C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Titles
Virtue is the first title of nobility.
The fool or knave who wears a title lies.
Titles do not count with posterity.
Of the king’s creation you may be; but be who makes a count never made a man.
High titles debase, instead of elevate, those who know not how to support them.
A truce to titles; I will none.
Titles of honor add not to his worth, who is himself an honor to his title.
Of all trifles, titles are the lightest.
For it is not titles that reflect honor on men, but men on their titles.
Titles are too “thin” for the nineteenth century.
A successive title, long and dark, drawn from the mouldy rolls of Noah’s ark.
The three highest titles that can be given a man are those of martyr, hero, saint.
I can make a lord, but only God Almighty can make a gentleman.
Titles, indeed, may be purchased; but virtue is the only coin that makes the bargain valid.
Titles are of no value to posterity; the name of a man who has achieved great deeds imposes more respect than any or all epithets.
All transitory titles I detest; a virtuous life I mean to boast alone. Our birth’s our sires’; our virtues be our own.
Titles of honor are like the impressions on coin; which add no value to gold and silver, but only render brass current.
How impious is the title of sacred majesty applied to a worm, who, in the midst of his splendor, is crumbling into dust.
Kings do with men as with pieces of money; they give them what value they please, and we are obliged to receive them at their current and not at their real value.
I would not cross the street to make a Baptist, but I would go round the world to make a Christian.
A fool, indeed, hath great need of a title; it teaches men to call him count and duke, and to forget his proper name of fool.
Titles are valuable; they make us acquainted with many persons who otherwise would be lost among the rubbish.
Title and ancestry render a good man more illustrious, but an ill one more contemptible. Vice is infamous, though in a prince; and virtue honorable, though in a peasant.
Everything made by man may be destroyed by man. There are no ineffaceable characters except those engraved by nature; and she makes neither princes, nor rich men, nor lords.
Titles and mottoes to books are like escutcheons and dignities in the hands of a king. The wise sometimes condescend to accept of them; but none but a fool would imagine them of any real importance. We ought to depend upon intrinsic merit, and not the slender helps of the title.
Titles the servile courtier’s lean reward.
These people, however fallen, are still men, and that is a very good title to my affection.
Some people are all quality; you would think they are made up of nothing but title and genealogy. The stamp of dignity defaces in them the very character of humanity and transports them to such a degree of haughtiness that they reckon it below themselves to exercise either good nature or good manners.
A lawyer is sometimes required to search titles, and the client who thinks he has good right to an estate, puts the papers in his hands, and the attorney goes into the public records and finds everything right for three or four years back; but after a time he comes to a break in the title. So he finds that the man who supposed he owned it owns not an acre of the ground which belongs to someone else. I trace the title of this world from century to century until I find the whole right vested in God. Now to whom did he give it? To his own children. All are yours.