Honore de Balzac Quotes

Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch-hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Barontage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; . . .

Nobility is often no more than the inner aspect which our egotistical feelings assume when we have not yet named and classified them.

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

Nobility is a graceful ornament to the civil order.

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.

In England the more horses a nobleman has, the more popular he is. So long as the English are devoted to racing, Socialism has no chance with you.

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

We have nobility in Sweden, and it comes from the old British aristocracy.

My mother Diana was a true-blue aristocrat, descended from William the Conqueror and listed in 'Burke's Peerage.' My father David, from a poor Scottish family, was a doctor.

I come from a class which used to be called the gentry - which is nowadays mistakenly used to include the nobility, but in fact is not. The gentry was essentially the untitled landowning class.

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

The parson knows enough who knows a Duke.

I deeply detest social distinction and snobbery, and in that lies my strong aversion to titular honours.

I was born into a very important family in Japan. My grandfather was a descendant of the Emperor, and we were very wealthy.

In the past, people were born royal. Nowadays, royalty comes from what you do.

A court is an assembly of noble and distinguished beggars.

Aristocracy is naturally abhorrent to me, and adored equality is my idol.

All privileges by legislation attached to nobility, title, and rank shall be abolished.

Kings! Why, what's a king? .... Is their blood purer than our own? We are all the seed of Abraham!

No person shall be admitted as a citizen who holds any heredity title.

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.

Chivalry only worked with men of the same class.

The Spanish culture taught is that having titles of nobility was the way to get rich. But the Aztecs and the indigenous cultures taught us the same thing.