|
|
|
More "Self-indulgence" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in a beautiful saloon, where the light is brilliant, yet tempered; where crimson curtains and a blazing fire speak at once of comfort and affluence of means. There are no discomforts, such as any one meets with more or less, inevitably, in private families—nothing to jar upon the spirit of self-indulgence and indolence which is thus fostered. The dinners, in cooking and service, are unexceptionable; and there are always plenty of associates as idle and thoughtless, and as good-natured, as himself, to make a jest of ...
— Godey's Lady's Book, Vol. 42, January, 1851 • Various
... and recoiled from a contemplation of the great change which awaits us. Like him, he was content with the goodly green earth and human countenances, and would fain set up his tabernacle here. He had less of what might be termed self-indulgence in this feeling than Lamb. He had higher views; he loved this world not only for its own sake, but for the opportunities it afforded of doing good. Like the Persian seer, he beheld the legions of Ormuzd ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... want knowledge, you must toil for it; and if pleasure, you must toil for it. Toil is the law. Pleasure comes through toil, and not by self-indulgence and indolence. When one gets to love work, his life ...
— The Girl Wanted • Nixon Waterman
... is never one of rigid asceticism any more than it is one of voluptuous self-indulgence; it is an equilibrium of forces, a vital harmony, a constant symphony, in the performance of which all capabilities in all phases of expression are called into vital but never into hysterical activity. The true peace is so heroic that it only follows crucifixion of all that was once ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... wanted him to start with every advantage, to have a gentleman's education. At home he's seen nothing of extravagance and self-indulgence." ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... our places till everybody else was placed, and then, when the picadors and banderilleros and matadors were all ranged in the arena, and the gate was lifted, and the bull came rushing madly in, we would rise before he had time to gore anybody, and go inexorably away. This union of self-indulgence and self-denial seemed almost an act of piety when we learned that the bull-fight was to be on Sunday, and we prepared ourselves with tickets quite early in the week. On Saturday afternoon it rained, of course, but the worst was that it rained ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... Kingsdown, and faced the sea and the storm. Think of the deed, and its hardships, and its heroism; of the brave hearts who 'darkling faced the billows,' and the anxious women left behind, ye who live to kill time in graceless self-indulgence, and ere it be too late, learn to ...
— Heroes of the Goodwin Sands • Thomas Stanley Treanor
... exaggeration, be called the turning-point and the last great earthly opportunity of Barrett's character. He had not originally been an evil man, only a man who, being stoical in practical things, permitted himself, to his great detriment, a self-indulgence in moral things. He had grown to regard his pious and dying daughter as part of the furniture of the house and of the universe. And as long as the great mass of authorities were on his side, his illusion was quite pardonable. His crisis ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... days old, when he died, Whittenden; but the tradition has come down to me. If he hadn't been so weak, so totally self-indulgent, he'd have been a genius. Even in the worst of his self-indulgence, he had ten times my mother's logic. If he had had one tenth of her will power, he'd have counted. As it was, though,—utter annihilation. He died, and left no record. My mother helped it on, by never mentioning him, up to the ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... elementary structure; nor of the fact that education consists in such a discipline of the primitive impulses as shall lead men to do right, not by the constraint of mechanical external sanctions, but by an instant, spontaneous, and almost inarticulate repugnance to cowardice, cruelty, apathy, self-indulgence, and the other great roots and centres of wrong-doing. It was to a society composed of men and women whose characters had been shaped on this principle, that Condorcet looked for the realisation of his exalted hopes ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... students, living lives of simplicity and hard toil, had in the case of the Portroyalists, the Oratorians, and above all, the Benedictines of St. Maur, splendidly redeemed the Church of France, in otherwise evil days, from the reproach of idleness and self-indulgence. He found under his hand men who had in them something of the making of students; and he hoped to see college fellowships filled more and more by such men, and the life of a college fellow more and more recognised as that of a man to whom learning, and especially sacred learning, ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... less clean than it was before. We have all of us a lazy tendency to approve of the virtue which costs no trouble; to contemplate in ourselves or others, with a spurious moral satisfaction, the development of this or that virtuous quality in souls which are deteriorating in undoubted criminal self-indulgence. We have all of us, at the bottom of our hearts, a fellow feeling for all human affection; and the sinfulness of sinners like Tristram and Yseult lies largely in the fact that they pervert this legitimate and holy sympathy into a dangerous leniency for any strong and consistent ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... thinking with men of larger ideas and richer culture, and he was far too quick in sympathy with life to remain untouched by his surroundings. He was more tolerant of opinions other than his own, but more unrelenting in his fidelity to conscience and more impatient of half-heartedness and self-indulgence. He was full of reverence for the great scholars and the great leaders of men he had come ...
— Black Rock • Ralph Connor
... 2d, 1840. Time passes on, and what progress do I make, either in usefulness in the earth, or preparation for heaven? Self-indulgence is the bane of godliness, and is, alas! mine.' This world's goods are snares, and are, alas! snares to me. Coward that my heart is, when pride is piqued, I have not resolution to conquer my own spirit. Pride, indolence, and worldly-mindedness are bringing me into closer and closer bondage: ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... non-existent and not liable to spring up again in the future [Footnote ref 2]." Karma by itself without craving (ta@nha) is incapable of bearing good or bad fruits. Thus we read in the Mahasatipa@t@thana sutta, "even this craving, potent for rebirth, that is accompanied by lust and self-indulgence, seeking satisfaction now here, now there, to wit, the craving for the life of sense, the craving for becoming (renewed life) and the craving for not becoming (for no new rebirth) [Footnote ref ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... time, was what the old monks called accidia—[Greek text]—and ranked it as one of the seven deadly sins: a general careless, sleepy, comfortable habit of mind, which lets all go its way for good or evil—a habit of mind too often accompanied, as in the case of the Angle-Danes, with self-indulgence, often coarse enough. Huge eaters and huger drinkers, fuddled with ale, were the men who went down at Hastings—though they went down like heroes—before the staid and sober Norman ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... wished to give him the effect before the world of having brought her to a house of his own. She had even furnished it anew for the most part, and had banished as far as possible the things that reminded her of the time when she was not his wife. He humored her in this fantastic self-indulgence, and philosophized her wish to give him the appearance of having the money, as something orderly in its origin, and not to be deprecated on other grounds, since probably it deceived nobody. They lived a very tranquil life, and Clara had no grief of ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... Master did. To be a Christian is far more than to be honest, truthful, sober, industrious, and decorous; it is also to be a cross-bearer after Jesus; to love men, and to serve them. Ofttimes it is to leave your fine room, your favorite work, your delightful companionship, your pet self-indulgence, and to go out among the needy, the suffering, the sinning, to try to do them good. The monk could not paint the face of the Lord while he was neglecting those who needed his ministrations and went unhelped because he came not. Nor can any Christian paint the face of the Master in its full ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... narrowing rules of caste; at home in all companies; an enfranchised citizen of the world. To such a man, endowed as he was by nature, placed where he was by fortune and by circumstances, there was open, if he had chosen to enter it, an unlimited field for self-indulgence. But, Sir, as every one will acknowledge who was brought into daily contact with him in the sphere of affairs, his duty to the State always came first. In this great business community there was no better ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... strayed, nor how mercilessly obstacles must be tramped down, in order to facilitate the accomplishment of his purposes. Naturally neither cruel nor vindictive, he had gradually grown pitiless in all that conduced to self-aggrandizement or self-indulgence; incapable of a generosity that involved even slight sacrifice, a polished handsome epicurean, an experienced man of the world, putting aside all scruples in the attainment of ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... to be rewarded! That was the great difficult question. Was wealth to be conferred upon him! For wealth he cared nothing Millions had been at his disposal, and he had emptied them all into the treasury of France. Ease, luxury, self-indulgence had no charms for him. Were monuments to be reared to his honor, titles to be lavished upon his name? Napoleon regarded these but means for the accomplishment of ends. In themselves they were nothing. ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... the contrary, behaved themselves with a gallantry that filled Washington with astonishment and admiration. Heretofore he had seen them only in camp or on the line of march, where their habits of ease and self-indulgence had led him to doubt their having the courage and firmness to face, without shrinking, danger in such appalling forms. Unmindful of the bullets that whistled continually about their heads, they galloped up and down the broken ...
— The Farmer Boy, and How He Became Commander-In-Chief • Morrison Heady
... material desires of each individual, left to the judgment of the individual intellect, are apt to be treated with a certain amount of indulgence—even when the intellect has received the full benefit of modern scientific enlightenment. Unmorality, lack of restraint, lack of faith and aspiration, self-indulgence and pleasure seeking in all its forms—this is the natural and inevitable consequence of the kind of progress which modern science is accomplishing, in connection with the conduct of ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... his hours. One day in particular his walk was so unsteady and his speech so thick, that Ralph could only wonder how it was that Ellinor did not perceive the cause; but she was too openly anxious about the headache of which her father complained to have been at all aware of the previous self-indulgence which must have brought it on. This very afternoon, as ill-luck would have it, the Duke of Hinton and a gentleman whom Ralph had met in town at Lord Bolton's rode by, and recognised him; saw Ralph supporting a tipsy man with such quiet friendly ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell
... tormentor's hands and the rack were irresistible. My soul would succumb as well as my body. This would seem wild, wicked talk to Mr. Eltinge; it would seem weak and irrational to any man. But I'm only Ida Mayhew, and such is my nature. I've been made all the more incapable of patient self-sacrifice by self-indulgence from my childhood up. Oh, will it be very, very wrong to win him if I can?" and the passionate tears and sobs that followed these words would seem to indicate that she understood her nature ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... and myself from boundless regret. My boy, my boy, do you feel the lack of your own mother's vigour? Might you have lived under my care and owned a better restraint and learned to work and live a respectable life in circumstances less provocative of self-indulgence? Such questions, when they rise, are maddening. When I see them form themselves in Philemon's eyes I drive them out with all the force of my influence, which is still strong over him. But when they make way in my own breast, I can find ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... the citizens generally the absolute necessity of keeping up a military spirit and willingness to brave at all times personal hardship and discomfort: so that increase of wealth, on account of the habits of self-indulgence which it commonly introduces, was regarded by them with more or less of disfavor. If in their estimation any Grecian community had become corrupt, they were willing to sanction great interference ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... drill in the vocation they have chosen? How many have to hobble along on crutches because they were never taught to help themselves, but have been accustomed to lean upon a father's wealth or a mother's indulgence? How many are weakened for the journey of life by self-indulgence, by dissipation, by "life-sappers"; how many are crippled by disease, by a weak constitution, by impaired eyesight ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... them!' You would not regard him as a Clifford-Earp, or even as an entirely sane man. So with our student of poetry. It is indubitable that a large amount of what is known as self-improvement is simply self-indulgence—a form of pleasure which only incidentally improves a particular part of the machine, and even that to the neglect of far ...
— The Human Machine • E. Arnold Bennett
... my giving-up would be self-indulgence, not self-mortification. But there may be good reasons for choosing not to do what ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... soiled by foreign travel, but too often not before his soul was stained with questionable deeds. It was a life of adventure and excitement, and abundantly gratifying to pride and ambition. While it could be idealized into a noble calling, it too often ended in a lawless, capricious career of self-indulgence. The cross on the mantle symbolized the heavy blows and sorrows inflicted on those who had the misfortune to differ in opinion, faith, or race with the knight, the steel of whose armor seemingly got into his heart, rather than any personal self-denial. Without any moral change on his ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... verdict of long future generations—that, the direction in which the endeavour of woman to readjust herself to the new conditions of life is leading today, is not towards a greater sexual laxity, or promiscuity, or to an increased self-indulgence, but toward a higher appreciation of the sacredness of all sex relations, and a clearer perception of the sex relation between man and woman as the basis of human society, on whose integrity, beauty ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... to which I refer lies between these two extremes. The science of Egyptology does not demand from its devotees a performance of many extreme acts of discomfort; but, during the progress of active work, it does not afford many opportunities for luxurious self-indulgence, or for any slackness in the taking ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... and their pulses almost to cease with terror. A drunkard, who drowned in his cup, not only wife and children and home and all outward decency, but every characteristic of truth and honesty and manhood of his own soul. A man, who through self-indulgence and the incessant yielding to unspeakable desires, had become little better than a human sewer, through whom the slime and indescribable filth of fallen and degraded humanity found its unhindered course. A human being, who had become a lazar spot, a walking ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman
... hands and heart of His Father? Sufficient unto the baby's day is the need thereof; he toils not, neither does he spin, and yet he if fed and clothed, and loved, and rejoiced in. Do you remind me that sometimes even his mother forgets him—a mother, most likely, to whose self-indulgence or weakness the child owes his birth as hers? Ah! but he is not therefore forgotten, however like things it may look to our half-seeing eyes, by his Father in heaven. One of the highest benefits we can reap from understanding the way of God with ourselves is, that we become ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... Campbell, "but since it has been lost to me, I have often thought that I might have done more good with it. But the fact is, my dear children, there is nothing so dangerous to our eternal welfare as great wealth; it tends to harden the heart by affording the means of constant self-indulgence:—under such circumstances, man is apt to become selfish, easily satisfied with his own works, and too proud to see his errors. Did you observe in the Litany, which I read at this morning's service, how very appropriately is inserted ...
— The Settlers in Canada • Frederick Marryat
... necessity of employment more strongly each day, not only for the sake of the money it might bring, but also as an antidote to a growing tendency to brood over her deep disappointment. She soon began to recognize that such self-indulgence would unfit her for a struggle that might be extended and severe, and was not long in coming to the conclusion that she must make the best of her life as it was and would be. Days and weeks had slipped by and had seen her looking regretfully back at the past, which was receding ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... forgotten, and many Englishmen, in spite of them, still remain immensely incurious about us. The American who wishes to be taken nationally by them must often inspire them with a curiosity about us, before he can gratify it, and that is a species of self-indulgence which leaves a pang. ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... science struggles and to which it often succumbs; which eludes the restrictive grasp of legislation; lurks behind lace curtains, hides in luxurious boudoirs, haunts the solitude of the study, and with waxen {442} face, furtive eyes and palsied step totters to the secret recesses of its self-indulgence? It is the drunkenness of drugs, and woe be unto him that crosseth the threshold of its dream-curtained portal, for though gifted with the strength of Samson, the courage of Richard and the genius of Archimedes, he shall never return, and ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... darling! my little Geraldine!—is it not fairer to the man you love? Is he not worth striving for, suffering for? Have you no courage to endure if he is to be the reward? Is a little selfish weakness, a miserable self-indulgence to stand between you ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... spent in Southern California, moving from one large hotel crowded with Eastern visitors to another. This uncommon self-indulgence and her devotion to Helene were the only weak spots Ruyler was able to discover in that cast-iron character. She seldom attended the brilliant entertainments of her daughter and refused the endowed car offered by her son-in-law. Helene married ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... is a kind of domestic luxury, akin to the keeping of any other pets, such as lap-dogs and canaries. It is a species of self-indulgence which those who can afford it give themselves when fortune has proved unpropitious, an artificial method of counteracting the inequalities of fate. That such is the plain unglamoured view of the procedure is shown by the age at which the object is adopted. Usually the ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... of all overworked doctors. But Court was a type by himself. Lansing thought he'd never seen a colder eye. Yet, the captain's lean face—so unlike the warden's mild, scholarly one—was quiet, composed, unmarked by any weakness of feature or line of self-indulgence. A big, tough man, Lansing mused, a very tough man. But ...
— Criminal Negligence • Jesse Francis McComas
... a generation of monoglots," MacHenery sighed. "It figures, though. There's no profit in having today's youth read the clinical record of another civilization that died of self-indulgence, that went roistering to its doom in a ...
— The Great Potlatch Riots • Allen Kim Lang
... pleasures of their rich comrades? to look on with friendly interest, without cynicism or concealed malice, at the preparations in which they do not join? Or do they yield to selfishness, and gratify their own vanity, weakness, self-indulgence, and love of pleasure, at whatever cost to their parents? Or is there such a state of public opinion and usage in college that this custom is equally honored in the breach and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... surrender the fortress, stipulating for a safe conveyance and shelter at Corinth. This tyrant, broken by his drunken habits, did not care to fight, as his father did, for a sceptre so difficult to be maintained, and only sought his ease and self-indulgence. So he passed into the camp of Timoleon with what money he could raise, and the fortress was surrendered. A re-enforcement from Corinth enabled Timoleon to maintain ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... come out of the academy to plead before the Chorus. The former draws a picture of the old-fashioned times when a sturdy race of men was reared on discipline, obedience and morality—a broad-chested vigorous type. In utter contempt the latter brands such teaching as prehistoric. Pleasure, self-indulgence, a lax code of morality and easy tolerance of little weaknesses are the ideal. The power of his words is such that the Just ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... when I had graduated from school, I would purchase a house somewhere in Kojimachi-ku and get a position in a government office. She decided everything in her own way, and talked of it aloud, and I was made an unwilling and bashful listener. I do not know how her nephew weighed her tales of self-indulgence on me. Kiyo was a woman of the old type, and seemed, as if it was still the days of Feudal Lords, to regard her nephew equally under obligation to me even ...
— Botchan (Master Darling) • Mr. Kin-nosuke Natsume, trans. by Yasotaro Morri
... Pyroch'les, son of Aerates, husband of Acras'ia the enchantress. He sets out against Sir Guyon, but being ferried over Idle Lake, abandons himself to self-indulgence, and is slain by King Arthur (canto 8).—Spencer, Faery Queen, ii. 5, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... smile on his face, which seemed natural to that smooth and rosy countenance; and this, together with a general tendency to corpulency, which was rather becoming to the man, and the gouty foot, all served to suggest high living and self-indulgence. ...
— The Living Link • James De Mille
... invectives, nor foul breaches of morality, though these were not wanting in Israel, but the vices peculiar to selfish, luxurious upper classes in all times and countries, who forget the obligations of wealth, and think only of its possibilities of self-indulgence. French noblesse before the Revolution, and English peers and commercial magnates, and American millionaires, would yield examples of the same sin. The hardy shepherd from Tekoa had learned 'plain living and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... the minister if she were to be taken away. She had been worse than a drag upon him all these years. Foolish, idle, lazy, extravagant, she had exaggerated her physical delicacy and given herself up to indolence and self-indulgence, running the household into debt until it was a disgrace to the minister and to the church. Mr. Middleton, dear saint, hadn't known order nor comfort nor companionship for years until his niece had come. And when all was said, she could do better ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray
... regard to my arrival. They had eyes and ears for but one person: a woman, richly and tastefully attired; of elegant carriage, and a musical speech; not so much old in years, as worn and marred by self-indulgence: her face, which was still attractive, stamped with the most cruel passions, her eye burning with the greed of evil. It was not from her appearance, I believe, but from some emanation of her soul, that I recoiled in a kind of fainting terror; as we hear of plants that blight ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... disregarded the warnings of wife and doctor, had dined and slept, and drunk his favourite wines—not immoderately, but with utter disregard of medical regimen—had neither walked, nor ridden, but had let life slip by him in a placid, plethoric self-indulgence—shunning all exertion, all pleasure even, if it were allied with activity of any kind. So, in an existence almost as sleepy as the spell-bound slumber in Beauty's enchanted palace, Ida's father had left the door of his mansion ajar to the fell visitor Death, and ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... clothed; his heavy face, with its moustache twisted into points, the clouded purple of his cheeks contradicted by the penetration of a steadily focussed gaze, expressed nothing more than a niceness of balance between self-indulgence, tempered by exercise, games in open air, and a far from negligible administration of the resources ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... "Entire absence of self-indulgence, to begin with,"—he answered— "No child should be permitted to have its own way or expect to have it. The first great lesson of life ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... place in me. What befell me was that the life of our class—the wealthy and cultured—not only became repulsive to me, but lost all significance. All our actions, our judgments, science, and art itself, appeared to me in a new light. I realized that it was all self-indulgence, and that it was useless to look for any meaning in it. I hated myself and acknowledged the truth. Now it had all become clear ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... good she will do some day, meanwhile helping in every way open to her and standing firmly for the things she knows are right, resisting with granite-like determination the onslaught of the waves of self-indulgence and the tides of wild extravagance ...
— The Girl and Her Religion • Margaret Slattery
... and Peters. Verily, if their prototypes were like their modern representatives, the spread of the gospel at first was by far the mightiest miracle the world ever saw. On one you find the unmistakeable marks of sordid appetite and self-indulgence: on another, low intrigue has imprinted the most sinister lines: a third is a mere man of the world;—his prayers and vigils have been kept at the shrine of pleasure. But along with much that is sordid and worldly, there are astute and far-seeing minds in the sacred college; ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... natural conclusion of the foregone stage of Byron's career. Years had given him power, but they were years in which his energies were largely wasted. Self-indulgence had not petrified his feeling, but it had thrown wormwood into its springs. He had learnt to look on existence as a walking shadow, and was strong only with the strength ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... carmine which was all that he possessed. We believed, but I do not know whether this could be the fact, that carmine of this superlative quality was sold at a guinea a cake. 'Carmine', therefore, became my shibboleth of self-indulgence; it was a symbol of all that taste and art and wealth could combine to produce. I imagined, for instance, that at Belshazzar's feast, the loftiest epergne of gold, surrounded by flowers and jewels, carried the monarch's proudest possession, a cake of carmine. I knew ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... himself to hold a divine commission to regenerate a fallen country; of one who knew that he alone in all the world held up aloft at the head of an army the proud banner of Conservatism; of one who, for this mission, had given up ease and luxury and self-indulgence; had entered upon a life of danger, hardship, and ceaseless toil, and every day lived in the very presence of Death; in short, they saw before them the idol of the Spanish Legitimists—the high-souled, ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... perhaps beginning to be forgotten: Somewhere about the year 1755, the once celebrated Dr. Brown, after other little attempts in literature and paradox, took up the conceit that England was ruined at her heart's core by excess of luxury and sensual self-indulgence. He had persuaded himself that the ancient activities and energies of the country were sapped by long habits of indolence, and by a morbid plethora of enjoyment in every class. Courage, and the old fiery spirit of the people, had gone to ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... training camps at home, especially of those where little or no supervision is exercised as to strong drink. How plainly this shows that hardness, even of an extreme character, braces up the body; softness and self-indulgence enfeeble it. ...
— The Discipline of War - Nine Addresses on the Lessons of the War in Connection with Lent • John Hasloch Potter
... combative. egotism, its hand against every man. Instead of the light of pure vision, there have been restless senses nave been re and imaginings. Instead of spiritual joy, the undivided joy of pure being, there has been self-indulgence of body and mind. These are all real forces, but distorted from their true nature and goal. They must be extricated, like gems from the matrix, like the pith from the reed, steadily, without destructive violence. Spiritual powers are ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... have such a bother with himself as me?" he asked vaguely but vehemently. "It's self-indulgence does it—sitting down's the beginning ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... is to be redeemed and sanctified, and made an instrument of the new life in Christ. The extremes of asceticism and self-indulgence, both of which found advocates in Greek philosophy and even in the early Church, have no countenance in scripture. Evil does not reside in the flesh, as the Greeks held, but in the will which uses the flesh for its base ends. Not mutilation but transformation, not suppression but consecration ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... does not require much penetration," said Mary, "to discover the Doctor's master-passion; love of ease and self-indulgence seem to be the pre-dominant features of his mind; and he looks as if, when he sat in an arm-chair, with his toes on the fender and his hands crossed, he would not have an idea beyond 'I wonder what we shall ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... Mac-Ivor, I dare not hope it; a thousand circumstances of fatal self-indulgence have made me the creature rather of imagination than reason. Durst I but hope—could I but think—that you would deign to be to me that affectionate, that condescending friend, who would strengthen me to redeem my errors, ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... killed him in the end.—You, who are a great artist, who have labored through poverty, through injustice, through calumny, through the jealousy of friends and the libel of enemies, and have conquered them all, you know well in your heart that great ignorance, great vanity, great self-indulgence, belong not to the characters of the truly great.—Oh I, I, Irina, the outcast, know that well! Did I tempt you?—Those traits were Joseph's. I, who have loved him, say it. For love of me and of himself, he degraded his art. For himself, he has played ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... Tudesco walked into the shop with a staggering gait; his eyes glittered and his mouth hung half open in anticipation of racy talk and self-indulgence, while his great nose, his pink cheeks, his fat, loose hands and his big belly, gallantly carried, gave him, beneath his jacket and felt hat, a perfect likeness to a little rustic god his ancestors ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... self-reliance were held up, and a judicious respect for, and imitation of, successful men. Covetousness was specially reprobated, and luxury and self-indulgence were looked on as a course which ends ...
— The Religion of Ancient Egypt • W. M. Flinders Petrie
... impressed with the fact that in the present Book the stress is upon the discipline of the will. The inner reactions of complaint, doubt, or despair turn against the deed, to which Ulysses has to nerve himself by a supreme act of volition. The world of Calypso is that of self-indulgence, inactivity, will-lessness, to which Ulysses has sunk after his sin against the source of light, after his negation of all intelligence. It is not simply sensuous gratification with the mind still whole and ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... placed under like healthy training, where his really fine qualities of heart and mind might have been cultured, and he might early have been taught to curb that hot and hasty temper, and to restrain those habits of self-indulgence, which ...
— Lewie - Or, The Bended Twig • Cousin Cicely
... strange and fascinating interest. Every one on the range had money; every one was independent. Once more it seemed that man had been able to overleap the confining limitations of his life, and to attain independence, self-indulgence, ease and liberty. A chorus of Homeric, riotous mirth, as of a land in laughter, rose up all over the great range. After all, it seemed that we had a new world left, a land not yet used. We still were young! The cry arose that there was land enough for all out West. And at first the trains ...
— The Passing of the Frontier - A Chronicle of the Old West, Volume 26 in The Chronicles - Of America Series • Emerson Hough
... evil. Guy had been generous and frank in the old days, a lover of fair play, an impetuous follower of anything that appealed to him as great. She was sure that these characteristics had been an essential part of his nature. He had failed through instability, through self-indulgence and weakness of purpose. But he was not fundamentally wicked. She was sure that she could appeal to those good impulses within him, and that she would not appeal in vain. She was sure that the power of good would still be paramount over him if she held out to him the helping hand which he so ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... regarding them as they met, would have said that once Miss Betsey had been much handsomer than ever Miss Elizabeth would be. For Miss Betsey had been young at a time when there was little danger that indolence or self-indulgence could injure the full development of healthful beauty, and as yet Miss Elizabeth had fallen on easy days, and was languid at times, and delicate, and if the truth must be told, a little discontented with what life had as yet brought her, and a little ...
— David Fleming's Forgiveness • Margaret Murray Robertson
... surroundings, and personal appearance is a duty; because it gives free exercise to our higher and nobler sentiments; elevates and enlarges our lives; while discomfort and repulsiveness in these things lower our standards, and drive us to the baser elements of our nature in search of cheap forms of self-indulgence to take the place of that natural delight in attractive dress and surroundings which has been repressed. Both to ourselves and to our friends we owe as much attractiveness of personal surroundings and personal ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... so long on this part of my subject, because I think it very probable that, with your warm affections, and before your selfishness has been hardened by habits of self-indulgence, you might some time or other fall into the error I have been describing. In the ardour of your anxiety for some beloved relative, you may be induced to persevere in such close attendance on the sick-bed as may seriously injure your own health, and unfit you for more useful, and certainly more self-denying ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... the Sanitary Inspector had been about. Or, again, if a fire were to devastate our little town, we should not smite our breasts in the manner of those same forefathers, and attribute it to what there is amongst us of sloth and self-indulgence, to God's wrath upon our drinking habits or our neglect of Sunday observance: we should trace it to a foul chimney and translate our discovery into a Bye-law, maybe into a local Fire Brigade. That is how men improve their knowledge, ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... true," she reflected; and her imagination was fired by the thought that Mr. Gryce, who might have sounded the depths of the most complex self-indulgence, was perhaps actually taking his first journey alone with ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... Nibelungen, is the occasion, but the curse attached to it is not the cause, of crimes; this cause is the cupidity of human nature and the helplessness of the individual who allows the forces of evil to gain sway over him. Jason, in overweening self-indulgence, attaches himself to a woman to whom he cannot be true. Medea, in too confident self-sufficiency, is not proof against the blandishments of an unscrupulous adventurer and progresses from crime to crime, doing from beginning to end what it ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... evil days of King Ethelred the Unready, when the teaching of good King Alfred was fast fading away from the minds of his descendants, and self-indulgence was ruining the bold and hardy habits of the English, the fleet was allowed to fall into decay, and Danish ships again ventured to appear on ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... spendthrift, to whom it becomes a temptation to vice. Better be poor forever, and, by the sweat of the brow, eat your daily bread, maintaining, at the same time, a pure and unblemished character, than to have a fortune that only induces idleness and self-indulgence, opening to you an avenue for the destruction of soul and body; and, perhaps, too, as is often the case, cause you to blindly drag your wife and children with you, if not to vice, at least to want and to disgrace. Money ...
— A Biographical Sketch of the Life and Character of Joseph Charless - In a Series of Letters to his Grandchildren • Charlotte Taylor Blow Charless
... not in the least likely to follow, and providing him with a model of extravagant dandyism that he was only too certain to copy. In her heart she knew that Comus would have embarked just as surely on his present course of idle self-indulgence if he had never known of the existence of Youghal, but she chose to regard that young man as her son's evil genius, and now he seemed likely to justify more than ever the character she had fastened on to him. For once in his life Comus appeared to have ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... too much taste to reveal their amorous desires quite so bluntly as an appetite, yet they, too, never went beyond the confines of self-indulgence. When Propertius says a girl's cheeks are like roses floating on milk; when Tibullus declares another girl's eyes are bright enough to light a torch by; when Achilles Tatius makes his lover exclaim: "Surely you must carry about a bee on your lips, they are full of honey, ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... fact, it often occurs that by waiting too long the freshness of life is worn off, and that the generous glow of early feelings becomes tamed down to lukewarmness by a too prudent delaying; while a slight sacrifice of ambition or self-indulgence on the part of the gentleman, and a little descent from pride of station on the lady's side, might have ensured years of satisfied love ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... the profoundest of all moral truths; a truth not of a narrow theology, but which lies at the very bottom of the well, at the fountain-head of human morality; namely, that a man who would work out his salvation must cast out self, though he rend his heart-strings in doing it; not love of self-indulgence only, but self-applause, self-confidence, self-conceit and vanity, desire or expectation of reward; self in all the subtle ingenuities with which it winds about the soul. In one dialect or another, ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... Fulmort might have been good for something, if her mind and her affections had not lain fallow ever since she escaped from a series of governesses who taught her self-indulgence ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... refused to see any one. She grew morbid and was sure that every person who approached her had some sneaking, personal, hostile motive. Though always busy, she accomplished little. Desultory work, procrastination, and self-indulgence destroyed her power of concentration. She could not think long enough on one subject to think it out straight, therefore she was constantly deceived in her friends and interests. She first trusted everybody, then mistrusted everybody. Infatuation ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... and more of a pattern. He was always talking about his feelings. He always 'felt it to be his duty' to do just what he most wished to do, and he always had some wonderfully self-sacrificing motive for the greatest self-indulgence. He 'felt it to be his duty' to stay at home from church to warn truant boys not to steal the peaches on the Sabbath-day, and how many do you suppose he himself ate ...
— The Old Stone House • Anne March
... self-government. "As man rises in education and moral feeling he proportionately rises in the power of self-restraint; and consequently as he becomes deprived of this wholesome law of discipline he sinks into self-indulgence and the ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... of the moral tone by honesty and generosity, so that when the mind found itself face to face with the need for a strong muscular effort, it was competent to perform it; so in Tito we have a picture of that depression of the moral tone by falsity and self-indulgence, which gradually evokes on every side of the subject some implacable claim, to be avoided or propitiated. At last all his unpaid debts join issue before him, and he finds the path of life a hideous blind alley. Can any argument be more plain? Can ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... older, and he looked it. He was one of those gentle natures which put on fat, not from self-indulgence, but from want of resisting force, and the clerical waistcoat that buttoned black to his throat swayed decidedly beyond a straight line at his waist. His red-gold hair was getting thin, and though he wore it cut close ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... nervous system had been enervated by a constant course of self-indulgence, had nothing to support the terror of the shock, and, at the time her husband breathed his last, was passing from one fainting fit to another; and he to whom she had been joined in the mysterious tie of marriage passed from her forever, ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the same time I did feel some curiosity concerning the oddly-yoked couple, and wondered whether the lady was really so ill as she would appear. I doubted whether she might not be using her illness both as an excuse for self-indulgence, and as a means of keeping her husband's interest in her on the stretch. I did not like the wearing of her religion on her sleeve, nor the mellifluous drawl in which ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... went on, now interested only in expressing her belief, "I fear their ignorance and idleness and irresponsibility and self-indulgence, and, all the more because it is so delicate and attractive and unconscious; and their belief that the world owes them luxury and happiness without their lifting a finger. I fear their ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... and an inferior which serves; and the ruler is to be preferred to the servant. Wherefore I bid every one next after the Gods to honour his own soul, and he can only honour her by making her better. A man does not honour his soul by flattery, or gifts, or self-indulgence, or conceit of knowledge, nor when he blames others for his own errors; nor when he indulges in pleasure or refuses to bear pain; nor when he thinks that life at any price is a good, because he fears the world below, which, ...
— Laws • Plato
... home; and for a moment—only one moment—Mittie wavered. She knew how much more this meant to Joan than it could mean to herself. She knew that she had no right to put herself first, to snatch the joy from Joan. But the habit of self-indulgence ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... Lord Jesus does not fill dirty cups. Anything that springs from self, however small it may be, is sin. Self-energy or self-complacency in service is sin. Self-pity in trials or difficulties, self-seeking in business or Christian work, self-indulgence in one's spare time, sensitiveness, touchiness, resentment and self-defence when we are hurt or injured by others, self-consciousness, reserve, worry, fear, all spring from self and all are sin and make our cups unclean.[*] But all ...
— The Calvary Road • Roy Hession
... last, after a few acts of weakness, of treachery, of culpable self-indulgence, the survey of our past life can bring discouragement only, whereas we have great need that our past should inspire and sustain us. For therein alone do we truly know what we are; it is only our past that can come to us, in our moments ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... some people whom sorrow softens and touches, but Vera was not one of them. Her whole soul revolted and rebelled against her fate. She said to herself that for once she had let her heart guide her; she had cast aside the crust of worldliness and self-indulgence in which she had been brought up. She had listened to the softer whisperings of the better nature within her—she had been true to herself—and lo! what had ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... in Paris; lived for a number of years in England, where, in company with More and Colet, he fostered the new studies; and finally took up his abode at Basel. In early youth, against his will, he had been for a while an inmate of a cloister. The idleness, ignorance, self-indulgence, and artificial austerities, which frequently belonged to the degenerate monasticism of the day, furnished him with engaging themes of satire. But in his Praise of Folly, and in his Colloquies, the two most diverting of his ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... passion ever arose to excite him—nor care to harass—nor pain to awake him. Even in the severest winter his sleeping-room was without a fire; only in his latter years he yielded so far to the entreaties of his friends as to allow of a very small one. All nursing or self-indulgence found no quarter with Kant. In fact, five minutes, in the coldest weather, sufficed to supersede the first chill of the bed, by the diffusion of a general glow over his person. If he had any occasion to leave his room in the night-time, (for it was always ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... fresh round face, in his soft brown eyes, lovely pouting lips, and little white hands. Everything about him was suggestive of the happy light-heartedness of perfect health and youth—the carelessness, conceit, self-indulgence, and charm of youth. He used his eyes, and smiled and leaned his head as boys do who know that people look at them admiringly. He wore a loose white coat, made like a blouse, a blue kerchief wrapped his slender throat, and ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... or, at any rate, that a certain number of them may find their highest happiness in knowledge and wisdom rather than in amateur theatricals and fancy-dress balls. The human mind, after all, cannot find rest in triviality, and after so long a period of the most sordid and vulgar self-indulgence it is reasonable to hope that our aristocracy may experience ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... the poet creator of "Nourhulma" such love any more,—had he not drained the cup of Passion to the dregs in the far Past, and tasted its mixed sweetness and bitterness to no purpose save self-indulgence? All that was over;—and yet, as he walked away from the bridge, back to his hotel in the quiet moonlight, he thought what a transcendent thing Love might be, even on earth, between two whose spirits were SPIRITUALLY AKIN,—whose ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... full in the direction of infinite growth—the primal end of a man's being, who is that he may return to the Father, gathering his truth as he goes. Yet by the simple instincts of a soul undebased by self-indulgence or low pursuits, he was drawn ever toward things lofty and good; and life went calmly on, bearing Godfrey Wardour toward middle age, unruffled ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... wanted to worship Him, and to sing Him the Song of the Soul from some quiet hill among the olive trees by the Mediterranean Sea. I wanted this marvellous, this almost terrible, joy of meeting God in a beautiful place that I should choose: I wanted it so that it became spiritual greed—spiritual self-indulgence. ...
— The Prodigal Returns • Lilian Staveley
... to?" she flashed back at him disconcertingly. "It was my choice, you know: there was a time when I couldn't live without it. Philanthropy is one of the subtlest forms of self-indulgence." ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... them as is about her cheerful and happy, and that vile she goes to church, or chapel, or wot not, at all proper times, she should be wery careful not to con-wert this sort o' thing into a excuse for idleness or self-indulgence. I have done this," she says, "and I've vasted time and substance on them as has done it more than me; but I hope ven I'm gone, Veller, that you'll think on me as I wos afore I know'd them people, and as I ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... we have here a mere woman, affected, as every true sister of hers to-day would be, by the helpless wailing. God has put that instinct there. Alas that it ever should be choked by frivolity or pride, and frozen by indifference and self-indulgence! Gentle souls spring up in unfavourable soil. Rameses was a strange father for such a daughter. How came this dove in the vulture's cage? Her sweet pity beside his cold craft and cruelty is like the lamb couching by the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... Seymours, while they practised the broadest liberality, had instincts of great sobriety in expense. Needless profusion shocked them as out of taste; and a quiet and decent reticence in matters of self-indulgence ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... if through association with the former we find ourselves ditched before we are well under way—for it is coming to us, sooner or later. We might go far, as some have done, through the lanes and alleys of ill-gotten gains and luxurious self-indulgence, but we would pay in the end. So, why not charge them up to "profit and loss" at the start and kick them off into the gutter where they belong? They are not for us on our eventful journey through life, and ...
— Laugh and Live • Douglas Fairbanks
... the whole world, children are taught that virtue is self-control. In the Southern States, among these tobacco-lords, boys learned just the opposite lesson,—that virtue is self-indulgence. This particular youth, thin-skinned, full of talent, fire, and passion, the heir to a large estate, fatherless, would have been in danger anywhere of growing up untrained,—a wild beast in broadcloth. ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... not say that I can feel humbly and reverently that my inner life is progressing. I don't think that I am as earnest in prayer as I was. Whether it be the effect of the amount of work distracting me; or, sometimes, of physical weariness, or of the self-indulgence (laugh as you may) which results from my never being contradicted or interfered with, or much worried, still I do feel this; and may He strengthen me to pray more for ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the nation was directed partly against the irresponsible injustice of the Puritan military government but largely also against the excessive moral severity of the whole Puritan regime. Accordingly a large part of the nation, but particularly the Court, now plunged into an orgy of self-indulgence in which moral restraints almost ceased to be regarded. The new king and his nobles had not only been led by years of proscription and exile to hate on principle everything that bore the name of Puritan, but had spent their ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... same with us. Satan offers us this world instead of the world to come. He offers us our own way, so dear to all of us. He offers us the pleasures of the body, "let us eat and drink." He offers us self-indulgence in all the lusts of the flesh. He offers us all the flash and glitter of the world, but he does not let us see the foulness and rottenness which they cover. To the man of science he comes, as to Faustus in the legend, and tries ...
— The Life of Duty, v. 2 - A year's plain sermons on the Gospels or Epistles • H. J. Wilmot-Buxton
... her part, was no less interested in him, but she found little else than that she had already seen: humorous, quizzical grey eyes, a face a good deal lined, and a mouth and chin suggesting a nature fond of enjoyment and self-indulgence, which it had never seen any cause to deny itself. She saw that he was very grey about the temples, and a trifle inclined to stoutness, but tall enough and broad enough to carry ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... children, so that the race shall increase and not decrease. If this is not so, if through no fault of the society there is failure to increase, it is a great misfortune. If the failure is due to deliberate and wilful fault, then it is not merely a misfortune, it is one of those crimes of ease and self-indulgence, of shrinking from pain and effort and risk, which in the long run Nature punishes more heavily than any other. If we of the great republics, if we, the free people who claim to have emancipated ourselves from ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... and affectionate. He had all his life a large professional income. But he never seemed to care for money. In that respect he was like one who dwelt by the side of a pond, ready to dip up and to give its waters to any man who might thirst. He never wasted money, or spent it for any self-indulgence. But he was ready to share it with any deserving object. Starr King said of him that "he ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... necessary to our life in its largest sense. The danger of sneering at friendship is that it may be discarded or neglected, not in the interests of a more spiritual affection, but to minister to a debased cynical self-indulgence. There is possible to-day, as ever, a generous friendship which forgets self. The history of the heart-life of man proves this. What records we have of such in the literature of every country! Peradventure for a good man men have even dared ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... nurse, assuredly not insensitive to his adoration? The flame of martyrdom was swiftly quenched with beef tea, soft-boiled eggs and sweet malaga wine, and I could not possibly recognize Satan's voice in these gentle commands to self-indulgence, nor could I think to honor God by disobedience to ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... master. I wanted to distinguish myself in my profession, and rise in the world, and tower over other men; and I liked all the delights of life as well as other people do, and was unwilling to give up a life of self-indulgence, which I had means to gratify. Esther, I fought hard! I fought for years—can you believe it?—before I could make up ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... a pause. Our new acquaintance had become involved in a vexatious difficulty with his pipe which had suddenly betrayed his trust and disappointed his anticipation of self-indulgence. To keep the ball rolling I asked Marlow if this Powell was remarkable ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... twelve hours before? Indeed rather, what had I not gained? But my reasonings were of no use. Against them all, some vision of Thorold's face, some sparkle of his eyes, some touch of his hand, would come back to me, and break down my power and unlock fresh fountains of tears. This passion of self-indulgence was not like me, and surprised myself. I suppose the reason was, I had been so long alone; I had been working my way and waiting, in exile from home as it were, so many days and years; nobody that loved me better than I loved ...
— Daisy in the Field • Elizabeth Wetherell
... own unique temptations. It is against these that we pray to-day. We are all prepared to repent, to use abstinence, to mortify the body with its corrupt affections. Are we prepared to bear the burden of our brother's and our sister's unrepentance? Of their self-indulgence? Of their sin? To follow in all things the Divine Example? We are told that the Saviour of the world was the friend of publicans and sinners. We accept the statement, we have gone on accepting it, year after year, as the ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... in regard to Adrian; he found he had mistaken vivacity for genius, and frankness of manner for generosity of heart, when in fact his favourite proved unformed and untaught, indifferent to the opinion of all whom he ought to have valued, and given up to idleness and self-indulgence. Such a companion was quitted without any effort of resolution, but the sister's power over him did not yield so easily. Amaranthe's vanity had been too much flattered by such a conquest, for her to endeavour to conceal the satisfaction it ...
— The Flower Basket - A Fairy Tale • Unknown
... prudence in regard to money. It provides for "the rainy day." If poverty be our lot, we must bear it bravely; but there is no special blessing in poverty. It is often misery unspeakable. It is often brought upon us by our self-indulgence, extravagance and recklessness. We are to use every means in our power to guard against it. The words of the poet ...
— Life and Conduct • J. Cameron Lees
... creature like Clarence Copperhead, without birth, or breeding, or brains, or anything but money, was able to gratify every wish, while he—his senior, his superior! Instead of blaming himself, therefore, for his self-indulgence, Mr. May sympathized with himself, which is a much less safe thing to do; and accordingly, it soon began to appear to him that his self-denial all this time in not giving himself what he wanted had been extreme, and that what he had now done, in conceding ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... bringing up and starting in life of his children, so the most important, the most honorable and desirable task which can be set any woman is to be a good and wise mother in a home marked by self-respect and mutual forbearance, by willingness to perform duty, and by refusal to sink into self-indulgence or avoid that which entails effort and self-sacrifice. Of course there are exceptional men and exceptional women who can do and ought to do much more than this, who can lead and ought to lead great careers of outside usefulness in addition to—not as substitutes for—their home work; but I am not ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... through our joint lives day by day, hour by hour, microscopically—to describe every book we read, every game we played, every pensum (i.e., imposition) we performed; every lark we were punished for—every meal we ate. But space forbids this self-indulgence, and other considerations make it unadvisable—so I will resist ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... customs, he had better marry a poor girl without fortune! This one will simply ruin him. My dear, I am continually amazed at the way people are living whose incomes I know to the last sou. What an example for Jacqueline! Extravagance, fast living, elegant self-indulgence.... Did you observe the Baronne's gown?—of rough woolen stuff. She told some one it was the last creation of Doucet, and you know what that implies! His serge costs more than one of our velvet gowns . . . . And then her artistic tastes, her ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... to enrich the world with things of beauty, and have a fairly good time myself while doing so. I do not think I mentioned that second part, which is the only one I have managed to carry out; but my father must have suspected the suppression, for he branded the whole affair as self-indulgence. ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... vacuity, all but despair must come. The immortal spirit, finding no healthy satisfaction for its highest aspirations, is but too likely to betake itself to an unhealthy and exciting superstition. Ashamed of its own long self-indulgence, it is but too likely to flee from itself into a morbid asceticism. Not having been taught its God-given and natural duties in the world, it is but too likely to betake itself, from the mere craving for action, to self-invented and unnatural duties out of the world. Ignorant ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... painful lot to take to him. I think of it with dread. It has been my pleasure to stand your friend—you must prove mine. I shall expect you to act with fortitude and calmness, and not, by weakness and self-indulgence, to increase the pain that will afflict the parent's heart—for it will be sufficient for Fairman to know only what has happened to give up every hope and consolation. You must be firm on his account and chiefly for the sake of the dear girl, who should not see ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... holiest of holies as a throwing open of the various divisions or compartments of the celestial kingdom for all the angels to hasten forth together, from their several places of indolence and carelessness and self-indulgence, (for such he represents their state to have been,) to visit this earth. Surely such a comment would better suit the mythology of the cave and dens of AEolus and his imprisoned winds (velut agmine facto qua data porta ruunt) ...
— Primitive Christian Worship • James Endell Tyler
... St. Clair achieved better results. She was a gentle girl, with an affectionate, yielding disposition, tending towards indolence and self-indulgence. Her aunt's chief concern about her was that she should be frocked and mannered as became her position. Her education was committed to a very select young ladies' school, where only the daughters of the first families ever entered. What or how they were taught, her aunt never inquired. ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... another—Dermot, who thenceforward viewed him with unvarying hero-worship, and accepted Eustace as his appendage; and George Yolland, the very reverse of all Dermot's high-bred form of Irishism, and careless, easy self-indulgence. ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... could produce nothing better. How would he and such men as he stand the great ordeal when it came? If wealth, education, and breeding were to result in a class who could only carp and criticize, accumulate money, give way to self-indulgence, and cherish low foreign ideals, then would it have appeared that there was a radical unsoundness in our society, refinement would have been proved to be weakness, and the highest education would have been shown to be ...
— Hero Tales From American History • Henry Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt
... discrimination of characters; and that what any one says might, with equal propriety, have been said by another. The general design is, perhaps, open to criticism; but the composition can seldom be charged with inaccuracy or negligence. The author never slumbers in self-indulgence; his full vigour is always exerted; scarcely a line is left unfinished; nor is it easy to find an expression used by constraint, or a thought imperfectly expressed. It was remarked by Pope, that The Dispensary had been corrected in every edition, and that every change was an improvement. ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... English poor always utter the names of the titled classes. And so in fact it was; for the famous gout doctor had lately been knighted for his eminent services in saving a royal duke from the worst effects of his own self-indulgence. Dolly put one fat finger to her lip, and elevated her eyebrows, and looked grave at once. Sir Anthony Merrick! What a very grand gentleman he must be indeed, and how nice it must seem to be able to drive in so distinguished a vehicle with ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... advising me, you would tell me precisely what I'm telling you. Here, where's that rascal of mine?' He opened the door and shouted, and in came a bronzed dragoon in civilian costume. 'Get a bottle of champagne and bring glasses. I've been longing for an excuse for self-indulgence all the morning, and I'm much obliged to ...
— VC — A Chronicle of Castle Barfield and of the Crimea • David Christie Murray
... Pompeii; and the respectability of the survival of the fittest is its own. But almonds-and-raisins are different; to a certain class of society they represent the embodiment of refinement and luxury and self-indulgence." ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... the King's favorite companions, on account, as it should seem, of the strong opposition between their characters. The parts of D'Argens were good, and his manners those of a finished French gentleman; but his whole soul was dissolved in sloth, timidity, and self-indulgence. His was one of that abject class of minds which are superstitious without being religious. Hating Christianity with a rancor which made him incapable of rational inquiry, unable to see in the harmony ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... and these means can be procured only by sinning. Obstacles often stand in the way and new sins furnish steps to vault over, or implements to batter them down. Intricate and difficult conditions frequently arise as the result of self-indulgence, out of which there is no exit but by fresh sins. Hence the long train of crimes led by one capital sin towards the goal of its satisfaction, and hence the havoc wrought by its untrammeled working in a ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... visible in peaceful days. God! wondrous are Thy ways, For out of chaos comes construction; out of darkness and of doubt And the black pit of death comes glorious faith; From want and waste comes thrift, from weakness strength and power And to the summits men and women lift Their souls from self-indulgence in this hour, This crucial hour of life: So shines the golden side of this black shield ...
— Hello, Boys! • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... I wanted, in place of the life of self-indulgence, to which I was yielding myself, a happy, conscious sense that I was pleasing God, living right, and spending all my powers to get others into such a life. I saw that all this ought to be, and I decided that it should be. It is wonderful that I should have reached this decision ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... little house. You will have treated them handsomely, and, whatever happens, you will be glad of it." Mr. Wentworth was liberal, and he knew he was liberal. It gave him pleasure to know it, to feel it, to see it recorded; and this pleasure is the only palpable form of self-indulgence with which the narrator of these incidents will be able ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... committed a crime, that May awaited Annie in the drawing-room to which the probationers' friends were free at St. Ebbe's. The consciousness had come too late of having wasted the little money her father had to spare on sentimental self-indulgence and the gratification of her own feelings instead of employing it as it was meant to be employed, in controlling herself and doing her duty, so as to acquire fitting arms for the battle ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... continent? It is the 'Kaiser' in each one of us that makes wars possible. It is because we have in every nation, and in every class, multitudes of men and women who neglect the service of their fellow-creatures in a desire for self-indulgence and self-aggrandizement, that this catastrophe has fallen upon us all. It is a case of devil-possession, and our only hope is to exorcise ourselves of the evil spirit. Our avowed intention is to cast out 'Kaiserism' in Germany by brute ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... world's vocations only, without a deep inculcation of the love and fear of God, and the penalty hereafter of an irreligious and wicked life, will have but one leading idea—self-aggrandizement and self-indulgence, and will be checked by no restraint of conscience in the way and means of securing them. Gigantic frauds will be perpetrated, if riches can thus be acquired; atrocious murders will be committed, if these will remove the barrier to unholy and polluting connections, or cast out of sight the ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... destination; and under mistakes, advice of friends, doubted his chances, as a story-writer, even after Treasure Island had enjoyed its special success. . . . We venture to think that, with his love of intellectual self-indulgence, had he found novel-writing really enjoyable, he would never have doubted at all. But there comes in the difference between him and Scott, whom he condemns for the slovenliness of hasty workmanship. Scott, in his best days, sat down to his desk and let the swift ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... measured and even habit of mind, who may have occasionally indulged in sensual gratifications to prove that he thought them lawful, but who generally preferred, as a matter of taste, the exercises of the intellect to the more violent forms of self-indulgence. And this life, it seems to us, would be most consistent with his opinions. To avoid commotion, to make the stream of life flow on as easily as possible, was clearly the aim of his philosophy."—Maurice's "Ancient ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... having that force of thought and that sense of right which are the warp and woof of greatness.... Thus was formed a romantic character, absolutely without any vulgar trait; living to ideal ends, without any mixture of self-indulgence or compromise, such as lowers the value of benevolent and thoughtful men we know; abstemious, refusing luxuries, not sourly and reproachfully, but simply as unfit for his habit; quiet and gentle as a child, in the house. And as happens usually to ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... continued; "and those who could not conscientiously say Yes, ought not, I said, to take the charge of children. For love alone will lead us to make sacrifices, and children constantly require us to give up our own ease and self-indulgence, and devote ourselves unceasingly to all their wants. A nurse should feel herself a temporary mother, and should make her every thought tend to her children's welfare. It is a high and honorable post, and has a rich reward, when well sustained. You must excuse me, therefore, if, with such ...
— The Young Emigrants; Madelaine Tube; The Boy and the Book; and - Crystal Palace • Susan Anne Livingston Ridley Sedgwick
... in Southern California, moving from one large hotel crowded with Eastern visitors to another. This uncommon self-indulgence and her devotion to Helene were the only weak spots Ruyler was able to discover in that cast-iron character. She seldom attended the brilliant entertainments of her daughter and refused the endowed car ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... braver, fairer, to fight it out alone, eradicate what threatens you—oh, my own darling! my little Geraldine!—is it not fairer to the man you love? Is he not worth striving for, suffering for? Have you no courage to endure if he is to be the reward? Is a little selfish weakness, a miserable self-indulgence to stand between ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... straphanging on the District Railway in the morning to the straphanging on the District Railway the next morning. Beware of hope, and beware of ambition! Each is excellently tonic, like German competition, in moderation. But all of you are suffering from self-indulgence in the first, and very many of you are ruining your constitutions with the second. Be it known unto you, my dear men and women, that existence rightly considered is a fair compromise between two instincts—the instinct of hoping one day to live, ...
— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett
... splendid mansions in Seville he selected for his residence, and in less than two years he found that one-half of his princely fortune had melted away. They were two years of adulation, of self-indulgence, of mental intoxication. It was a delirious dream from which he suddenly awoke. Reflection taught him that he must immediately curtail his expenses, and very seriously, or engage in some new enterprise ...
— Ferdinand De Soto, The Discoverer of the Mississippi - American Pioneers and Patriots • John S. C. Abbott
... spite of them, still remain immensely incurious about us. The American who wishes to be taken nationally by them must often inspire them with a curiosity about us, before he can gratify it, and that is a species of self-indulgence which leaves ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... necessity calls from the darkened room, the languid trance of pain, in which the wearied heart longs to indulge, and gives this trite prose of common life, at which our weak and wearied appetites so revolt! Mary never thought of such a thing as self-indulgence;—this daughter of the Puritans had her seed within her. Arial in her delicacy, as the blue-eyed flax-flower with which they sowed their fields, she had yet its strong fibre, which no stroke of the flail could break; bruising and hackling ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... thought for its own sake; the life of a dreamer or idealist; a life like that of Coleridge, with his paralysis of will and abnormal activity of the speculative faculty, eternally spinning metaphysical cobwebs, doubtless seemed to the author of "The Strenuous Life" a career of mere self-indulgence. It is not without significance that, with all his passion for out of doors, for wild life and the study of bird and beast, he nowhere, so far as I can remember, mentions Thoreau,[A] who is far and away our greatest nature writer. Doubtless he may have esteemed ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... leave it clear. The work displays the iridescent brightness as well as the occasional impurity of this froth-like character. Beauty and ugliness are, indeed, almost inseparable in the moral impression which it leaves upon us. The author has put forth a plea for self-indulgence with a much slighter attempt at dramatic disguise than his special pleadings generally assume; and while allowing circumstances to expose the sophistry of the position, and punish its attendant act, he does not sufficiently ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... our character. What is the quality of our anger? What kindles it? Is it incited by our own wrongs or by the wrongs of another? Is it set on fire by self-indulgence or by a noble sympathy? Here is a sentence which describes the anger of the Apostle Paul: "Who is made to stumble and I burn not?" Paul's holy anger was made to burn by oppression, by the cruelty inflicted upon his fellow-men. His fire had ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... others which we praise or those acts of ourselves which, on reflexion, we approve involve some amount of sacrifice, whereas all those acts of others which we blame, or those acts of ourselves which, on reflexion, we disapprove involve some amount of self-indulgence. The conflict is between a man's own lower and higher good, or between his own good and the greater good of others, or, in certain cases, as we shall see presently, between the lesser good of some, ...
— Progressive Morality - An Essay in Ethics • Thomas Fowler
... composed of society butterflies. One man hovered attentive about the most beautiful of these, and whispered entertainingly as she scanned the gowns submitted to her choice. He was a dissolute—looking man, although faultlessly arrayed. His hair was thin, his eyes were cruel, and his face bespoke self-indulgence. ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... command; but there was something within him that spurned this ignoble existence, and called for higher aims and worthier exertion. He was not vicious, he never had been vicious, or, as somebody else said, his vices were all refined vices; but a life of mere self-indulgence, although pursued without self- satisfaction, is constantly lowering the standard and weakening the forces of virtue lessening the whole man. He felt it so; and to leave his ordinary scenes and occupations, and lose a morning with little Fleda, was a freshening ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... judging of pleasures is that so well expressed by Seneca: 'Sic praesentibus utaris voluptatibus ut futuris non noceas'—so to use present pleasures as not to impair future ones. Drunkenness, sensuality, gambling, habitual extravagance and self-indulgence, if they become the pleasures of youth, will almost infallibly lead to the ruin of a life. Pleasures that are in themselves innocent lose their power of pleasing if they become the sole or main object ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... Here he appears the idol of the hearth—genial, graceful, gifted, beautiful, and warm-hearted. But he betrays ambition, sudden and great haste to be married, and some selfishness. He walks to his lodging in a neighbouring village, where trifling circumstances point to a refined sensuousness, self-indulgence, and sophistry in his character, leading to the neglect of serious duty. The shadow of impending tragedy is hinted at from the first line ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... tell me precisely what I'm telling you. Here, where's that rascal of mine?' He opened the door and shouted, and in came a bronzed dragoon in civilian costume. 'Get a bottle of champagne and bring glasses. I've been longing for an excuse for self-indulgence all the morning, and I'm much obliged to ...
— VC — A Chronicle of Castle Barfield and of the Crimea • David Christie Murray
... devotees,—persons who mistake spiritual selfishness for sanctity, and grab at the infinite prize of the great Future and Elsewhere with the egotism they excommunicate in its hardly more odious forms of avarice and self-indulgence. How could he speak with the old physician and the old black woman about a sorrow and a terror which but to name was to strike dumb ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... she should be taken to Italy. This may, without any exaggeration, be called the turning-point and the last great earthly opportunity of Barrett's character. He had not originally been an evil man, only a man who, being stoical in practical things, permitted himself, to his great detriment, a self-indulgence in moral things. He had grown to regard his pious and dying daughter as part of the furniture of the house and of the universe. And as long as the great mass of authorities were on his side, his illusion was quite pardonable. His crisis came when ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... the people of older lands a strange and fascinating interest. Every one on the range had money; every one was independent. Once more it seemed that man had been able to overleap the confining limitations of his life, and to attain independence, self-indulgence, ease and liberty. A chorus of Homeric, riotous mirth, as of a land in laughter, rose up all over the great range. After all, it seemed that we had a new world left, a land not yet used. We still were young! The cry arose that there was land enough for all out West. And at ...
— The Passing of the Frontier - A Chronicle of the Old West, Volume 26 in The Chronicles - Of America Series • Emerson Hough
... apparently a kind master. His servants lived with him till they became friends, and he took care to pay so well the unfortunate servant whose sleep was broken by his calls, that she said that she would want no wages in a family where she had to wait upon Mr. Pope. Another form of self-indulgence was more injurious to himself. He pampered his appetite with highly seasoned dishes, and liked to receive delicacies from his friends. His death was imputed by some of his friends, says Johnson, to "a silver saucepan in which it was his delight to ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... in every corner of this continent? It is the 'Kaiser' in each one of us that makes wars possible. It is because we have in every nation, and in every class, multitudes of men and women who neglect the service of their fellow-creatures in a desire for self-indulgence and self-aggrandizement, that this catastrophe has fallen upon us all. It is a case of devil-possession, and our only hope is to exorcise ourselves of the evil spirit. Our avowed intention is to cast out 'Kaiserism' in ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... number of them may find their highest happiness in knowledge and wisdom rather than in amateur theatricals and fancy-dress balls. The human mind, after all, cannot find rest in triviality, and after so long a period of the most sordid and vulgar self-indulgence it is reasonable to hope that our ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... was conformable to his taste, within his capacity, and compatible with entire personal freedom. His patron did as the world is so naturally ready to do with those who choose the stoic's way; he declared that Rousseau was gone mad.[208] Talk like this had no effect on a man whom self-indulgence led into a path that others would only have been forced into by self-denial. Let it be said, however, that this is a form of self-indulgence of which society is never likely to see an excess, and meanwhile we may continue to ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... evidently priding herself on her independence of thought. "God is the same every where. We have an excellent priest, he conducts the service decently and with dignity, and the deacon is the same. What holiness is there in giving concerts in the choir? I don't like it, it's just self-indulgence!" ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... than any fiend's kitchen or subterranean Smithfield that ye'll hear o' in the pulpits—the hell on earth o' being a flunkey, and a humbug, and a useless peacock, wasting God's gifts on your ain lusts and pleasures—and kenning it—and not being able to get oot o' it for the chains of vanity and self-indulgence." ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... has been lost to me, I have often thought that I might have done more good with it. But the fact is, my dear children, there is nothing so dangerous to our eternal welfare as great wealth; it tends to harden the heart by affording the means of constant self-indulgence:—under such circumstances, man is apt to become selfish, easily satisfied with his own works, and too proud to see his errors. Did you observe in the Litany, which I read at this morning's service, how very appropriately is inserted the prayer for deliverance ...
— The Settlers in Canada • Frederick Marryat
... the Seven Sacraments. He still believed in the Brethren's system of stern moral discipline. He still believed, for practical reasons, in the celibacy of the clergy. "This eating," he wrote, "this drinking, this self-indulgence, this marrying, this living to the world—what a poor preparation it is for men who are leaving Babylon. If a man does this he is yoking himself with strangers. Marriage never made anyone holy yet. It is a hindrance to the ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... suggested the man who had relentlessly fought his way to whatever position of dominancy he might then occupy. He wore the same faded black hat planted squarely on his head, and was in his shirt-sleeves. The only sign of self-indulgence betrayed in him or his surroundings was an old crucible, serving as an ash tray, which was half-filled with cigar stumps, and Dick observed, in that instant's swift appraisement, that even these were chewed as if between the teeth of a mentally ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... would open their souls to receive. Like themselves, their gifts were invisible—incapable of weight and measurement in gross earthly scales. To mourners they carried joy; to weary and perplexed hearts, peace; to souls stifling in luxury and self-indulgence they carried that noble discontent that rises to aspiration for higher things. Sometimes they took away an earthly treasure to make room for a heavenly one. They took health, but left resignation ...
— Betty's Bright Idea; Deacon Pitkin's Farm; and The First Christmas - of New England • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... II. was not characterized by any special development in the political condition of the country. Lacking in energy and decision, given to self-indulgence, controlled by courtiers and favorite women, although by the partition of Poland he increased the national domains, and by educational measures helped to promote German literature instead of the French preferred by his father, he was yet too inferior to the great Frederick to be able to uphold ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Lizzy, then examined my papers to see what is to be burned. I wish I knew what I was made for—I mean, in particular—what I can do, and what I ought to do. I can not bear to live a life of literary self-indulgence, which is no better than another self-indulgence. I do want to be of some use in the world, but I am infinitely perplexed as to the how and the what. Aug. 26th.—Hurried through the last 200 pages of Mackintosh today. On the whole, there is much to like as well as to admire in him. ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... Men began coming to the clinics. I found I was making enough out of the patients who could pay to add a few free wards. I want to tell you now, Wilson, that the opening of those free wards was the greatest self-indulgence I ever permitted myself. I'd seen so much careless attention given the poor—well, never mind that. It was almost three years ago that things began to go wrong. I lost a ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... rich or curious rhymes. Next year (1833) in the Revue des Deux Mondes appeared Rolla, the poem which marks the culmination of Musset's early manner, and of Byron's influence on his genius; the prodigal, beggared of faith, debased by self-indulgence, is not quite a disbeliever in love; through passion he hastens forward in desperation ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... chandelier. The furniture was exceedingly rich. Fresh from our old farmhouse, with its homely board and benches in the dining-room, and a few wicker chairs in the best parlor, it struck me that here was the fulfilment of every fantasy of an imagination revelling in various methods of costly self-indulgence and splendid ease. Pictures, marbles, vases,—in brief, more shapes of luxury than there could be any object in enumerating, except for an auctioneer's advertisement,—and the whole repeated and doubled by ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... turn upon us, with a pernicious subtlety, and show, to such a condensing point has the effeminate spirit reached among us, that we have compressed the essence of two such establishments into one! Mr. Harris might have carried out his argument, and shown also that to such a pass of self-indulgence have we reached, that Washington itself is so "situated as to enjoy the advantages of both ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... a life of self-indulgence till he doesn't know how to control a thought or a passion. It was something of that kind which was meant when we were told about the rich man and the ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... robes, like courtiers', but a girdle of camels' hair, not delicate food, but locusts and wild honey, were his. And that was another part of his power, as it must be, in one shape or other, of all who rouse men's consciences, and wake up generations rotting away in self-indulgence. John's fiery words would have had no effect if they had not poured hot from a life that despised luxury and soft ease. If a man is once suspected of having his heart set on material good, his usefulness as a Christian teacher is weakened, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... an untiring wing. You may possess a more extensive dominion by controlling a craving disposition, than if you could unite Libya to the distant Gades, and the natives of both the Carthages were subject to you alone. The direful dropsy increases by self-indulgence, nor extinguishes its thirst, unless the cause of the disorder has departed from the veins, and the watery languor from the pallid body. Virtue, differing from the vulgar, excepts Phraates though restored to the throne of Cyrus, from ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... strength of her mother's character, but admired her mother's ways, and followed Lady Aylmer in all things at a distance. She was very good as indeed was Lady Aylmer entertaining a high idea of duty, and aware that her own life admitted of but little self-indulgence. She had no pleasures, she incurred no expenses; and was quite alive to the fact that as Aylmer Park required a regiment of lazy, gormandizing servants to maintain its position in the county, the Aylmers themselves should not be lazy, and should not gormandize. No one was ...
— The Belton Estate • Anthony Trollope
... expense was the smallest objection. No boy of fourteen can smoke without being affected injuriously. Men are frequently injured by smoking, and boys always. But large numbers of the newsboys and boot-blacks form the habit. Exposed to the cold and wet they find that it warms them up, and the self-indulgence grows upon them. It is not uncommon to see a little boy, too young to be out of his mother's sight, smoking with all the apparent satisfaction of ...
— Ragged Dick - Or, Street Life in New York with the Boot-Blacks • Horatio Alger
... their hearts to cheer. Ere long, however, troubles unforeseen Burst on the little band with shafts so keen That WILLIAM'S faith and strength were sorely tried, And with his lot he was dissatisfied. One of the flock was easily led astray, And self-indulgence held him in its sway. Two others left because a change of view Made several seek to be ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd
... have been hard to recognise the vigorous seaman of Papeete roads. He kept himself reasonably well in hand till he had taken the sun and yawned and blotted through his calculations; but from the moment he rolled up the chart, his hours were passed in slavish self-indulgence or in hoggish slumber. Every other branch of his duty was neglected, except maintaining a stern discipline about the dinner-table. Again and again Herrick would hear the cook called aft, and see him running with fresh ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... it, with the exception of the brilliant and successful surprise raids which Washington made upon Trenton and Princeton. But these exploits were wholly owing to Washington's skill, and sleepless energy, and heroic courage, with feeble forces, in contrast to the lethargy and self-indulgence of the English officers on the one hand and the inactivity of Congress ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... colonization of those regions. Social life is an elaborate apeing of behavior which has no root in the real impulses of the human heart; its true underlying spirit is made up of hatred, covetousness, and self-indulgence. There are no illusions left to us, no high, inspiring sentiment. We have reached our limit, and the best thing to be hoped for now is some vast cataclysmal event, which, by destroying us out-of-hand, may save us the slow misery of extinction by disease, ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... future; that what is seen must give way to what is believed. Nay, more, she drank in the teaching which at first seemed so paradoxical, that even present happiness and present greatness lie in relinquishing what at first sight seems to promise them; that the way to true pleasure is, not through self-indulgence, but through mortification; that the way to power is weakness, the way to success failure, the way to wisdom foolishness, the way to glory dishonour. She saw that there was a higher beauty than ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... English political system, and to some extent in the English character, is a weakness which necessarily produces a curious crop of superstitions, of lying legends, of evident delusions clung to through low spiritual self-indulgence. There are so many of these public-school superstitions that I have here only space for one of them, which may be called the superstition of soap. It appears to have been shared by the ablutionary Pharisees, who resembled the English public-school aristocrats in so many respects: ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... coldly. "The lines are obscured by cushions of flesh; no heart line at all, mentality small, self-indulgence and irritability very marked." ...
— When a Man Marries • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... through poverty, through injustice, through calumny, through the jealousy of friends and the libel of enemies, and have conquered them all, you know well in your heart that great ignorance, great vanity, great self-indulgence, belong not to the characters of the truly great.—Oh I, I, Irina, the outcast, know that well! Did I tempt you?—Those traits were Joseph's. I, who have loved him, say it. For love of me and of himself, he degraded his art. For himself, he has played and played and ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... after a few acts of weakness, of treachery, of culpable self-indulgence, the survey of our past life can bring discouragement only, whereas we have great need that our past should inspire and sustain us. For therein alone do we truly know what we are; it is only our past that can come to us, in our moments of doubt, and say: "Since ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... were irresistible. My soul would succumb as well as my body. This would seem wild, wicked talk to Mr. Eltinge; it would seem weak and irrational to any man. But I'm only Ida Mayhew, and such is my nature. I've been made all the more incapable of patient self-sacrifice by self-indulgence from my childhood up. Oh, will it be very, very wrong to win him if I can?" and the passionate tears and sobs that followed these words would seem to indicate that she understood her ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... advantages and gifts which reason gives, even though they may be bestowed to an extraordinary degree. There is no more impotent slavery than that to which the most gifted intellects have been occasionally doomed. Self-indulgence is sure to sap every element of moral strength, and to take away from genius itself all power, except to sharpen the stings of self-reproach. "Louis XV. was not insensible to the dangers which menaced his throne, and would have despoiled the Parliament of the right of remonstrance; ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... princes in adversity, as appeared fitted to sustain his drooping spirits. It seems, however, that, according to the general course of violent emotions, the rebound of high spirits was in proportion to his first despondency. He omitted nothing of his usual luxury or self-indulgence, and he even found spirits for going incognito to the theatre, where he took sufficient interest in the public performances, to send a message to a favorite actor. At times, even in this hopeless situation, his native ferocity returned upon him, and he was believed ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... Edgeworth's dear little clean bright-looking boys, who would have carried all he got to his mother; but in Nick it was detestable. No human feeling seemed to warm his young heart, not even the love of self-indulgence, for he was not only ragged and dirty, but looked considerably more than half starved, and I doubt not his dinners and suppers ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... the stress is upon the discipline of the will. The inner reactions of complaint, doubt, or despair turn against the deed, to which Ulysses has to nerve himself by a supreme act of volition. The world of Calypso is that of self-indulgence, inactivity, will-lessness, to which Ulysses has sunk after his sin against the source of light, after his negation of all intelligence. It is not simply sensuous gratification with the mind still whole ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... Harcourt Manor would be done away with. I felt even then the shame and disgrace of so doing, and knew also the trouble and grief I was causing to you, whom (although you may find it difficult to believe) I really loved, and who had ever been such a kind friend to me. I now see that it was a love of self-indulgence which led me to commit so foul a sin. Conscience remonstrated, and the words of the Bible, so early instilled into my mind by my mother, constantly reproached me; but I turned from and stifled the voice of conscience, and deliberately chose the evil way. ...
— Little Frida - A Tale of the Black Forest • Anonymous
... too much difficulty. Nothing is worth doing or well done which is not done fairly easily, and some little deficiency of effort is more pardonable than any very perceptible excess; for virtue has ever erred rather on the side of self-indulgence than of asceticism, and well-being has ever advanced through the pleasures rather ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... account, as it should seem, of the strong opposition between their characters. The parts of D'Argens were good, and his manners those of a finished French gentleman; but his whole soul was dissolved in sloth, timidity, and self-indulgence. He was one of that abject class of minds which are superstitious without being religious. Hating Christianity with a rancour which made him incapable of rational inquiry, unable to see in the harmony ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... extend the kind of cooperation to the less fortunate members that will inspire hope, confidence and progress. A rich nation can for a time, without noticeable damage to itself, pursue a course of self-indulgence, making its single goal the material ease and comfort of its own citizens-thus repudiating its own spiritual and material stake in a peaceful and prosperous society of nations. But the enmities it will incur, the isolation into which it will descend, and the internal moral and physical softness ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... deny his animal nature, to persuade himself that he is not limited by its weaknesses nor concerned in its fate. And this impulse may be harmless, when it is genuine. But what are we to say when we see the formulas of heroic self-deception made use of by unheroic self-indulgence? What are we to say when we see asceticism preached to the poor by fat and comfortable retainers of the rich? What are we to say when we see idealism become hypocrisy, and the moral and spiritual heritage of mankind twisted to the ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... the one to whom, with her desire of heaven for her child, whatever might become of herself, she would wish to entrust him. Slight speeches, telling of a selfish, worldly nature, unnoticed at the time, came back upon her ear, having a new significance. They told of a low standard, of impatient self-indulgence, of no acknowledgment of things spiritual and heavenly. Even while this examination was forced upon her, by the new spirit of maternity that had entered into her, and made her child's welfare supreme, she hated and reproached herself for the necessity ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... as a poet, to live; reticent where it approaches the complexities of the concrete which the poet was not yet sufficiently mature to handle, restrained where increased power was to breed a too generous self-indulgence, a too manifest aptitude for glorying and drinking deep. It is flushed with the peculiar mellow beauty which comes if at all to the early manhood of genius,—a beauty like that of Amiens or Lincoln in Gothic art, where the crudeness of youth is overworn, and the problems of ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... of these, you may say, are the demands of luxury, of indolent ease, of man setting nature to work and lapsing in self-indulgence. To some degree this result may grow out of the present state of things; as some portion of evil will follow in the sweep of an immense good. But what is the precise sentence to be passed upon this prevalent luxury? Of course, admitting the evil—which is apparent—I maintain ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... walked into the shop with a staggering gait; his eyes glittered and his mouth hung half open in anticipation of racy talk and self-indulgence, while his great nose, his pink cheeks, his fat, loose hands and his big belly, gallantly carried, gave him, beneath his jacket and felt hat, a perfect likeness to a little rustic god his ancestors worshipped, the ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... attain, and well worth the contemplation of the Protestant, both as sternly significative of an episcopal authority which in the early days of the Church was never disputed, and as dependent for all its impressiveness on the utter absence of any expression either of pride or self-indulgence. ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... it in a very hard way but with great calm and fortitude. She felt that she had failed her aunt, that she should have been with her, instead of at the war. She blames herself. She felt that being at the war was a form of selfishness of self-indulgence, when her duty should have been to ...
— Nelka - Mrs. Helen de Smirnoff Moukhanoff, 1878-1963, a Biographical Sketch • Michael Moukhanoff
... feast proceeded, he grew more sober. He felt that college life, however much it was doing for the faithful students, was only fostering self-indulgence in ...
— Walter Sherwood's Probation • Horatio Alger
... upon every wind that blows, every rain that falls, and every vapour that hangs in the air, the evils which arise from their own imprudence or the gloom which is engendered in their own tempers,—and that all men and women, in couples or otherwise, who fall into exclusive habits of self-indulgence, and forget their natural sympathy and close connexion with everybody and everything in the world around them, not only neglect the first duty of life, but, by a happy retributive justice, deprive themselves of its truest and ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... armful of girl," buxom and hearty. Often, therefore, when she had gone to bed, he would refresh himself by a vigorous flirtation with Madame Seraphine de Belle-Ile, a brisk and vivacious young widow, who affected always gowns of a peculiarly vivid and searching scarlet. And this self-indulgence proved in the end the ruin of his fine scheme of establishing himself in life on ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... suppose that is about the truth of it; and indeed, indeed, I do sympathise with you. If you have done that, though it is no more than the plainest duty, I will love you for it. One finds so few people that will do any duty that taxes their self-indulgence." ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... touched upon the character of Gian Maria Sforza, the reigning Duke of Babbiano—seated upon its throne by his powerful uncle, Lodovico Sforza, Lord of Milan. He exposed the man's reckless extravagances, his continued self-indulgence, his carelessness in matters of statecraft, and his apparent disinclination to fulfil the duties which his high station imposed upon him. On all this Fabrizio touched with most commendable discretion and restraint, as was demanded by the circumstance that in Francesco del Falco he was addressing ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... really did want to go out and fight, as he had always wanted to follow Jerrold's lead; he wanted it so badly that it seemed to him a form of self-indulgence; and this idea of taking a better man's place so worked on him that he had almost decided to give it up, since that was the sacrifice required of him, when he told Queenie what ...
— Anne Severn and the Fieldings • May Sinclair
... new guns, powder, bullets, small shot, knives, and axes "against another going out or hunting." When the new munitions had been paid for, the buccaneers knew exactly how much money they could spend in self-indulgence. Those who have seen a cowboy on a holiday, or a sailor newly home from the seas, will understand the nature of the "great liberality" these hunters practised on such occasions. One who saw a good deal of their way of life[7] has written that their chief vice, or debauchery, was ...
— On the Spanish Main - Or, Some English forays on the Isthmus of Darien. • John Masefield
... he had to seek in the Church. Denied the wild wit-combats of the Mermaid, he disported himself in a pamphlet-war on bishops and divorce. But he found health and exercise for his faculties there; and the moral (for all things have a moral) is this: that when, in a mood of self-indulgence, we can write habitually with the gust, the licentious force, the flow, and the careless wealthy insolence of the Animadversions upon the Remonstrant's Defence against Smectymnuus, we need not then repine or be ill-content if we find that we can rise only ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... been given a glimpse of another life—one employed in the King's service. And she had seen also the life that the unfortunate ones of the earth led, the cruel misery they suffered, and it had all seemed to her the direct result of her own self-indulgence. She had fled from that selfish life, and now her act was likely to bring disaster upon those she loved best, and she was in doubt. Perhaps she had done wrong. Had she? And was it possible a right act could bring ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... strawberries what would maintain a poor man for a year, would learn how infinitely more noble was the abstinence of this young Roman, who though born in the midst of splendour and luxury, learnt from the first to loathe the petty vice of gluttony, and to despise the unmanliness of self-indulgence. Very early in life he joined the glorious fellowship of those who esteem it not only a ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... just so much money down, and for nothing more noble, it is a hideous system, and one that makes the modern mother utterly inexplicable. We wonder where her mere instincts can be, not to speak of her reason, her love, her conscience, her pride. Pleasure and self-indulgence have indeed gained tremendous power, in these later days, when they can thus break down the force of the strongest law of nature, a law stronger even than that ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... see Chaucer dwells on the color just as much as the painter does, but the painter has also given her the English shield to bear, meaning that good-humor, or debonnairete, cannot be maintained by self-indulgence;—only by fortitude. Farther note, with Chaucer, the "eyen glad," and brows "bent" (high-arched and calm), the strong life, (hair down to the heels,) and that her gladness is to be without subtlety,—that is ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... Adrian; he found he had mistaken vivacity for genius, and frankness of manner for generosity of heart, when in fact his favourite proved unformed and untaught, indifferent to the opinion of all whom he ought to have valued, and given up to idleness and self-indulgence. Such a companion was quitted without any effort of resolution, but the sister's power over him did not yield so easily. Amaranthe's vanity had been too much flattered by such a conquest, for her ...
