"Self-culture" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... undoubtedly a clever, cultured young woman; the great work of her life had been self-culture. To know and understand, she had spared neither herself nor any one else. To know, and to use her acquired knowledge intellectually as teacher and, perhaps, too, as writer, had been the great aim of her life. Everything that ...
— Ships That Pass In The Night • Beatrice Harraden
... would be common in their later lives, namely, a reaction from so much ideal effort, and a plunge into cynicism and malice, scoundrelism and the flesh-pots. In their early life they resembled the Abolitionists in their devotion to an idea; but with the Transcendentalists self-culture and the aesthetic and sentimental education took the place of more public aims. They seem also to have been persons of greater ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... employers find that they can depend upon Jim. Customers soon learn to like and trust him. By diligence, self-culture, good habits, cheerful and kindly conduct, he is laying the foundation of a generous ...
— McGuffey's Fourth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... influenced by the example of Nat, devoted his spare moments to self-culture, and made commendable progress before he resolved to quit his trade, and educate himself for the legal profession. Without means of his own, or wealthy friends to aid, he succeeded in his laudable efforts, and, without being able to command a collegiate education, was admitted ...
— The Bobbin Boy - or, How Nat Got His learning • William M. Thayer
... philosophy of the Chutsz school in Japan compared with that of the other two schools was moderate in tone, free from eccentricities, and practical in a rare degree. In the enormous importance it attached to self-culture and what is known in modern terminology as self-realization, the teaching of the Chutsz school of Japanese moralists differed in no material respects from the doctrines of the ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... passages in the 'Cortegiano' it is clear that Castiglione is painting the character of an independent gentleman, to whom self-culture in all humane excellence is of far more importance than the acquisition of the art of pleasing. Circumstances made the life of courts the best obtainable; but there is no trace ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... s. of a quarrier at Kirkconnel, Dumfriesshire, became a surfaceman on the railway. Spending all his leisure in self-culture, he mastered German, French, and Spanish sufficiently to read the chief masterpieces in these languages. His poetic vein, which was true if somewhat limited in range, soon manifested itself, and his first book, Songs of Labour, appeared in 1873, and there followed Two Angels ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... streets, behind counters, in workshops, at the loom and the plough, in counting- houses and manufactories, and in the busy haunts of men. This is that finishing instruction as members of society, which Schiller designated "the education of the human race," consisting in action, conduct, self-culture, self-control,—all that tends to discipline a man truly, and fit him for the proper performance of the duties and business of life,—a kind of education not to be learnt from books, or acquired by any amount of mere ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... opinions worth expressing. The immediate need of women's souls at the beginning of the club movement was for education; the higher education they missed by not going to college, and they formed their clubs with the sole object of self-culture. ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr
... wasted, and not the necessary and sacred duties of home, the personal attention and effort which the majority of American women have to give to their household affairs, produce that lack of time that is offered as an excuse for the neglect of the duty of self-culture. This it is which fritters away thought and the taste for higher things, leaving the mind blank and nerveless ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... ill-treatment and contumely, being so starved that he was fain sometimes to devour raw roots to stay his hunger. His constitution must have been of iron to carry him through all that he endured. In the meantime his indomitable mind was engaged in attempts at self-culture; he studied a Euclid which he had brought with him, drawing his diagrams on the sand, and he afterwards managed to teach himself Latin by means of a Horace and a Latin Bible, aided by some slight vestiges of the education which he had received at a grammar school. His conversion was brought ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... a "Precis of English History," a "Continuation of Grecian History," etc., and for many years Editor of Self-Culture Magazine.—The Publishers. ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... last, to be captains of our own souls. There is an element of absurdity in the thought that the aim and purpose of human life is for each soul to hunt for the sins and imperfections in others. The enjoinment of self-criticism and self-culture seems a simpler and less circumstantial rule of life. Asceticism, abnegation, prayer, remoteness from the passions that rend the worldly, bring peace and content. But they limit experience and give a false simplicity to the problems ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... it when free from the coercion of parents and masters. And when the acquisition of knowledge has been rendered habitually gratifying, then there will be as prevailing a tendency to continue, without superintendence, that self-culture previously ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... The self-culture that there is in the mere habit of faithfulness is in itself a rich reward for all our striving. It is a great thing to train ourselves to do always our best, to do as nearly perfect work as possible. Said Michael Angelo: "Nothing makes the soul so pure, so religious, as ...
— Making the Most of Life • J. R. Miller
... improvement of morals can assert that poverty is no evil, I cannot imagine!" she exclaims in the "Wrongs of Woman." She cared nothing for the luxuries and the ease and idleness which wealth gives, but she prized above everything the time and opportunity for self-culture of which the poor, in their struggle for existence, are deprived. The Wollstonecraft fortunes were at low ebb. Her share in them, should she remain at home, would be drudgery and slavery, which would grow greater ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell |
