"Self-made" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fellest of the giant brood, Sons of brutish Force and Darkness, who have drenched the earth with blood, Famished in his self-made desert, blinded by our purer day, Gropes in yet unblasted regions for his miserable prey;— Shall we guide his gory fingers where our helpless ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... heart of the vast business district of Chicago, but the West Side is as big as the two of them, and its population contains a large number of exceedingly rich men, who, like the rich men of the other sides, are as content with themselves for being "self-made," are just as grumpy, and with as many weaknesses. Some of these West Side rich men live on Ashland Avenue. There certainly lived and lives Mr. Jason B. Grampus, a great speculator, whose ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... the story of his life he has exploited all available resources of this genetic period of storm and stress more fully perhaps than any other writer. At the other extreme, we have writers like Charles Dudley Warner,[2] a self-made man, whose early life was passed on the farm, and who holds his own boyhood there in greater contempt than perhaps any other reputable writer of such reminiscences. All the incidents are treated not ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... his self-made gibbet fast, Self-pilloried to the public view, A mark for every passing blast Of ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... be observed that it was not Miss Winwood's habit to waste time. Her appointments were kept to the minute, and her appointment (self-made on this occasion) was the welcoming of her uncle, the Archdeacon, on the threshold of Drane's Court. But Miss Winwood was making holiday and allowed herself certain relaxations. Her brother's health having ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... been of late ransacking his grandfather's library and had found besides sea-stories and stories of wrecks, and foreign lands and pirates and deep sea treasure—what interested him more than all, a volume of biographies of self-made men. ...
— An Australian Lassie • Lilian Turner
... is termed a "self-made" man,—that is, he owed nothing to the chances of birth; he had received little early cultivation, but he had educated himself, and therefore all the knowledge he had acquired was positive mental gain, ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... pertinacity of ignorance, they maintained their certainty of his abnormal condition; and with all the officiousness of quackery, they insisted upon immediate amputation. Aided by two volunteer assistants, the self-made surgeons cut off limb after limb before their reckless butchery ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... adopted the tone which Green River's self-made gentlewomen like Mrs. Theodore Burr mistakenly believed to be effective with servants. The boy beside her gave no sign that it was effective with him. He spoke softly to the horse again, and flicked at it coaxingly ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... all nations, Ole Bull will always remain a striking figure. As a musician, none so eminent has been so essentially a self-made man, none has grown up with so little influence from outside, none with a technique so essentially self-discovered. As a son of his country, none has retained so sturdy a sense of patriotism; none has, amid the more brilliant ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee
... every description; subscription lists and all kinds of propositions were placed before him; his name was in demand everywhere. Nothing could be started without the support of the business element; and it was especially the younger business men, the energetic and self-made men who conducted the large enterprises, who commanded money and credit and knew and recognised opportunities, whose interest had to be enlisted. There was the electric street-car proposition, the new theatre, the proposed pulp-mills in ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun
... general ruin of the brain can make even the beautiful Rhine more beautiful than it is to the common eye; can calm it with the hues of departed love, and bids its possessor walk over its vine-clad mountains with the beings that have ceased to be! There, perhaps, the self-made monarch sits upon his throne and claims the vessels as his fleet, the waves and the valleys as his own; there, the enthusiast, blasted by the light of some imaginary creed, beholds the shapes of angels, and watches in the clouds round the setting sun the pavilions of God; there ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... rich man—banker, merchant, manufacturer, and what not. A big, loud man, with a stare and a metallic laugh. A man who could never sufficiently vaunt himself—a self-made man. A man who was always proclaiming, through that brassy speaking-trumpet of a voice of his, his early ignorance and poverty. A man who was ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... William. The young Pepperrell learned what little was taught at the village school, supplemented by a private tutor, whose instructions, however, did not perfect him in English grammar. In the eyes of his self-made father, education was valuable only so far as it could make a successful trader; and on this point he had reason to be satisfied, as his son passed for many years as the chief merchant in New England. He dealt in ships, timber, naval stores, fish, and miscellaneous ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman
... had gone up, Sir William came near and put his hand on Aaron's shoulder. It was evident the charm was beginning to work. Sir William was a self-made man, and not in the least a snob. He liked the fundamental ordinariness in Aaron, the commonness of ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... told me to stay in school until I'd got my bearings in the world. And then I was to have a career. Well, I've got my education for myself... and now I'm ready for the career. [After a pause.] Listen, Gerald. I said I'd be a self-made man. I said I'd conquer the world for myself. But of late I've come to realize how far it is to the top, and ...
— Prince Hagen • Upton Sinclair
... had been stuff in him. We talked (in the papers) of his "output." He had been, after all, a prodigious, a gigantic worker. He appealed to our profoundest national instincts, to our British admiration of sound business, of the self-made, successful man. He might not have done anything for posterity, but he had provided magnificently for ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... enough at first. You have had a heavy trial indeed, poor Emma; but what is a trial but something to try us? Would it not be more manful to face the pain of going home, and to take up your allotted work? Then you would be submitting, not to a self-made rule, but to ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... wonderfully narrow-minded in business, and, being new to the country, had no notion that Indian banking is totally distinct from Home work. Like most clever self-made men, he had much simplicity in his nature; and, somehow or other, had construed the ordinarily polite terms of his letter of engagement into a belief that the Directors had chosen him on account of his special and brilliant talents, ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... Grandmother Ludlow, Joan and many others who had formed the habit of believing that Christopher Ludlow's widow would remain true to his memory, failed utterly to understand the reason for her sudden breakaway from a settled and steady routine, to plunge into belated matrimony with a self-made man of fifty-five who seemed to them to be not only devoid of all attractiveness but bourgeois and rather ridiculous. But why? A little sympathy, a little knowledge of human nature,—that's all that was necessary to make this romance understandable. Because it was romance, in the best sense of ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... thrillingly upon his words when he denounced slavery now listened with interest to what he had to say upon other topics. He spoke sometimes on Woman Suffrage, of which he was always a consistent advocate. His most popular lecture was one on "Self-made Men." Another on "Ethnology," in which he sought a scientific basis for his claim for the negro's equality with the white man, was not so popular—with white people. The wave of enthusiasm which had swept the enfranchised slaves into what seemed at that time the safe harbor ...
— Frederick Douglass - A Biography • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... The United States Biographical Dictionary and Portrait Gallery of Eminent and Self-Made Men, Minnesota Volume by Jeremiah Clemmens, assisted by ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... farm-houses, over which the woodbine and the honeysuckle clamber, while the surrounding wheat fields—(I have lost my volume of WHITMAN, and forget what the wheat fields do, poetically.) Perhaps it is my duty to here introduce some remarks about farming, but, as the Self-made Man is struggling with that subject, and as a certain innocent, who has been abroad, proposes to handle it, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 14, July 2, 1870 • Various
... was one of the American delegates to the Conference for the formation of the Evangelical Alliance in 1846. He is a Southern man, born and bred amidst the wilds of Tennessee, whose early educational advantages were very small. He is, in a great measure, a self-made man. Brought up in the midst of slavery, he is (I rejoice to hear) a cordial hater of the system. As a minister, he is "thoroughly furnished—a workman that needeth not to be ashamed." His knowledge of the world, as well as of the Word of God and of the human heart, is extensive, and is turned ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... of this sketch is a good illustration of the self-made man. He inherited good lungs, a strong voice and a splendid physique. He is really a physical giant, his stalwart frame towering upward six feet, and tipping the beam at 265 pounds. His erect and dignified movements have made him a commanding figure among his people. His constant endeavor ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... name which is, in itself, a title to the confidence of the American people, a diplomatist familiar with the rights, the customs, the traditions, the courtesies, which belong to the diplomatic service, the successor of Mr. Motley at Vienna, and therefore familiar with his official record, not self-made, which too commonly means half-made, but with careful training added to the instincts to which he had a right by inheritance, he could not allow the memory of such a scholar, of such a high-minded lover of his country, of so true a gentleman as Mr. Motley, to remain without challenge ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... cumbering consciousness, all these self-made doubts and worries, had for the