Ennobling Quotes

#1. All [zoos] actually offer to the public in return for the taxes spent upon them is a form of idle and witless amusement, compared to which a visit to a penitentiary, or even to a State legislature in session, is informing, stimulating and ennobling.

H.L. Mencken

#2. I've never subscribed to the notion that poverty is quaint or that isolation is somehow ennobling. And anyway, this is Rwanda. There is very little innocence left to lose.

Will Ferguson

#3. Freedom is the very essence of our nation. To be sure, ours is not a perfect nation. But even with our troubles, we remain the beacon of hope for oppressed peoples everywhere. Never give up the fight for freedom - a fight which, though it may never end, is the most ennobling known to man.

Ronald Reagan

#4. Advertising ministers to the spiritual side of trade. It is great power that has been entrusted to your keeping which charges you with the high responsibility of inspiring and ennobling the commercial world. It is all part of the greater work of the regeneration and redemption of mankind.

Calvin Coolidge

#5. Bargaining is essential to the life of the world; but nobody has ever claimed that it is an ennobling process.

Agnes Repplier

#6. Murray is a man dedicated to serving Christ. His greatest joy is to respond in faithful obedience when his master calls. "There can be no higher and more ennobling privilege than to have the Lord of the universe as one's Owner and Master and to be his accredited representative on earth.

Chris A. Vlachos

#7. Religion is always an irrational enterprise, no matter how ennobling it may be to the human spirit.

Lawrence Wright

#8. In itself and in its consequences the life of leisure is beautiful and ennobling in all civilised men's eyes.

Thorstein Veblen

#9. We constantly pass up the rich and beautiful and ennobling experiences and seek out the tawdry, the cheap, and the degrading. These are the works of the devil, and they flourish on every side!

Billy Graham

#10. Perlstein says a movement gives you a chance, to make anger boiling inside you ennobling, productive, powerful, instead of embittering.

Rick Perlstein

#11. Tragedy is a vision of nihilism, a heroic or ennobling vision of nihilism.

Susan Sontag

#12. What is really inspiriting and ennobling in the doctrine of freewill, is the conviction that we have real power over the formation of our own character; that our will, by influencing some of our circumstances, can modify our future habits or capabilities of willing.

John Stuart Mill

#13. Politics is brutal because it engages the most fundamental human impulses for affection, honor, power, and fame. Great principles and grand visions are ennobling, but at its best politics is an imperfect means to an altruistic end.

Jon Meacham

#14. The darkest clouds are the best ennobling of the sun, because the sun is most wanted under the darkest clouds! The evil is condemned to glorify and to honour the good!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#15. A country should be judged by how it treats its minorities. To the extent it protect them, it stands for the ennobling values of empathy and compassion, for justice rooted, not in might, but in human equality, and for civilization instead of savagery.

Mohsin Hamid

#16. The principal object of your reading should be for the acquisition of useful knowledge , and the strengthening, refining, and ennobling of your character.

Grenville Kleiser

#17. The only ones who have been silenced forever are the dead. The rest, even in the distance, still remain sons of the fatherland, keeping its memory alive and ennobling our language with their words.

Maria Duenas

#18. The heart is what is important. There is nothing more vulnerable, nothing more corruptible than the human mind; nor is there anything as powerful, steadfast and ennobling.

Daisaku Ikeda

#19. Also learned that the ones who invented the notion that work is ennobling were the same ones who drank and ate all night long with beautiful women on their knees, the rich ones, who could be as happy as little children

Anonymous

#20. The cultivation of trees is the cultivation of the good, the beautiful, and the ennobling in man, and for one, I wish to see it become universal.

Julius Sterling Morton

#21. Even philosophers will praise war as ennobling mankind, forgetting the Greek who said: 'War is bad in that it begets more evil than it kills.

Immanuel Kant

#22. One of the most despicable religious fallacies is that suffering is ennobling, that it is a step on the path to some kind of enlightenment or salvation.

