Quotes about honour

“When I was a child I dreamed of adventure, glory, honor in feats of arms. I think now that these things are shadows.”

“If you see them as shadows then you see them for what they are,” Annlaw agreed. “Many have pursued honor, and in the pursuit lost more of it than ever they could gain.”

A man of worth never gets up to unsay what he said yesterday.

There's nothing noble about dying. Not even if you die for honor. Not even if you die the greatest hero the world ever saw. Not even if you're so great your name will never be forgotten and who's that great? The most important thing is your life, little guys. You're worth nothing dead except for speeches. Don't let them kid you any more. Pay no attention when they tap you on the shoulder and say come along we've got to fight for liberty, or whatever their word is. There's always a word.

He was starting to change his mind about the old Warrior Code stuff knights and princes invoked, usually when they were drunk and in need of spilling their words, or trying to justify their poor behavior in some other field.

Behave honourably and wish for a good death. He always dismissed it as self-serving bullshit, frankly; most of the people he’d been told were his betters were quite venally dishonourable, and the more they got the more the greedy bastards wanted, while those that weren’t like that were better behaved at least partly because they could afford to be.

Was it more honourable to starve than to steal? Many people would say yes, the rarely those who’d actually experienced an empty belly, or a child whimpering with its own hunger. Was it more honourable to starve than to steal when others had the means to feed you but chose not to, unless you paid with money you did not have? He thought not. By choosing to starve you became your own oppressor, keeping yourself in line, harming yourself for having the temerity to be poor, when by rights that ought to be a constable’s job. Show any initiative or imagination and you were called lazy, shifty, crafty, incorrigible. So he’d dismissed talk of honour; it was just a way of making the rich and powerful feel better about themselves and the powerless and poverty-stricken feel worse.

I gave them the word of a Jedi Master that if they surrendered I would keep them from harm. I will not be made a liar.

The family feuds or the village feuds often had to do with an idea of honor. Perhaps it was a peasant idea; perhaps this idea of honor is especially important to a society without recourse to law or without confidence in law.

And much as Wine has play'd the Infidel,

And robb'd me of my Robe of Honour — well,

I often wonder what the Vintners buy

One half so precious as the Goods they sell.

He’d always been glad he wasn’t an infantryman: if you were a mudfoot, war, and the death and the maiming that went with war, were random and impersonal. What had he just been doing but dealing out random, impersonal death? He thought of himself as a knight in shining armor. What sorts of filthy things had knights done that never got into the pages of Malory and Ivanhoe? He didn’t know. He didn’t want to find out, not really.

He looked down at himself. His imaginary suit of armor seemed to have a patch or two of rust on it. No matter who you were or what you did, you couldn’t stay immaculate, not in this war.

Yet perhaps no sacrifice is wholly useless which proves there are men who prefer honour to life.

self-control contains honour as a chief constituent, and honour bravery.

If we devote ourselves to finding holes exactly shaped to house such great words as Freedom, Honor, Bliss, I agree, we shall spend a lifetime slipping and sliding and searching, and all in vain.

Honor is only a label they use for what they want you to do, Chernon. They want you to stay, so they call staying honorable.