The legislators who decreed that henceforth the rope should be reserved for the ultimate crime of murder were inspired with a proper sense of humour and proportion. It would be ignoble to dignify that ugly enterprise of to-day, the cracking of suburban cribs, with the same punishment which was meted out to Claude Duval and the immortal Switcher. Better for the churl the disgrace of Portland than the chance of heroism and respect given at the Tree!英文原著 · 《A Book of Scoundrels》
"As the first two lived--Adam and Eve in their garden of Eden--they seem to me," she used to say to her own heart; "but the Tree of Knowledge was not forbidden them, and it has taught them naught ignoble."英文原著 · 《A Lady of Quality》
"Neither of us dare be ignoble," Osmonde said, "for 'twould make poor and base the one who was not so in truth."英文原著 · 《A Lady of Quality》
Fiction has just as much right to select large female souls as Biography or Painting has; and to pick out a selfish, shallow, illiterate creature, with nothing but beauty, and bestow three enormous volumes on her, is to make a perverse selection, beauty being, after all, rarer in women than wit, sense, and goodness. It is as false and ignoble in art, as to marry a pretty face without heart and brains is silly in conduct.英文原著 · 《A Woman-Hater》
The other hint is this. If Callimachus, the founder of Alexandrian literature, be such as he is, what are his pupils likely to become, at least without some infusion of healthier blood, such as in the case of his Roman imitators produced a new and not altogether ignoble school?英文原著 · 《Alexandria and her Schools》
Why should she listen? Why had reason been given to us if we were not to use it--weigh good and evil in the balance and decide for ourselves where lay the nobler gain? Were we to be led hither and thither like blind children? What was right--what wrong, but what our own God-given judgment told us? Was it wrong of the woman to perform this act of self-renunciation, yielding up all things to love? No, it was great--heroic of her. It would be her cross of victory, her crown. If the gift were noble, so also it could not be ignoble to accept it.英文原著 · 《All Roads Lead to Calvary》