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More "Self-sufficiency" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... characteristics of that "fast-running nation" which is "indivertible in aim," and incredulous of the existence of the unattainable. His dominant failing was a self-dependence, which, in a weaker nature, would have degenerated into self-sufficiency, but just stopped short of that complacent, puerile egotism, which narrows the mind, and rears its own opinions upon a judgment-seat to pronounce verdicts upon the rest of the world. He never doubted his ability to scale any height upon which he fixed his eyes; he laughed at obstacles; he did not ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... whom I have been speaking placed themselves, are as lasting and as unchangeable as the everlasting hills. The lines on which they wrought have borne the trial and stood the test of all the Christian ages. Are we tempted, in a spirit of self-sufficiency or of doubt or of impatience, to forsake them? Then let us put the temptation firmly to one side. Only by so doing shall we maintain for ourselves, and hand on to others, who shall then in coming years rise up ...
— Report Of Commemorative Services With The Sermons And Addresses At The Seabury Centenary, 1883-1885. • Diocese Of Connecticut
... consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National ...
— The Communist Manifesto • Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
... drawn up a codicil to his will, the poor, decided Governor, who had adopted Mr. Ryland, was so ill. Nay, Mr. Ryland, for the love of this one honorable and just man, could have almost forgotten that he was surrounded by scoundrels, and would bury in oblivion the mean jealousies of a contemptible self-sufficiency, and the false professions of smiling deceit. But should it please Almighty God to remove the incomparable man, and should there be a chance that the civil government of the province should be again disunited from the military command, he did hope that the dear, dear Lord, would favor him with ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... But we cannot close our eyes to its defects. Divine providence, though frequently dwelt upon, signified little more for the Stoic than destiny or fate. Harmony with nature was simply a sense of proud self-sufficiency. Stoicism is the glorification of reason, even to the extent of suppressing all emotion. Sin is unreason, and salvation lies in an external control of the passions—in indifference and apathy begotten of the subordination ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... McClellan's self-sufficiency, see vol. i.; on campaign of 1862; on extraordinary powers given ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse
... well up within me. "At last," said my heart, "what I write is my own!" Let no one mistake this for an accession of pride. Rather did I feel a pride in my former productions, as being all the tribute I had to pay them. But I refuse to call the realisation of self, self-sufficiency. The joy of parents in their first-born is not due to any pride in its appearance, but because it is their very own. If it happens to be an extraordinary child they may also glory in ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... herself that she valued her liberty too highly to part lightly with it; but the reason in her heart was not this, and with all her wilfulness, her childish self-sufficiency, she ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... floor-scrubber to the dramatist, from the academician to the simpleton who gets muddled over the evening newspaper, from the witty courtier down to his philosophic lackey, each one revises Montesquieu with the self-sufficiency of a child which, because it is learning to read, deems itself wise; where self-esteem, in disputation, caviling and sophistication, destroys all sensible conversation; where no one utters a word, but to teach, never imagining that ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... so much that he said to his companions, and afterward wrote to Aristotle, "If I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes," and thus did strenuosity pay its tribute to self-sufficiency. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... will suppose that by what is here said I countenance the notion which is held by some authors—a notion implying either arrogant self-sufficiency or mercenary servility—that to succeed, a man should write down to the public. Quite the reverse. To succeed, a man should write up to his ideal. He should do his very best; certain that the very best will still fall short of what the public can appreciate. ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... the dead misanthrope shows the same lack of self-sufficiency which characterized the living Timon. He despises the opinion of men, but he must let them know that he despises it. Coriolanus would have laughed at them from Elysium and scorned to write ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... of it; I should be so in her place—immensely. She was never a woman of any mind, but she may now pass for one of genius. I am sure you will describe her in one of those delightful novels you write. And pray don't forget Vandenesse; put him in to please me. Really, his self-sufficiency is too much. I can't stand that Jupiter Olympian air of his,—the only mythological character exempt, ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... him or her a Christian, and you will thus increase the number, already unfortunately too large, of those who maintain the form and pretenses of piety without its power; whose hearts are filled with self-sufficiency and spiritual pride, and perhaps zeal for the truths and external duties of religion, while the real spirit of piety has no place there. They trust to some imaginary change, long since passed by, and which ...
— The Teacher • Jacob Abbott
... the first time realized that his ex-subaltern had not a friend among the captains and senior officers now on duty at the fort. His indifference to duties, his airy foppishness, his conceit and self-sufficiency, had all served to create a feeling against him; and this had been intensified by his conduct since coming to Sibley. The youngsters still kept up jovial relations with and professed to like him, but among the seniors there were many men who had only a nod for ...
— From the Ranks • Charles King
... of July Maud was married. Between Mr Dolomore and Jasper existed no superfluous kindness, each resenting the other's self-sufficiency; but Jasper, when once satisfied of his proposed brother-in-law's straightforwardness, was careful not to give offence to a man who might some day serve him. Provided this marriage resulted in moderate happiness to Maud, it was undoubtedly ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... give her the letter, and go without saying a word? She knew well the arguments he would adduce! Henceforward and for ever there would be a gulf between them! The poor religion he had would never serve to keep him straight! What was it but a compromise with pride and self-sufficiency! It could bear no such strain! He acknowledged God, but not God reconciled in Christ, only God such as unregenerate man would have him! And when Ian came home, he would be sure to side ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... more familiar expression of the religious emotion, akin to the belief in double-sexed deities,—nay, in its physiological aspect identical with it, as assuming sexual self-sufficiency, is the myth of ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... resentment at my patronage, but a self-sufficiency that made my sympathy seem superfluous, giving the impression of an inner harmony and ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... for two days, and in fact I held his tenets scarcely short of blasphemy; they were such as I had never heard before, and his congregation, which was numerous, were turning up their ears and drinking in his doctrines with the utmost delight; for Oh they suited their carnal natures and self-sufficiency to a hair! He was actually holding it forth, as a fact, that "it was every man's own blame if he was not saved!" What horrible misconstruction! And then he was alleging, and trying to prove from nature and reason, that no man ever was guilty of a sinful action ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... willingly effect a very material change in his relative situation to other individuals. Unluckily for the rest of your argument, the understanding of literary people is for the most part exalted, as you express it, not so much by the love of truth and virtue, as by arrogance and self-sufficiency; and there is, perhaps, less disinterestedness, less liberality, less general benevolence, and more envy, hatred, and uncharitableness among them, than among any other ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... plain things. There have been people in the Christian Church who have said, 'We have all the Spirit, and therefore we do not need one another.' There may be isolation, and self-sufficiency, and a host of other evils coming in, if we only grasp the thought, 'The manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man,' but they are all corrected if we go on and say, 'to profit withal.' For every one of us has something, and no one of us has everything; ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... arrogant self-sufficiency, he passed by Mordecai, who not only refused to give him the honors decreed in his behalf, but, besides, pointed to his knee, inscribed with the bill of sale whereby Haman had become the slave of Mordecai. (154) Doubly ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... of revolt against the limitations of human thought grew more frequent as the summer progressed. Day after day my self-sufficiency and conceit were being crushed out of me. I was always in the society of a boy of seven whom I was forced to regard as immeasurably my intellectual superior. There was no department of useful knowledge in which I could compete ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... address themselves to the eye." It was this principle, derided by the many, dimly perceived by the few, which led to the development of the sign-language, the means which God had appointed to unlock the darkened understanding of the deaf-mute, but which man, in his self-sufficiency and blindness, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... supposititious names, and which had been universally attributed to him; but enough remained, which he could not deny, to tarnish, if not to cancel his fame. To these he has since, with the reckless and inconsiderate greed that cares not for the public, so long as it finds a publisher, considerably added. His self-sufficiency is unparalleled; and in the preface to an edition of his works published under the comprehensive and presumptuous title of "La Comedie Humaine," he puts himself on a level with the first of poets and philosophers, proposing himself the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... Finland excels in high-tech exports, e.g., mobile phones. Except for timber and several minerals, Finland depends on imports of raw materials, energy, and some components for manufactured goods. Because of the climate, agricultural development is limited to maintaining self-sufficiency in basic products. Forestry, an important export earner, provides a secondary occupation for the rural population. High unemployment remains a persistent problem. In 2007 Russia announced plans to impose high tariffs on raw timber exported to Finland. The Finnish ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... and to maintain the abstract right of congregations to a share in the appointment of their minister, has the 'Free Church' drawn from the humbler classes of a poor country many hundred thousand pounds. No doubt all this results in some measure from the self-sufficiency of the Scotch character; but besides this, it should be remembered that to a Scotchman it is a matter of much graver importance who shall be his clergyman than it is to an Englishman. In England, if the clergyman can but read decently, the congregation may find edification in listening ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... is at once to limit its universality. Such is not the case, as an analysis of the conception of personality will show. The philosophic term "person" is utterly indifferent to the ideas of limitation or illimitation. Its essential significance, its distinguishing note, is that of self-sufficiency or self-subsistence, prescinding entirely from all considerations of limits or their absence. Thus a stone, a plant, a brick is an individual, because each is self-contained and is sufficient for the constitution of itself in being, and were they endowed with intelligence they would be further ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... Arnold and Mr. George M. Whiteside. Mr. Whiteside has indications of qualities not far remote from genius, and would be well repaid by a rigorous course of study. Messrs. John Hartman Oswald and James Laurence Crowley are both gifted with a fluency and self-sufficiency which might prove valuable assets in a study of poesy. W. F. Booker of North Carolina possesses phenomenal grace, which greater technical care would develop into unusual power. Rev. Robert L. Selle, D. ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... metallic voice was neither friendly nor hostile. It expressed, more than anything else, a sardonic, bullying self-sufficiency. ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... distressed women under their protection," returned Leo promptly. "Every woman who needs my help is my sister," he added with a look of self-sufficiency which he ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... but it was truth without the needful amount of humility, of meekness, of gentleness, and of self-distrust. It was truth, but it was truth put in such a form as to do the work of falsehood. It was an appeal to pride, to self-conceit, to self-sufficiency. It was truth presented in such a shape, as to abate the sense of my dependence on God; as to make me forgetful of my own imperfections; as to exclude from my mind all thoughts of danger, and so prepare me for mistakes, ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... through the raw darkness of the coming dawn. He met nobody. His mind was beautifully still and thoughtless, like a still pool, and his body full and warm and rich. He went quickly along towards Shortlands, in a grateful self-sufficiency. ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... captain of the vessel in which I arrived; but when he called at the Consulate on the subject, some minor official ordered him off with a contemptuous "Barra! barra!" and he accordingly yielded to the solicitations of his crew and embarked without seeing me. There is too much of this self-sufficiency and off-handedness in all Consulates in the Levant, where a grain of authority is apt at once to magnify a man, in his own estimation, into a mighty potentate. I regret my Jerbine captain very much; he originally volunteered to accompany us, and entered into my plans with an enthusiasm ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson
... Self-sufficiency was both a characteristic and a necessity among these Scotch-Irish, English, and German settlers of central Pennsylvania. Bringing their agrarian traditions with them from the "old country," where they ...
— The Fair Play Settlers of the West Branch Valley, 1769-1784 - A Study of Frontier Ethnography • George D. Wolf
... children, and charged them, on their fealty to act only as such. "I absolve them all from wisdom," he said; "I bid them be just wise enough to make fools of themselves, and do decree that none shall sit apart in pride and eke in self-sufficiency to laugh at others"; ...
— Historic Girls • E. S. Brooks
... now undertook an enterprise, which, in the opinion of the French generals, savoured of rashness and inconsiderate self-sufficiency. This was the siege of Lisle, the strongest town in Flanders, provided with all necessaries, stores of ammunition, and a garrison reinforced with one and twenty battalions of the best troops in France, commanded by mareschal de Boufflers in person. But these were not the principal difficulties ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... was her self-support—and, worse, self-sufficiency. Gilfoyle had sent Kedzie no money beyond returning what he had borrowed, and she had not used that to buy a ticket to Chicago with. She had written rarely, and had not asked him for money. That was mighty convenient ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... had mixed with the feminine world more intimately she would not be the standard of maidenly modesty and reserve that she was in her nineteenth year; but in her there was an utter absence of that self-sufficiency and loudness that is painfully prominent now-a-days in the very city we inhabit. And yet in all her meekness and mildness if you by look or word injured the extreme sense of delicacy that was the under current of all her movements, ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... Harry's self-sufficiency had left so little room for anything that did not directly concern his own comfort, that he could not understand the deadly earnestness of the men he saw file out of camp, or that there was any urgent call for him to join them in ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... infernally certain that the Emperor would wipe the floor with us. Us! Isn't it a queer thing now? Here I am, a man who has been abusing the English all my life, and hating them—I give you my word that I've always hated the self-sufficiency and nauseating hypocrisy of the English. There's nothing I've wanted more than to see them damned well thrashed by somebody. And yet the minute anybody comes along to thrash them I'm up on my hind legs, furious, talking ...
— The Island Mystery • George A. Birmingham
... education was really pernicious, and far from being calculated to fulfil the object which every wise government must have in view. The result of the system, he said, was to inspire the pupils, who were all the sons of poor gentlemen, with a love of ostentation, or rather, with sentiments of vanity and self-sufficiency; so that, instead of returning happy to the bosom of their families, they were likely to be ashamed of their parents, and to despise their humble homes. Instead of the numerous attendants by whom they were surrounded, their dinners of two courses, and their horses and grooms, he ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... of his time at school he was very solitary and futile. He never regretted the time, for it gave him two things, complete mental self-sufficiency and a comprehension of the psychology ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... in the army, a Russian officer remarked, with much self-sufficiency, "That his country fought for glory and the French for gain."—"You are perfectly right," answered Napoleon; "every one fights for that which ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 343, November 29, 1828 • Various
... Davray moved away. "I sometimes think that when I'm properly drunk one day I'll murder that man. His self-sufficiency and conceit are an insult to the Cathedral. But the Cathedral ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... distinguished minds, thinkers, and profound critics, refuse to see that Art is a special entity which responds to a certain sense? If Art accommodates itself marvellously, if it accords itself with the precepts of morality and passion, it is nevertheless sufficient unto itself—and in its self-sufficiency ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... added, for the dweller in the tents of the literary world hears but little of the ordinary topics of conversation, and becomes suffocated, if he be not to the manner born, with the nauseating cant and self-sufficiency which is so typical of the literary world of to-day, and more especially typical of its younger members. But at George Newnes's house you hear but little shop. We discussed golf and its rapidly increasing popularity, the newest "serve" at tennis, and some of the ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... cause like the tiller-ropes of a ship, if the rough gripe of England had been capable of managing so sensitive a kind of machinery. It has required nothing less than the boorishness, the stolidity, the self-sufficiency, the contemptuous jealousy, the half-sagacity, invariably blind of one eye and often distorted of the other, that characterize this strange people, to compel us to be a great nation in our own right, instead of continuing virtually, if not in name, a province ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... ambitions in their own society. Already in the centres of Negro prosperity and culture it would be almost, if not quite, as impossible for a white man to be received into the best Negro society as it would for a Negro to be received into the best white society. This growing independence and self-sufficiency in the trades, the professions, and social intercourse leads inevitably, as he pointed out, to a form of natural segregation based upon economic needs and social preferences, and in conformity to the laws of nature, which is a very different matter from the artificial and arbitrary ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... up to the grand stand, bowed elaborately to Miss Messiter, and perched himself on the fence, where he might be the observed of all observers. It was curious, she thought, how his vanity walked hand in hand with so much power and force. He was really extraordinarily strong, but no debutante's self-sufficiency could have excelled his. He was so frankly an egotist that it ceased to be ...
— Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West • William MacLeod Raine
... had ever broken through the crust of self-sufficiency the Kentuckian had begun to grow in early childhood. His grandfather's bitter hatred of his father had made Drew an outsider at Red Springs from birth and had finally driven him away to join General Morgan in '62. Those he had ever cared about he could list on the fingers ...
— Rebel Spurs • Andre Norton
... views them. They have a patriarchal, self-satisfied, suburban manner of complete importance. The old gentleman bosses his harem outrageously, and each and every member of the tribe walks about with short steps and a stuffy parvenu small-town self-sufficiency. One is quite certain that it is only by accident that they have long tusks and live in Africa, instead of rubber-plants and self-made business and a pug-dog within commuters' distance of New York. But ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... this place at ease and by choice, and had no evils to suffer or to fear; yet the imaginations excited by the view of an unknown and untravelled wilderness are not such as arise in the artificial solitude of parks and gardens, a flattering notion of self-sufficiency, a placid indulgence of voluntary delusions, a secure expansion of the fancy, or a cool concentration of the mental powers. The phantoms which haunt a desert are want, and misery, and danger; the evils of dereliction rush upon the thoughts; man is made unwillingly acquainted with his own weakness, ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... virtual falsehood and a subornation of falsehood), however liable to deception the senses might be generally, and as sole and primary proofs unsupported by antecedent grounds, 'praecognitis vel preconcessis.' And that St. John never thought of advancing the senses to any such dignity and self-sufficiency as proofs, it would be easy to shew from twenty passages of his Gospel. I say, again and again, that I myself greatly prefer the general doctrine of our own Church respecting the Eucharist,—'rem credimus, modum nescimus,'—to either Tran- (or Con-) substantiation, ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... inhabitants, at a price which left him very little profit, and had also been charged an exorbitant price for every thing he got, whether labor or provisions; and so far had that feeling of South Carolina's self-sufficiency been carried out against him in all its cold repulsiveness, that he found much more honesty and true hospitality under the roof of a poor colored man. This so enraged some of the planters, that they proclaimed against him, and that ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... Providence for letting her witness so much beauty. This was the nature, with its antecedents and surroundings, to come shortly into communion with Shelley, at the time of his despondency at his wife's hardness and supposed desertion; Shelley then, so far from self-sufficiency, yearning after sympathy and an ideal in life, with all his former idols shattered. Godwin's house became for him the home of intellectual intercourse. Godwin, surrounded by a cultivated family, was not ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... Senators and 300 Knights, the selected Knights to be included in the now attenuated ranks of the Senate. 14. ad dandam civitatem Italiae. The claims of the Italians to the franchise were just and pressing, but the overbearing pride and self-sufficiency of the ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... material and social self-sufficiency lasted in places long after the Revolution. It was a curious little aristocracy—a very faint and faded one, lacking the robustness of the far southern type, and lacking indeed the real essential of an aristocracy, namely political power. Moreover, although there were slaves ...
— The Quaker Colonies - A Chronicle of the Proprietors of the Delaware, Volume 8 - in The Chronicles Of America Series • Sydney G. Fisher
... the neighbouring county of Lancaster is struck by the peculiar force of character which the Yorkshiremen display. This makes them interesting as a race; while, at the same time, as individuals, the remarkable degree of self-sufficiency they possess gives them an air of independence rather apt to repel a stranger. I use this expression "self-sufficiency" in the largest sense. Conscious of the strong sagacity and the dogged power of will which seem almost the birthright of the natives of the West Riding, each ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... have essayed to do in this book what should have been done by one of the masters of the science of folklore—Mr. Frazer, Mr. Lang, Mr. Hartland, Mr. Clodd, Sir John Rhys, and others—I hope it will not be put down to any feelings of self-sufficiency on my part. I have greatly dared because no one of them has accomplished, and I have so acted because I feel the necessity of some guidance in these matters, and more particularly at the present stage of inquiry into the early history ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... Wargeilah town An English new-chum did infest: He used to wander up and down In baggy English breeches drest — His mental aspect seemed to be Just stolid self-sufficiency. ...
— Rio Grande's Last Race and Other Verses • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... Lake Champlain the disputed shield is unalloyed gold, reflecting all that is strong and brave, all that is courageous and magnanimous, all that is patriotic and generous, while from the other shore its appearance is as brass engraven by vanity and vulgarity, by self-sufficiency and infidelity. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... reproach than anger. Louis felt struck to the heart with shame and anger; but so much had he lately been nursed in conceit and self-sufficiency, that he drove away the better impulse; and, instead of at once acknowledging himself in the wrong and begging pardon, he stood still, endeavoring to look unconcerned, repeating, ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... contrasted him with her father and Mr. Lane,—yes, even with little Strahan. In her bitter words he heard the verdict of the young men with whom he had associated, and of the community. Throughout the summer he had dwelt apart, wrapped in his own self-sufficiency and fancied superiority. His views had been of gradual growth, and he had come to regard them as infallible, especially when stamped with the approval of his father's old friend; but the scathing words, yet ringing in his ears, ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... Yet, what her discretion would have concealed, was discovered by her eyes, which, in spite of all her endeavours, breathed forth complacency and love; for her inclination was flattered by her own self-sufficiency, which imputed her admirer's silence in that particular to the hurry and perturbation of his spirits, and persuaded her that he could not possibly regard her with any other ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... silent happiness of the German, which last, alas! appears since the dissipation of the intoxication of the Revolution of March, 1848, to consist, as far as the great mass of the population is concerned, merely in the egotistic repose of self-sufficiency, weakness, and ignorance. The American finds repose only in his house, in his family circle, and among his children; all without the walls of that home is an incessant working and striving, in politics as in trade—by the streets and canals, as in the woods of the West. Different as ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... those meagre lines there is indeed an expression of aristocracy in its worst characters; coldness, perfectness of training, incapability of emotion, want of sympathy with the weakness of lower men, blank, hopeless, haughty self-sufficiency. All these characters are written in the Renaissance architecture as plainly as if they were graven on it in words. For, observe, all other architectures have something in them that common men can enjoy; some concession to the simplicities of humanity, ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... wounding most cruelly his best friend. He took no thought of another Friend, still kinder, whom he was wounding. And indeed had Donald been able, by an effort of his will, to be at that moment all his uncle desired, he would have done so. But he had cast away his anchor, in a moment of self-sufficiency and it would be hard to find it again. He could not know that a season was coming swiftly upon him, a season of storm and stress, when that discarded anchor would be his only stay, and the nearness with which he came to missing his hold ...
— Duncan Polite - The Watchman of Glenoro • Marian Keith
... the break-down of this social structure proceeds, step by step, in relation with the two great changes to which normal Bread-culture is exposed. On the one hand, primitive self-sufficiency (the retrospective ideal of Greek political thought) was infringed irrevocably as soon as contact was made with a region, like ancient Scythia, where, as Herodotus puts it, 'there are no earthquakes ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... I didn't." Miss Loder, who at Cambridge had been known as an excellent debater, closed the subject by her tone; and Barry smiled quietly at her self-sufficiency. ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... with the half-culture of the West. His sagacity had been caricatured as cunning; his presence of mind taken for vulgar audacity; he was held up as a half-educated debater, filled with a miserable self-sufficiency. He was attacked as a demagogue. The East held itself aloof from him in unctuous self-righteousness, because of his stand in the Mexican War. His fight for Oregon had aligned against him the friends of England in America. ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... Esq.,' he says:—'I have no intention to pay you compliments—To entertain agreeable notions of one's own character is a great incentive to act with propriety and spirit. But I should be sorry to contribute in any degree to your acquiring an excess of self-sufficiency ... I own indeed that when ... to display my extensive erudition, I have quoted Greek, Latin and French sentences one after another with astonishing celerity; or have got into my Old-hock humour and fallen a-raving about princes and lords, knights and geniuses, ladies of quality and harpsichords; ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... Demorest's resolute face. His old self-sufficiency returned. "Good," he said, with a frank laugh, "that will do for me. Open the door there, Lulu, and take me to him. I'm not ashamed of anything I've done, my girl, nor need you be. I'll tell him my real name is Dick Demorest, as I ought to have ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... personal existence was but one, and to use this one as the eye that beheld the other, and as the tongue that could convey the discovery. There is no greater or more common vice in dramatic writers than to draw out of themselves. How I—alone and in the self-sufficiency of my study, as all men are apt to be proud in their dreams—should like to be talking 'king'! Shakspeare, in composing, had no 'I', but the 'I' representative. In Beaumont and Fletcher you have descriptions ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... enjoys in his old age — He has still access to all the ministers, and is said to be consulted by them on many subjects, as a man of uncommon understanding and great experience — He is, in fact, a fellow of some parts, and invincible assurance; and, in his discourse, he assumes such an air of self-sufficiency, as may very well impose upon some of the shallow politicians, who now labour at the helm of administration. But, if he is not belied, this is not the only imposture of which he is guilty — They say, he is at bottom not only ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... self-sufficiency is usually untroubled by what any mean other-person may say, at this cannot contain himself, but starting to his feet cries out a command for the blasphemous fool's annihilation! Before Alberich, however, has caught the words—his deafness perhaps ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... pride and independence to be a little god, having but oneself for an authority, and a light, and a law to oneself. But does this or does it not contradict the fact that we are dependent beings, and that the Lord, He is God? This spirit of independence, with self-sufficiency for its basis, and rebellion for its act, is just what Sacred Scripture ...
— The Purpose of the Papacy • John S. Vaughan
... what that is, I should say that it is the imbibing instinctively of what is eminently a fine, manly, and graceful convention. Its good side is a certain chivalrous code of courage, honour, efficiency, courtesy, and duty. Its fault is a sense of perfect rightness and self-sufficiency, an overvaluing of sport and games, an undervaluing of intellectual interests, enthusiasm, ideas. It is not that the sense of effortless superiority is to be emphasized or insisted upon—modesty entirely forbids that—but it is the sort of feeling described ironically in the book of Job, ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... suspected Tom of such a feeling, I fear he would have cared little, save how to restore the balance by making a fool of the man who fancied him a fool: but no male self-sufficiency or pride is proof against the contempt of woman; and Tom slunk along by the schoolmistress's side, as if he had been one of her naughtiest school-children. He tried, of course, to brazen it out to ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... Villalongas—said, and said with truth, that she had changed. She had not tried to change, but it was hard for her to get the old point of view now, to laugh at the old jokes, to listen to the old gossip. She had been cold and wretched only a year before, but she had had the confident self-sufficiency of a gypsy who walks bareheaded and irresponsible through a world whose treasure will never come her way. Now Rachael, tremulous and afraid, was the guardian of the great treasure, she knew now what love meant, and she could no longer face ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... who hears when his children cry. The gospel according to this or that expounder of it, may repel him unspeakably; the gospel according to Jesus Christ, attracts him supremely, and ever holds where it has drawn him. To the priest, the scribe, the elder, exclaiming against his self-sufficiency in refusing what they teach, he answers, 'It is life or death to me. Your gospel I cannot take. To believe as you would have me believe, would be to lose my God. Your God is no God to me. I do not desire him. I would rather die the death than believe in such a God. In the name of the true ...
— Hope of the Gospel • George MacDonald
... would certainly say he did not know; and if he were expostulated with, he would reply rudely, arrogantly. This is worthy of notice, for what was special in his character was the combination it afforded of degenerate weakness and pride, complicated with a towering sense of self-sufficiency. Youth's illusions would not pass from him easily; in his eyes and heart the hawthorn would always be in bloom, young girls would always be beautiful, innocent, true to the lovers they had selected; nor was there of necessity degradation nor forced continuance ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... vows of vengeance. But the bumping of the carriage over a rough road disturbed the pleasing reveries of revenge, to awaken him to the more probable and less agreeable consequences likely to occur to himself for the blunder he had made; for, with all the puppy's self-sufficiency and conceit, he could not by any process of mental delusion conceal from himself the fact that he had been most tremendously done, and how his party would take it was a serious consideration. O'Grady, another horrid Irish squire—how should he face him? For a moment he thought it better to ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... came to him and, laying his hand upon his nose, blew into his nostrils the breath of hauteur and conceit, so that he magnified and glorified himself and said in his heart, "Who among men is like unto me?" And he became so puffed up with arrogance and self-sufficiency, and so taken up with the thought of his own splendour and magnificence, that he would not vouchsafe a glance to any man. Presently, there stood before him one clad in tattered clothes and saluted him, but he returned not his salam; whereupon ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... her charms; the fact of a declaration from such a source carrying with it really more questions than it would answer. She had received a strong impression of his being a "personage," and she had occupied herself in examining the image so conveyed. At the risk of adding to the evidence of her self-sufficiency it must be said that there had been moments when this possibility of admiration by a personage represented to her an aggression almost to the degree of an affront, quite to the degree of an inconvenience. She had never yet known a personage; there had been no personages, in this sense, ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... accusers. For nearly half an hour he reviewed step by step and detail by detail the charges against him—with plausible explanation and sophistical argument, but always with a singular prolixity and reiteration that spoke of incessant self-consciousness and self-abstraction. Of that dashing self-sufficiency which had dazzled his friends and awed his enemies there was no trace! At last, even the set smile of the degraded recipient of these confidences darkened with a dull, bewildered disgust. Then, to his relief, a step was heard without. The major's ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... the death of Paul's mother in the first number, to that of Paul himself in the fifth, which, as a writer of genius with hardly exaggeration said, threw a whole nation into mourning. But see how eagerly this fine writer takes every suggestion, how little of self-esteem and self-sufficiency there is, with what a consciousness of the tendency of his humour to exuberance he surrenders what is needful to restrain it, and of what small account to him is any special piece of work in his care and his considerateness for the general design. I think ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... occupations, too, which are simple, and requiring less of ingenuity and skill than those which engage the attention of the other portion of their fellow-creatures, are less favourable to the engendering of self-conceit and self-sufficiency, so utterly at variance with that lowliness of spirit which constitutes the ...
— The Pocket George Borrow • George Borrow
... it. Now pride is a certain character or shape of life. It is a term of description not of the material of life but of a particular result of that material fused into a particular furnace. In general the shape of life which pride describes may be otherwise characterized as arrogant self-reliance or self-sufficiency. We may reach more minute definitions of it before we are done, but this seems to make the meaning plain when it is said that the pride of life is not of the Father, but of the world. Life comes from ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... present, or have actually been admitted to a place of power or prestige. But secularism or worldliness in this sense suffers from the general error of materialism, the error of mistaking the de facto good for the whole good. It is only another case of that blindness which is the penalty of all self-sufficiency. The ancient and the modern types of worldliness present an interesting difference which will serve to illustrate their ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... like a nation, may cherish visions of self-sufficiency, may stretch its tentacles forward to the consumer and backwards to its supplies of raw material; but each fresh extension of its activities serves only to multiply its points of contact with the outside world. When those points are reached, the largest business, like ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson
... all our human passions none is so isolating as the tenderest. To shut that one other being in, we must of necessity shut all the rest of mankind out; and we do so with a reckless trust in our own self-sufficiency which has about it a touch of the sublime. The other millions are as though they were not, and we two are alone in the earth, which suddenly seems to have grown unprecedentedly beautiful. Indeed, it only needs such judicious depopulation to make of any spot an Eden. Perhaps the ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... tell Mrs. Martindale,' said Theodora, glad to escape that she might freely uplift her eyes at his self-sufficiency, and let her pity for Arthur exhale ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to their lips, screwing up their eyes to enjoin secrecy. A provincial flavor distinguished them all, with differences of inflection, Southern excitability, the drawling accent of the Centre, Breton sing-song, all blended in the same idiotic, strutting self-sufficiency; frock-coats after the style of Landerneau, mountain shoes, and home-spun linen; the monumental assurance of village clubs, local expressions, provincialisms abruptly imported into political and administrative language, the limp, colorless phraseology which invented "the burning questions ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... Judaisers to whom we have referred, but the application of the metaphor goes far beyond the petty strife in Corinth and carries for us the wholesome lesson that one main cause which keeps men back from Christ is a too high estimate of themselves. Some of us are enclosed in the fortress of self-sufficiency: we will not humbly acknowledge our dependence on God, and have turned self-reliance into the law of our lives. There are many voices, some of them sweet and powerful, which to-day are preaching that gospel. It finds eager response in many hearts, and there is something ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... be self-reliant. Though he may not be so in all things, he must be self-reliant in the one in which he would be great. This self-reliance is not the self-sufficiency of conceit. It is daring to stand alone. Be an oak, not a vine. Be ready to give support, but do not crave it; do not be dependent on it. To develop your true self- reliance, you must see from the very beginning that life is a battle ...
— The Majesty of Calmness • William George Jordan
... he could while parleying with Berenice, he at last obtained speech of Lucien; and, arrogant publisher though he was, he came in with the radiant air of a courtier in the royal presence, mingled, however, with a certain self-sufficiency and easy good humor. ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... in the market; and great bankers came to her office and did business with her on a footing of equality. She did not become any prouder for it, she knew too well the strength and weakness of life to have pride; her former plain dealing had not stiffened into self-sufficiency. Such as one had known her when beginning business, such one found her in the zenith of her fortune. Instead of a woollen gown she wore a silk one, but the color was still black; her language had not become refined; she retained the same blunt familiar ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... gentlemen who were here the other day shocked my ignorance by numberless little displays of indifference. Yet I can feel that they must have been paragons of good-breeding, and that what I believed to be a very cool self-sufficiency, was in reality the very latest London version ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... redundancies, and errors, is the collected reason of ages, combining the principles of original justice with the infinite variety of human concerns, as a heap of old exploded errors, would be no longer studied. Personal self-sufficiency and arrogance (the certain attendants upon all those who have never experienced a wisdom greater than their own) would usurp the tribunal. Of course no certain laws, establishing invariable grounds of hope and fear, would keep the actions of men in a certain course, or direct ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... so unaccountably was I urged to do this, that I had actually set out to find the first lieutenant when reflection and common sense came to my aid and asked me what was this thing that I was about to do. The answer to this question was, that with the self-sufficiency and stupendous conceit which my father had especially cautioned me to guard against, I was arrogating to myself the possession of superhuman sagacity, and (upon the flimsy foundation of a wild and extravagant ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... added to the cruelties for some of which several hussars had been executed: carried to its extent the vengeance threatened in the Duke of Brunswick's Declaration, in burning whole villages where a shot was fired on them: and on the other hand by their self-sufficiency, want of subordination and personal disrespect, have drawn upon themselves the contempt of the combined armies." Oct. 6. So late as 1796, the exile Louis XVIII. declared his intention to restore the "property and rights" (i.e. tithes, feudal dues, etc.) of the nobles and ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... adoration bestowed by the ladies of the family and their endearing adjectives, Mr. Harness is very outspoken on the subject of the handsome Doctor! He disliked his manners, his morals, his self-sufficiency, his loud talk. 'The old brute never informed his friends of anything; all they knew of him or his affairs, or whatever false or true he intended them to believe, came out carelessly ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... such a funny looking little fellow to Peg that she could not feel any resentment toward him. His sleek well-brushed hair; his carefully creased and admirably-cut clothes; his self-sufficiency; and above all his absolute assurance that whatever he did was right, amused Peg immensely. He was an entirely new type of young man to her and she was interested. She smiled at him now in a friendly way and said: "Ye must know 'Michael' is ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners
... aspect has changed. Our fathers are not butchered in feuds, our sons are not sold into slavery, and except in war or in street robberies we are not insulted by brute physical force. Nevertheless we are cheated by scoundrels, oppressed by financial tyranny, wounded by injustice, suppressed by self-sufficiency, rasped by harsh tempers, annoyed by snobbery, and often ruined by unconscious selfishness. We long to strike back at the human traits which have wronged us, and the satiric depiction of hateful characters whose seeming virtues ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... to the topic of trained bands, and will only remark that in this and other respects Liverpool obtained a degree of self-sufficiency and independence surpassing anything known at the present time, and, apparently, far beyond the common standard even of mediaeval towns. It might therefore have stood forth as an object not so much of envy as of imitation. In point ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... should be scared away into irreligion or unbelief by the wretched delusion, that these creatures, wickedly caricaturing Christianity, are fairly representing it. I have beheld more deliberate malice, more lying and cheating, more backbiting and slandering, denser stupidity, and greater self-sufficiency, among bad-hearted and wrong-headed religionists, than among any other order of human beings. I have known more malignity and slander conveyed in the form of a prayer than should have consigned any ordinary libeller to the pillory. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... be endured"—i.e. good courage seems to be the same as assurance, for he defines it as "strength of soul in the accomplishment of its purpose." Manliness is apparently the same as confidence, for he says that "manliness is a habit of self-sufficiency in matters of virtue." Besides magnificence he mentions andragathia, i.e. manly goodness which we may render "strenuousness." For magnificence consists not only in being constant in the accomplishment of great deeds, which belongs to constancy, but also in bringing a certain manly ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... moonstones; in short, let us suppose them, if our vanity will permit the supposition, as superior to us in knowledge, and consequently in power, as the Europeans were to the Indians when they first discovered them. All this is very possible, it is only our self-sufficiency that makes us think otherwise; and I warrant the poor savages, before they had any knowledge of the white men, armed in all the terrors of glittering steel and tremendous gunpowder, were as perfectly convinced that they themselves ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... with which this new view of the life of civilisation has won acknowledgment from men of all classes is amazing. It rests upon a belief in the self-sufficiency and the all-sufficiency of the life of this world, of the bearings of which it may be assumed that few of its votaries are aware. In reality this view cannot by any possibility be described as the result of knowledge. ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... of the journalists of the world and on into literature, into literature worth the writing. The man won his place in England much as his hero won his, by defiance, by strong shoulder blows, by his self-sufficiency and inexhaustible strength, and when he finished his book he did not know that his end would be so much less glorious than his hero's, that it would be his portion not to fall manfully in the thick of the combat and the press of ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... arts, contrivances, and materials must unquestionably have appeared to them, and eager as they were to profit by this superiority, yet, contradictory as it may seem, they certainly looked upon us in many respects with profound contempt; maintaining that idea of self-sufficiency which has induced them, in common with the rest of their nation, to call themselves, by way of distinction, Innue, or mankind. One day, for instance, in securing some of the gear of a sledge, Okotook broke a part of it, composed of a piece of our white line, and I shall never forget the ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... ceremony, "that to great ones 'longs": it breaks in pieces the golden images of poetry, and defaces its armorial bearings, to melt them down in the mould of common humanity or of its own upstart self-sufficiency. They took the same method in their new-fangled "metre ballad-mongering" scheme, which Rousseau did in his prose paradoxes— of exciting attention by reversing the established standards of opinion and estimation in the world. They were for bringing poetry back to its primitive ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... THEOLOGY AND RELIGION.—Upon these subjects it is customary to find a mingling of contradictions. Leading New England literati, who inherit all the narrowness and self-sufficiency of British conservatism, are frequently impelled to utter expressions which would lead the reader to think them persons of liberal and progressive minds. Such expressions we find in the writings of Dr. Holmes, a thorough medical bigot and sceptic; R. W. Emerson, who closed his eyes against ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, June 1887 - Volume 1, Number 5 • Various
... instantaneous in its action in my mind as that of the lightning when it strikes its object. I stood confounded, yet enlightened, all ablaze!—but the subject of this discovery did not seem in the least to apprehend it, or to believe it possible, in his mad, mole-like effrontery of self-sufficiency, that by his own track ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... fires, sweep out in the morning, go on errands, and such work. Boys must begin at the foot of the ladder. I began at the foot of the ladder," answered Mr. Flint, with an immense self-sufficiency, which Harry, however, ...
— Try Again - or, the Trials and Triumphs of Harry West. A Story for Young Folks • Oliver Optic
... think that his judgment of her character had not been at fault. Hers was a brave soul, not easily daunted or discouraged, better worthy of this life which was teaching its stoicism, charity and self-abnegation than of that other life which denied by self-sufficiency their very existence—a gallant spirit which for once soared free of the worldly, venal and time-serving. It pleased him to think it was by his means that she had been bought into his valley of contentment and that thus far she had found it ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... too readily identified merely with the opportunity of securing material prosperity, and the love of liberty was apt to become, what indeed it too often is everywhere, a purely self-regarding emotion. The distance of the republic from Europe and its controversies, its economic self-sufficiency, its apparent security against all attack, fostered and strengthened this feeling. While the peoples of the Old World strove with agony and travail towards freedom and justice, or wrestled with the ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
... caught you, Collonel; is this the Sum of all your Self-sufficiency, your Matrimonial Hate, and boasted Liberty. [Aside.] His Merits probably may vie with any, but sure he last shou'd hope a Lady's Graces, who saucily ...
— The Fine Lady's Airs (1709) • Thomas Baker
... reason to think that any objections however well founded would have made any impression on the interested views of one, or the haughtiness and self-sufficiency of the other." ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. I • Various
... For Washington is itself, and something else besides. Along beside it ever runs that dark and haunting echo; that shadowy world-in-world with its accusing silence, its emphatic self-sufficiency. Mrs. Cresswell at first demurred. She thought of Elspeth's cabin: the dirt, the smell, the squalor: of course, this would be different; but—well, Mrs. Cresswell had little inclination for slumming. She was interested in the under-world, ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... ourselves, indefensible. He to whom God has intrusted a child, and an only child at that, must employ for her preservation all the means that God has made available, and not become careless of them through fatalism or self-sufficiency. If writing tires you, ask your mother to send us news. Moreover, it would seem to me very desirable if one of your friends could be prevailed upon to go to you until you are better. Whether a doctor can help you or not—forgive me, but you ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... of his wishes. He had courage sufficient, as well as decision, where others were not menaced and the danger was confined to himself; but, where his family or his people were involved, he was utterly unfit to give direction. The want of self-sufficiency in his own faculties have been his, and his throne's, ruin. He consulted those who caused him to swerve from the path his own better reason had dictated, and, in seeking the best course, he often ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... impression, on returning to their own country, of its superiority or inferiority in other respects, they cannot but have felt one thing about it—the comfortable look of its towns and villages. Foreign towns are often very picturesque, very beautiful, but they never have quite that look of warm self-sufficiency and wholesome quiet, with which our villages nestle themselves down among the green fields. If you will take the trouble to examine into the sources of this impression, you will find that by far the greater part of that warm and satisfactory appearance depends upon ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... intelligence, and were universally toiling, but for the most part in vain, the Ruler of Heaven was pleased to turn the eyes of his clemency towards earth, and perceiving the fruitlessness of so many labours, the ardent studies pursued without any result, and the presumptuous self-sufficiency of men which is farther from truth than is darkness from light, he resolved, by way of delivering us from such great errors, to send to the world a spirit endowed with universality of power in each art, and in every profession, one capable ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... makes on me the effect of a pedagogic exuberance. Even the occasional good views (on harmony, for example) that it contains are obscured by a self-sufficiency in the tone and manner of them, of which one may well complain as insupportable. What Raff wishes to appear spoils four-fifths (to quote the time which he adapts so ridiculously to "Lohengrin" of what he might be. He is perpetually getting on scientific stilts, which are by no means ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... principle:—The thing of all others that unfits men for the reception of Christ as a Saviour, and for the simple reliance on His atoning blood and divine mercy, is not gross, long profligacy, and outward, vehement transgression; but it is self-complacency, clean, fatal self-righteousness and self-sufficiency. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... beguiled by frivolous applause, has once given way to insolent self-sufficiency, {such} foolish vanity ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... relations had been anxious about it at first, and had tried to cure him of his apparent hypochondria, and to persuade him to employ himself with something, but as he was obstinate, avoided them, rejected their friendly offers with arrogance and self-sufficiency, even his brothers had abandoned him, and almost renounced him. All their affection had been transferred to the poor child who shared his solitude, and who endured all that wretchedness with the resignation of a saint. Thanks to them, she had a few gleams of pleasure in ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... improving upon it by a cultivated and collective experience. The naturalist uncritically exalts nature, seeks identification with it so that he may freely exploit both himself and it. The faith of the one is in the self-sufficiency of the disciplined spirit of mankind; the unfaith of the other is in its glorification of the natural world and in its allegiance to the momentary devices and desires of the separate heart. It will be ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... self-subsisting community. This partly arose from the necessity of the system of land tenure, partly from ignorance of how to take advantage of special qualities and positions of soil, and partly from the self-sufficiency improved by difficulties of conveyance. As the century advanced, the enclosure of commons, the increase of large farms, the application of new science and new capital led to a rapid differentiation in the use of land for agricultural purposes. But in ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... and they hated the idolaters who gloried with haughty self-sufficiency in their intellectual inheritance; the traditions of a brilliant past. They, who had been persecuted and contemned, now had the upper hand; they were in power, and the more insolently they treated their opponents, the more injustice they did them, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... conceptions. He slaved for months and years perfecting each of his plays, recasting the action and curtailing the dialogue and polishing the verse; yet the action was always heavy, the dialogue unnatural to the last degree, the verse unpoetical. But all this extraordinary self-sufficiency was not a delusion, all this extraordinary labour was not a waste: Alfieri, who never had a single poetical thought, nor a single art-revolutionising notion, was yet a great genius and a great innovator, inasmuch as he first moulded in his own image the Italian patriot of the nineteenth ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... of woman for whom such men as meet her have the strongest passion of their lives, if for no other reason than because she induces an exaggeration of their best faculties and a consequent exaltation of self-appreciation, as distinguished from mere masculine self-sufficiency. Never is the briefly favoured one so much of a man apart from a type, looking down upon that type with pitying scorn. This is a mere matter of fascination, too subtle, and composed of too many parts for man's analysis, but it is the most ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... a cheap restaurant. He assumed a great reverence for RABELAIS and ARISTOPHANES; he told shady stories, void of point and humour, which you were to suppose were modelled on the style of these two masters. And all the time he gave you to understand, with a blatant self-sufficiency, that he himself was one of the greatest and most formidable beings in existence. This was GRUBLET as I first knew him, and so he ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, Sep. 24, 1892 • Various
