Virtue is the first title of nobility. [ Moliere ]

The clouds may drop down titles and estates, wealth may seek us; but wisdom must be sought. [ Young ]

O, be sick, great greatness, and bid thy ceremony give thee cure! Thinkest thou the fiery fever will go out with titles blown from adulation? [ William Shakespeare ]

The most accomplished way of using books at present is to serve them as some do lords, learn their titles, and then boast of their acquaintance. [ Swift ]

I hope I shall always possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain, what I consider the most enviable of all titles, the character of an honest man. [ George Washington ]

There is a kind of physiognomy in the titles of books no less than in the faces of men, by which a skilful observer will as well know what to expect from the one as the other. [ Butler ]

He that has complex ideas, without particular names for them, would be in no better case than a book-seller who had volumes that lay unbound and without titles, which he could make known to others only by showing the loose sheets. [ Locke ]

The gloomy recess of an ecclesiastical library is like a harbor, into which a far-travelling curiosity has sailed with its freight, and cast anchor; the ponderous tomes are bales of the mind's merchandise; odors of distant countries and times steal from the red leaves the swelling ridges of vellum, and the titles in tarnished gold. [ R. A. Willmott ]

Founders and senators of states and cities, lawgivers, extirpers of tyrants, fathers of the people, and other eminent persons in civil government, were honored but with titles of worthies or demigods; whereas such as were inventors and authors of new arts, endowments, and commodities towards man's life, were ever consecrated among the gods themselves. [ Bacon ]