Nothing is really beautiful unless it is useless; everything useful is ugly, for it expresses a need, and the needs of man are ignoble and disgusting, like his poor weak nature. The most useful place in a house is the lavatory. - Théophile Gautier
Submission to what people call their 'lot' is simply ignoble. If your lot makes you cry and be wretched, get rid of it and take another. - Elizabeth von Arnim
Beneath beautiful appearances I search out ugly depths, and beneath ignoble surfaces I probe for the hidden mines of devotion and virtue. It's a relatively benign mania, which enables you to see something new in a place where you would not have expected to find it. - Gustave Flaubert
Vigilantes who executed some of the most vicious and ignoble acts of lawless brutality in U.S. history nevertheless considered those very acts to be the work of citizenship and in many cases elicited wide popular approval. - Linda Gordon
To conquer oneself is the best and noblest victory; to be vanquished by one's own nature is the worst and most ignoble defeat. - Plato
Noble life demands a noble architecture for noble uses of noble men. Lack of culture means what it has always meant: ignoble civilization and therefore imminent downfall. - Frank Lloyd Wright
Something ignoble, loathsome, undignified attends all associations between people and has been transferred to all objects, dwelling, tools, even the landscape itself. - Bertolt Brecht
I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life. - Theodore Roosevelt