“No sound is breathed so potent to coerce
And to conciliate, as their names who dare
For that sweet mother-land which gave them birth
Nobly to do, nobly to die.”

Tiresias, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Alfred, Lord Tennyson213

British poet laureate 1809–1892

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“Nobly to live, or else nobly to die,
Befits proud birth.”

Sophocles Ajax

ἀλλ᾽ ἢ καλῶς ζῆν ἢ καλῶς τεθνηκέναι
τὸν εὐγενῆ χρή
Source: Ajax, Lines 479-480

“Men do not care how nobly they live, but only how long, although it is within the reach of every man to live nobly, but within no man's power to live long.”
Nemo quam bene vivat sed quam diu curat, cum omnibus possit contingere ut bene vivant, ut diu nulli.

Seneca the Younger (-4–65 BC) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, and dramatist

Source: Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter XXII: On the futility of half-way measures, Line 17.

“If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!”

Claude McKay If We Must Die

If We Must Die, l. 5-8 (1919)

“In revealing the workings of government that led to the Vietnam War, the newspapers nobly did precisely that which the Founders hoped and trusted they would do.”

Hugo Black (1886–1971) U.S. Supreme Court justice

Concurring in New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971).

“The Puritans nobly fled from a land of despotism to a land of freedim, where they could not only enjoy their own religion, but could prevent everybody else from enjoyin his.”

Artemus Ward (1834–1867) American writer

London Punch Letters, No. 5 (1866).

“The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of a mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.”

Wilhelm Stekel (1868–1940) Austrian physician and psychologist

Cited by a character in J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye (1951) as a statement of Stekel, this has often been attributed to Salinger, and may actually be a paraphrase by him of a statement of the German writer Otto Ludwig (1813-1865) which Stekel himself quotes in his writings: Das Höchste, wozu er sich erheben konnte, war, für etwas rühmlich zu sterben; jetzt erhebt er sich zu dem Größern, für etwas ruhmlos zu leben. The highest he could raise himself to was to die gloriously for something; now he rises to something greater: to live humbly for something. Gedanken Otto Ludwigs : Aus seinem Nachlaß ausgewählt und herausgegeben von Cordelia Ludwig (1903) p. 10 http://archive.org/stream/gedankenottolud00ludwgoog#page/n39/mode/2up; this is quoted by Stekel in "Die Ausgänge der psychoanalytischen Kuren" in Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse : Medizinische Monatsschrift für Seelenkunde (1913), p. 188 http://archive.org/stream/ZB_III_1913_4_5_k#page/n19/mode/2up, and in Das liebe Ich : Grundriss einer neuen Diätetik der Seele (1913), page 38 http://books.google.de/books?id=PgFAAAAAIAAJ&q=r%C3%BChmlich. Misattributed

“The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of a mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.”

Jerome David Salinger (1919–2010) American writer

Quoted by Salinger as a statement of the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Stekel in The Catcher in the Rye, this has often been attributed to Salinger, and it may actually be a paraphrase by him of a statement of the German writer Otto Ludwig (1813-1865) which Stekel himself quotes in his writings: Das Höchste, wozu er sich erheben konnte, war, für etwas rühmlich zu sterben; jetzt erhebt er sich zu dem Größern, für etwas ruhmlos zu leben. The highest he could raise himself to was to die gloriously for something; now he rises to something greater: to live humbly for something. Gedanken Otto Ludwigs : Aus seinem Nachlaß ausgewählt und herausgegeben von Cordelia Ludwig (1903), p. 10 http://archive.org/stream/gedankenottolud00ludwgoog#page/n39/mode/2up; this is quoted by Stekel in "Die Ausgänge der psychoanalytischen Kuren" in Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse : Medizinische Monatsschrift für Seelenkunde (1913), p. 188 http://archive.org/stream/ZB_III_1913_4_5_k#page/n19/mode/2up, and in Das liebe Ich : Grundriss einer neuen Diätetik der Seele (1913), page 38 http://books.google.de/books?id=PgFAAAAAIAAJ&q=r%C3%BChmlich. Disputed

“Genius borrows nobly. When Shakespeare is charged with debts to his authors, Landor replies: "Yet he was more original than his originals. He breathed upon dead bodies and brought them into life."”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

1870s, Society and Solitude (1870), Quotation and Originality
Variant: Genius borrows nobly. When Shakespeare is charged with debts to his authors, Landor replies: "Yet he was more original than his originals. He breathed upon dead bodies and brought them into life".

“Crying amid the glittering sea,
Naming it with the ecstatic breath,
Because it had such dignity,
By the sweet name of Death.”

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) Irish poet and playwright

His Dream http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1509/ The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910) Context: I swayed upon the gaudy stern The butt-end of a steering-oar, And saw wherever I could turn A crowd upon a shore. And though I would have hushed the crowd, There was no mother's son but said, 'What is the figure in a shroud Upon a gaudy bed?' And after running at the brim Cried out upon that thing beneath --It had such dignity of a limb-- By the sweet name of Death. Though I'd my finger on my lip, What could I but take up the song? And running crowd and gaudy ship Cried out the whole night long, Crying amid the glittering sea, Naming it with the ecstatic breath, Because it had such dignity, By the sweet name of Death.

“Philosophy is like a mother who gave birth to and endowed all the other sciences. Therefore, one should not scorn her in her nakedness and poverty, but should hope, rather, that part of her Don Quixote ideal will live on in her children so that they do not sink into philistinism.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

(28 September 1932), p. 106
Attributed in posthumous publications, Albert Einstein: The Human Side (1979)

“No sound is breathed so potent to coerceAnd to conciliate, as their names who dareFor that sweet mother-land which gave them birthNobly to do, nobly to die.”

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Alfred, Lord Tennyson213

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“No sound is breathed so potent to coerce
And to conciliate, as their names who dare
For that sweet mother-land which gave them birth
Nobly to do, nobly to die.”