De Virtutibus

We ought to rebuke in no measured language those who celebrate nobility of birth as the greatest of all blessings, and the cause also of great blessings, if in the first place they think those men nobly born who are sprung from persons who were rich and glorious in the days of old, when those very ancestors themselves, from whom they boast to be descended, were not made happy by their unlimited abundance; since, in truth, that which is really good does not naturally or necessarily lodge in any external thing, nor in any of the things which belong to the body, and indeed I may even say not in every part of the soul, but only in the dominant and most important portion of it. [*]( Leviticus xxvi. 12.)

For when God determined to establish this in us out of his own exceeding mercy and love for the human race, he could not find any temple upon earth more beautiful or more suited for its abode than reason: for the mind makes, as it were, an

Since, then, nobility of mind, perfectly purified by complete purifications, is the proper inheritance, we ought to call those men alone noble who are temperate and just, even though they may be of the class of domestic slaves, or may have been bought with money. But to those persons who, being sprung from virtuous parents, do themselves turn out wicked, the region of nobleness is wholly inaccessible;