... of self-sufficiency, the obsession for exclusiveness and separation—so distinctively a Jewish trait at that time—was inculcated at the maternal knee and emphasized in synagog and school. The Talmud,[165] which in codified ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... no small privilege to you "gentlemen of England who live at home at ease," or otherwise, that you cannot hear how the whole Continent is talking of you at this moment. We have, as a nation, no small share of self-sufficiency and self-esteem. If we do not thank God for it, we are right well pleased to know that we are not like that Publican there, "who eats garlic, or carries a stiletto, or knouts his servants, or indulges in any other taste or pastime of 'the confounded foreigner.'" The 'Times' proclaims how infinitely ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... to follow also from the notion of self-sufficiency, a quality thought to belong to the final good. Now by sufficient for Self, we mean not for a single individual living a solitary life, but for his parents also and children and wife, and, in general, friends and countrymen; for man is by nature ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... served him as a cushion. The Akali did not attempt either to give him his blessing or to shake hands with him. The proud expression of his face also changed, and showed confusion and anxious humility instead of the usual self-respect and self-sufficiency. The brave Sikh knelt down before the Takur, and instead of the ordinary "Namaste!"—"Salutation to you," whispered reverently, as if addressing the Guru of the Golden Lake: "I am your servant, Sadhu-Sahib! give ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... genius which he had given them when he first came. But in all school sports he had improved, and was the acknowledged leader and champion in matters requiring boldness and courage; his popularity made him giddy; favour of man led to forgetfulness of God; and even a glance at his countenance showed a self-sufficiency and arrogance which ill became the refinement of his features, and ill replaced the ingenuous modesty ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... oil and increase employment opportunities for the swelling Saudi population. Priorities for government spending in the short term include additional funds for the water and sewage systems and for education. Water shortages and rapid population growth constrain the government's efforts to increase self-sufficiency in agricultural products. ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... voice was neither friendly nor hostile. It expressed, more than anything else, a sardonic, bullying self-sufficiency. ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... to the voluble man on her left, who was short and fat, and red of face, as he graded, with egotistical self-sufficiency, the thirteen competitors for the big Handicap. Lucretia he had passed over in disdain. Crude as his judgment seemed, arrogantly insufficient, it affected Allis disagreeably. Now that everything had been done, that the last minute of suspense was on, she was depressed. ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... we shall bear some resemblance to our Lord's humility."[29] This, in the language of the Holy Ghost, is called the foolishness of the cross of Christ,[30] in which consists true wisdom. That prudence of the flesh and worldly wisdom, which is the mother of self-sufficiency, pride, avarice, and vicious curiosity, the source of infidelity, and the declared enemy of the spirit of Christ, is banished by this holy simplicity; and in its stead are obtained true wisdom, which can only be ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... wine seem his religion, and a well-furnished room his morality—his dinners engross his thoughts—his field sports are a nation's care. He writes books on arm-chairs, hunts with the most ineffable self-sufficiency, and talks of his dogs and horses as Howard or Clarkson might speak of the jails they had visited, and the mourners they had set free. He commits errors with a stolid air of deliberation, which the reckless passions of boiling youth could hardly palliate, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... weeks and a day. D'Alembert had been anxious that Frederick of Prussia should invite Diderot to visit him at Berlin. Frederick had told him that, intrepid reader as he was, he could not endure to read Diderot's books. "There reigns in them a tone of self-sufficiency and an arrogance which revolt the instinct of my freedom. It was not in such a style that Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Gassendi, Bayle, and Newton wrote." D'Alembert replied that the king would judge more favourably of the philosopher's person ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... themselves but each other. The ensuing conversation showed that Mr. Prince was somewhat disgusted with the mundane movement, and that Marguerite was his disciple. They were more and more leaving the world alone; their self-sufficiency was increasing with the narrow regularity of their habits. They seldom went out; and when they did, they came home the more deeply convinced that all was not well with the world, and that they belonged to the small remnant of the wise and the sane. George was in two minds ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... as much noise as he could while parleying with Berenice, he at last obtained speech of Lucien; and, arrogant publisher though he was, he came in with the radiant air of a courtier in the royal presence, mingled, however, with a certain self-sufficiency and ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... borne a deal of bitter fruit in the last one hundred years—grow out of one soil. In general they are due to Locke's sensationalism, Hume's skepticism, a new emphasis upon reason as opposed to revelation and the self-sufficiency of the individual. If conscious life is nothing but sensation worked over and built up, then pleasurable sensations are the best we can aspire to, happiness is the end of the quest. So Utilitarianism defined goodness ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... us should apologize. I now perceive and frankly admit that there was wrong on my side. I could not have approached you and spoken to you in the right spirit, for if I had, what followed could not have occurred. I fear there was a self-sufficiency in my words and mariner yesterday, which made you conscious of Dr. Marks only, and you had no scruples in dealing with Dr. Marks as you did. If my words and bearing had brought you face to face with my august yet merciful Master, you would have respected Him, and also me, His servant. ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... charged them, on their fealty to act only as such. "I absolve them all from wisdom," he said; "I bid them be just wise enough to make fools of themselves, and do decree that none shall sit apart in pride and eke in self-sufficiency to laugh at others"; ...
— Historic Girls • E. S. Brooks
... pride of the human intellect, which, with all its defects, redundancies, and errors, is the collected reason of ages, combining the principles of original justice with the infinite variety of human concerns, as a heap of old exploded errors, would be no longer studied. Personal self-sufficiency and arrogance (the certain attendants upon all those who have never experienced a wisdom greater than their own) would usurp the tribunal. Of course no certain laws, establishing invariable grounds ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... work and exchange a few words with him. He liked this. Her companionable presence soothed him and even made him happy. Her figure, her gestures, her conversation seemed to be the very essence of firmness and repose, and her self-sufficiency always aroused Frederick's silent admiration. When he told her how perceptibly his new work acted as a sedative upon him, she replied that she had had the same experience, and if he did not fly off at a tangent but remained steadily ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... nation, may cherish visions of self-sufficiency, may stretch its tentacles forward to the consumer and backwards to its supplies of raw material; but each fresh extension of its activities serves only to multiply its points of contact with the outside world. When those points are reached, the largest business, like the smallest, ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson
... excels in high-tech exports, e.g., mobile phones. Except for timber and several minerals, Finland depends on imports of raw materials, energy, and some components for manufactured goods. Because of the climate, agricultural development is limited to maintaining self-sufficiency in basic products. Forestry, an important export earner, provides a secondary occupation for the rural population. High unemployment remains a persistent problem. In 2007 Russia announced plans to impose high tariffs on raw timber exported to Finland. The Finnish pulp and paper industry will ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... when working as a hewer down the pit been disabled by a fall of stone; then as he had been a 'handy man' and used to both horses and flowers the Rector had taken him into his service as groom-gardener. 'Crammed with northern self-sufficiency and a sort of scornful incivility, he has a keen sense of humour and a heart of gold,' said my uncle, as he forewarned me as to the character of ...
— Border Ghost Stories • Howard Pease
... Christmas pantomime; but when we remember that the French court, that model of patrician pride, was playing with democracy, with republicanism, with the simple life, as presented by Rousseau to its consideration, we see plainly enough how the real self-sufficiency of caste and the purely artificial sentiment of the day found expression in absurdities of costume. Women dared to wear such things, because, being aristocrats, they felt sure of themselves: and they professed ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... 'Dedication to James Boswell, Esq.,' he says:—'I have no intention to pay you compliments—To entertain agreeable notions of one's own character is a great incentive to act with propriety and spirit. But I should be sorry to contribute in any degree to your acquiring an excess of self-sufficiency ... I own indeed that when ... to display my extensive erudition, I have quoted Greek, Latin and French sentences one after another with astonishing celerity; or have got into my Old-hock humour and fallen a-raving about princes and lords, knights and geniuses, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... the world go round. His feet rested upon the rung of his tilted chair, forming his knees into a sort of desk upon which lay a French newspaper. The tilting of his knees, the tilting of his chair, the tilting of his hat and the rakish tilt of his cigar, gave him the appearance of great self-sufficiency, as if, away down in his soul, he knew what he was there for, and cared not a whit whether ...
— Tom Slade Motorcycle Dispatch Bearer • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... the Stoics indeed expressed themselves in very arrogant, absurd terms, about the wise man's self-sufficiency; they elevated him to the rank of a deity.[A] But these were only talkers and lecturers, such as those in all ages who utter fine words, know little of human affairs, and care only for notoriety. Epictetus and Antoninus ...
— Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
... a self-subsisting community. This partly arose from the necessity of the system of land tenure, partly from ignorance of how to take advantage of special qualities and positions of soil, and partly from the self-sufficiency improved by difficulties of conveyance. As the century advanced, the enclosure of commons, the increase of large farms, the application of new science and new capital led to a rapid differentiation in the use of land for agricultural purposes. But in the earlier ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... repeatedly read that gardening in raised beds was the most productive vegetable growing method, required the least work, and was the most water-efficient system ever known. So, without adequate irrigation, I would have concluded that food self-sufficiency on my homestead was not possible. In late September of that first year, I could still run that single sprinkler. What a relief not to have invested every last cent in ...
— Gardening Without Irrigation: or without much, anyway • Steve Solomon
... to the Trustworthiness of our Judgment,' [2] he maintains that 'it is a silly presumption to go about despising and condemning as false that which does not seem probable to us; which is a common fault of those who think they have more self-sufficiency than the vulgar. So was I formerly minded; and if I heard anybody speak either of ghosts coming back, or of the prophecy of coming things, of spells, of witchcraft, or of any other ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... a class of travelling oddities—the dandy voyageurs of Britain, who, teeming with the proud consciousness of their excellence in comparison with the rest of human kind, swoln with self-sufficiency, float like empty bubbles on the water's surface, and who seem as if they would break and be dissolved by contact with a vulgar touch. They contrive to swim by means of their air-blown vanity until they come into concussion with some material object, and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 335 - Vol. 12, No. 335, October 11, 1828 • Various
... part in vain, the Ruler of Heaven was pleased to turn the eyes of his clemency towards earth, and perceiving the fruitlessness of so many labours, the ardent studies pursued without any result, and the presumptuous self-sufficiency of men which is farther from truth than is darkness from light, he resolved, by way of delivering us from such great errors, to send to the world a spirit endowed with universality of power in each art, and in every profession, one capable of ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... instances, when you are told to go to bed, or to mend your dress, or to put on a wrap, or to tidy your room, are you in any way a finer nature if you dawdle and argue and resent the order? Nothing is so small as self-sufficiency and self-centredness, whereas humility and obedience are of the Nature of our Lord Himself, and every humble and obedient soul is in communion with His Greatness. Dante's hierarchy of heaven, "in order serviceable," in ordered ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... of any trousered being. I declare, although the reverse of a professed ascetic, I am more obliged to women for this ideal than I should be to the majority of them, or indeed to any but one, for a spontaneous kiss. There is nothing so encouraging as the spectacle of self-sufficiency. And when I think of the slim and lovely maidens, running the woods all night to the note of Diana's horn; moving among the old oaks, as fancy-free as they; things of the forest and the starlight, not touched by the commotion of man's hot and turbid life-although there ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of such a proceeding by arriving on the scene and being utterly unable to extricate him from his position. If children would realize their weakness and foolishness more in these days, they would develop into better men and women, but self-sufficiency and self-conceit ...
— His Big Opportunity • Amy Le Feuvre
... cock-feathers in his hat,' the type of the dissolute man-about-town of the period. To me it seems very natural that, dispirited by his first contact with the outer world—unable to feel any real sympathy with the rollicking and sleek self-sufficiency of that holiday crowd, Faust should turn again to reflexion and speculation, and that when he is in this depressed and metaphysical mood the demonic element in his nature should first present itself—and that too in ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... always do, at this particular stage, with his compatriots; not so much, perhaps, for the compliment to myself and my poor country, as for the revelation (which is ever fresh to me) of Britannic self-sufficiency and taste. And he was so far softened by my gratitude as to add a word of praise on the American method of lacing sails. "You're ahead of us in lacing sails," he said; "you can say that ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... whom he was wounding. And indeed had Donald been able, by an effort of his will, to be at that moment all his uncle desired, he would have done so. But he had cast away his anchor, in a moment of self-sufficiency and it would be hard to find it again. He could not know that a season was coming swiftly upon him, a season of storm and stress, when that discarded anchor would be his only stay, and the nearness with ...
— Duncan Polite - The Watchman of Glenoro • Marian Keith
... Mulattoes, whose huts surround the salt lake, we found it shoemaker of Castilian descent. He received us with the air of gravity and self-sufficiency which in those countries characterize almost all persons who are conscious of possessing some peculiar talent. He was employed in stretching the string of his bow, and sharpening his arrows to shoot birds. His trade of a shoemaker could not be very lucrative ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... apparently quite oblivious of her. Then he came to himself with a quick smile, which she recognised as characteristic of all that disturbed her about this man—a smile in which there was humour, a little malice and self-sufficiency and—many, many things she did not try ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... Knights to be included in the now attenuated ranks of the Senate. 14. ad dandam civitatem Italiae. The claims of the Italians to the franchise were just and pressing, but the overbearing pride and self-sufficiency of the Roman ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... without object or resources is perpetual, where, from the floor-scrubber to the dramatist, from the academician to the simpleton who gets muddled over the evening newspaper, from the witty courtier down to his philosophic lackey, each one revises Montesquieu with the self-sufficiency of a child which, because it is learning to read, deems itself wise; where self-esteem, in disputation, caviling and sophistication, destroys all sensible conversation; where no one utters a word, but to teach, never imagining that ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... he left her, was quite determined to carry his project through. Cecilia had thrown him over with most abominable unconcern and self-sufficiency. He had intended to honour her and she had monstrously dishonoured him. He had endeavoured to escape this by taking upon himself falsely the fault of having been the first to break their engagement. But there was a doubt as to this point, ...
— Kept in the Dark • Anthony Trollope
... the most aggravating self-sufficiency. "It makes no difference," he declared. "NO ONE will ever find that map, or see that map, or know where that treasure is, until ...
— My Buried Treasure • Richard Harding Davis
... with a large army in 1592, it looked as if she were well started on her career as a world-power. But that was not yet to be. The hegemony of her clans passed into the powerful and shrewd Tokugawa family, the policy of which was peace and national self-sufficiency. ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and ...
— Manifesto of the Communist Party • Karl Marx
... college life with the victories of the field. He beheld again the quieter hours when the young men saw visions together and felt themselves called to put shoulder to the car of righteousness, while they discussed with the sublime self-sufficiency of inexperience the politics and sociology of the world. The fellows all believed in him as one of those who are destined to be prime pushers at the wheel. Perhaps he would be among those conquerors who climb aboard and ride, forgetful of the plodding crowd which ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... dear nephew, do you be guilty of such weakness. Avoid singularity, whenever it can be avoided with innocence: an affectation of singularity for singularity's sake, generally proceeds from conceit or self-sufficiency. But where the path of duty is clear, let no example or persuasion induce you to swerve from it. Keep ever impressed upon your mind the admonition of Scripture, Thou shalt not follow ...
— Advice to a Young Man upon First Going to Oxford - In Ten Letters, From an Uncle to His Nephew • Edward Berens
... prescription observed that few coxcombs, dandies, and heads filled with bitter conceits, would like to be anointed with this cure of self-sufficiency. The wax might make the plaster stick, but it might be feared that the honey and the incense would neutralize the good effects to be expected from the wormwood and salt. If, however, the phrase "vanityes of the head" be ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... 'unlike' became the watchword of Aetius and Eunomius, and their followers delighted to shock all sober feeling by the harshest and profanest declarations of it. The scandalous jests of Eudoxius must have given deep offence to thousands; but the great novelty of the Anomoean doctrine was its audacious self-sufficiency. Seeing that Arius was illogical in regarding the divine nature as incomprehensible, and yet reasoning as if its relations were fully explained by human types, the Anomoeans boldly declared that it is no mystery at all. If the divine essence ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... incredible snobbery of the mind, so encrusted with the rankest and grossest egotism, that soon they must flutter and die out, leaving him stone-blind against the sunshine and the morning. No scratch could penetrate that Achilles-armor of self-sufficiency. There must be a shock to break it apart, or a vicious stabbing to cut through it to such spark ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... could be made, it was done. Not until the long-desired documents, vouching for the equitable settlement of the estate, were in Jasper's hands, did he breathe freely. Oh! through what an ordeal he had passed. How his own pride, self-consequence, and self-sufficiency had been crushed out of him! And not only in spirit was he humbled and broken. In his anxiety to settle up the estate of Mr. Elder, and thus get the sword that seemed suspended over his head by a single hair, ...
— True Riches - Or, Wealth Without Wings • T.S. Arthur
... case, as an analysis of the conception of personality will show. The philosophic term "person" is utterly indifferent to the ideas of limitation or illimitation. Its essential significance, its distinguishing note, is that of self-sufficiency or self-subsistence, prescinding entirely from all considerations of limits or their absence. Thus a stone, a plant, a brick is an individual, because each is self-contained and is sufficient for the constitution of itself in being, and were they endowed with intelligence they would ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... which the French travellers of a hundred years ago found here,—perhaps because they looked for it, perhaps because of their impenetrability by the English tongue,—we have lost something also of that self-sufficiency which is the mark as well of provincials as of barbarians, and which is the great hindrance to all true advancement. It is a wholesome symptom, I think, if we are beginning to show some of that talent for grumbling which is the undoubted heirloom of ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... that his judgment of her character had not been at fault. Hers was a brave soul, not easily daunted or discouraged, better worthy of this life which was teaching its stoicism, charity and self-abnegation than of that other life which denied by self-sufficiency their very existence—a gallant spirit which for once soared free of the worldly, venal and time-serving. It pleased him to think it was by his means that she had been bought into his valley of contentment and that ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... that her son drew away from her, in his haughty manner of self-sufficiency, as he spoke. She sighed, shaking her head sadly. "Well, I'll be rackin' off home," ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... more a human creature has tasted of bitter things the more it hungers after the sweet things of life. And we, wrapped round in the rags of our virtues, and regarding others through the mist of our self-sufficiency, and persuaded of our universal impeccability, do not ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... course of an argument however, you may easily discover whether vanity or conviction stimulates the disputant, though his inflated countenance may be turned from you, and you may not see the gestures which mark self-sufficiency. He ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... will repose in the belief that you consider him or her a Christian, and you will thus increase the number, already unfortunately too large, of those who maintain the form and pretenses of piety without its power; whose hearts are filled with self-sufficiency and spiritual pride, and perhaps zeal for the truths and external duties of religion, while the real spirit of piety has no place there. They trust to some imaginary change, long since passed by, and which has proved to be spurious by its failing of its fruits. The best way—in fact, the ...
— The Teacher • Jacob Abbott
... or recommend self-sufficiency. We should always be learners, gladly welcoming every help, and respecting every personality. But we should also respect our own, and bear in mind, that "though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to us but through our toil bestowed ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... think over this matter a little, we shall soon feel that in those meagre lines there is indeed an expression of aristocracy in its worst characters; coldness, perfectness of training, incapability of emotion, want of sympathy with the weakness of lower men, blank, hopeless, haughty self-sufficiency. All these characters are written in the Renaissance architecture as plainly as if they were graven on it in words. For, observe, all other architectures have something in them that common men can enjoy; ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... necessarily the wish of every finite rational being, and this, therefore, is inevitably a determining principle of its faculty of desire. For we are not in possession originally of satisfaction with our whole existence- a bliss which would imply a consciousness of our own independent self-sufficiency this is a problem imposed upon us by our own finite nature, because we have wants and these wants regard the matter of our desires, that is, something that is relative to a subjective feeling of pleasure or pain, which determines what we need in order to ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... Pickle, were my reflections on what I had occasion to observe concerning that famous trial; and, on my return to England two years after, I could not help pitying the self-sufficiency of some people, who, at this distance, pretended to pass their judgment on that verdict with as great positiveness as if they had been in the secrets of the cause, or upon the jury who tried it; and that from no better authority than the declamations of ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... identified merely with the opportunity of securing material prosperity, and the love of liberty was apt to become, what indeed it too often is everywhere, a purely self-regarding emotion. The distance of the republic from Europe and its controversies, its economic self-sufficiency, its apparent security against all attack, fostered and strengthened this feeling. While the peoples of the Old World strove with agony and travail towards freedom and justice, or wrestled with the task of sharing their own civilisation with the backward races of the globe, the echo of ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
... strikes one is its inferiority to preceding Houses of Commons, and the presumption, impertinence, and self-sufficiency of the new members.... There exists no party but that of the Government; the Irish act in a body under O'Connell to the number of about forty; the Radicals are scattered up and down without a leader, numerous, restless, ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... her. They knew she would not let them down. She would not intrigue into marriage, or try and make use of them in any way. She didn't care about them. And so, because of her isolate self-sufficiency in the fray, her wild, overweening backbone, they were ready to attend on her and serve her. Headley in particular hoped he might overcome her. He was a well-built fellow with sandy hair and a pugnacious face. The battle-spirit ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... delusion, that these creatures, wickedly caricaturing Christianity, are fairly representing it. I have beheld more deliberate malice, more lying and cheating, more backbiting and slandering, denser stupidity, and greater self-sufficiency, among bad-hearted and wrong-headed religionists, than among any other order of human beings. I have known more malignity and slander conveyed in the form of a prayer than should have consigned any ordinary libeller to the pillory. I have known a person who made evening prayer ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... each of his plays, recasting the action and curtailing the dialogue and polishing the verse; yet the action was always heavy, the dialogue unnatural to the last degree, the verse unpoetical. But all this extraordinary self-sufficiency was not a delusion, all this extraordinary labour was not a waste: Alfieri, who never had a single poetical thought, nor a single art-revolutionising notion, was yet a great genius and a great innovator, inasmuch as he first moulded in his own image the Italian patriot ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... in his tone, and he is rarely mentioned by them except in a slighting manner. "I think the Monarch a literary puppy, from what little I have seen of him," writes Hazard to Belknap. "He certainly does not want understanding, and yet there is a mixture of self-sufficiency, all-sufficiency, and at the same time a degree of insufficiency about him, which is (to me) intolerable. I do not believe that he is fit for a superintendent; that the persons mentioned will be his coadjutors, or that either the demand or the profits will be any way near equal to ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... infirm a purpose. Vague recollections of these great abortive schemes of mine left a deceptive glow in my soul and fostered my belief in myself, without giving me the energy to produce. In my indolent self-sufficiency I was in a very fair way to become a fool, for what is a fool but a man who fails to justify the excellent opinion which he has formed of himself? My energy was directed towards no definite aims; I wished for the flowers of life without the toil of cultivating them. I had no idea of the ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... Wotan, whose Olympian self-sufficiency is usually untroubled by what any mean other-person may say, at this cannot contain himself, but starting to his feet cries out a command for the blasphemous fool's annihilation! Before Alberich, however, ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... have been speaking placed themselves, are as lasting and as unchangeable as the everlasting hills. The lines on which they wrought have borne the trial and stood the test of all the Christian ages. Are we tempted, in a spirit of self-sufficiency or of doubt or of impatience, to forsake them? Then let us put the temptation firmly to one side. Only by so doing shall we maintain for ourselves, and hand on to others, who shall then in coming years rise up and call us blessed, the precious deposit ...
— Report Of Commemorative Services With The Sermons And Addresses At The Seabury Centenary, 1883-1885. • Diocese Of Connecticut
... boredom. Give me a tree, a perfect tree, and you may keep your palaces. Give me the green fields with a hundred thousand flowers, and you may keep your streets and your piles of gold. Give me the wild wind and the breath of the torrent, and I have no wish to hear your hymns. There is a brazen self-sufficiency about the nature-lover which baffles and offends the mind of the crowd. The most amazing thing about him is that he turns hardship and deprivation into pleasure. Take away his house and he shelters in a cave. Deprive him of your company and he laughs to himself. Take ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... pere et sans proche—utterly without the responsibility of background and entirely unacquainted with the obligation of noblesse. The superficial observer in the United States might conceivably imagine the characteristic national trait to be self-sufficiency or vanity (this mistake has, I believe, been made), and his opinion might be strengthened should he find, as I did, in an arithmetic published at Richmond during the late Civil War, such a modest example as the following: ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... made it clear, by these instances, what is meant by Christian self-denial. If we have good health, and are in easy circumstances, let us beware of high-mindedness, self-sufficiency, self-conceit, arrogance; of delicacy of living, indulgences, luxuries, comforts. Nothing is so likely to corrupt our hearts, and to seduce us from God, as to surround ourselves with comforts,—to have ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... of living in Virginia was determined, not so much by design, as by force of circumstances. Available land and tobacco were determining factors in developing large plantations along the main waterways and small plantations in the hinterlands. Self-sufficiency was concomitant ...
— Domestic Life in Virginia in the Seventeenth Century - Jamestown 350th Anniversary Historical Booklet Number 17 • Annie Lash Jester
... difficult for us men of the "historical sense" to grasp, feel, taste, and love, what finds us fundamentally prejudiced and almost hostile, is precisely the perfection and ultimate maturity in every culture and art, the essentially noble in works and men, their moment of smooth sea and halcyon self-sufficiency, the goldenness and coldness which all things show that have perfected themselves. Perhaps our great virtue of the historical sense is in necessary contrast to GOOD taste, at least to the very bad taste; and we can only evoke in ourselves imperfectly, hesitatingly, and with compulsion ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... and charged with the half-culture of the West. His sagacity had been caricatured as cunning; his presence of mind taken for vulgar audacity; he was held up as a half-educated debater, filled with a miserable self-sufficiency. He was attacked as a demagogue. The East held itself aloof from him in unctuous self-righteousness, because of his stand in the Mexican War. His fight for Oregon had aligned against him the friends of England in America. Yet men were in power because of him. A ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... primitive. Even more than the original colonists, these dwellers on the second frontier caught something of the wild freedom of the wilderness, something of the ruthlessness of nature, something also of its self-sufficiency, something of its somber ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... and we at this moment know more than ever that we must work out our own national salvation, not only without aid, which we had no reason to ask, but without sympathy, which we had every honorable right to expect. But, to be a truly independent people, we must practically prove our self-sufficiency; and at this moment patriotism shows itself not only in defending the nation against the Rebellion, but in the heartiest encouragement of every art and manufacture for which our opportunities and capacities ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... giveth grace to the humble." So says the Apostle James. And why is this so? Because the proud man, in his sense of self-sufficiency, feels no want at the present which he thinks he is not able to supply, and dreads no want in the future, either because he does not think of any future life, or because he has persuaded himself to believe there is ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... important movement, belonging to the same general realistic type with Eleaticism and Spinozism. Absolute being is again the fundamental conception. Here, however, it is conceived that being is primarily not affirmation or self-sufficiency, but the good or ideal. There are few great metaphysical systems that have not been deeply influenced by Platonism; hence the importance of understanding it in its purity. To this end we must return again to the early Greek conception of the philosopher; ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... a manifest tendency to subvert revealed religion, and expose the exercise of serious godliness, under the notion of enthusiasm; to advance self-love, as the leading, principle and motive in all human actions whatever, and to destroy the self-sufficiency of God, making him a debtor to his creatures: yet though these, with a number of God-dishonoring, creature-exalting, and soul-ruining errors, were notorious from his books, and were defended by him; the heretic, instead of being ...
— Act, Declaration, & Testimony for the Whole of our Covenanted Reformation, as Attained to, and Established in Britain and Ireland; Particularly Betwixt the Years 1638 and 1649, Inclusive • The Reformed Presbytery
... for inexcusableness was her self-support—and, worse, self-sufficiency. Gilfoyle had sent Kedzie no money beyond returning what he had borrowed, and she had not used that to buy a ticket to Chicago with. She had written rarely, and had not asked him for money. That was mighty convenient ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... it. Cornelia's glance took in the magnificent proportions of the man, the indefinable air of birth and breeding, the faultless toilette; the strong, dark features. To one and all she paid a tribute of admiration, but the expression on the face was of concentrated self-sufficiency. At this point admiration stopped dead, to be replaced by an uneasy dread. Was Geoffrey Greville, even as his friend, frankly indifferent to everything but his own amusement, and if so, what of poor Elma and her dream? It was an awful reflection that in such a case ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... he was direct and sincere, although in a manner totally different from Thorpe's own directness and sincerity. Wallace, on his part, adored in Thorpe the free, open-air life, the adventurous quality, the quiet hidden power, the resourcefulness and self-sufficiency of the pioneer. He was too young as yet to go behind the picturesque or romantic; so he never thought to inquire of himself what Thorpe did there in the wilderness, or indeed if he did anything at all. He accepted ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... the topic of trained bands, and will only remark that in this and other respects Liverpool obtained a degree of self-sufficiency and independence surpassing anything known at the present time, and, apparently, far beyond the common standard even of mediaeval towns. It might therefore have stood forth as an object not so much of envy as of imitation. In point of fact, ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... in reproach than anger. Louis felt struck to the heart with shame and anger; but so much had he lately been nursed in conceit and self-sufficiency, that he drove away the better impulse; and, instead of at once acknowledging himself in the wrong and begging pardon, he stood still, endeavoring to look unconcerned, repeating, "I ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... tea, when both Mrs. Fisher and Lady Caroline had disappeared again—it was quite evident that nobody wanted her—she was more dejected than ever, overwhelmed by the discrepancy between the splendour outside her, the warm, teeming beauty and self-sufficiency of nature, and the ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... upon his nose, blew into his nostrils the breath of hauteur and conceit, so that he magnified and glorified himself and said in his heart, "Who among men is like unto me?" And he became so puffed up with arrogance and self-sufficiency, and so taken up with the thought of his own splendour and magnificence, that he would not vouchsafe a glance to any man. Presently, there stood before him one clad in tattered clothes and saluted him, but he returned not his salam; whereupon the stranger ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... the reception of Christ as a Saviour, and for the simple reliance on His atoning blood and divine mercy, is not gross, long profligacy, and outward, vehement transgression; but it is self-complacency, clean, fatal self-righteousness and self-sufficiency. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... with an American and see my countrymen unbending to him as to a performing dog. But in the case of Mr. Grant White example were better than precept. Wyoming is, after all, more readily accessible to Mr. White than Boston to the English, and the New England self-sufficiency no ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Here we may observe the difference between good philosophy and bad. The idea of Leibnitz is speculative and far outruns the evidence, but it is speculative in a well-advised, penetrating, humble, and noble fashion; while the idea of Spencer is foolishly dogmatic, it is a piece of ignorant self-sufficiency, like that insular empiricism that would deny that Chinamen were real until it had actually seen them. Nature is richer than experience and wider than divination; and it is far rasher and more arrogant to declare that any part of nature is simple than to suggest ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... the course, while enjoying Dorothy's presence to the full. Crane and Margaret talked easily, but at intervals. Save when directly addressed. DuQuesne maintained silence—not the silence of one who knows himself to be an intruder, but the silence of perfect self-sufficiency. The meal over, the girls washed the dishes and busied themselves in the galley. Seaton and Crane made another observation upon the Earth, requesting DuQuesne to stay out of the "engine room" as they called the partially-enclosed space surrounding the main instrument board, where were ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... us," went on the other, smiling with benign self-sufficiency, "the innumerable irregularities of the nervous system. With regard to madame, she has always seemed to me, I confess, very susceptible. And so I should by no means recommend to you, my dear friend, any of those so-called remedies that, under the pretence of attacking the ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... of Philistinism; he saved himself from wild experimenting by clinging to the idyllic, and opposed the restless creative spirit that animates the artist, by means of a certain smug ease—the ease of self-conscious narrowness, tranquillity, and self-sufficiency. His tapering finger pointed, without any affectation of modesty, to all the hidden and intimate incidents of his life, to the many touching and ingenuous joys which sprang into existence in the wretched depths of his uncultivated existence, ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... them on many subjects, as a man of uncommon understanding and great experience — He is, in fact, a fellow of some parts, and invincible assurance; and, in his discourse, he assumes such an air of self-sufficiency, as may very well impose upon some of the shallow politicians, who now labour at the helm of administration. But, if he is not belied, this is not the only imposture of which he is guilty — They say, he is at bottom not only a Roman-catholic, but really a priest; and while he pretends ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... pernicious, and far from being calculated to fulfil the object which every wise government must have in view. The result of the system, he said, was to inspire the pupils, who were all the sons of poor gentlemen, with a love of ostentation, or rather, with sentiments of vanity and self-sufficiency; so that, instead of returning happy to the bosom of their families, they were likely to be ashamed of their parents, and to despise their humble homes. Instead of the numerous attendants by whom they were surrounded, their dinners ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... and often a symmetric and well-tended one) desiring to learn whether you had reference or no to G. P. R. James, of the "two horse-men" celebrity. Their ignorance, however, is not equal to their self-sufficiency. Almost whenever the average Wall Street man goes into good society he makes himself more pronounced there by his assurance than his culture. Of the latter quality he has so little that the best clubs ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... women find so attractive in you? The man's experienced insouciance? The boy's unconscious cynicism? The mystery of your self-sufficiency? The faulty humanity in you? The youth in you already showing traces of wear that hint of future scars? What will you be at thirty-five? At forty? ... Ah," she added softly, "what are you now? For I don't know, and ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... bitten with skepticism there is little argument—especially if he be still in youth, which is a time of raw and ready judgments and of great spiritual self-sufficiency. You wanted to go to Harvard. I wanted you to go to Princeton, because of its Presbyterianism and because, too, of Harvard's Unitarianism. We compromised on Yale—my own alma mater, as it was my father's. To my belief, this ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... spilled milk. It was impossible at times for him not to feel intensely in moments of success or failure; but the proper thing to do was to bear up, not to show it, to talk little and go your way with an air not so much of resignation as of self-sufficiency, to whatever was awaiting you. That was his attitude on this morning, and that was what he expected from those around him—almost compelled, in fact, ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... as death. Why did he give her the letter, and go without saying a word? She knew well the arguments he would adduce! Henceforward and for ever there would be a gulf between them! The poor religion he had would never serve to keep him straight! What was it but a compromise with pride and self-sufficiency! It could bear no such strain! He acknowledged God, but not God reconciled in Christ, only God such as unregenerate man would have him! And when Ian came home, he would be sure to side ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... dug up out of somewhere close and damp. 'Come to my private room, upstairs, not here,' whispered the librarian in the big ear of the humpback as he moved away, displaying his gloves, oiled hair, and middle parting with the self-sufficiency often observable ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... masked cannon, right in their very faces, added the horror of surprise to the disorder of attack, and the thick blue lines broke in irrestrainable confusion. The terror of the unknown seized officers and men alike. In five minutes the crest was cleared, and the ignoble vanity, ignorance, and self-sufficiency of one man had undone in an hour the splendid work of the commander-in-chief. A melee of miserable, disgraceful disorder ensued. The rebel sharpshooters, hurrying to the flank, poured in hurtling, murderous volleys, filling ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... Theo humbly. She had come full of the spirit of putting everything and everybody to rights, and she told herself that her own pride and self-sufficiency had earned its well-merited fall. Theo Carnegy's heart was too gentle and single in thought to harbour arrogant pride. Her quick repentance for the ill-advised words she had suffered to spring off her lips gave ample proof that it was so, ...
— The Captain's Bunk - A Story for Boys • M. B. Manwell
... attributed to him; but enough remained, which he could not deny, to tarnish, if not to cancel his fame. To these he has since, with the reckless and inconsiderate greed that cares not for the public, so long as it finds a publisher, considerably added. His self-sufficiency is unparalleled; and in the preface to an edition of his works published under the comprehensive and presumptuous title of "La Comedie Humaine," he puts himself on a level with the first of poets and philosophers, proposing himself the modest aim of portraying ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... though they were, missed nothing; those sudden spaces of motionlessness, the peculiar, utterly still tilt of the head, were the natural impulses of one ever listening; the calm immobility of the dusky face was bred of a life of self-sufficiency, where muscle and eye were ever-active guardians. The coarse black hair that straggled from beneath a dirty Stetson, the high cheek bones, the swarthy complexion; these the outward signals of his half-breed origin. Yet from Stetson to high-heeled boots he was a cowboy, with ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... moved away. "I sometimes think that when I'm properly drunk one day I'll murder that man. His self-sufficiency and conceit are an insult to the Cathedral. But the Cathedral knows. It ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... of the historical method is that it does away with the feeling of self-sufficiency, and the braggadocio which cause most men to ridicule what they do not understand, and the higher to look down with contempt on lower civilizations. Whoever is acquainted with the laws of the development of the plant, cannot fail to see in the seed the germ of its growth, and in ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... perched himself on the fence, where he might be the observed of all observers. It was curious, she thought, how his vanity walked hand in hand with so much power and force. He was really extraordinarily strong, but no debutante's self-sufficiency could have excelled his. He was so frankly an egotist that it ceased ...
— Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West • William MacLeod Raine
... as a critic," continued De Gollyer, pleasantly aware of the antagonism he had exploded, "you remain children afraid of the dark—afraid of being alone. Solitude frightens you. You lack the quality of self-sufficiency that is the characteristic of the higher critical faculties. You marry because you ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... ambassador, Spencer Smith dropping to secretary of embassy, and his brother remaining on the Egyptian coast. Elgin was far from being in accord with Smith's general line of conduct, which was marked with presumption and self-sufficiency, and in the end he greatly deplored the terms "granted to the French, so far beyond our expectation;" but he shared the belief that to rid Egypt of the French was an end for which considerable sacrifices should ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... shown how the war, and the social and industrial upheaval that followed in its wake have enlarged and fortified the coal situation in the Union. Practically all other interests are similarly affected. The outstanding factor in the prosperity of the Union has been the development of war-born self-sufficiency. I used to think during the conflict that shook the world, that this gospel of self-containment would be one of the compensations that Britain would gain for the years of blood and slaughter. So far as Britain ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... interest of the public in instrumental music for its own sake as an incentive, could take advantage of these circumstances to display his genius and to delight his hearers with a piece of genuine music. This he did and his operatic overtures are of such distinct import and self-sufficiency that they are often detached from the opera itself and played as concert numbers. The Magic Flute Overture is also noteworthy because of the polyphonic treatment of the first theme which is a definite fugal presentation in four voices. The second theme, beginning in measure 64, and soon repeated, ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... Mrs. Martindale,' said Theodora, glad to escape that she might freely uplift her eyes at his self-sufficiency, and let her pity for Arthur exhale ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... was in the company of people who did not care for science. No one knew better than he how to accommodate himself to his company he was friendly with everyone, and never gave offence. But what were his qualifications? It would be much easier to say what he had not than what he had. He had no pride, self-sufficiency, nor tone of superiority—in fact, none of those defects which are often the reproach of the learned ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... and instruments of war are only part of what has to be considered if we are to provide for the supreme matter of national self-sufficiency and security in all its aspects. There are other great matters which will be thrust upon our attention whether we will or not. There is, for example, a very pressing question of trade and shipping involved ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... which fortified her against all his attacks. Yet, what her discretion would have concealed, was discovered by her eyes, which, in spite of all her endeavours, breathed forth complacency and love; for her inclination was flattered by her own self-sufficiency, which imputed her admirer's silence in that particular to the hurry and perturbation of his spirits, and persuaded her that he could not possibly regard her with any ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... with destruction; but God was entreated not to destroy them utterly, and Moses was assured that God would extend mercy as He should see fit. The quotation has a bearing upon the position of the Jews and Paul's argument. They were filled with self-sufficiency and pride, and in great danger. In the reply to Moses, God claimed the right of extending mercy as He pleased, and would not allow Moses to interfere with His prerogative. The Jews were reminded by the quotation that God had a right to say on what terms He would have mercy ...
— The Doctrines of Predestination, Reprobation, and Election • Robert Wallace
... revived in the world, and which lasted six months, when, thinking he could do better, he cut me, as he had done others before. I am not a fair judge of him, because the pique which his conduct to me naturally gave me would induce me to underrate him, but I take vanity and self-sufficiency to be the prominent features of his character, though of the extent of his capacity I will give no opinion. Let time show; I think he will fail. [Time did show it to be very considerable, and the volvenda dies brought back our former friendship, as will hereafter appear; he certainly ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... into the streets. The brooding tenderness is vanished from the City's face. The fretful noises of the day have come again. Silence, her lover of the night, kisses her stone lips, and steals away. And you, gentle Reader, return home, garlanded with the self-sufficiency of the early riser. ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... of the German, which last, alas! appears since the dissipation of the intoxication of the Revolution of March, 1848, to consist, as far as the great mass of the population is concerned, merely in the egotistic repose of self-sufficiency, weakness, and ignorance. The American finds repose only in his house, in his family circle, and among his children; all without the walls of that home is an incessant working and striving, in politics ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... But that is objectionable on more grounds than one; it is redundant, and it is aberrant from the true point contemplated. Sufficiency for itself, without alien helps, is the thing contemplated. The Greek autarkeia, self-sufficiency, or, because that phrase, in English, has received a deflexion towards a bad meaning, the word self- ufficingness might answer; sufficiency for the exposition of its own most secret meaning, out of fountains within itself; ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... by the ladies of the family and their endearing adjectives, Mr. Harness is very outspoken on the subject of the handsome Doctor! He disliked his manners, his morals, his self-sufficiency, his loud talk. 'The old brute never informed his friends of anything; all they knew of him or his affairs, or whatever false or true he intended them to believe, came out carelessly ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... month in the economy of nature; which alone is an invaluable lesson, a "precept upon precept" to a cultivated mind. This is variously effected, besides by the agency of man; and it is a satire on his self-sufficiency which should teach him that Nature worketh out her way by means ...
— Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 276 - Volume 10, No. 276, October 6, 1827 • Various
... be a little god, having but oneself for an authority, and a light, and a law to oneself. But does this or does it not contradict the fact that we are dependent beings, and that the Lord, He is God? This spirit of independence, with self-sufficiency for its basis, and rebellion for its act, is just what Sacred Scripture ...
— The Purpose of the Papacy • John S. Vaughan
... and freedom of the human soul.'[6] But we cannot close our eyes to its defects. Divine providence, though frequently dwelt upon, signified little more for the Stoic than destiny or fate. Harmony with nature was simply a sense of proud self-sufficiency. Stoicism is the glorification of reason, even to the extent of suppressing all emotion. Sin is unreason, and salvation lies in an external control of the passions—in indifference and apathy begotten of the ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... abilities; yet is so well disposed, that Count Bernstorff finds him as tractable as he could wish; for I consider the Count as the real sovereign, scarcely behind the curtain; the Prince having none of that obstinate self-sufficiency of youth, so often the forerunner of decision of character. He and the Princess his wife, dine every day with the King, to save the expense of two tables. What a mummery it must be to treat as a king a being who has lost the majesty of man! But even Count Bernstorff's ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... girl's most withering contempt; and he saw how she contrasted him with her father and Mr. Lane,—yes, even with little Strahan. In her bitter words he heard the verdict of the young men with whom he had associated, and of the community. Throughout the summer he had dwelt apart, wrapped in his own self-sufficiency and fancied superiority. His views had been of gradual growth, and he had come to regard them as infallible, especially when stamped with the approval of his father's old friend; but the scathing words, yet ringing in his ears, showed him that brave, conscientious manhood ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... doctrine? Grant that love is self-sacrifice (I had rather say that self-sacrifice is a part, and but a part, of love): is love also self-sufficiency? ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... was rather highflown; but if the Editor had seen the stacks of paper, in Pinecoffin's handwriting, on Nafferton's table, he would not have been so sarcastic about the "nebulous discursiveness and blatant self-sufficiency of the modern Competition-wallah, and his utter inability to grasp the practical issues of a practical question." Many friends cut out these remarks and sent them ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... needful amount of humility, of meekness, of gentleness, and of self-distrust. It was truth, but it was truth put in such a form as to do the work of falsehood. It was an appeal to pride, to self-conceit, to self-sufficiency. It was truth presented in such a shape, as to abate the sense of my dependence on God; as to make me forgetful of my own imperfections; as to exclude from my mind all thoughts of danger, and so prepare me for mistakes, mishaps, and ultimately ruin. It is not enough to aim ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... enjoin secrecy. A provincial flavor distinguished them all, with differences of inflection, Southern excitability, the drawling accent of the Centre, Breton sing-song, all blended in the same idiotic, strutting self-sufficiency; frock-coats after the style of Landerneau, mountain shoes, and home-spun linen; the monumental assurance of village clubs, local expressions, provincialisms abruptly imported into political and administrative ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... which is—the divinity of Jesus. Their fault was not their jealousy for the divine honour, but their inattention to Christ's evidence in support of His claims, which inattention had its roots in their moral condition, their self-sufficiency and absorption in trivialities of externalism. But we have to thank them for clearly discerning and bluntly stating what was involved in our Lord's claims, and for thus bringing up the sharp issue—blasphemer, or 'God manifest ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... them had more books, some ran to handsome photographs, some afforded fads in old furniture; but it was only a question of more or less. It looked utterly impersonal to-day; its very atmosphere was artificial, typical, a pretended self-sufficiency. ...
— A Reversion To Type • Josephine Daskam
... use to talk about it, Mr. Slick," I replied; "I plead guilty. You took me in then. You touched a weak point. You insensibly flattered my vanity, by assenting to my self-sufficiency, in supposing I was exempt from that universal frailty of human nature; ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... tongues are the bridge between ourselves and antiquity. Since the decline in the study of Greek and Latin, this is a factor to be seriously considered. It is the fashion today to berate the past, to speak of the dead hand of tradition, and to flatter ourselves with the delusion of self-sufficiency. To be sure, the aim of education is never to pile up information but to "fit your mind for any sort of exertion, to make it keen and flexible." But the best way to encompass this is to feed the mind on ideas, and ideas are not produced every day, nor for that matter every year, ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... plainer than it had ever been, which may have been because she had now a standard of comparison. He was tall and well-favoured, and he moved with a jaunty and yet not ungraceful swing; but it almost seemed to her that this was merely the result of an empty self-sufficiency. There was, she felt, no force behind it which when the strain came would prove that jaunty bearing warranted. He was smiling, and for some reason his smile appeared a trifle inane, while there was certainly a hint of sensuousness in his face. It suggested ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... love were not wanting, but they were vague and without heartiness. They savoured of insincerity, though there was nothing in the words themselves to convict them. Few liars can lie with the full roundness and self-sufficiency of truth; and Crosbie, bad as he was, had not yet become bad enough to reach that perfection. He had said nothing to Lily of the hopes of promotion which had been opened to him; but he had again spoken ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... are used substantively (suppositio materialis), they are categorematic. In the proposition, 'Of' was used more indefinitely three hundred years ago than it is now, 'of' is categorematic. On the other hand, all substantives may be used categorematically; and the same self-sufficiency is usually recognised in adjectives and participles. Some, however, hold that the categorematic use of adjectives and participles is due to an ellipsis which the logician should fill up; that instead of Gold ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... deliberate erudition, to be amazingly unable to feel at home in another age than his own. This same simplicity of outlook makes A Traveler at Forty so revealing a document, makes the Traveler appear a true Innocent Abroad without the hilarious and shrewd self-sufficiency of a frontiersman of genius like Mark Twain. While it is true that Mr. Dreiser's plain-speaking on a variety of topics euphemized by earlier American realists has about it some look of conscious ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... at my patronage, but a self-sufficiency that made my sympathy seem superfluous, giving the impression of an inner harmony and ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... slavery, and except in war or in street robberies we are not insulted by brute physical force. Nevertheless we are cheated by scoundrels, oppressed by financial tyranny, wounded by injustice, suppressed by self-sufficiency, rasped by harsh tempers, annoyed by snobbery, and often ruined by unconscious selfishness. We long to strike back at the human traits which have wronged us, and the satiric depiction of hateful characters whose seeming virtues are turned upside down to expose ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
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