— The Flower Basket - A Fairy Tale • Unknown
... of their success with a strange envy. They were returning home! HOME! For sometimes—but seldom—he thought of his own home and his past. It was a miserable past of forgery and embezzlement that had culminated a career of youthful dissipation and self-indulgence, and shut him out, forever, from the staid old English cathedral town where he was born. He knew that his relations believed and wished him dead. He thought of this past with little pleasure, but with little remorse. Like most of his stamp, ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... occupation, or your companionship will have changed, and so you fondly imagine that you yourself will be sure to change, as if your soul were just a weathercock that answers to every changing breeze. So perhaps you hope that some habit of self-indulgence or idleness will drop off, or some evil temper be eradicated; and whilst all this vague and mischievous dreaming goes on you yield very likely to some besetting sin, making no serious effort to get away from it now, and you yield all the more because of this misleading ...
— Sermons at Rugby • John Percival
... eyes and straight, heavy eyebrows that frequently meet over the nose. Their faces beam with good nature and they evidently regard the frequent enjoyment of coffee and cigarettes as among the real pleasures of life. But the older men all show traces of this life of ease and self-indulgence. It is seldom that one sees a man beyond fifty with a strong face. The Egyptian over forty loses his fine figure, he lays on abundant flesh, his jowl is heavy and his whole face suggests satiety and the loss of that pleasure in mere existence that ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... own life was reflected in his verse, just as the mad license and the furious self-indulgence of Byron are mirrored in Don Juan, Manfred and Cain. Even to extreme old age Tennyson preserved that high poetic faculty which he manifested in early youth. One of his latest poems, Crossing the Bar, is also one of the finest in the language, breathing the old man's assurance of a life ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... gracious realities relating to the coming of the Master. The followers of Christ must be on their guard lest they be overcome by the influences which Jesus described as characterizing the days immediately preceding his return. There will be temptation to self-indulgence and indifference and absorption in worldly cares. Believers are warned to be on their watch lest the coming of Christ overtake them unexpectedly, as indeed it will come upon others. They are urged to watch and to pray that they may be able to escape from those ...
— The Gospel of Luke, An Exposition • Charles R. Erdman
... habitually met their clients in taverns, and having talked themselves dry at the bars of Westminster Hall, drank themselves speechless at the bars of Strand taverns—ere they reeled again into their chambers. The same habits of uproarious self-indulgence were in vogue with the benchers of the inns, and the Doctors of Doctors' Commons. Hale's austerity was the exceptional demeanor of a pious man protesting against the wickedness of an impious age. Had it not been for the shortness of time that had elapsed since ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... pages were appearing serially I was remonstrated with for bad economy; as if such writing were a form of self-indulgence wasting the substance of future volumes. It seems that I am not sufficiently literary. Indeed, a man who never wrote a line for print till he was thirty-six cannot bring himself to look upon his existence and his experience, ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... one will simply ruin him. My dear, I am continually amazed at the way people are living whose incomes I know to the last sou. What an example for Jacqueline! Extravagance, fast living, elegant self-indulgence.... Did you observe the Baronne's gown?—of rough woolen stuff. She told some one it was the last creation of Doucet, and you know what that implies! His serge costs more than one of our velvet gowns . . . . And then her artistic tastes, her bric-a brac! Her salon looks ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... learned that for such an escapade as his last he might easily obtain forgiveness. It was not that Charles was, even in youth, a sincere or warm friend. His easy good nature had its root in self-indulgence. Clarendon, who knew him and his family intus et in cute, has pointed this out in one of his best character sentences. "They were too much inclined to love men at first sight," so writes the faithful servant ...
— St George's Cross • H. G. Keene
... conveniences, from the need to continue wage-earning as long as endurance will hold out, and also from the sheer carelessness which is a part of their necessary habit, both the men and the women not seldom allow themselves to fall into sickness which a little self-indulgence, if only they dared yield to it, would enable them to avoid. I should not know how to begin counting the numbers I have personally known enfeebled for life in this way. Things are better now than they were twenty years ago; there are many more ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... attention was so suddenly drawn. They were, in that somewhat heterogeneous crowd, sufficiently noticeable. The man, although he assumed the jauntiness of youth, was past middle-age, and his mottled cheeks, his thin, watery eyes, and thick red neck were the unmistakeable hall-marks of years of self-indulgence. He was well dressed and groomed, and his demeanour towards his companion was one of deferential good humour. She, however, was a person of a very different order. She was a girl apparently between fifteen and sixteen, her figure as yet undeveloped, her dresses a little ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... been taken from the indulgent arms of his weak and doating mother, and placed under like healthy training, where his really fine qualities of heart and mind might have been cultured, and he might early have been taught to curb that hot and hasty temper, and to restrain those habits of self-indulgence, which ...
— Lewie - Or, The Bended Twig • Cousin Cicely
... vindictively, will you be aroused, in sleepless hours of unbearable misery (future-waking nightmares), from your false, uneasy dream of death; to participate in an inheritance of woe still worse than yours—worse with all the accumulated interest of long years and centuries of iniquitous self-indulgence, and poisoned by the sting of a self-reproach that shall never cease till the last of your tainted progeny dies out, and finds his true nirvana, and yours, in the dim, forgetful depths of ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... diseases, shut herself up in her house, and refused to see any one. She grew morbid and was sure that every person who approached her had some sneaking, personal, hostile motive. Though always busy, she accomplished little. Desultory work, procrastination, and self-indulgence destroyed her power of concentration. She could not think long enough on one subject to think it out straight, therefore she was constantly deceived in her friends and interests. She first trusted everybody, then mistrusted everybody. Infatuation with every new acquaintance was quickly followed ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... of sheiks, dressed in the utmost simplicity, and seated before his writing materials in a plain room, surrounded by books. He wished to disabuse them of the idea that he led in private a life of luxury and self-indulgence. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... intuition than of knowledge—gave her pleasure of richer quality. High-tempered she unquestionably read him, arrogant and on occasion not inconceivably remorseless; but neither mean nor ungenerous, his energy unwasted, his mind untainted by self-indulgence. If he were capable of cruelty to others, he was at least equally capable of turning the knife on himself, cutting off or plucking out an offending member. This appealed to the heroic in her. While over her vision, ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... they strayed, nor how mercilessly obstacles must be tramped down, in order to facilitate the accomplishment of his purposes. Naturally neither cruel nor vindictive, he had gradually grown pitiless in all that conduced to self-aggrandizement or self-indulgence; incapable of a generosity that involved even slight sacrifice, a polished handsome epicurean, an experienced man of the world, putting aside all scruples in the attainment ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... neighbours, who were regarding them as they met, would have said that once Miss Betsey had been much handsomer than ever Miss Elizabeth would be. For Miss Betsey had been young at a time when there was little danger that indolence or self-indulgence could injure the full development of healthful beauty, and as yet Miss Elizabeth had fallen on easy days, and was languid at times, and delicate, and if the truth must be told, a little discontented with what life had as yet brought her, and a little afraid of what might lie before her, and ...
— David Fleming's Forgiveness • Margaret Murray Robertson
... some of Evadne's wisdom occurring to her with the old worn axiom upon which for untold ages the masculine excuse for self-indulgence at the expense of the woman has rested. "I believe Evadne is right after all. I shall get out her letters, and read them again. And what is more, I shall write to her just ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... peering countenance than I thought I saw a startled opening of its lips; it withdrew and was gone. I had merely caught a glance at it, yet of this I am sure—the face was white with the pallor of things that grow in a cellar, it was weak with the terrible drooping, hopeless weakness of endless self-indulgence; it was a brutal face, and yet wore the expression of timid, anxious, pathetic inquiry. It was a face that had come to ask a question. And though, because only the pale skin had reflected the light from within, I had not seen what might have appeared ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... had a kitchen to herself, in the morning. She either ousted her landlady, or used her as second cook. For Madame was a gourmet, if not gourmand. If she inclined towards self-indulgence in any direction, it was in the direction of food. She loved a good table. And hence the Tawaras saved less money than they might. She was an exacting, tormenting, bullying cook. Alvina, who knew well enough how to prepare a simple dinner, was offended by Madame's exactions. Madame ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... elements is present in the home out of which family life can be reconstructed, if the man's self-indulgence and cruelty have been proved beyond any doubt, or if affection is dead or never existed, then the decision may have to be that no reconciliation be attempted. In many cases the question then is how best to ...
— Broken Homes - A Study of Family Desertion and its Social Treatment • Joanna C. Colcord
... dangerous passive enemy called sentimentality. He lolls upon a couch to music when he ought to be carrying her glove to battle. Olivia is in an unreal mood of mourning for her brother. Grief is a destroying passion. Olivia makes it a form of self-indulgence, or one sweet the more to attract flies to her. Malvolio is in an unreal mood of self-importance. Long posing at the head of ceremony has given him the faith that ceremony, of which he is the head, is the whole of life. This faith deludes him into a life ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... indifferent, more intelligent than those around him, scarcely a Buddhist in belief, and very kind-hearted: indeed Judson believed that it was his interposition alone that prevented the lives of the captives from being taken at once; but he was demoralized by self-indulgence, and allowed himself to be governed by his queen, the daughter of a superintendent of gaols; and through her, by her brother, who was cruel, rapacious and violent, and the chief author of all the sufferings inflicted on the prisoners. Among these were seven or eight British ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... the doctor, "if you needed soup to keep you up, you would not have to feel any scruple, for it will be no self-indulgence, but a necessity, and the Church does not exact fasting in ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... a bother with himself as me?" he asked vaguely but vehemently. "It's self-indulgence does it—sitting down's the ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... Just look at my lovely acetylene lamps, how they shine, and how I've polished them!' You would not regard him as a Clifford-Earp, or even as an entirely sane man. So with our student of poetry. It is indubitable that a large amount of what is known as self-improvement is simply self-indulgence—a form of pleasure which only incidentally improves a particular part of the machine, and even that to the neglect of far more ...
— The Human Machine • E. Arnold Bennett
... that, as an old woman, she would be unwelcome everywhere. In Aunt Victoria's day old people were only too apt to be selfish, tyrannical, narrow, and ignorant, a terror to their friends; and they were nearly always ill, the old men from lives of self-indulgence, and the old women from unwholesome restraint of every kind. Now we are beginning to ask what becomes of the decrepit old women, there are so few to be seen. This is the age of youthful grandmothers, capable of enjoying a week ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... man so powerful as Henderson as his backer, and a person so omniscient as Mavick for his friend. No combination could be more desirable for a young man who proposed to himself a career of getting money by adroit management and spending it in pure and simple self-indulgence. There are plenty of men who have taken advantage of like conditions to climb from one position to another, and have then kicked down the ladders behind them as fast as they attained a new footing. It was Jack's fault that he was not one ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... first; and then we will see to the rest. My goodness, what a bundle: quackery, ignorance, quarrelsomeness, vainglory; idle questionings, prickly arguments, intricate conceptions; humbug and gammon and wishy-washy hair-splittings without end; and hullo! why here's avarice, and self-indulgence, and impudence! luxury, effeminacy and peevishness!—Yes, I see them all; you need not try to hide them. Away with falsehood and swagger and superciliousness; why, the three-decker is not built that would hold you ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... it was only his early death that deposed him from his place of equality with Newman and Keble and Pusey. Anthony was a sickly child, and from his earliest years lacked the loving care of a mother. He was brought up with Spartan severity by his father and his aunt. The most venial self-indulgence was regarded as criminal. From the age of three he was inured to hardship by being ducked every morning in a trough of ice-cold water. Hurrell Froude felt no tenderness for the ailing lad. Once, in order to rouse a manly spirit in his little brother, he ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... theory was wholly rational—far more rational than yours; rationally it was perfect. It was a wholly logical recoil from the idleness, the lack of purpose, the slipshod self-indulgence under many names that I saw, and see, everywhere about me. I have work to do—serious work of large importance—and it seemed to me my duty to carry it through at all hazards. I need not add that it still seems so. ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... house had taken life a little too easily, had disregarded the warnings of wife and doctor, had dined and slept, and drunk his favourite wines—not immoderately, but with utter disregard of medical regimen—had neither walked, nor ridden, but had let life slip by him in a placid, plethoric self-indulgence—shunning all exertion, all pleasure even, if it were allied with activity of any kind. So, in an existence almost as sleepy as the spell-bound slumber in Beauty's enchanted palace, Ida's father had left the door of his mansion ajar to the fell visitor Death, ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... temptation to ease and self-indulgence, to which men are by nature prone, that the glory is all the greater of those who, born to ample fortunes, nevertheless take an active part in the work of their generation—who "scorn delights and live laborious days." ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... no merit in me, but, as you say, rather self-indulgence, to be looking up and relieving destitute cases. But it would be merit in you, if you don't like it; and you might have all that, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... to battle from the women's chamber, but, hushing the bacchanal shouts and putting an end to the orgies, he became at once, as Euripides calls it, "the minister of the unpriestly Mars;" and, in short, he never once incurred disaster through indolence or self-indulgence. Whereas Antony, like Hercules in the picture where Omphale is seen removing his club and stripping him of his lion's skin, was over and over again disarmed by Cleopatra, and beguiled away, while great actions and enterprises of the first necessity fell, as it ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... virtuous resolutions and a thorough love of things good and noble. Such men,—or women,—may hardly, perhaps, debase themselves with the more vulgar vices. They will not be rogues, or thieves, or drunkards,—or, perhaps, liars; but ambition, luxury, self-indulgence, pride, and covetousness will get a hold of them, and in various moods will be to them virtues in lieu of vices. Such a man was Frank Greystock, who could walk along the banks of the quiet, trout-giving Bob, ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... situation, that no uneasy passion ever arose to excite him—nor care to harass—nor pain to awake him. Even in the severest winter his sleeping-room was without a fire; only in his latter years he yielded so far to the entreaties of his friends as to allow of a very small one. All nursing or self-indulgence found no quarter with Kant. In fact, five minutes, in the coldest weather, sufficed to supersede the first chill of the bed, by the diffusion of a general glow over his person. If he had any occasion to ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... what she had once read, that people would often gladly put away from their children friends the very trials that are sent by Heaven to prove and strengthen their will and power of resisting self-indulgence. Before she had quite thought it out, the quick steps were back again, and Sam greeted the entrance of John thus: "Well, if that isn't a shame! Have you been and done Sukey out of all ...
— The Stokesley Secret • Charlotte M. Yonge
... position in Giovanni's house was a very singular one. His wife was a weak and indolent woman, and with little religious character about her; she was the first of the family, however, over whom Dominica's influence was felt. In a short time her habits of vanity and self-indulgence were laid aside; and she began to pray night and morning, and to attend Mass, which till then she had neglected. Then one of the sons, who was to all outward seeming given up to the thoughtless dissipation ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton
... origin and connexion to the Optimates; but he regarded politics as a game to be played for his personal aggrandizement, and public office as a means of replenishing a purse drained by boundless extravagance and self-indulgence. His record had been bad. He had accompanied his brother-in-law Lucullus, or had joined his staff, in the war with Mithridates, and had helped to excite a mutiny in his army in revenge for some fancied slight. He had then gone to Cilicia, where another brother-in-law, ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... the delight she received from it was of a kind quite new to her. She had to make an effort to close it and turn to her specified occupations. For Adela had so systematised her day that no minute's margin was left for self-indulgence. Her reading was serious study. If ever she was tempted to throw open one of the volumes which Alice left about, a glance at the pages was enough to make her push it away as if it were impure. She had read very few stories ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... indignation on Fay's behalf; but presently he became secretly anxious. Before the end of his visit he grew afraid that more was amiss with Hugh than he at first guessed. He had often stayed with him before, and Hugh had visited them at Belgrave House, but he had never noticed any sign of self-indulgence. ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... and ordinary passenger traffic, I am sure the general public will not fail to appreciate to the full a self-denial which leads patrons of private cars, Pullman and dining coaches to abandon their self-indulgence. ...
— Mobilizing Woman-Power • Harriot Stanton Blatch
... studied theology in Paris; lived for a number of years in England, where, in company with More and Colet, he fostered the new studies; and finally took up his abode at Basel. In early youth, against his will, he had been for a while an inmate of a cloister. The idleness, ignorance, self-indulgence, and artificial austerities, which frequently belonged to the degenerate monasticism of the day, furnished him with engaging themes of satire. But in his Praise of Folly, and in his Colloquies, the two most diverting of his productions, ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... acknowledge the preeminence of their superiors. In Julius Caesar everything turns upon the conception that the better people do not wish any one placed in supreme authority because they imagine, mistakenly, that they can work in unison. Anthony and Cleopatra, calls out with a thousand tongues that self-indulgence and action are incompatible. And further investigation will rouse our admiration of this ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... plot," with an accumulated obligation to liberty which can only be paid by helping others to be free; and when she utterly forgets which, her doom is sealed, as surely as that of the old empires which passed away in their self-indulgence ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... had been one of self-indulgence. She had indulged herself with Fulton's love till she was glutted with it; that she was the mother of two children may, perhaps, be traced to self-indulgence, and surely it must be laid down to self-indulgence ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... Spain, France, Germany, with their Swiss auxiliaries, had been summoned upon various pretexts to partake of the rich prey she offered. Patriots like Machiavelli perceived too late the suicidal self-indulgence which, by substituting mercenary troops for national militia, and by accustoming selfish tyrants to rely on foreign aid, had exposed the Italians defenceless to the inroads of their warlike neighbors. Whatever parts the Powers ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... shall increase and not decrease. If this is not so, if through no fault of the society there is failure to increase, it is a great misfortune. If the failure is due to deliberate and wilful fault, then it is not merely a misfortune, it is one of those crimes of ease and self-indulgence, of shrinking from pain and effort and risk, which in the long run Nature punishes more heavily than any other. If we of the great republics, if we, the free people who claim to have emancipated ourselves from the thraldom of wrong and error, bring down on our heads the curse that ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... single dollar had the idle, drunken father earned during the week, that he had not expended in self-indulgence; and yet, in his brutality, he could roughly chide this little girl, yet too young for the taskmaster, because she had lost half a dollar of her week's earnings through an accident, the very nature of which he would not hear explained. So grieved was the poor child at this unkindness, that ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... been decorated by the French government! The men in the grill then talked openly of his flaws and the verdict, officious or otherwise, was failure. Flaws! He was not a big painter. He was merely a self-centered, impecunious, improvident Irishman, indifferently skillful, whose vanity and self-indulgence had driven his son off into a vague green world, God alone knew where. He was a big painter! Posterity would fling that back in ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... no comrades but those who struggle in the flood like themselves. If they be frivolous, lightheaded, men without purpose or achievement, we may conjecture, if we do not know, that they were born so, or spoiled by fortune, or befuddled by self-indulgence. It is no great matter ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... worse than any of his own, and make gentlemen and ladies of them, whatever they did or wherever they went, he only knew, and his faithful wife, and the Lord who helps brave poverty. Of such things he never spoke, unless his temper was aroused by luxury and self-indulgence ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... as he was from active life in the House of Commons, Mr. Gladstone was far too acute an observer to have any leanings to the delusive self-indulgence of temporary retirements. To his intimate friend, Sir Walter James, who seems to have nursed some such intention, he wrote at this ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... much easier. According to him, instead of working better, organising better, and putting more of our output into plant and equipment and less into self-indulgence and vulgarity all that we have to do to work the necessary reform is to provide more money and credit. Since, he says, under the ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers
... having no taste for social intercourse, and no material wants to be supplied, which might have required the active exercise of his powers, gave himself up entirely to solitary reading, as a sort of luxurious self-indulgence. He shut himself up in his room, all day long, day after day, devouring one book after another, until he became almost idiotic by the process, and he finally died of softening of the brain. Had he been compelled ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... end. Although we have already quoted him as saying that he always felt bound to demand some good reason why he should not use all things lawfully his, and enjoy to the full every innocent pleasure, yet that demand was made solely in the interests of human freedom, never in that of self-indulgence. He seems to have been ascetic by nature—a Stoic, not an Epicurean, by the very make-up of his personality. The reader will see this more clearly as we pass on to the succeeding phases of Father Hecker's interior life. But we cannot leave the statement even here ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... necessaries of life went into the little coffer with steel bands and florid key. They denied themselves in turn the humblest luxuries, and then, catching one another's looks, smiled; perhaps with a greater joy than self-indulgence has to bestow. And so in three years more they had gleaned enough to set up their fourth son as a master-tailor, and their eldest daughter as a robemaker, in Tergou. Here were two more provided for: their own trade would enable them to throw work into the hands of this pair. But the ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... wanton flesh, degenerate victim of the sensuous filth and fermentation of self-indulgence, is ever striving to exile and suppress, from the wilderness of sin, the warning cry of the Nazarite voice by intriguing with the cunning, incestuous daughters of unholy thoughts ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... and banderilleros and matadors were all ranged in the arena, and the gate was lifted, and the bull came rushing madly in, we would rise before he had time to gore anybody, and go inexorably away. This union of self-indulgence and self-denial seemed almost an act of piety when we learned that the bull-fight was to be on Sunday, and we prepared ourselves with tickets quite early in the week. On Saturday afternoon it rained, of course, but the worst was that it rained on Sunday morning, and the clouds did not lift till noon. ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... single-minded students, living lives of simplicity and hard toil, had in the case of the Portroyalists, the Oratorians, and above all, the Benedictines of St. Maur, splendidly redeemed the Church of France, in otherwise evil days, from the reproach of idleness and self-indulgence. He found under his hand men who had in them something of the making of students; and he hoped to see college fellowships filled more and more by such men, and the life of a college fellow more and more recognised as that of a man to whom learning, ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... could endure. When we remember what good advice he had given to Pen in former days, how an early wisdom and knowledge of the world had manifested itself in the gifted youth; how a constant course of self-indulgence, such as becomes a gentleman of his means and expectations, ought by right to have increased his cynicism, and made him, with every succeeding day of his life, care less and less for every individual in the world, with the single ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... church business than the older parishioners. Mr. Freely was a very regular churchman, but at the Oyster Club he was sometimes a little free in his conversation, more than hinting at a life of Sultanic self-indulgence which he had passed in the West Indies, shaking his head now and then and smiling rather bitterly, as men are wont to do when they intimate that they have become a little too wise to be instructed about a world which has long been flat and ...
— Brother Jacob • George Eliot
... that's strongly put," remarked Mr. Lilburn, reflectively. "I'm afraid I'll have to give it up. What say you, sir?" turning to Mr. Daly, "has a man a right to a choice in such a matter as this? a right to injure his body—to say nothing of the mind—by a self-indulgence the pleasure of which seems to him to overbalance the possible or probable ...
— Elsie's Motherhood • Martha Finley
... it on with worldly care, Oppressive toil, and meagre fare, While sin and self-indulgence wear Our chariot wheels Increasing still the load ...
— The Black-Sealed Letter - Or, The Misfortunes of a Canadian Cockney. • Andrew Learmont Spedon
... comforted," said the kind clergyman, taking his young friend's hand. "Your poor uncle has been taken in mercy from the evil to come. You know his frank, generous nature—you know his extravagant habits and self-indulgence. How could such a man struggle with the sorrows and cares of poverty, or encounter the cold glances of those whom he was wont to entertain? Think, think a moment, and restrain this passionate grief. Would it be wise, or kind, or Christian-like, ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... partly against the irresponsible injustice of the Puritan military government but largely also against the excessive moral severity of the whole Puritan regime. Accordingly a large part of the nation, but particularly the Court, now plunged into an orgy of self-indulgence in which moral restraints almost ceased to be regarded. The new king and his nobles had not only been led by years of proscription and exile to hate on principle everything that bore the name of Puritan, but had spent their exile at the French Court, where utterly cynical and selfish ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... for her husband's weak rejoinder, "don't confuse the head, dethrone the reason, brutalize, debase and ruin men in soul and body as do wine and brandy. The difference lies there, and all men see and feel it, make what excuses they will for self-indulgence and deference to custom. The curse of drink is too widely felt. There is scarcely a family in the land on which its blight does not lie. The best, the noblest, the purest, the bravest, have fallen. It is breaking hopes and hearts and fortunes every day. The ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur
... what anyone is driving at, Collins. You've been blinded by a spectacular display of kindness, misdirected by self-indulgence. I told you I knew everything I needed to know about you, and I do. Now I'm going to ask you to remember these things for yourself; the things you've avoided considering ...
— This Crowded Earth • Robert Bloch
... and a community of design, and to tell of just land laws and wise government, a wisely balanced economic system, and wise social arrangements without telling how it was brought about, and how it is sustained against the vanity and self-indulgence, the moody fluctuations and uncertain imaginations, the heat and aptitude for partisanship that lurk, even when they do not flourish, in the texture of every man alive, is to build a palace without ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... first arose from my bed, that I would write to Claude Bainrothe, and thus save myself the trial of an interview. But the necessity of secrecy, in the commencement at least of the rupture, on his own account, presented itself too forcibly to my mind to permit me such self-indulgence. I felt assured in the first bitterness of feeling, that he would lay my letters before Evelyn, from whom I especially wished, for household peace, to preserve the knowledge of what had passed in my ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... this world's vocations only, without a deep inculcation of the love and fear of God, and the penalty hereafter of an irreligious and wicked life, will have but one leading idea—self-aggrandizement and self-indulgence, and will be checked by no restraint of conscience in the way and means of securing them. Gigantic frauds will be perpetrated, if riches can thus be acquired; atrocious murders will be committed, if these will remove the barrier to unholy and ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... raised his head and grew more steady, it was only to see the soundness of his conclusion. He had not the right now in the final hour to buy for himself a little of glory. It would only be a form of self-indulgence. They would call it, and perhaps rightly, hush money to his conscience. They would say he went back on them only when he was through with them. Oh, no, there would be no more strength in it than in the average deathbed repentance. He would at ...
— Lifted Masks - Stories • Susan Glaspell
... bachelor sources of comfort. Redclyffe, whose destiny had hitherto, and up to a very recent period, been to pass a feverishly active life, was greatly impressed by all these tokens of learned ease,—a degree of self-indulgence combined with duties enough to quiet an otherwise uneasy conscience,—by the consideration that this pensioner acted a good part in a world where no one is entitled to be an unprofitable laborer. He thought ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Then I will give you an example. Suppose the case of a man hurting his health by self-indulgence of any kind. Then his adversaries are the laws of health. Let him agree with them quickly, while he has the power of conquering his bad habits, by recovering his health, lest the time come when his own sins deliver him up to God his judge; and God to ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... her as she stood, silent, beside the coffin of Jane's husband, remembering how lately she had seen the young man, full of life and vigour, thoughtlessly devoting the best energies of body and soul to culpable self-indulgence. It is melancholy indeed, to record such a close to such a life; and yet it is an event repeated in the gay world with every year that passes. It is to be feared there were companions of Tallman Taylor's, pursuing the same course of wicked folly, which had been so suddenly interrupted before ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... Erasmus deplored in the case of Luther, that the great change was not allowed to work itself out slowly, calmly, and without violence and disruption. These graceful regrets are powerless, and on the whole they are very enervating. Let us make our account with the actual, rather than seek excuses for self-indulgence in pensive preference of something that might have been. Practically in these great circles of affairs, what only might have been is as tho it could not be; and to know this may well suffice ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
Copyright © 2025 Diccionario ingles.com
|
|
|
