The patrician … can absolutely distinguish between ends, which are always and everywhere the same, and means, which we adopt only later to adapt, whi… - R. W. K. Paterson

Far from invalidating the ideal, the fact that men’s behaviours is in opposition to it invalidates their behaviour. We measure the cloth by the yardstick, not the yardstick by the cloth.

When those around us perceive the world as if it were a narrow and humdrum shopping precinct, in which the best life possible consists in avoiding all risk and striking bargain after bargain in order to multiply and spin out a succession of manageable pleasures, all else being folly, we can easily come to doubt any version of reality in which there is space for grandeur.

We need constantly to compare our evaluation of the patrician character with the portraits of him painted by others who have tried to show us how a patrician distinctively comports himself and especially, from within, what distinctive manner of consciousness he evinces; for it is in the analyses of philosophers, the parables of religious teachers, the perceptions of poets, novelists and dramatists, and indeed often in the songs and symphonies of musicians, that he can be made to arise and speak to us and can assure us that the concepts of nobility we have formed do full justice to the reality. And when we have found his speaking likeness, he will surely not fail to address us, reminding us of a world which we had half forgotten and in the existence of which, perhaps, we had almost come to disbelieve.