Aleksandar Hemon

#23. The redemption of Zion is more than the purchase or recovery of lands, the building of cities, or even the founding of nations. It is the conquest of the heart, the subjugation of the soul, the sanctifying of the flesh, the purifying and ennobling of the passions.

Orson F. Whitney

#24. Suffering isn't ennobling, recovery is.

Christiaan Barnard

#25. Those who remember only that the Roosevelts served hot dogs to the royals will be fascinated by this well-researched account of an historic and ennobling relationship - a great story!

James MacGregor Burns

#26. Music can be soothing or invigorating ennobling or vulgarizing, philosophical or orgiastic. It has powers of evil as well as for good.

Howard Hanson

#27. I had pictured journalism as I'd seen it in the most ennobling films, where the reporter battles for the truth, propelled by conviction, and is triumphant. There are journalists who fit that ideal.

Tom Rachman

#28. The incurable sufferer is given very little opportunity to be proud of his suffering and to consider it ennobling rather than degrading" so that "he is not only unhappy, but also ashamed of being unhappy.

Viktor E. Frankl

#29. Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life--the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within--can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.

George Eliot

#30. What an ennobling sadness you lent to my evening's enjoyment.

Colette

#31. It is much more ennobling to the human spirit to let people judge themselves than to judge them. And

Stephen R. Covey

#32. Everything that occurs in the temple is uplifting and ennobling. It speaks of life here and life beyond the grave. It speaks of the importance of the individual as a child of God. It speaks of the importance of the family and the eternity of the marriage relationship.

Gordon B. Hinckley

#33. Health is a great blessing
competence obtained by honorable industry is a great blessing
and a great blessing it is to have kind, faithful, and loving friends and relatives; but, that the greatest of all blessings, as it is the most ennobling of all privileges, is to be indeed a Christian.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

#34. The true evolutionary epic, retold as poetry, is as intrinsically ennobling as any religious epic.

E. O. Wilson

#35. Maybe what life needs is a good soundtrack, especially during the long stretches when nothing interesting is being said. A soundtrack might dignify things a bit, ennobling us with the proper drama and tension and pathos.

Jonathan Hull

#36. Science as an intellectual exercise enriches our culture, and is in itself ennobling.

Henry Taube

#37. While 'Buddhism' suggests another belief system, 'dharma practice' suggests a course of action. The four ennobling truths are not propositions to believe; they are challenges to act.

Stephen Batchelor

#38. Motherhood is not what was left over after our Father blessed His sons with priesthood ordination. It was the most ennobling endowment He could give His daughters, a sacred trust that gave women an unparalleled role in helping His children keep their second estate.

Sheri L. Dew

#39. If art is to flourish in the twenty-first century, it must renew its moral authority by rededicating itself to life. It must be an enriching, ennobling and vital partner in the public pursuit of civilization. It should be a majestic presence in everyday life just as it was in the past.

Frederick Hart

#40. The dream was ennobling but doomed. It was Malcolm's curse to see this before the most of the rest of us; it was the beginning of his sainthood that when black Americans reached that point--when they arrived, that is to say, at their blackness--Malcolm was already there.

Peter Goldman

#41. In all holiest and most unselfish love, friendship is the purest element of the affection. No love in any relation of life can be at its best if the element of friendship be lacking. And no love can transcend, in its possibilities of noble and ennobling exaltation, a love that is pure friendship.

Henry Clay Trumbull

#42. "On my honor" - what an ennobling phrase! Three short words, nine letters, but the summation of all we call character. From the Boy Scout's Oath.

Ezra Taft Benson

#43. It's often difficult for us to act compassionately, but sacred art eases the difficulty by ennobling us.

Huston Smith

#44. Biography, especially of the great and good, who have risen by their own exertions to eminence and usefulness, is an inspiring and ennobling study. Its direct tendency is to reproduce the excellence it records.

Horace Mann

#45. If we think of the novel and the epic ... The difference lies in the fact that the important thing about the epic is a hero
a man who is a pattern for all men. While, as Mencken pointed out, the essence of most novels lies in the breaking down of a man, in the degeneration of character.

Jorge Luis Borges