moment dropped clean away! A transfigured man it was that lingered at the old spot—a man once more young, divining with enchantment the approach of passion, feeling at last through all his being the ecstasy of a self-surrender, ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... statesman, Canning," more biography; "Henry Clay, the American orator," with autobiography; and a meteoric shower of lesser biographies emanating from Tremont Temple. Nat carried a book in his pocket, and "Pockets have been of great service to self-made men. A more useful invention was never known, and hundreds are now living who will have occasion to speak well of pockets till they die, because they were so handy to carry a book. Roger Sherman had one when he was a hard-working shoemaker, etc., etc., etc. Napoleon had one ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... still less repay the Prince for his long-suffering with the studied insolence of demeanour and the fabrication of insulting nicknames, such as Prince Featherhead, which run from ear to ear and create a laugh throughout the country. Gondremark has thus some of the clumsier characters of the self-made man, combined with an inordinate, almost a besotted, pride of intellect and birth. Heavy, bilious, selfish, inornate, he sits upon this court ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... said that he was inconsistent in his lessons. He dragged in all that came to his hand for the astonishment of Liubka. Once he brought along for her a large self-made serpent—a long cardboard hose, filled with gunpowder, bent in the form of a harmonica, and tied tightly across with a cord. He lit it, and the serpent for a long time with crackling jumped over the ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... having at last proved that he could be Harold Parmalee even in this crisis, the scene was extended to the entrance of the indignant father. He was one of those self-made men of wealth, Merton thought, a short, stout gentleman with fiery whiskers, not at all fashionably dressed. He broke upon the embrace with a threatening stick. The pair separated, the young lover facing him, proud, erect, defiant, the girl ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... was true. The one thing lacking to the millionaire's perfect joy was that he would never have the chance to treat the tall, imposing Don Ramon on equal terms for once,—the crowning triumph of a self-made man. ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... I have read, a self-made man always begins by picking up a pin. After that, as the memoirs say, ...
— What Every Woman Knows • James M. Barrie
... about it," said Mrs. Easterfield, "the more you like weeds. They have such fine physiques, and they don't ask anybody to do anything for them. They are independent, like self-made men, and come up of themselves. They laugh at disadvantages, and even bricks and flagstones will not ...
— The Captain's Toll-Gate • Frank R. Stockton
... medium of his servant Francis Burnens, an ignorant peasant. Now this ignorant peasant was a man of strong native intellect, possessing that indefatigable energy and enthusiasm which are so indispensable to make a good observer. He was a noble specimen of a self-made man, and afterwards rose to be the chief magistrate in the village where he resided. Huber has paid the most admirable tribute to his intelligence, fidelity and indomitable patience, energy ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... Standing between the two eras, and marking the transition from spiritual to practical interests, is Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), a "self-made" man, who seems well content with his handiwork. During the latter part of his life and for a century after his death he was held up to young Americans as a striking example of practical wisdom ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... "Stephen Holmes is not miserly. I've knowed him since a boy. To buy place, power, perhaps, eh? Yet not that, neither," he added, hastily. "We think a sight of him out our way, (self-made, you see,) and would have had him the best office in the State before this, only he ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... Europe. He was the embodiment of common sense and of the useful virtues; with the enterprise but without the nervousness of his modern compatriots, uniting the philosopher's openness of mind with the sagacity and quickness of resource of the self-made business man. He was representative also of his age, an age of aufklaerung, eclaircissement, or "clearing up." By the middle of the eighteenth century a change had taken place in American society. Trade had increased between the different ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... Few business men in New York in my day were more highly respected for