"Renunciation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hour," resumed Zenith, "she makes every effort to bury herself, to deny her personality, and to lay aside whatever individual desires and aspirations she may have had; that is, if she is what you would call a true woman. If she objects to this renunciation and attempts to make an independent career suited to her talents, then she is strong- minded and is trying to unsex herself. With the world full of work waiting for her nimble fingers and loving heart, she is compelled to suppress all secret hope of doing something to impress her own character on ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... in a gesture of renunciation and exclaimed: "I'm not equal to any of them, not even the least noble. I ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... private conversation at the moment; but he had persevered, and had resented the little effort. The idea in his mind that she was unwilling to hear him abuse Arthur Fletcher, unwilling to renounce the man, anxious to escape his order for such renunciation, added fuel to his jealousy. It was not enough for him that she had rejected this man and had accepted him. The man had been her lover, and she should be made to denounce the man. It might be necessary for him to control his ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... veracity in dealing with human character. It will inhibit that pitiful tendency toward a falsification of the facts of life, which asserts the reform of a character in the twinkling of an eye just before the final fall of the curtain. It will lead to a renunciation of the feeble and summary psychology which permits a man of indurated habits of weakness or of wickedness to transform himself by a single and sudden effort of will. And, on the other hand, it may tempt certain students of life, subtler than their fellow-craftsmen and more inquisitive, to dwell ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... examination of consciousness can tell us that; and it will take more than a renunciation of explicit knowledge to recreate in us a new mind, capable of grasping the bare fact exactly as it is: what we require is perhaps a penetrating reform, a kind ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy
... occasion to enter seriously on this argument with the present laird or his grandfather, nor could I have any temptation to such a renunciation from either of them. I acknowledge, the benefit of being chief of a clan is in our days of very little significancy, and to trace out the progress of this honour to the founder of a family, of any standing, would perhaps be a matter of ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... likewise a Christian faith, and the name of church of the faithful; but their people are so remiss that they content themselves with furthering only their trading and commerce, caring only for their own individual aims and interests, and peradventure, to no little renunciation of the name of Christian, and causing it to be despised (as in Goa, Malaca, Macan, Maluco, and other parts)—who, satisfied with their own individual interests and business, do not, as here, regard the propagation of the holy gospel as their principal ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume VIII (of 55), 1591-1593 • Emma Helen Blair
... worshippers, whether it approached its god with prayer for deliverance from calamities or for material blessings, approached him in order that their desires might be fulfilled; in the end the worshipper is taught that approach is possible only on renunciation of his own desires and on acceptance of God's will. The centre of religion is transposed: it is no longer man and his desires round which religion is to revolve. The will of God is to be the centre, to which man is no longer to gravitate unconsciously but ...
— The Idea of God in Early Religions • F. B. Jevons
... must be to have a baby in her arms again, and though she herself did not profess to have a strong turn for infant humanity, it was the greatest possible relief to be no longer an heiress, excepting that the renunciation in favour of ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... with a pretty thorough course of reading upon sin, repentance, faith in Christ, renunciation of all evil, walking obediently in God's holy will and commandments, which is another name for holy living, and as she prayed constantly for God's blessing upon her efforts, she had great cause for thankfulness in the hope that many of these young souls thus brought, for the first time, face to ...
— Katie Robertson - A Girls Story of Factory Life • Margaret E. Winslow
... Set the parsons after them! Teach them heaven! Set them to singing about harps and golden crowns, and milk and honey flowing! Then you can shut them up in slums and starve them, and they won't know the difference. Teach them non-resistance and self-renunciation! You've got the phrases all pat... handed out from heaven direct! Take no thought saying what ye shall eat! Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth! Render unto Caesar ...
— Prince Hagen • Upton Sinclair
... their inimical suggestions of death and hell, change their meaning as soon as the founders of religious Orders adopt them for the garb of the cloister. Black then symbolizes renunciation, repentance, the mortification of the flesh, according to Durand de Mende; and brown and even grey suggest poverty ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... there are grounds for suspicion in the circumstances of which you speak; but in such a terrible affair as this there must be no jumping at conclusions. However, the death of your uncle by poison immediately after the renunciation of his wife, and the burning of the will which transferred the estates from her to you, are, when considered in conjunction, so very mysterious—not to say suspicious—that I shall consider myself justified in issuing a warrant for the detention of Lady Eversleigh, ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... did what I prayed you would do. When the months passed and you did not come back, I knew that not even the woman you loved could have called you back. I knew that you had learned the priceless lesson of renunciation, of sacrifice, through which alone the great deeds of the world always ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... flashing eyes, every trace of humility and renunciation vanishing like smoke,—"what! Borka? The infamous wretch who has ruined me, killed his mother, and brought disgrace upon our name? Do you know that he has married a wench of no family and without a farthing,—who would be honored, if I should ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... the very opposite to Emmeline's feeble character, the heroine of the present story is intended to set forth the manner in which a Christian may contend with and conquer this world, living in it but not of it, and rendering it a means of self-renunciation. It is therefore purposely that the end presents no great event, and leaves Marian unrecompensed save by the effects her consistent well doing has produced on her companions. Any other compensation would render her self-sacrifice incomplete, ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... character, in the first three centuries after our era, at Aphaca, at Hierapolis, and at Antioch, where, in the time of Julian, even a Libanius confessed that the great festival of the year consisted only in the perpetration of all that was impure and shameless, and the renunciation of every lingering ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... intercourse with the Beautiful teaches us, therefore, the renunciation of the unnecessary for the sake of the possible. It teaches asceticism leading not to indifference and Nervana, but to higher complexities of vitalisation, to a more complete and harmonious rhythm of ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... as in the easy meeting of the Pagan Feirefis and the Christian Parzifal, and in the double marriage of Gachmuret with the Indian Belakane and the Welsh Herzeloid; there remains only a kind of Buddhistic Nirvana of vague passive perfection, but without any renunciation; and in a world devoid of evil and full of excellent brocade and armour and eatables, and lovely maidens who dress and undress you, and chastely kiss you on the mouth; a world without desire, aspiration, or combat, vacantly happy and virtuous. A world purely ideal, divorced from ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... through the confessional. He wept and cried over his own degradation in the midst of that modern Sodom. Our merciful God looked down with compassion upon him, and sent him His saving grace. Not long after, he sent to the Bishop his renunciation of the errors and abominations ...
— The Priest, The Woman And The Confessional • Father Chiniquy
... no easy task to be a good Mission Priest. It meant self-mastery, self-renunciation, self-forgetfulness total and complete. It meant the laying aside of much that lies very close to a man's heart. "Unless the Congregation of the Mission is humble," said Vincent, "and realizes that it can accomplish nothing of any value, but that it is more apt to mar than to ...
— Life of St. Vincent de Paul • F.A. [Frances Alice] Forbes
... is not only for Apostles or missionaries of great causes; it is the condition of all true, noble life, and prescribes the path not only for those who would live for others, but for all who would truly live their own lives. Self-renunciation guards the way to the 'tree of life.' That lesson was specially needed by 'Greeks,' for ignorance of it was the worm that gnawed the blossoms of their trees, whether of art or of literature. It is no less needed by our ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... form, so," says Col. Higginson, "I have always thought it the ablest." Whittier says, "It is no exaggeration to say that no man or woman at that period rendered more substantial service to the cause of freedom, or made such a 'great renunciation' ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... the impulse and the call. The gleam on the snow, the upward path, the urgent stress within, that is our certainty, the rest is doubt. But doubt is a horizon, and on it hangs the star of hope. By that we live; and the science blinds, the renunciation maims, that would shut us off from those silver rays. Our eyes must open, as we march, to every signal from the height. And since the soul has indeed 'immortal longings in her' we may believe them prophetic of their fruition. For her claims are august as those ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... occasion, while she armed herself to repel the foes of Britain, while her population poured to her shores to resist the insulting fleet of the enemy, and preserve her connexion with the empire, acted with the proper and true spirit of a brave and loyal people in calling on the British Parliament for a renunciation of that claim to rule her which was originally founded only on her weakness, and was supported by no other argument than power. While this then is admitted, let it be remembered, that they who opposed this just claim of Ireland to be free, must have been the advocates of ...
— The Causes of the Rebellion in Ireland Disclosed • Anonymous
... it were possible to look into the future. Such a thought had more than once crossed Vane Maxwell's mind, but could he, in that solemn moment, have looked into the future and seen what lay before him, he would have been well content with the high destiny to which his great renunciation ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... with naturalized citizens returning to Russia have been reported during the current year. One Krzeminski was arrested last summer in a Polish province on a reported charge of unpermitted renunciation of Russian allegiance, but it transpired that the proceedings originated in alleged malfeasance committed by Krzeminski while an imperial official a number of years ago. Efforts for his release, which promised to be successful, were in progress ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Volume 8, Section 2 (of 2): Grover Cleveland • Grover Cleveland
... nuns clad in brown—I know not what their order was—their wide white cowls or coifs serving only to accentuate the pallor of their grave faces, veritable "incarnations of meek renunciation," as some poet ...
— Vanished towers and chimes of Flanders • George Wharton Edwards
... life for others. The expiation is not enough. I lived in another: to win a woman's love; and I have, and was caught up by it for a moment, and it was wonderful. But it is over now, quite over. . . . And now for her sake renunciation must be made, before I have another dream—a ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... for mercy," cried the King. "Wait till you have heard my terms. They are these. I have here," he continued, unfolding a paper, "a complete renunciation on the part of France of the city of Bordeaux with the towns and territories embraced by Guienne, lands that were won by the good sword of my predecessors, to have and hold for three hundred years, but which you now occupy on sufferance and ...
— The King's Esquires - The Jewel of France • George Manville Fenn
... anything to each other," he answered firmly, "on any other terms than the renunciation of all that Bivens leaves. I don't care what you do with it, just so you wash your hands of it. You and I must begin life just where we left off when the shadow of his money darkened the world for us both. You ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... that he had met Francesca in the Mongolfieri casino. And on the 2nd June Casanova, doubtless feeling his helplessness in the matter of money, and the insufficiency of his occasional remittances, and suspicious of Francesca's loyalty, wrote her a letter of renunciation. Then came her news of the sale of his books; and eighteen months passed before ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... so easy, took the lead. "Just a formal renunciation of the crown," he said. "Give as your reason, if you choose, your inability to fall in with the expressed desire of the Cabinet that you should marry a Serbian lady. It is essential that ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... baseball game on Sunday! What would his people think of such a thing? How would he himself feel there,—he, notwithstanding his renunciation of office, a minister of the gospel? He hastened to his room, where he could be alone and think. The city indeed was full of temptations to the young! And yet he knew he would be ashamed to tell his convictions to Perkins, or to explain his horror at the proposition. ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... If I had thought so three years ago, I'd be dust or ashes at this present moment. It can't be that you would feel hurt if Tom Appleton there should fail to keep his oath and should continue to live in spite of your renunciation of him?" ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... that after all his love was hers—that he was sharing her sacrifice. Why this was she did not understand; she only felt sure that she was right, and she gloried in it. Then, woman-like, she reproached herself for the moments when she had cheapened her renunciation by the suspicion that he ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... thoughtful, penetrating, sweet. Yet more than all the rest, perhaps, which struck Miss Frere, was an expression, in mouth and eyes both, which is seen on no faces but of those who have gone through discipline and have learned the habit of self-renunciation, endurance, and ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... ends with the renunciation of the two hundred thousand francs on the part of the Marquis, who has at last become bold enough to declare himself, after manifold hints on the part of the Comtesse; and love triumphs. Thus with apparently little to work upon has ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
... heart. Nay, nor are any of our house, though they perceive it not. My father fasts at Lent, but it is the Pagan Aristotle that nourishes his thought. Rome counts her beads and mumbles her paternosters, but she has outgrown the primitive faith in Renunciation. Our pageants and processions, our splendid feasts, our gorgeous costumes, what have these to do with the pale Christ, whom thou ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... life was easy. Their discourse was elevated, and was occupied by subjects of the sublime learning which belonged to their sect. They believed on one Eternal God, whose existence was light and purity. They sought to approach him by purity of heart and action, by renunciation of the pleasures of the world, and by humility of heart and mind to understand the works of the allwise Creator. They believed in quiet abodes on the other side of the desert pilgrimage, where clear waters ran and soft winds blew, ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... Government, as well as to quiet the uncertainty which is agitating the minds of the people of the eleven States which have been declared to be in insurrection." The objection to this course was, that in a certain degree it involved the renunciation on the part of both Senate and House of their right to be the exclusive judge of the qualification of members of their respective bodies. Mr. Stevens was the author of the resolution and it really included, as ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... himself to say this at all; yet he said it almost as if he were urging it. It implied a renunciation that he could hardly bear to think of. To put off his wedding day, the bliss upon whose threshold he stood after his three years of faithful battle for it, and that wedding journey he had arranged: for there were the mountains in sight, the woods ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... out at the calm moonlight and pondering over the great changes that less than a year had brought her. Her own happiness so complete, she longed for the whole world to be happy with her. Her ever-ready sympathy went out to all those in it whose difficult love-problems tended toward renunciation. She wished whole-heartedly that she might waken to the sunlight of a day when she could say joyfully and with supreme truth: ...
— Grace Harlowe's Golden Summer • Jessie Graham Flower
... renunciation, accepted on the surface with so kind a face, was a source of secret bitterness and hidden tears. But time, with its mercy of compensation, had worked for her one of its many mysterious transmutations, and shown her of what fine gold her apparently leaden days were made. She was now thirty-three; ...
— Different Girls • Various
... considerably above her. It had long been in her mind that she would not strongly object to give him back again to Emily if her friend felt so very badly about him. To this end she had written a letter of renunciation to Shadrach, which letter she carried in her hand, intending to send it if personal observation of Emily convinced her ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... bitterly, "you have been educated in too good a school, and are too thoroughly a Hohenzollern, not to believe in the complete self-renunciation of women. At this court, women have ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... my last annual message that existing legislation concerning citizenship and naturalization be revised. We have treaties with many states providing for the renunciation of citizenship by naturalized aliens, but no statute is found to give effect to such engagements, nor any which provides a needed central bureau for the registration of ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 8: Grover Cleveland, First Term. • Grover Cleveland
... is more often to the unscrupulous than to the strong. His wife's injustice cut Desmond to the quick. Impulsive renunciation sprang to his lips; and was only checked by the remembrance that he ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... the battle with that—the hope that love may yet prevail; the clutch at some high stoicism drawn from the laws of nature, or from "old earth's" genial wisdom; next, the less exalted plan to be "of use," since there is nothing else for her to be—and finally the flight, the whole renunciation. Echoes hover from all sad women's stories elsewhere studied: the Tear reigns supreme, the Victim is in excelsis—for hardly did Pompilia suffer such excess of misery, since she at least could die, remembering Caponsacchi. James Lee's wife will ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... conceived the wretch to be so thoroughly beyond the reach of redemption as when Dr. Riccabocca took his leave, and once more interred himself amidst the solitudes of the Casino, and without having made any formal renunciation of his criminal celibacy. For some days she shut herself up in her own chamber, and brooded with more than her usual gloomy satisfaction on the certainty of the approaching crash. Indeed, many signs of that universal calamity, which, while the visit of Riccabocca lasted, she had permitted herself ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Since the war a sort of refluence of the old anti-slavery politics carried from his moorings in Southern tradition Mr. George W. Cable, who, against the white sentiment of his section, sided with the former slaves, and would, if the indignant renunciation of his fellow-Southerners could avail, have consequently ceased to be the first of Southern authors, though he would still have continued the author of at least one ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... only kept smiling to herself with secret and hearty satisfaction. All who knew of the promise she had given could see that she was every moment on the point of betraying her happy secret, and that it was with a sort of longing renunciation that she withheld it, just as children sometimes delay the enjoyment of their choicest morsels. Bertalda and Huldbrand shared this delightful feeling, and expected with fearful hope the tidings which were to fall from the lips of Undine. Several of the company ...
— Undine - I • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... effect upon me, and when I rose to my feet, I felt stronger. Although Martin was as dear to me as ever, I thought I saw my way at last. If he loved me as I loved him, I had to be brave for both of us. I had to oppose to the carnal instinct of love the spiritual impulse of renunciation. Yes, yes, that was what I ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... renunciation her husband had assented. It had been made an article of the Treaty of the Pyrenees. The Pope had been requested to give his apostolical sanction to an arrangement so important to the peace of ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... fishing vessel. The observation that similar vessels under the British flag have the right to enter the ports of the United States for the purchase of supplies loses its force when it is remembered that the convention of 1818 contained no restriction on British vessels, and no renunciation of any ...
— History of the United States, Volume 4 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... decision which her conscience, amongst other things, had dictated, she was still in doubt as to whether she had won her son or lost him for ever. She almost regretted the burst of generosity in which she had refused to read Gabrielle's letter of renunciation. For all she knew the wording might be provocative and calculated to wreck her plans at the last moment. The letter lay sealed upon her dressing-table. It speaks well for her sense of honour in a bargain that this pathetic document remained unopened. Meanwhile she only prayed that ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... unfinished novels assumed a more ambitious form, and were modelled chiefly upon Jane Eyre, with occasional tentative imitations of Thackeray. Stories of gentle hearts that loved in vain, always ending in renunciation. One romance there was, I well remember, begun with resolute purpose, after the first reading of Esmond, and in the endeavour to give life and local colour to a story of the Restoration period, a brilliantly wicked interval in the social history of England, which, after the lapse ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... the fatal result of the renunciation of the Church system of belief. The subject of the tale simply experiences moral annihilation; but the object of his affection, whose mind he had been the means of unsettling in her faith, burst through the boundaries which humanity has placed, and the moral order of the world imposes: they perish ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... life of complete self-renunciation lived out in that little home—the quiet acceptance and patient bearing of a life-long sorrow, and the earnest endeavour day after day to follow closely the Master's footsteps, and live his holy, blameless life. But some day in the great hereafter, ...
— Aunt Judith - The Story of a Loving Life • Grace Beaumont
... repenting. It is effected in three ways; by repentance and sorrow for sin, by full confession, and by hearty amendment. The illumination belongs to those who are growing, and it also is effected in three ways; by the renunciation of sin, by the practice of virtue and good works, and by willing endurance of all trials and temptations. The union belongs to those who are perfect, and this also is effected in three ways; by pureness and singleness of heart, by ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... moment the prospect of worldly sovereignty, which she thought she had touched with her hand, escaped her. She had a presentiment of a melancholy future of solitude, of renunciation, of secret tears; but near him grief became a fete. One knows with what rapidity life passes with those who busy themselves without distraction in some profound grief—the days themselves are long, but the succession of them is rapid and ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... species of comfort which follows rapid denouements, when at the windows of the attics in the chateau appeared men-servants tearing their liveries to pieces. They flung their torn clothes into the garden, as a mark of renunciation. The people hooted at them, and ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... trembled the emotion of a last farewell to a joy which was going from her forever. The man would be loved by others . . . and she was giving him up! . . . But the noble sadness of the sacrifice restored her courage. Only by this renunciation could she expiate ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Duc de Bordeaux, only son of the Duc de Berri, had by the death of Charles X. and the renunciation of all claims to the French Throne on the part of the Duc d'Angouleme, become the representative of the elder branch of the Bourbons. He had intended his visit to England to ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria
... of the coming renunciation in his voice and in his half-unconscious change of tense, and she dropped her eyes again, for fear they should betray the gladness that she felt, and so should ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... Lords found their party impracticable, and they were compelled (or thought themselves so) to give way to the prejudices of the majority. But Peel did not understand this knocking under to violence and folly, and his pride was mortified, because it was a sort of renunciation of his authority as leader and chief of the whole party. Accordingly it was with reference to these proceedings that Peel spoke with great bitterness to Sandon, and said that 'he never would be the tool of the Lords,' He left town in high dudgeon, ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... clasped her in his strong arms, kissing, imploring, cheering her,—and how should true love choose hopeless renunciation? ...
— Old Man Savarin and Other Stories • Edward William Thomson
... vanishes. But it will be a Roman world peace, made in Germany, and there will have to be several more great wars before it is established. Germany is too homogeneous yet to have begun the lesson of compromise and the renunciation of the dream of national conquest. The Germans are a national, not an imperial people. France has learnt that through suffering, and Britain and Russia because for two centuries they have been imperial and not national systems. The German conception of world ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... American girl hint away freely through three volumes; and it is understood that they either go through the practical ceremony of getting married at the finish, or decline into the most delicately-finished melancholy that resignation, or more properly, renunciation can produce. Yet the atmosphere in which they dwell is sickly to the sound soul. It is as if one were placed in an orchid house full of dainty and rare plants, and kept there until the quiet air and ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... upon material things must be transferred to a perception of and dependence on spiritual things. For Spirit to be supreme in demonstration, it must be supreme in our affections, and we must be clad with divine power. Purity, self-renunciation, faith, and understanding must reduce all things real to their own mental denomination, Mind, which divides, subdivides, increases, diminishes, constitutes, and sustains, according ...
— Retrospection and Introspection • Mary Baker Eddy
... of an evening. To be in the Church was in fact simply to pursue one of those professions which Nature and Society had decided were proper to gentlemen and gentlemen alone. The fervours of piety, the zeal of Apostolic charity, the enthusiasm of self-renunciation— these things were all very well in their way and in their place; but their place was certainly not the Church of England. Gentlemen were neither fervid nor zealous, and above all they were not enthusiastic. There were, it was true, occasionally to be found within the ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... taught her; and the one bitter truth of self-renunciation she had wrung out of it must tell itself somehow. No man's history is dumb. It came out vaguely, an inarticulate cry to God and man, in the songs she sang, I think. That very night, as she stood there ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... obloquy; who devoted exclusively to it an energy of will and power of intellect that in worldly professions might have raised him to the highest positions of honor and wealth. Of his sincerity, of his self-renunciation, of his deep and fervent piety, of his almost boundless activity, there can be no question. Yet with all these qualities he was not an amiable man. He was hard, punctilious, domineering, and in a certain sense even selfish. A short time before he left England, his father, who was then ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... thence we will take you to a place of safety." The convent was reached, and in the morning Bonivard was greeted by his comrade Voruz, who came into his room, and, laying paper and pen before him, required him to write a renunciation of his priory in favor of the abbot of Montheron. Resistance was vain. He was a prisoner in the hands of traitors. The alternative being "Your priory or your life!" he frankly owns that he required no time at all to make up his choice. Voruz took the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... eyes, as if he were feeling the pains of humanity crucified anew, and the chair began to drop slowly below the surface, swinging down into the darkness and the evil dangers that lurked below. Her face was the last thing he saw—a face full of agony yet calm with a great renunciation coming to birth in her eyes, her lips drawn thin like a slit in her face and all the color gone from them, the head bent a little as if a great blow had fallen upon her—an island of agony set in ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... was prepared for so much renunciation. She hoped that he would, in time, adopt her friends in place of them. He was inclined, after all, to respond ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... in a few days he had a spacious dwelling and food in plenty. What more could he desire? He thrived well, growing large and fat. Blessings are showered upon those who are vowed to simplicity and renunciation! ...
— The Original Fables of La Fontaine - Rendered into English Prose by Fredk. Colin Tilney • Jean de la Fontaine
... and lo! his short, massive form and his square-cut, honest countenance in that ardour of renunciation had suffered a change to things almost divine. At that moment—to her sight at least—this homely Hollander wore the aspect of an angel. She ground her teeth and pressed her hands upon her heart. "For his sake—to save him," she muttered to ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... throne of Mexico had been offered to him; that after the negotiations were closed, when his withdrawal must have brought about the most serious European complications, the Emperor Francis Joseph, accompanied by his most intimate councilors, had come hastily to Miramar to force from him an absolute renunciation of his birthrights; that, having given his word to the Mexican delegation sent to offer him a throne, he had signed this unqualifiable compact, but that experienced diplomats and expert jurists, after studying the question, were of the opinion that a document exacted ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... express a feeling which certainly inspired many monks when they turned from their gloomy cells to the gardens and woods beyond—a feeling compounded of renunciation of the world with idyllic comfort in their surroundings. If their fundamental feeling was worship and praise of the Creator, their constant outdoor work, which, during the first centuries, was strenuous cultivation of the soil, must have roused a deep ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... voluntary renunciation, I hoped to escape the curse that advancing age brings to most women. Alas! This year has taught me that we can neither deceive nor escape our destiny, since we carry it in our hearts ...
