is the man about whom people no longer ask, 'is he well-born?'

I come from a long line of generations!

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.

High birth is a thing which I never knew any one to disparage except those who had it not; and I never knew any one to make a boast of it who had anything else to be proud of.

Of what use are pedigrees, or to be thought of noble blood, or the display of family portraits, O Ponticus?

Of what avail are pedigrees?

What is birth to a man if it shall be a stain to his dead ancestors to have left such an offspring?

Those who have nothing else to recommend them to the respect of others but only their blood, cry it up at a great rate, and have their mouth perpetually full of it. They swell and vapor, and you are sure to hear of their families and relations every third word.

I am no more proud of my career as an athlete than I am of the fact that I am a direct descendant of that noble warrior [Chief Black Hawk].

It is better to be nobly remembered than nobly born.