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More "Self-effacement" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the typical lazy, effeminate, creature whose only interests in life were holidays and the society of such ladies as would receive him. On the contrary he was conscientious, retiring to a point of absolute self-effacement, and able to forget himself only in his one great passion: music. He was a Pole of the Chopinesque type: and it was in spite of himself that he gave his pupil, besides the regular studies, a very thorough grounding in the classical masters, taught him something ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... had to walk the sorrowful road of married life; she, too, had to learn from bitter experience that legal statutes signify dependence and self-effacement, especially for the woman. The marriage was no liberation from the Puritan dreariness of American life; indeed, it was rather aggravated by the loss of self-ownership. The characters of the young people differed too widely. A separation ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... to think," she continued, "that woman's supreme happiness is to be gained by self-effacement. I suppose her custom is with you, as it formerly was here, to renounce her own name at ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... excel the average, which is depressingly low. But in a city where more or less strikingly pretty women, bent upon being seen, are as plentiful as the blackberries of Kentucky's July—in New York no one would have given her a second look, this quiet young woman screened in an atmosphere of self-effacement. ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... she looks like with him, her first love, and that's all I want." Never had this woman, who was such a fateful influence in his life, aroused such love in his breast, such new and unknown feeling, surprising even to himself, a feeling tender to devoutness, to self-effacement before her! "I will efface myself!" he said, in a rush of almost ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... destined to sacrifice and self-effacement, and as he grew older and other youngsters came to fill Cassie's cabin, he took up his lot with the meekness of an infantile Moses. Like a Moses he was, too, leading his little flock to the promised ...
— The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... undying faith, that it, and it alone, can perform the fate-appointed task, dwells the virtue of every imperial race that History knows. How shall any empire, any state, conscious of its destiny, imitate the self-effacement prescribed to the individual—"In honour preferring one another"? This in an imperial State were the premonition of decay, the presage ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... suddenly grown rich and solemn. If she had been told she was in love, she would have been a good deal surprised; for she had an idea that love was an eager and exacting passion, and her own heart was filled in these days with the impulse of self-effacement and sacrifice. Whenever Morris Townsend had left the house, her imagination projected itself, with all its strength, into the idea of his soon coming back; but if she had been told at such a moment that he ...
— Washington Square • Henry James
... motive, by this semi-histrionic effort at self-effacement the Emperor made himself tenfold conspicuous among his staff-officers, whose plumes, cloaks, kilts, and saddle-cloths blazed with crimson, green and gold, blue and silver and ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... deviltry, the controlling brain of the underworld, a brain which might have made or marred the destiny of nations—that's the man! But so aloof is he from general suspicion, so immune from criticism, so admirable in his management and self-effacement, that for those very words that you have uttered he could hale you to a court and emerge with your year's pension as a solatium for his wounded character. Is he not the celebrated author of The ...
— The Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... latter assumed the first position, and indeed, most of the angry gestures had been made in Boston, and Boston had been the special object of British punishment. Still, with what may seem unexpected self-effacement, they did not press strongly for the choice of a Massachusetts man as Commander-in-Chief. On June 15, 1775, Congress having resolved "that a general be appointed to command all the continental forces raised or to be raised for the defence ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... eyes and receding chin gave one the idea that he was hardly to be trusted astride anything more spirited than a gold-headed cane. And yet, somehow, he aroused compassion rather than any sense of the ludicrous: he had that look of shrinking self-effacement which comes of a recent humiliation, and, in spite of all extravagances, he was obviously a gentleman; while something in his manner indicated that his natural tendency would, once at all events, have been to avoid any ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... gave an air of authority and power to his face, while the more subdued expression which was habitual to his brother marked the man whose whole life had been spent in one long exercise of deference and self-effacement. The dauphin, on the other hand, with a more regular face than his father, had none of that quick play of feature when excited, or that kingly serenity when composed, which had made a shrewd observer say that Louis, if he were not the greatest monarch that ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle
... showed little inclination to perform this noble act of self-effacement. On no account would {115} he have a dictator imposed upon him to shape the fortunes of Greece according to his caprice, unfettered by "military advisers of limited perceptions." If Greece was to have a dictator, the King had said long ago, he would rather ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... whether, in these cases, the gentleman ought not to take his wife's name in private, as a compensation for her not taking his in public. Poor Miss Paton's noble husband was the only Englishman, that I know of, who committed that act of self-effacement. To go much further back in dramatic and social history, the old, accomplished, mad Earl of Peterborough married the famous singer Anastasia Robinson, and refused to acknowledge the fact till her death. To be sure, ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... God whom Pheidias moulds, Clothed in marmoreal calm divine, Veils all that strength 'neath beauty's line, All energy in repose enfolds;— So He, in self-effacement great, Magnanimous to ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... correct, this English version reads like an excellent original English work, and gives fresh proof that the work of translation, if it is to be done with effect, must be done by those who, possessing, like Mrs. Ward, original literary gifts, are willing to make a long act of self-denial or self-effacement [20] for the benefit of the public. In this case, indeed, the work is not wholly one of self-effacement, for the accomplished translator has prefaced Amiel's Journal by an able and interesting essay of ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... worldliness and folly lay in his own consciousness that it was partly his fault. He could not chide his brother when he felt that his own heart was absorbed in his neighbor's wife, and although he had rigidly adhered to his own crude ideas of self-effacement and loyalty to McGee, he had been again and again a visitor at his house. It was true that Mrs. McGee had made this easier by tacitly accepting his conditions of their acquaintanceship, by seeming more natural, by exhibiting a gayety, ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... wrongly. Neither, on the other hand, would they be likely to praise him, as the sacrifice he was undergoing would be out of proportion to the good attained by it, and the interests of others to which he was postponing his own interests would not be so distinctly greater as to warrant the act of self-effacement. But now let us suppose that, in attending to the interests of the trust, he is neglecting the interests of others who have a claim upon him, or impairing his own efficiency as a public servant or a professional man. If the ...
— Progressive Morality - An Essay in Ethics • Thomas Fowler
... the Irishwoman's mental outfit, namely, the capacity even to conceive that ideal of impersonal self-effacement, which, as Paul said truthfully, is the everywhere accepted standard for servants. Her loquacity was a never-ending joke to Madeleine Lowder and her husband, who were exulting in a couple of deft, silent, expensive Japanese "boys" and who, ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... women love to feel the support of a stronger nature; Audrey loved to support others; any form of suffering, mental or physical, appealed to her irresistibly. Her sympathy was often misplaced and excessive, and her power of self-effacement, under some circumstances, was even more remarkable, the word 'self-effacement' being rightly used here, as 'self-sacrifice' presupposes some consciousness of action. It was this last trait that caused genuine anxiety to those who knew and loved Audrey best; for who can tell to what ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... or maintained the merriment. He took his share in these diversions, not so much like a man in high spirits, but like one of an approved good-nature, habitually self-forgetful, accustomed to please and to follow others. I have remarked in old soldiers much the same smiling sadness and sociable self-effacement. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... She was sober and industrious. The wine had never been better served; the dinner had rarely come to the table so hot. Had she been a butler of the first magnitude she could not so have discouraged the idea of acquaintance; her attraction, if anything, was a combination of her self-effacement and her ugliness. The latter might have been noticed as she entered the dining-room; it was soon forgotten in the unconsciously observed ease with which she went ...
— Paste Jewels • John Kendrick Bangs
... the most elevated and revered ideas conceivable. She saw the eternal Tao flowing like a great green river of souls, smooth and mighty and resistless; and she willed that she too might become a part of that desirable self-effacement, safe in surrender. Men striving to create a Tao for personal ends beat out their lives in vain. It was the figure of the river developing, like floating on a deliberate all-powerful tide ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
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