— The Dangerous Age • Karin Michaelis
... 'Even so,' I make reply,—'if you will consent to use no politer word.' For humanism, conceiving the more 'true' as the more 'satisfactory' (Dewey's term), has sincerely to renounce rectilinear arguments and ancient ideals of rigor and finality. It is in just this temper of renunciation, so different from that of pyrrhonistic scepticism, that the spirit of humanism essentially consists. Satisfactoriness has to be measured by a multitude of standards, of which some, for aught we know, may fail in any given case; ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... girl said after a reflection on this that had perceptibly ended for her in a renunciation of further debate. "Of course you understand that ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... comprehensive insight, the ripened products of searching meditation, the weighty utterances of weighty minds. The proverb, "A burnt child dreads the fire," flies over all climes and alights on every tongue. The maxim, "All true life begins with renunciation," appeals to comparatively few, and tarries only in prepared and thoughtful minds. Proverbs are often mere statements of facts, barren truisms, too obvious to instruct our thought, affect our feeling, or in any way change ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... from the use he made of the Gordon Riots of 1780, "Barnaby Rudge," like "A Tale of Two Cities," may be considered an historical work. It is more of a story than any of its predecessors. Lord George Gordon, the instigator of the riots, died a prisoner in the Tower of London, after making public renunciation of Christianity in favour of the Jewish religion. "The raven in this story," said Dickens, "is a compound of two originals, of whom I have been the proud possessor." Dickens died at Gad's Hill on June 9, 1870, having ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... was hard to understand and appreciate, he knew. That it was bitter not to be understood or appreciated, he had experienced. That the discipline associated with all intellectual work demands its tribute in the form of sacrificial renunciation needed no proof ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... everything to conciliate his opponents. He submitted himself to a fresh election by the German nobles, and won the Hohenstaufen by marrying Beatrice, the daughter of his late rival. He made new concessions to the Pope, which practically amounted to a renunciation of the powers confirmed to the Emperor in the matter of elections by the Concordat of Worms; he undertook to give up the right of spoils and to help in the eradication of heresy. And all this he promised ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley
... a thoughtful one with Gifford Woodhouse; Helen's words had stirred those buried hopes, and it was hard to settle back into a life of renunciation. He was strangely absent-minded in his office. One day Willie Denner, who had come to read law, and was aspiring to be his clerk, found him staring out of the window, with a new client's papers lying untouched before him. After all, he ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... do not fear to be degraded by this feeling, I am not ashamed of my love, I am proud of it. It is not my fault that I love. It has come about against my will. I tried to escape from my love by self-renunciation, and tried to devise a joy in the Cossack Lukashka's and Maryanka's love, but thereby only stirred up my own love and jealousy. This is not the ideal, the so-called exalted love which I have known before; ...
— The Cossacks • Leo Tolstoy
... B., pp. 116-124, gives a long account; see also "Buddhist Birth Stories," the Nidana Katha, p. 158. In it, as Sudana, he fulfilled "the Perfections," his distinguishing attribute being entire self-renunciation and alms-giving, so that in the Nidana Katha is made to say ("Buddhist ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien
... is another consideration very necessary to be remembered, and that is that this possession of God involves, and is possible only by, a deliberate act of renunciation. The Levite's example, that is glanced at in my text, is always our law. You must have no part or inheritance amongst the sons of earth if God is to be your inheritance. Or, to put it into plain words, there must be a giving up of the material and the created if there ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... a sob of joy and pain. Sight of his face then blinded Joan with her tears. But when he caught her to him, in a violence that was a terrible renunciation, she gave her embrace, her arms, her lips without the vestige of a lie, with all of womanliness and sweetness and love and passion. He let her go and turned away, and in that instant Joan had a final divination that this strange man could rise once to heights as supreme ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... somewhat arid one. That is perhaps only because it is nearer the sky, more directly bathed in what he calls, beautifully, 'this queen of colours, the light.' There is a passage in the tenth book which may almost be called a kind of aesthetics. They are aesthetics indeed of renunciation, but a renunciation of the many beauties for the one Beauty, which shall contain as well as eclipse them; 'because those beautiful patterns which through men's souls are conveyed into their cunning hands, come from that Beauty, which is above ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... enjoyment of love is so much the more natural in Richard, as his brother Edward, who besides preceded him in the possession of the crown, was distinguished by the nobleness and beauty of his figure, and was an almost irresistible conqueror of female hearts. Notwithstanding his pretended renunciation, Richard places his chief vanity in being able to please and win over the women, if not by his figure at least by his insinuating discourse. Shakspeare here shows us, with his accustomed acuteness of observation, that human nature, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... Ladies" William Shakespeare A Renunciation Edward Vere A Song, "Ye happy swains, whose hearts are free" George Etherege To His Forsaken Mistress Robert Ayton To an Inconstant Robert Ayton Advice to a Girl Thomas Campion Song, "Follow a shadow, it still flies ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... weeks obtained the release of his sister from the Hoxton Asylum by formally undertaking her future guardianship,—a charge which was borne, until Death released the compact, with a steadfastness, a cheerful renunciation of what men regard as the crowning blessings of manhood, [8] that has shed a halo more radiant even than that of his genius about the figure—it was "small and mean," said sprightly Mrs. ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... though on its good side somewhat beyond the reach of human endeavour and on its bad side overloaded with pedantry and superstition, it combines in a rare degree self-abnegation and independence. It differs from the ideal set up by Buddhism and by many forms of Hinduism which preach the renunciation of family ties, for it clearly lays down that it is a man's duty to continue his family and help his fellow men just as much as to engage in religious exercises. Thus, the Satapatha Brahmana[215] teaches that man is born owing four debts, one to the gods, one ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... suffrage." It was started doubtless by some one who supposed her to be so narrow as to abandon a great principle because her brother had been defeated in a city where women had the suffrage. The Portland Oregonian having used this alleged renunciation as the basis for a leading editorial, the ladies of Tacoma, Wash., where women had been arbitrarily disfranchised by the supreme court, sent a telegram to Miss Anthony asking if the rumor were true. She telegraphed in reply: "Report false; am stronger ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... philosophers or of savants,” but “the God of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob—the God of Jesus Christ,” from whom he had been severed, but from whom he felt he never more would be severed; abiding in Him in “sweet and total renunciation” of all else. The idea, of course, is that Pascal’s dream or vision was the result of physical derangement; and it may be safely granted that if the reality at all corresponded to Lélut’s imaginary picture, this is its natural explanation. The story of the “vision” ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... the teachings of his lifetime—the teachings of Granny, of experience, yes, even of Monteith, for he realised now they had all come from God, and were one. He was down in the valley of the shadows, and the rod and staff were of no comfort to him, for they meant pain and renunciation. ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... should be done; no grief from loss of fortune, if he were to estimate at its true value that which fortune can bring him, and that which fortune can never bring him; no wounded self-love, if he had learned well the eternal lesson of life,—self-renunciation. ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... and the laws should work together to strengthen the motive principle belonging to that form. Especially is this necessary in republics, for honor, which sustains monarchies, is favored by the passions; but virtue, on which democracies depend, implies renunciation of self. Virtue, in a republic, is love of the republic itself, which leads to good morals; the public good is set above private gratification. Thus we see that monks love their order the more, the more austere is its rule. The love of the state, in a democracy, ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... a swiftly-receding wave of agony swept across his mobile features, while his hand clenched tightly. "A soldier of the Cross," he murmured, and the hand was raised in quick salute. "Thy will be done." It was his final renunciation ...
— Charred Wood • Myles Muredach
... communicated to them, by which it appears he has annulled the former treaty, and the authority thereby acquired to the Company, as a grievance and usurpation, to which, from the general corruption of their service, no other remedy could be applied than a formal renunciation of their power and influence: for which said actings and doings the said Warren Hastings is guilty of an high ...
— The Works Of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IX. (of 12) • Edmund Burke |