indomitable energy and personal integrity than Mr. Fish. He became President of the Tradesmen's Bank, and held other positions of responsibility and trust. He represented an ideal type of the self-made man, and in spite of an unknown origin and a ridiculous name battled successfully with life without a ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... general favorite that he was led to solicit a personal sketch, to go with a new collection of his writings. It is but due to the author to say, that his concurrence in the matter was not without considerable reluctance. From this sketch it will be seen that Mr. Arthur is a self-made man, and that he has gained his present enviable position through long and patient labor, and against the pressure of much that was adverse and discouraging. In his elevation he has this pleasing reflection, that in seeking to gain a high place ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... A system of pitfalls thoughtfully prepared for the feet for the self-made man, along the path by which ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... conflicting deities. From it we learn that the universe is not self-existent, nor even (as the pantheist thinks of it) the expression of one vague, impersonal and unconscious, but all-pervading influence. It was not self-made; it did not exist from all eternity. It is not God, ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... distance: a string of jokes spoken with an effect of rapid-fire smartness, and simply reeking with commercialism. I could not describe it better than to say that it was on the ethical level of the "Letters of a Self-Made Merchant to His Son". Again, I attended a debate on Socialism, in which the capitalist end was taken by another famous clergyman, pastor of the Metropolitan Temple, the Rev. J. Wesley Hill. He was so ignorant that when he wished to prove that Socialism ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... Southern aristocrats who loved tobacco then as now. They decorate our Capitol as a mere matter of form. I don't pretend to hope that ninety representative Americans are Beau Brummels, but there must be a respectable minority of gentlemen— whether self-made or not I don't care. I am going to make a deliberate attempt to know that minority, and shall call on Lady Mary Montgomery this afternoon as the first step. So you are resigned, are you not, ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... gifts that come to them be wisely conceived or dutifully expressed, is a secondary matter, after all, so long as they feel gratitude. The true ignorance is when a man does not know that he has received a good gift, or begins to imagine that he has got it for himself. The self-made man is the funniest windbag after all! There is a marked difference between decreeing light in chaos, and lighting the gas in a metropolitan back-parlour with a box of patent matches; and do what ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson
... nothing should stop me except a bullet, neither reason nor morals nor the lives of other men. I said "Thou shalt starve ere I starve"; and with that word I became free and great. I was a dangerous man until I had my will: now I am a useful, beneficent, kindly person. That is the history of most self-made millionaires, I fancy. When it is the history of every Englishman we shall have an ...
— Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... Doctor Morton was a self-made man, but not a rough diamond,—rather one of Nature's gentlemen. The pleasant urbanity of his manner was so conspicuous that no person of sensibility could approach him without being impressed by it. His was a character such as those who live by academic ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... his moral ruin. A grave, gentle, somewhat effeminate boy, with a great love of books and a wonderful power of application to study, he suffered so much during those years of early maturity, that, as in almost all such eases, his nature was corrupted. Pity that some self-made intellectual man of our time has not flung in the world's teeth a truthful autobiography. Scawthorne worked himself up to a position which had at first seemed unattainable; what he paid for the success was loss of all his pure ideals, of his sincerity, of his disinterestedness, ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... youth Palmer did not receive an average common-school education, he converses like a man of liberal culture, showing that he belongs to the class of self-made men. ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the kingdom, and not only called an extra session of Parliament, but in 1265 admitted representatives of the towns and boroughs, thereby instituting the House of Commons, where self-made men might sit on the small of the back with their hats on and ...
— Comic History of England • Bill Nye
... too poor to send him to any but a common country school, where he was drilled only in the "three R's." But he used every spare moment to study without a teacher, and in after years he was a king among self-made men. The boy who had learned to speak in a barn, with only a cow and a horse for an audience, became one of the greatest of ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... down from their broad dome, clear, sweet, white, and serene, putting to shame by their immortal solemnity the poor little mimes, the paltry puppet-shows of the human jackstraws who had just been worshipping at their self-made shrine. ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... director and principal shareholder—if these other fruiterers and greengrocers did not buy their stuff from his company, he tried to smash them by opening branches in their immediate neighbourhood and selling below cost. He was a self-made man: an example of what may be accomplished by ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... landscaped her Hair into a new Design and carefully picked each broad Western "R" out of her Vocabulary, and she could walk right up to a French Bill of Fare without the quiver of an Eye-Lash. Also she could hand out that Dear Boy line of Polite Guff to all of those rugged and self-made Bucks who get back to Earth every day at 5 P. M. and begin calling feebly for Barbers and Masseurs and Manicures and Nerve ...
— Knocking the Neighbors • George Ade
... it is well to do, but because they do not choose to attempt it. And why do they not choose? So far as this question affects middle life, it is largely because so few of us have the grit to face its difficulties, and attack them, when we have to do it with the serious handicap of self-made disadvantages. It is while you are young that you must lay up these stores of living material for the after years; and this is the significance of it all—you can only do it, or you can do it most effectually, when you are young. ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd
... wider, just because he likes climbing, and doesn't mean to abandon it. There is no doubt of it. Manchester and Stockport and Birmingham have put this in his head. Their great smelting-houses and steam-power factories require big chimneys; and being an overbearing set of self-made vulgar fellows, they say they ought to be a law to all England. You don't want to make cotton-twist, or broad-gauge iron; so much the worse for you. It is the grandest object of humanity. Providence created men to manufacture ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... added—and now there was a small twinkle in his eye to offset to a degree the severity in his tones—"besides, the feller that was bein' called on by the committee might decline to take the hint and then purty soon you might have another self-made martyr on your hands. But ef he ran away on his own hook now—ef something came up that made him go of his own accord and go fast and cut a sort of a cheap figure in the eyes of his deluded followers whilst he was goin'—that'd ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... mark the convert with the stamp of denominational individuality. Salvation itself made no one a member of a church fashioned according to the kingdoms of this world. Consequently another standard of membership was necessary, a standard which required acceptance of and conformity to the self-made rules and regulations of that foreign society called a church. And when these earth-born institutions became identified in the public mind with the real church of Christ and membership in them became confused with ...
— The Last Reformation • F. G. [Frederick George] Smith
... emperor to the humblest believer, the god-way is founded on ancestor worship, and has had grafted upon its ritual system nature worship, even to phallicism.[29] In one sense it is a self-made religion of the Japanese. Its leading characteristics are seen in the traits of the normal Japanese character of to-day. Its power for good and evil may be traced in the education of the Japanese through many centuries. Knowing Shint[o], we to a large degree ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... find a prospector or explorer who has not absorbed empirically some of the elements of geology, and locally this may be enough. Very often men who take pride in the title of "practical prospectors" are the ones with the largest stock of self-made ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... child?" This led to an altercation, and the room had to be cleared while the question was debated. On the return of the Public, the query was repeated without a satisfactory result. And yet the evident answer is, that he is another person's child, except when he is "a self-made man." ...
— Punch, Vol. 99., July 26, 1890. • Various
... begins, and the first handwriting of life is a child's smile; but as boyhood gathers fuller strength, and youth hives a more intimate sweetness, and manhood expands in richer values, life is not less entirely a gift. As well say a self-born as a self-made man. Nature does not intrust to us her bodily processes and functions, and the fountains of feeling within well up, and the forms of thought define, without obligation to man's wisdom; body and soul alike are above his will—our garment of sense comes from no ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... gives away his honour, to prolong A craven life whose every breath is shame! If I betray the men who follow me, The city that has put her trust in me, What king can shield me from my own deep scorn What god release me from that self-made hell? The tender mercies of Assyria I know; and they are cruel as creeping tigers. Give up Damascus, and her streets will run Rivers of innocent blood; the city's heart, That mighty, labouring heart, wounded and crushed Beneath the brutal hooves of the wild Bull, Will cry against her captain, ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... gone nearer the mark. And yet, as it seemed to me typical of much that is evil in Scotland, Maybole is also typical of much that is best. Some of the factories, which have taken the place of weaving in the town's economy, were originally founded and are still possessed by self-made men of the sterling, stout old breed—fellows who made some little bit of an invention, borrowed some little pocketful of capital, and then, step by step, in courage, thrift, and industry, fought their way upward to an ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of life have been those who never saw the inside of a college and whose feet never stepped upon a campus. College-bred men, and men who never had college advantages, have succeeded in about equal ratios. The men occupying the most important commercial positions in New York to-day are self-made, whose only education has come to them from contact with that greatest college of all, the business world. Far be it from me to depreciate the value of a college education. I believe in its advantages too firmly. But no young man need feel hampered ...
— The Young Man in Business • Edward W. Bok
... man with a red face and a bald brow. His very strut pronounced him a self-made man. He glared at his son, whose cool nonchalance he often declared ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... music, would be hypnotised into a frenzy, run amuck, throw off every garment, and, snatching up swords, deliberately placed in convenient spots, castrate themselves at one blow. In a wilder hysteria, screaming loudly, the self-made eunuchs would then run through the streets holding the severed organs high above their heads. At last, faint through loss of blood, they brought their madness to its climax by hurling the organs in their hands into ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... the case with the strong American, he was self-made—that glory of our boasting. But we sometimes forget that an early life of hardship, while it may bring out what is best in a man, so often wastes up his strength and burns his ambition to ashes in the fierce fight against odds too great. So that the powers which should have carried ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen
... was like the house into which he had built himself thirty years ago, and in which his ideals and ambitions were incrusted. He was a self-made man. But in making himself he had chosen a highly esteemed pattern and worked according to the approved rules. There was nothing irregular, questionable, flamboyant about him. He was solid, ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... "self-made" men have undergone the severest discipline. By force of native ability and energy, they have surmounted difficulties and achieved success which merits the warmest praise. There is scarcely one of them who would not have availed himself of a collegiate or technical training ...
— Colleges in America • John Marshall Barker
... outer stalk or stem, confined the Mimosa, in a little chamber, and subjected it to the influence of the vapour of the drug. The fumes now penetrated and reached the nerves and the plant was made to record, by its own script, the variations, if any, produced by the drugs. The plant, by its self-made records, showed exultation with alcohol, depression with chloroform, rapid transmission of a shock with the application of heat, and an abolition of the propagated impulse with the application of a deadly poison like potassium cyanide. This variation in the transmitted impulse, under physiological ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... race-ground, to extol their pedigree, and traduce labor, and lead retainers to war—would be a government for the few over the many, an aristocracy of blood and privilege, of curled moustache and taper fingers; but not a republic of patriots, of self-made men, of equal privilege and just laws. It would be a return to semi-barbarism, to the age of Louis XIV., or even ...
— Government and Rebellion • E. E. Adams
... petroleum Mr. Bissell was a leading pioneer; perhaps he justly deserves the pre-eminence in this great work. Mr. Bissell is a self-made man. We quote a portion of his letter to President Smith, announcing his munificent donation for ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... When she left the king, Abraham complacently took her back without objection, which was no more than he should do seeing that her sacrifice had brought him wealth and honor. Like many a modern millionaire he was not a self-made but a wife-made man. When Pharaoh sent him away with his dangerously beautiful wife he is described as, "being rich in cattle, in silver and in gold," but it is a little curious that the man who thus gained wealth as the price of his wife's dishonor ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... must be self-made or self-begotten, but yet they must be congruent with known fact; but the manner of such congruence is hard to see, hard to express. Ideals cannot be themselves facts, and therefore cannot be known, but on the other hand they ...
— Progress and History • Various
... was proud of himself. He was a "self-made" man who attributed his own successes in life to his mastery of Facts. He is here represented as officially testing a school upon its knowledge of his ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... so general that she did not like it. If she had been younger, she would have turned sulky upon the spot, and Mr. Ferrars almost doubted whether to bring ont his final query. 'Pray, ma'am, do you think this creature out of reach in its self-made cave, at the bottom—no, below the surface of the sea, would be popular enough to repay the ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Bland might be odd from his wife's point of view. He was the self-made man who had shed the traces of self-making. Mrs. Bland was fond of describing herself as a self-made woman; but the stages of the process by which she had "turned herself out" were visible. She would ...
— The Letter of the Contract • Basil King
... think of Dr. Gowdy's characterization of their enterprise and the pointed alternative it presented? What did Andrew P. Hill, as the representative of local wealth and culture, think of Dr Gowdy's strictures on the self-made man's endeavour to adorn the city that had given him success and fortune? What did the distinguished members of the Western Art Circuit think of such treatment toward their most promising and conspicuous protege? All ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... tall and stalwart a specimen of Anglo-Saxon peasantry as you could wish to behold. And while I use the word "peasantry" let it be clearly understood that I do so in no sense as expressing Mr. Bumpkin's present condition. He had risen from the English peasantry, and was what is usually termed a "self-made man." He was born in a little hut consisting of "wattle and dab," and as soon as he could make himself heard was sent into the fields to "mind the birds." Early in the November mornings, immediately ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... complexities of travel incident to the odorous mazes of some hundred odd kegs of salt mackerel and boxes of brown soap impressively stacked before one very enterprising Commission house, Mr. BENTHAM lightened the journey with anecdotes of self-made Commission men who had risen in life by breaking human legs and city ordinances; and dwelt emotionally upon the scenes in the city hospitals where ladies and gentlemen were brought in, with nails from the hoops of sugar-hogsheads sticking into their feet, or limbs dislocated ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 2, No. 29, October 15, 1870 • Various
... reply from Sylvia, only her lips shut tight and her chin looked oddly square and determined for a young girl. But then Sylvia looked like her father, who, one must remember, was a self-made man. And sometimes the daughter also inherits the traits of character that have ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at Sunrise Hill • Margaret Vandercook
... J. Gould Bias, a Botanic Physician, and talented gentleman of Philadelphia, is a member of the class of 1851-52, of the Eclectic Medical School of that city. Dr. Bias deserves the more credit for his progress in life, as he is entirely self-made. ...
— The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States • Martin R. Delany
... William had been what is called a "self-made man," and had raised himself from the ranks of the soldiery through native genius backed by strength of will. His father is first noticed in the annals of the Isles of Shoals. The mansion now seen in Kittery Point was built, indeed, ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... gets, the more she'll have, Lee. As Ben says, she's the kind that if she were a boy would turn out a big self-made man. That's a little twisted as to grammar, but you see what I mean. Sex is one of the ultimate mysteries, isn't it? Now, why didn't I inherit my ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... ill-fate. His failure is due to his ignorance of the first of the four principal factors of the secret of certain success. Potentially qualified to succeed, he does not have the absolutely necessary dynamic element. He lacks an essential characteristic of the self-made successful man, a characteristic which any one of intelligence can learn how to develop—a high degree of capability in gaining his own opportunities ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... but never ending revolt. But the religionist, confessing the ruthless indifference, the amorality which he distrusts and fears, and not denying the majestic uniformity of order, nevertheless declares that these are not self-made, that the amorality is but one half and that the confusing half of the tale. The whole creation indeed groaneth and travaileth in pain, but for a final cause, which alone interprets or justifies ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... also who opposed secession as inexpedient and wrong. One of the finest exponents of this group was Alexander H. Stephens, a self-made man, inured in childhood to hardship, and made sympathetic through his own struggles. Orphaned at fifteen, he worked his way through college; admitted to the bar at twenty-two, he achieved fame as a lawyer; elected to Congress, he was one of the noted figures ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... deliberate. The old ties of duty seemed lost, or at least merged in one another. Beforetime, to serve the king was to serve the Clan of the Priests, from which he had been chosen, and whose head he constituted. But Phorenice was self-made, and appeared to be a rule unto herself; if Zaemon was to be trusted, he was the mouthpiece of the Priests, and their Clan had set her at defiance; and how was a mere honest man to choose on ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... his two sets of principles he would manage a wife remained to be proved. It is the misfortune of what are called self-made men in America, that, though early accustomed to the society of men of the world, they often remain utterly unacquainted with women of the world, until those charming perils are at last sprung upon them in full force, at ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... satisfactory. It was that which led to his son entering business—quite a new thing in their family. Wasn't it very sad? Poor Godfrey and his young wife both drowned! The marriage was, as you may imagine, not altogether a welcome one to Mrs. Eldon; Mr. Mutimer was quite a self-made man, quite. I understand he has relations in London of the ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... Sir John's well-known indolence and irresponsibility. Sir John was the exhausted reaction from the efforts of a self-made grandfather and of a father spendthrift in energy; he had had everything done for him ever since he was a baby, and consequently was now unable or unwilling to do anything for himself or other people. You couldn't see him taking an active part in the management of the League, ...
— Mr. Waddington of Wyck • May Sinclair
... this author, after his poetic descriptions of love, is in favor of prostitution. The German socialist, Bebel, has written a very remarkable book on woman in the past, the present and the future. In spite of scientific errors, which are easily excused in a self-made man who became one of the leaders of the German Reichstag, this book remains a veritable social monument on the sexual question. With the exception of his strong political bias, and the errors I have just mentioned ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... with the air with which one speaks of a self-made man who has just appeared in the Honours List—"tell us how ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 8, 1916 • Various
... Fame! Walt Whitman and Mark Twain, the two great interpreters and embodiments of America, represent the supreme contribution of democracy to universal literature. In so far as it is legitimate for anyone to be denominated a "self-made man" in literature, these men are justly entitled to such characterization. They owe nothing to European literature—their genius is supremely original, native, democratic. The case of Mark Twain, which is our ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... policy was more successful than that of Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar or Charles V. or Napoleon, and he may properly be estimated as one of the greatest if not the very greatest and most successful soldier in all history. Yet he was not born to a throne. He was a self-made man. His father was a modest merchant, without wealth or fame. His grandfather was a scholar of repute and conspicuous as the first convert to Mohammedanism in the country in which he lived. Timour went ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... looked perplexedly at the speaker. "You have had the wrong kind of education, Lewie. You have always been the spoiled child, and easily and half-unconsciously you have mastered things which the self-made man has to struggle towards with a painful conscious effort. The result is that you are a highly cultured man without any crudeness or hysteria, while the other people see things in the wrong perspective and run their heads against walls and make themselves miserable. You gain a lot, but ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... to enliven you a little, introduce to you a new acquaintance, self-made, that I meet at the chapel, and who always sits next me when there is room,— Mrs. J—, wife to the Bishop of K—: and before the service begins, she enters into small talk, with a pretty tolerable degree of frankness, not much repressed by ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... were those he had lent or given away.... "I have a larger number of books missing," he would boast, "than any man of my acquaintance. This big hole here is my Gibbon. I sent it to an interesting old chap I met at a public dinner some years ago. He was a prosperous hardware merchant, self-made, and, like all self-made men, a bit unfinished. He had read very little. I don't recall how I happened to mention Gibbon or to send him the set. I think I may have forgotten the first volume at his office the next morning. He ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... supposed to be the key to national success. It was at least the twin, in importance, with the War Office. Mr. Memminger, of South Carolina, was a self-made man, who had managed the finances of his state and had made reputation for some financiering ability and much common sense. He had, moreover, the advantage of being a new man; and the critics were willing to give him the benefit of common law, until he should prove himself guilty. ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon |
