"Self-sufficiency" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... GDP. Finland excels in high-tech exports, e.g., mobile phones. Except for timber and several minerals, Finland depends on imports of raw materials, energy, and some components for manufactured goods. Because of the climate, agricultural development is limited to maintaining self-sufficiency in basic products. Forestry, an important export earner, provides a secondary occupation for the rural population. High unemployment ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... Bracebridge household were of a broadening character. This great house was a school to Jennie, not only in the matter of dress and manners, but as formulating a theory of existence. Mrs. Bracebridge and her husband were the last word in the matter of self-sufficiency, taste in the matter of appointments, care in the matter of dress, good form in the matter of reception, entertainment, and the various usages of social life. Now and then, apropos of nothing save her own mood, Mrs. Bracebridge ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... Messiter, and perched himself on the fence, where he might be the observed of all observers. It was curious, she thought, how his vanity walked hand in hand with so much power and force. He was really extraordinarily strong, but no debutante's self-sufficiency could have excelled his. He was so frankly an egotist that it ceased to be ...
— Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West • William MacLeod Raine
... mystics show their genius; they suffer too much in order that ordinary people may suffer a little less. Poor Orange! He is certainly fine, for, even if I discard the mannerisms, the eccentricity, the possibly natural self-sufficiency, all that is essential in his character remains and must remain undeniably chivalrous. It was an immense relief to find that he had decided, without suggestions on my part, on his course of conduct. I hate a fellow who tries to be more than friendly, ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... by in fact any influence rather than that of pure reason. Taught they are, and taught they must be, however they repudiate it. But the most successful teachers and leaders are those who contrive to wound their sense of intellectual self-sufficiency least, and to offer them the strong food of dogmatic assertion sugared over and sparkling with the show of wit ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... instantaneous in its action in my mind as that of the lightning when it strikes its object. I stood confounded, yet enlightened, all ablaze!—but the subject of this discovery did not seem in the least to apprehend it, or to believe it possible, in his mad, mole-like effrontery of self-sufficiency, that by his own track he ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... he could not learn and could not do; and this faith was maintained with an abounding and triumphant joyfulness, that fairly carried your sympathies along with him, and made you feel quite as much delighted with his qualifications and prospects as he felt himself. There are two kinds of self-sufficiency; one is amusing, and the other is provoking. His was the amusing kind. It seemed, in truth, to be only the buoyancy and overflow of a vivacious mind, delighted with every thing delightful, in himself or others. He was always ready to magnify his own praise, but quite as ready to exalt ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... itself a kind of prayer; that its possibility is involved in all inquiry; that there is such a thing as an irreligious stifling of doubt, resulting in a spiritual and moral degradation; that doubt may sometimes be the clear work of the Spirit of God to break down pride and self-sufficiency, to force us to realise what we believe, to quicken our sense of truth, and to bid us chiefly rest our faith on personal and spiritual grounds which no doubts can touch. In this Tillotson shared in what must be considered ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... Better than I do—few, I think, so well: I can't account for this. The tailor is, A far more useful member of society Than is a poet;—then his sprightly wit, His glee, his humour, and his happy mind Entitle him to fair esteem. Allowed. But then, his self-sufficiency;—his shape So like a frame, whereon to hang a suit Of dandy clothes;—his small straight back and arms, His thick bluff ankles, and his supple knees, Plague on't!—'Tis wrong—I do ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 495, June 25, 1831 • Various
... such a funny looking little fellow to Peg that she could not feel any resentment toward him. His sleek well-brushed hair; his carefully creased and admirably-cut clothes; his self-sufficiency; and above all his absolute assurance that whatever he did was right, amused Peg immensely. He was an entirely new type of young man to her and she was interested. She smiled at him now in a friendly way and said: "Ye must know 'Michael' is simply ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners
... reverence for RABELAIS and ARISTOPHANES; he told shady stories, void of point and humour, which you were to suppose were modelled on the style of these two masters. And all the time he gave you to understand, with a blatant self-sufficiency, that he himself was one of the greatest and most formidable beings in existence. This was GRUBLET as I first knew him, and so ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, Sep. 24, 1892 • Various
... away into irreligion or unbelief by the wretched delusion, that these creatures, wickedly caricaturing Christianity, are fairly representing it. I have beheld more deliberate malice, more lying and cheating, more backbiting and slandering, denser stupidity, and greater self-sufficiency, among bad-hearted and wrong-headed religionists, than among any other order of human beings. I have known more malignity and slander conveyed in the form of a prayer than should have consigned any ordinary ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... it clear, by these instances, what is meant by Christian self-denial. If we have good health, and are in easy circumstances, let us beware of high-mindedness, self-sufficiency, self-conceit, arrogance; of delicacy of living, indulgences, luxuries, comforts. Nothing is so likely to corrupt our hearts, and to seduce us from God, as to surround ourselves with comforts,—to have things our own way,—to be the ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... salvation, and then, when we hang solely and entirely on the Lord Jesus, we shall be safe. Of this I feel no doubt or fear:—the fear is of having confidence in any thing besides, of spiritual pride, of self-sufficiency. Yes, I find self has many lives, and the very sorrows and humiliations of one day, if we do not beware, may become the idols of the next. "We have eaten and drunk in thy presence:" can such a language ever be used in vain-glory, while we ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... a critic," continued De Gollyer, pleasantly aware of the antagonism he had exploded, "you remain children afraid of the dark—afraid of being alone. Solitude frightens you. You lack the quality of self-sufficiency that is the characteristic of the higher critical faculties. You marry because you ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... professed ascetic, I am more obliged to women for this ideal than I should be to the majority of them, or indeed to any but one, for a spontaneous kiss. There is nothing so encouraging as the spectacle of self-sufficiency. And when I think of the slim and lovely maidens, running the woods all night to the note of Diana's horn; moving among the old oaks, as fancy-free as they; things of the forest and the starlight, not touched by the commotion of man's hot and ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a special entity which responds to a certain sense? If Art accommodates itself marvellously, if it accords itself with the precepts of morality and passion, it is nevertheless sufficient unto itself—and in its self-sufficiency lies its ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... travelling oddities—the dandy voyageurs of Britain, who, teeming with the proud consciousness of their excellence in comparison with the rest of human kind, swoln with self-sufficiency, float like empty bubbles on the water's surface, and who seem as if they would break and be dissolved by contact with a vulgar touch. They contrive to swim by means of their air-blown vanity until they come into concussion with some material object, and are at once reduced ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 335 - Vol. 12, No. 335, October 11, 1828 • Various
... Supreme; that, with his magic art, he transformed all there into children, and charged them, on their fealty to act only as such. "I absolve them all from wisdom," he said; "I bid them be just wise enough to make fools of themselves, and do decree that none shall sit apart in pride and eke in self-sufficiency to laugh at others"; and then ...
— Historic Girls • E. S. Brooks
... you, my good friends, it is not timidity—it is all pride. I would pardon his dulness, and even his ignorance; for one, as you say, might be the fault of his nature, and the other of his education: but his self-sufficiency is his own fault, and that I will not, and cannot pardon. Somebody says, that nature may make a fool, but a coxcomb is always of his own making. Now, my cousin—(as he is my cousin, I may say what I please of him)—my cousin Craiglethorpe is a solemn coxcomb, who ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... Johnny's yells sank to long-drawn sobs and then ceased altogether as he snuggled forgivingly against her arm. And in her heart was a great shame and an aching feeling of inadequacy and failure. Elliott Cameron had never known so bitter a five minutes. All her pride and self-sufficiency were gone. What was she good for in a practical emergency? Just nothing at all. She didn't know even the commonest ...
— The Camerons of Highboro • Beth B. Gilchrist
... but it occurred to her that this mild sample of lawlessness was quite in keeping with the men and the environment. There was no policeman on the corner, no mechanism of law and order visible anywhere. The characteristic attitude of these woodsmen was of intolerance for restraint, of complete self-sufficiency. It had colored her brother's point of view. She perceived that whereas all her instinct was to know the rules of the game and abide by them, he, taking his cue from his environment, inclined to break rules that proved inconvenient, ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... part, but on grounds of economy he declines the honourable dignity of marshal. 'Gentlemen,' he usually says to the noblemen who press that office upon him, and he speaks in a voice filled with condescension and self-sufficiency: 'much indebted for the honour; but I have made up my mind to consecrate my leisure to solitude.' And, as he utters these words, he turns his head several times to right and to left, and then, with a dignified air, adjusts his chin and his cheek over his cravat. In his young days he served as ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev
... needful amount of humility, of meekness, of gentleness, and of self-distrust. It was truth, but it was truth put in such a form as to do the work of falsehood. It was an appeal to pride, to self-conceit, to self-sufficiency. It was truth presented in such a shape, as to abate the sense of my dependence on God; as to make me forgetful of my own imperfections; as to exclude from my mind all thoughts of danger, and so prepare me for mistakes, mishaps, ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... itself, intent on its own game. Its aloofness, its self-sufficiency, are its great charm. The sea does not give and take, like the land and the sky. It has no traffic with the world. It spends its passion upon itself. Helena was something like the sea, self-sufficient and careless ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... no small privilege to you "gentlemen of England who live at home at ease," or otherwise, that you cannot hear how the whole Continent is talking of you at this moment. We have, as a nation, no small share of self-sufficiency and self-esteem. If we do not thank God for it, we are right well pleased to know that we are not like that Publican there, "who eats garlic, or carries a stiletto, or knouts his servants, or indulges in any other taste or pastime of 'the confounded foreigner.'" The 'Times' proclaims how infinitely ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... the young pupil will be sure that even the art of walking, which seems to be an exertion purely physical, will not be acquired properly if his mind has taken a vicious and unprincipled bias: it will either indicate his pride or his dastardly humility, his haughty self-sufficiency, or his mean truckling to the opinion of others, his honest independence, or his cringing servility. But he who has been blessed with the full use of his muscular powers, in proportion as he is virtuous, will, with a very little attention, indicate by his bearing, step, and ...
— The Book of Sports: - Containing Out-door Sports, Amusements and Recreations, - Including Gymnastics, Gardening & Carpentering • William Martin
... that, a very Sabbath of peace would have dawned for them. The modern Englishman is too much worried to plan the oppression of anybody. "Did you ever," asked Lord Salisbury on a remembered occasion, "have a boil on your neck?" To the Englishman of 1911—that troubled man whose old self-sufficiency has in our own time been shattered beyond repair by Boer rifles, German shipyards, French aeroplanes—Ireland is the boil on the neck of his political system. It is the one peche de jeunesse of his nation that will not sleep in the grave ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... humour into bulging excrescences on the flank of that monstrous pachyderm of Europe, the German. Professor Knatschke (HODDER AND STOUGHTON), aptly translated by Professor R.L. CREWE, is a joyous rag. It purports to be the correspondence of a Hun Professor, full of an egregious self-sufficiency and humourlessness and greatly solicitous for the unhappy Alsatian who is ignorant and misguided enough to prefer the Welsch (i.e. foreign) "culture-swindle" to the glorious paternal Kultur of the German occupation. And HANSI illustrates his witty ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, August 1, 1917. • Various
... conflict of principle between magic and religion sufficiently explains the relentless hostility with which in history the priest has often pursued the magician. The haughty self-sufficiency of the magician, his arrogant demeanour towards the higher powers, and his unabashed claim to exercise a sway like theirs could not but revolt the priest, to whom, with his awful sense of the divine majesty, and his humble prostration in presence of it, such ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... his time at school he was very solitary and futile. He never regretted the time, for it gave him two things, complete mental self-sufficiency and a comprehension of the ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... and memories until he could endure it no longer. He must have comfort; his wounded self-sufficiency craved the balm of approval, and although he was contemptuously conscious of his own weakness, he turned to Edith to seek admiration ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... willingly effect a very material change in his relative situation to other individuals. Unluckily for the rest of your argument, the understanding of literary people is for the most part exalted, as you express it, not so much by the love of truth and virtue, as by arrogance and self-sufficiency; and there is, perhaps, less disinterestedness, less liberality, less general benevolence, and more envy, hatred, and uncharitableness among them, than among any ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... as I always do, at this particular stage, with his compatriots; not so much, perhaps, for the compliment to myself and my poor country, as for the revelation (which is ever fresh to me) of Britannic self-sufficiency and taste. And he was so far softened by my gratitude as to add a word of praise on the American method of lacing sails. "You're ahead of us in lacing sails," he said; "you can say that ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... bankers came to her office and did business with her on a footing of equality. She did not become any prouder for it, she knew too well the strength and weakness of life to have pride; her former plain dealing had not stiffened into self-sufficiency. Such as one had known her when beginning business, such one found her in the zenith of her fortune. Instead of a woollen gown she wore a silk one, but the color was still black; her language had not become refined; ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... provisions or of perishing through famine. The Colonial paper money was in a state of great and increasing depreciation, and in order to check the alarming evil Congress, which, like other popular assemblies had in it no small share of ignorance and self-sufficiency, resolved to diminish the circulation and keep up the value of their paper currency by withholding the necessary supplies from the public agents. This foolish resolution threatened the ruin of the army. Nobody was willing to ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... the pain the sight of happy couples with children gave her and which made her shun other women and their company, the fear that her husband was unfaithful (which fear was probably justified), and the lack of any fixed or definite purpose, the lack of a great pride or self-sufficiency, brought on symptoms that necessitated ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... dress and mantle of stiff silk and the cock-feathers in his hat,' the type of the dissolute man-about-town of the period. To me it seems very natural that, dispirited by his first contact with the outer world—unable to feel any real sympathy with the rollicking and sleek self-sufficiency of that holiday crowd, Faust should turn again to reflexion and speculation, and that when he is in this depressed and metaphysical mood the demonic element in his nature should first present itself—and that too in the disguise of an itinerant ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... France will emerge changed, though less changed very likely than any other country. A certain self-sufficiency that was very marked about French life will have sloughed away. I expect an opening of the doors, a toleration of other tastes and standards, a softening of the too narrow ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... engines, to hurl enormous moonstones; in short, let us suppose them, if our vanity will permit the supposition, as superior to us in knowledge, and consequently in power, as the Europeans were to the Indians when they first discovered them. All this is very possible, it is only our self-sufficiency that makes us think otherwise; and I warrant the poor savages, before they had any knowledge of the white men, armed in all the terrors of glittering steel and tremendous gunpowder, were as perfectly convinced that they themselves were the wisest, the most virtuous, powerful, ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... judge's robe;" neither tradition, reverence, nor ceremony, "that to great ones 'longs": it breaks in pieces the golden images of poetry, and defaces its armorial bearings, to melt them down in the mould of common humanity or of its own upstart self-sufficiency. They took the same method in their new-fangled "metre ballad-mongering" scheme, which Rousseau did in his prose paradoxes— of exciting attention by reversing the established standards of opinion and estimation in the world. They ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... an incredible snobbery of the mind, so encrusted with the rankest and grossest egotism, that soon they must flutter and die out, leaving him stone-blind against the sunshine and the morning. No scratch could penetrate that Achilles-armor of self-sufficiency. There must be a shock to break it apart, or a vicious stabbing to cut through it to such spark ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... angle one views them. They have a patriarchal, self-satisfied, suburban manner of complete importance. The old gentleman bosses his harem outrageously, and each and every member of the tribe walks about with short steps and a stuffy parvenu small-town self-sufficiency. One is quite certain that it is only by accident that they have long tusks and live in Africa, instead of rubber-plants and self-made business and a pug-dog within commuters' distance of New York. But at the ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... use crying over spilled milk. It was impossible at times for him not to feel intensely in moments of success or failure; but the proper thing to do was to bear up, not to show it, to talk little and go your way with an air not so much of resignation as of self-sufficiency, to whatever was awaiting you. That was his attitude on this morning, and that was what he expected from those around him—almost compelled, in fact, by ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... Self-sufficiency was both a characteristic and a necessity among these Scotch-Irish, English, and German settlers of central Pennsylvania. Bringing their agrarian traditions with them from the "old country," where they had operated small ...
— The Fair Play Settlers of the West Branch Valley, 1769-1784 - A Study of Frontier Ethnography • George D. Wolf
... ease and by choice, and had no evils to suffer or to fear; yet the imaginations excited by the view of an unknown and untravelled wilderness are not such as arise in the artificial solitude of parks and gardens, a flattering notion of self-sufficiency, a placid indulgence of voluntary delusions, a secure expansion of the fancy, or a cool concentration of the mental powers. The phantoms which haunt a desert are want, and misery, and danger; the evils of dereliction rush upon the thoughts; man is made unwillingly acquainted ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... war are only part of what has to be considered if we are to provide for the supreme matter of national self-sufficiency and security in all its aspects. There are other great matters which will be thrust upon our attention whether we will or not. There is, for example, a very pressing question of trade and shipping involved in this great problem ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Woodrow Wilson • Woodrow Wilson
... the limitations of human thought grew more frequent as the summer progressed. Day after day my self-sufficiency and conceit were being crushed out of me. I was always in the society of a boy of seven whom I was forced to regard as immeasurably my intellectual superior. There was no department of useful knowledge in which I could ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... there followed for M. de Cussy an extremely bad quarter of an hour. M. de Cussy, in fact, deserves your sympathy. His self-sufficiency was blown from him by the haughty M. de Rivarol, as down from a thistle by the winds of autumn. The General of the King's Armies abused him—this man who was Governor of Hispaniola—as if he were a lackey. M. de Cussy defended ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... for a minute or two, puff'd the smoke from his mouth very leisurely in silence. His manner had an air of vacant self-sufficiency, rather strange in one ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... did not mean to fall on him. He was so infernally certain that the Emperor would wipe the floor with us. Us! Isn't it a queer thing now? Here I am, a man who has been abusing the English all my life, and hating them—I give you my word that I've always hated the self-sufficiency and nauseating hypocrisy of the English. There's nothing I've wanted more than to see them damned well thrashed by somebody. And yet the minute anybody comes along to thrash them I'm up on my hind legs, furious, ...
— The Island Mystery • George A. Birmingham
... wounding most cruelly his best friend. He took no thought of another Friend, still kinder, whom he was wounding. And indeed had Donald been able, by an effort of his will, to be at that moment all his uncle desired, he would have done so. But he had cast away his anchor, in a moment of self-sufficiency and it would be hard to find it again. He could not know that a season was coming swiftly upon him, a season of storm and stress, when that discarded anchor would be his only stay, and the nearness with which he came to missing ...
— Duncan Polite - The Watchman of Glenoro • Marian Keith
... belief that you consider him or her a Christian, and you will thus increase the number, already unfortunately too large, of those who maintain the form and pretenses of piety without its power; whose hearts are filled with self-sufficiency and spiritual pride, and perhaps zeal for the truths and external duties of religion, while the real spirit of piety has no place there. They trust to some imaginary change, long since passed by, and which has proved to be spurious by its failing of its fruits. The best way—in fact, the only way—to ...
— The Teacher • Jacob Abbott
... acquainted with the works of man's hands than with those of God; their occupations, too, which are simple, and requiring less of ingenuity and skill than those which engage the attention of the other portion of their fellow-creatures, are less favourable to the engendering of self-conceit and self-sufficiency, so utterly at variance with that lowliness of spirit which constitutes the best ...
— The Pocket George Borrow • George Borrow
... Filled with arrogant self-sufficiency, he passed by Mordecai, who not only refused to give him the honors decreed in his behalf, but, besides, pointed to his knee, inscribed with the bill of sale whereby Haman had become the slave of ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... sons are not sold into slavery, and except in war or in street robberies we are not insulted by brute physical force. Nevertheless we are cheated by scoundrels, oppressed by financial tyranny, wounded by injustice, suppressed by self-sufficiency, rasped by harsh tempers, annoyed by snobbery, and often ruined by unconscious selfishness. We long to strike back at the human traits which have wronged us, and the satiric depiction of hateful characters whose seeming virtues are turned upside down to expose their ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... deals chiefly with the shortcomings of the orthodox religious world. Its faults of temper, its repulsive manners, its custom of making home unlovely, its distaste of innocent amusement, its habits of censure, its self-sufficiency and pharisaical character, are touched with a caustic but healing power. Only the hand of a friend could have done this thing. No point of doctrine is questioned, no principle of faith invaded, no charity wounded. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Madame Mohl) I find Fauriel, "the first Provencal scholar in Europe," delightful, and am disgusted with Merimee, because he manifested self-sufficiency, as it seemed to my youthful criticism, by pooh-poohing the probability of the temple at Lanleff in Brittany having been aught else than a church of ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... a human creature has tasted of bitter things the more it hungers after the sweet things of life. And we, wrapped round in the rags of our virtues, and regarding others through the mist of our self-sufficiency, and persuaded of our universal ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... was almost a stranger to his nature. We all shed tears, the girls sobbing aloud; and we were both solemnly blessed. Nor am I ashamed to say I knelt to receive that blessing, in an age when the cant of a pretending irreligion—there is as much cant in self-sufficiency as in hypocrisy, and they very often go together—is disposed to turn into ridicule the humbling of the person, while asking for the blessing of the Almighty through the ministers of his altars; for kneel I did, and weep I did, and, I trust, the one in humility ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... the will to do it. With the gushing self-sufficiency of youth I was feverish to plunge in headlong and achieve a great reform here—until I saw the Mormon women. Then I was touched. My heart was wiser than my head. It warmed toward these poor, ungainly and pathetically "homely" creatures, and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... subaltern in the army, a Russian officer remarked, with much self-sufficiency, "That his country fought for glory and the French for gain."—"You are perfectly right," answered Napoleon; "every one fights for that which he does ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 343, November 29, 1828 • Various
... everyone to depend upon them. Indeed, they may even measure the success of their ministry by the number of people who depend upon them for guidance and support, rather than by the number who are achieving mature self-sufficiency. As a part of this same picture, some ministers are unable to accept suggestions, much less criticism. The clericalized image they hold of themselves is that of an "answer man"; that is, one who has all the answers to human problems, and ...
— Herein is Love • Reuel L. Howe
... stood in the way of pleasure, for the 'sixties were very busy years. China was just beginning to realize that she could no longer remain in peaceful self-sufficiency; intercourse with foreign nations she must have, willing or no; that meant drastic changes—changes in which the I.G.'s advice would be valuable. Thus circumstances helped him into a unique position, one without parallel in any other country; he ...
— Sir Robert Hart - The Romance of a Great Career, 2nd Edition • Juliet Bredon
... description and acquaintance with the subtle traits of character.(3) Painters in ordinary society, or in obscure situations where their value is not known, and they are treated with neglect and indifference, have sometimes a forward self-sufficiency of manner; but this is not so much their fault as that of others. Perhaps their want of regular education may also be in fault in such cases. Richardson, who is very tenacious of the respect in which the profession ought to be held, tells a story of Michael Angelo, that after ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... 'Dedication to James Boswell, Esq.,' he says:—'I have no intention to pay you compliments—To entertain agreeable notions of one's own character is a great incentive to act with propriety and spirit. But I should be sorry to contribute in any degree to your acquiring an excess of self-sufficiency ... I own indeed that when ... to display my extensive erudition, I have quoted Greek, Latin and French sentences one after another with astonishing celerity; or have got into my Old-hock humour and fallen ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... great principles on which they of whom I have been speaking placed themselves, are as lasting and as unchangeable as the everlasting hills. The lines on which they wrought have borne the trial and stood the test of all the Christian ages. Are we tempted, in a spirit of self-sufficiency or of doubt or of impatience, to forsake them? Then let us put the temptation firmly to one side. Only by so doing shall we maintain for ourselves, and hand on to others, who shall then in coming years rise up and call us blessed, the precious deposit that has come down to us, and for ...
— Report Of Commemorative Services With The Sermons And Addresses At The Seabury Centenary, 1883-1885. • Diocese Of Connecticut
... worldliness in this sense suffers from the general error of materialism, the error of mistaking the de facto good for the whole good. It is only another case of that blindness which is the penalty of all self-sufficiency. The ancient and the modern types of worldliness present an interesting difference which will serve to illustrate their ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... hang. You blacken your crime by your self-sufficiency. It ill becomes one who ... is accused of anything to set up ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... a tree, a perfect tree, and you may keep your palaces. Give me the green fields with a hundred thousand flowers, and you may keep your streets and your piles of gold. Give me the wild wind and the breath of the torrent, and I have no wish to hear your hymns. There is a brazen self-sufficiency about the nature-lover which baffles and offends the mind of the crowd. The most amazing thing about him is that he turns hardship and deprivation into pleasure. Take away his house and he shelters in a cave. Deprive him of your company and he laughs to himself. ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... suspected Tom of such a feeling, I fear he would have cared little, save how to restore the balance by making a fool of the man who fancied him a fool: but no male self-sufficiency or pride is proof against the contempt of woman; and Tom slunk along by the schoolmistress's side, as if he had been one of her naughtiest school-children. He tried, of course, to brazen it out to his own conscience. He had done ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... smiled because it pleased him to think that his judgment of her character had not been at fault. Hers was a brave soul, not easily daunted or discouraged, better worthy of this life which was teaching its stoicism, charity and self-abnegation than of that other life which denied by self-sufficiency their very existence—a gallant spirit which for once soared free of the worldly, venal and time-serving. It pleased him to think it was by his means that she had been bought into his valley of contentment and that thus far she had found it pleasant. Would ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... the poor, decided Governor, who had adopted Mr. Ryland, was so ill. Nay, Mr. Ryland, for the love of this one honorable and just man, could have almost forgotten that he was surrounded by scoundrels, and would bury in oblivion the mean jealousies of a contemptible self-sufficiency, and the false professions of smiling deceit. But should it please Almighty God to remove the incomparable man, and should there be a chance that the civil government of the province should be again disunited from the military command, he did hope that the dear, dear Lord, would favor him with ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... heart-strings, and might often have influenced our national cause like the tiller-ropes of a ship, if the rough gripe of England had been capable of managing so sensitive a kind of machinery. It has required nothing less than the boorishness, the stolidity, the self-sufficiency, the contemptuous jealousy, the half-sagacity, invariably blind of one eye and often distorted of the other, that characterize this strange people, to compel us to be a great nation in our own right, instead of continuing virtually, if not in name, ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... that women find so attractive in you? The man's experienced insouciance? The boy's unconscious cynicism? The mystery of your self-sufficiency? The faulty humanity in you? The youth in you already showing traces of wear that hint of future scars? What will you be at thirty-five? At forty? ... Ah," she added softly, "what are you now? For I don't know, and you cannot tell me if you would. ... Out of these little windows called eyes ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... special studies—a defect which was too apt to mar the qualities of the seekers into natural facts in what must now, I would hope, be called the just-passed epoch of intelligence dominated by Whig politics, and the self-sufficiency of ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele
... THEOLOGY AND RELIGION.—Upon these subjects it is customary to find a mingling of contradictions. Leading New England literati, who inherit all the narrowness and self-sufficiency of British conservatism, are frequently impelled to utter expressions which would lead the reader to think them persons of liberal and progressive minds. Such expressions we find in the writings of Dr. Holmes, a thorough medical bigot and sceptic; R. W. Emerson, who closed his eyes ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, June 1887 - Volume 1, Number 5 • Various
... brought up never to be demonstrative—that was one thing. But that wasn't the main trouble—the main trouble was her most curious, most frigid self-sufficiency. Until her children came she was the most wholly self-sufficient person I've ever known. She was really only happy when she was entirely alone, always. It wasn't egotism exactly—she's always had a very-well-mannered conviction of her own relative ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... For Washington is itself, and something else besides. Along beside it ever runs that dark and haunting echo; that shadowy world-in-world with its accusing silence, its emphatic self-sufficiency. Mrs. Cresswell at first demurred. She thought of Elspeth's cabin: the dirt, the smell, the squalor: of course, this would be different; but—well, Mrs. Cresswell had little inclination for slumming. She was interested ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... than it would answer. She had received a strong impression of his being a "personage," and she had occupied herself in examining the image so conveyed. At the risk of adding to the evidence of her self-sufficiency it must be said that there had been moments when this possibility of admiration by a personage represented to her an aggression almost to the degree of an affront, quite to the degree of an inconvenience. ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... is an instance of real patriotism against the curse of nationalism. Our people are athrill now, not from hate but from an ardent desire to serve and protect. Our war cry does not result from the ancient pagan conception of the self-sufficiency of the State, but from the desire for ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... dumbfounded, into his chair; his self-sufficiency had deserted him; for a moment the purple color surged in his face; his chagrin overwhelmed him. But Marcia, seated in the front row outside the bar, showed no confusion. Her brilliant, compelling eyes were on ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... be amazed at their self-sufficiency. How many are there not who seem capable of anything for the sake of the church or Christianity, except the one thing its Lord cares about—that they should do what he tells them! He would deliver them from themselves into the liberty of the sons of ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... to 'separate'; the principle of kindness and of love is not abiding, 'tis better then to reject this pitiful and doting heart. All things around us bear the stamp of instant change; born, they perish; no self-sufficiency; those who would wish to keep them long, find in the end no room for doing so. If things around us could be kept for aye, and were not liable to change or separation, then this would be salvation! where then can this be sought? You, and all that lives, can seek in ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... evil' refers to the cosmic dualistic compulsion. Falling under the sway of MAYA through misuse of his feeling and reason, or Eve-and Adam-consciousness, man relinquishes his right to enter the heavenly garden of divine self-sufficiency. {FN16-19} The personal responsibility of every human being is to restore his 'parents' or dual nature to a unified ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... truth, that she had changed. She had not tried to change, but it was hard for her to get the old point of view now, to laugh at the old jokes, to listen to the old gossip. She had been cold and wretched only a year before, but she had had the confident self-sufficiency of a gypsy who walks bareheaded and irresponsible through a world whose treasure will never come her way. Now Rachael, tremulous and afraid, was the guardian of the great treasure, she knew now what love meant, and she could no longer face even ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... a fund of self-sufficiency and instigation, she repaired to the academy on the instant, and inquiring for Mr. Fathom, was introduced to his apartment, where she found him in the very act of writing a billet to the jeweller's daughter. The artful agent having asked, ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... own senses; but when he asked her to sympathize with his pain, she laughed at him,—the magnificent coquette!—and bade him, since she was only the reflection of himself, be content with his own sympathy. Truly, if man and Nature be thus allied, and God be but man developed, then is self-sufficiency the only virtue worth cultivating, and idolatry must ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... a hurry to leave me, Helen?' he said, with a smile of the most provoking self-sufficiency. 'You don't ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... so indignant and irritated by this apparent boasting and self-sufficiency of Rustem, that his first impulse was to cast a dagger at him; but he kept down his wrath, and satisfied himself with giving him a scornful glance, and telling him to take a seat on his left hand. But Rustem resented this affront, saying that ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... so much that he said to his companions, and afterward wrote to Aristotle, "If I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes," and thus did strenuosity pay its tribute to self-sufficiency. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... one common experience during the last two years; they have had an enormous loss of self-sufficiency. This has been particularly the case with the United States of America. At the beginning of this war, the United States were still possessed by the glorious illusion that they were aloof from general international politics, that they needed no allies and need ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... state as the wielder of an authority derived from the people with its own sovereign powers and its own sphere of sovereignty ... The legal position of the party is therefore that of a completely sovereign authority whose legal supremacy and self-sufficiency rest upon the original independent political authority which the Fuehrer and the movement have attained as a result ...
— Readings on Fascism and National Socialism • Various
... surprise? To this a satisfactory answer can be given. It might be summarised in the admonitions: abolish over-centralisation; give proper scope to individual capacity and initiative; avoid professional self-sufficiency. ...
— Sea-Power and Other Studies • Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge
... ground-floor corners in a dozen other houses. Some of them had more books, some ran to handsome photographs, some afforded fads in old furniture; but it was only a question of more or less. It looked utterly impersonal to-day; its very atmosphere was artificial, typical, a pretended self-sufficiency. ...
— A Reversion To Type • Josephine Daskam
... unity with her divine original gives herself to such a one as lord Gartley, I cannot help thinking she must have seriously mistaken some things both in him and in herself, the consequence, probably, of some self-sufficiency, ambition, or other fault in her, which ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... trade because trade involves foreign connections; he distrusted manufactures because they produced big cities and collected crowds; if he had nevertheless to have manufactures, he wanted protection in the interest of self-sufficiency. When he could not find these conditions in the real world, he went passionately into the wilderness, and founded Utopian communities far from foreign contacts. His slogans reveal his prejudice. He is for Self-Government, ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... abuse. He had been berated for coarseness and charged with the half-culture of the West. His sagacity had been caricatured as cunning; his presence of mind taken for vulgar audacity; he was held up as a half-educated debater, filled with a miserable self-sufficiency. He was attacked as a demagogue. The East held itself aloof from him in unctuous self-righteousness, because of his stand in the Mexican War. His fight for Oregon had aligned against him the friends of England in America. ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... the responsibility of background and entirely unacquainted with the obligation of noblesse. The superficial observer in the United States might conceivably imagine the characteristic national trait to be self-sufficiency or vanity (this mistake has, I believe, been made), and his opinion might be strengthened should he find, as I did, in an arithmetic published at Richmond during the late Civil War, such a modest example as the following: "If one Confederate soldier can ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... seventeenth century writers it once boasted walls and upwards of two thousand inhabitants, but through the depredations of the sea, it had dwindled to a mere hamlet, and cut off by the Downs and away from all the usual channels of communication, the self-sufficiency of the place must have received a rude shock when the first visitors arrived, but natives of the coast are notoriously adaptable and know a "sure thing." The following account written in 1766 shows how quickly the town was ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... idea of Leibnitz is speculative and far outruns the evidence, but it is speculative in a well-advised, penetrating, humble, and noble fashion; while the idea of Spencer is foolishly dogmatic, it is a piece of ignorant self-sufficiency, like that insular empiricism that would deny that Chinamen were real until it had actually seen them. Nature is richer than experience and wider than divination; and it is far rasher and more arrogant to declare that any part of nature is simple than to suggest the sort of complexity ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... metallic voice was neither friendly nor hostile. It expressed, more than anything else, a sardonic, bullying self-sufficiency. ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... down-country paper, which printed both in full. The essay was rather highflown; but if the Editor had seen the stacks of paper, in Pinecoffin's handwriting, on Nafferton's table, he would not have been so sarcastic about the "nebulous discursiveness and blatant self-sufficiency of the modern Competition-wallah, and his utter inability to grasp the practical issues of a practical question." Many friends cut out these remarks and sent ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... feel, taste, and love, what finds us fundamentally prejudiced and almost hostile, is precisely the perfection and ultimate maturity in every culture and art, the essentially noble in works and men, their moment of smooth sea and halcyon self-sufficiency, the goldenness and coldness which all things show that have perfected themselves. Perhaps our great virtue of the historical sense is in necessary contrast to GOOD taste, at least to the very bad taste; and we can only evoke in ourselves imperfectly, hesitatingly, and with compulsion the small, ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... was next Pacey, on the left, pretended to decry Sponge's judgement, asking sotto voce, with a whiff through his nose, what such a Cockney as that could know about horses? What between Jack's encouragement, and the inspiring influence of the bottle, aided by his own self-sufficiency, Pacey began to look upon Sponge with anything but admiration; and at last it occurred to him that he would be a very proper subject to, what he called, 'take ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... one among the seniors whom he could call upon. As he ran over their names, Chester for the first time realized that his ex-subaltern had not a friend among the captains and senior officers now on duty at the fort. His indifference to duties, his airy foppishness, his conceit and self-sufficiency, had all served to create a feeling against him; and this had been intensified by his conduct since coming to Sibley. The youngsters still kept up jovial relations with and professed to like him, but among the seniors there were many men who had only a ...
— From the Ranks • Charles King
... been anxious about it at first, and had tried to cure him of his apparent hypochondria, and to persuade him to employ himself with something, but as he was obstinate, avoided them, rejected their friendly offers with arrogance and self-sufficiency, even his brothers had abandoned him, and almost renounced him. All their affection had been transferred to the poor child who shared his solitude, and who endured all that wretchedness with the resignation of a saint. Thanks to them, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... attendants I could better know and feel the loneliness of the Desert. The influence of such scenes, however, was not of a softening kind, but filled me rather with a sort of childish exultation in the self-sufficiency which enabled me to stand thus alone in the wideness of Asia—a short-lived pride, for wherever man wanders he still remains tethered by the chain that links him to his kind; and so when the night closed around me I ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... our table, bowed to us and nodded to one of the slave-waiters, who instantly and obsequiously vanished. Our new table- companion at once entered into conversation with us, speaking civilly, but with an irritating self-sufficiency. ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... scarcely short of blasphemy; they were such as I had never heard before, and his congregation, which was numerous, were turning up their ears and drinking in his doctrines with the utmost delight; for Oh they suited their carnal natures and self-sufficiency to a hair! He was actually holding it forth, as a fact, that "it was every man's own blame if he was not saved!" What horrible misconstruction! And then he was alleging, and trying to prove from nature and reason, that no man ever was guilty of a sinful ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... soliloquised vows of vengeance. But the bumping of the carriage over a rough road disturbed the pleasing reveries of revenge, to awaken him to the more probable and less agreeable consequences likely to occur to himself for the blunder he had made; for, with all the puppy's self-sufficiency and conceit, he could not by any process of mental delusion conceal from himself the fact that he had been most tremendously done, and how his party would take it was a serious consideration. O'Grady, another horrid Irish squire—how should he face him? For a moment he thought it better to go ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... and were threatened with destruction; but God was entreated not to destroy them utterly, and Moses was assured that God would extend mercy as He should see fit. The quotation has a bearing upon the position of the Jews and Paul's argument. They were filled with self-sufficiency and pride, and in great danger. In the reply to Moses, God claimed the right of extending mercy as He pleased, and would not allow Moses to interfere with His prerogative. The Jews were reminded by the quotation that God had a right to ...
— The Doctrines of Predestination, Reprobation, and Election • Robert Wallace
... simplicity of little children, in which we shall bear some resemblance to our Lord's humility."[29] This, in the language of the Holy Ghost, is called the foolishness of the cross of Christ,[30] in which consists true wisdom. That prudence of the flesh and worldly wisdom, which is the mother of self-sufficiency, pride, avarice, and vicious curiosity, the source of infidelity, and the declared enemy of the spirit of Christ, is banished by this holy simplicity; and in its stead are obtained true wisdom, which can only be found in a heart freed from the clouds of the passions, perfect prudence, which, as St. ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... cum dignitate), but above all he must have made proclamation that in his opinion all disinterested virtue was a chimera, since all the quadrifarious virtue of the scholastic ethics was founded either on personal self-sufficiency, on justice, moderation, etc., etc., or on direct personal and exclusive self-interest as regarded health ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... military subordination strong in respect—and the birch gyrated freely; but when he was full blown in powder, he was unbearable,—there was then combined all the severity of the soldier and the dogmatism of the pedagogue, with the self-sufficiency and domineering nature of the ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... even herself with any sinner who sought her counsel, had the same effect upon those who would compare what she condemned in herself with what she tolerated in them. And at the same time, no doubt, this total absence of self-sufficiency had something to do with the passionate tenderness with which commonplace people dared to cherish their ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... victories of the field. He beheld again the quieter hours when the young men saw visions together and felt themselves called to put shoulder to the car of righteousness, while they discussed with the sublime self-sufficiency of inexperience the politics and sociology of the world. The fellows all believed in him as one of those who are destined to be prime pushers at the wheel. Perhaps he would be among those conquerors who climb aboard ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... with the feminine world more intimately she would not be the standard of maidenly modesty and reserve that she was in her nineteenth year; but in her there was an utter absence of that self-sufficiency and loudness that is painfully prominent now-a-days in the very city we inhabit. And yet in all her meekness and mildness if you by look or word injured the extreme sense of delicacy that was the under current of all her movements, then—she reared her aristocratic chin high in the air and looked ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... duty of the State to see that the means for the higher education of the youth of the country are adequate in quantity and efficient in quality. The better technical training of our workmen is necessary if we are to secure their economic self-sufficiency and fit them to become socially useful as members of a community. One aim therefore underlying any future organisation of education must be to secure the industrial efficiency of the worker and to ensure that the results ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... primitive. Even more than the original colonists, these dwellers on the second frontier caught something of the wild freedom of the wilderness, something of the ruthlessness of nature, something also of its self-sufficiency, something of its somber and ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... more in reproach than anger. Louis felt struck to the heart with shame and anger; but so much had he lately been nursed in conceit and self-sufficiency, that he drove away the better impulse; and, instead of at once acknowledging himself in the wrong and begging pardon, he stood still, endeavoring to look unconcerned, repeating, "I didn't mean ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... both of pleasure and mind to be the absolute good have been entirely disproven in this argument, because they are both wanting in self-sufficiency and also in ...
— Philebus • Plato
... and was the acknowledged leader and champion in matters requiring boldness and courage; his popularity made him giddy; favour of man led to forgetfulness of God; and even a glance at his countenance showed a self-sufficiency and arrogance which ill became the refinement of his features, and ill replaced the ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... actuality, and the rest; his repudiation of inclusion in a genus; his actualized infinity; his "personality," apart from the moral qualities which it may comport; his relations to evil being permissive and not positive; his self-sufficiency, self-love, and absolute felicity in himself:—candidly speaking, how do such qualities as these make any definite connection with our life? And if they severally call for no distinctive adaptations of our conduct, what vital difference can it possibly make ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... before he had made himself known! It was his vanity that was starving to death, and all Mungold's hampers could not appease that hunger. Stanwell was not shocked by the discovery—he was only the more sorry for the little man, who was, after all, denied that solace of self-sufficiency which his talk so noisily proclaimed. His lot seemed hard enough when Stanwell had pictured him as buoyed up by the scorn of public opinion—it became tragic if he was denied that support. The artist wondered if Kate had guessed her brother's secret, or if she were ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... about it, Mr. Slick," I replied; "I plead guilty. You took me in then. You touched a weak point. You insensibly flattered my vanity, by assenting to my self-sufficiency, in supposing I was exempt from that universal frailty of human nature; ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... talk, Henry," she would say in the hard practical voice which so completed her self-sufficiency. "You are not earning your living. You are still dependent upon us;" and she would add with a note of triumph: "Remember, if anything were to happen to your dear father you would have to shift for yourself, for everything has been left ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... a thing is furnished with the conditions of happiness, the more desirable it is. Also one of the conditions of happiness is that it be self-sufficing, else it would not set man's appetite at rest, as the last end does. Now riches give great promise of self-sufficiency, as Boethius says (De Consol. iii): the reason of which, according to the Philosopher (Ethic. v, 5), is that we "use money in token of taking possession of something," and again it is written (Eccles. 10:19): "All things obey money." ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... imagination,—for who can find out the beginning of that which hath not a beginning to be found out,—and our most extended apprehensions fall infinitely short of the days of the Ancient of days. O how glorious, then, must his being be, and how boundless! His self-sufficiency and perfection doth herein appear, that from such an inconceivable space he was as perfect and blessed in himself as now. The creatures add nothing to his perfection or satisfaction. He was as well-pleased with his own all-comprehending ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... were being scourged out of her by force of the love which she had learnt to feel. She was little changed in manner, and an observer might have said that she was as childishly pleased as ever with a new gaud or a pretty toy; but behind the self-sufficiency of her demeanor, and the frivolity of her tastes, there was something new—something more real and living than mere self-indulgence and conceit. The faculty of giving and spending herself for others had sprung into being with the first love she had known. For the man with ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... met, who knows so little of the habits of society as myself? Those fine gentlemen who were here the other day shocked my ignorance by numberless little displays of indifference. Yet I can feel that they must have been paragons of good-breeding, and that what I believed to be a very cool self-sufficiency, was in reality the very latest ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... this last the door had opened. It was then he had hoped he might be far from Valmy the day his passion of soul was stirred. It expressed his mood of the moment, but now he knew he had said more, much more, than he had meant, as youth so often does in its gay self-sufficiency, and the words as they stood—if Tristan had caught them—were no commendation to either favour or confidence. How could the King trust him when his foolish satire had so plainly hinted that he did not trust the King? It would ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... as a hewer down the pit been disabled by a fall of stone; then as he had been a 'handy man' and used to both horses and flowers the Rector had taken him into his service as groom-gardener. 'Crammed with northern self-sufficiency and a sort of scornful incivility, he has a keen sense of humour and a heart of gold,' said my uncle, as he forewarned me as to ...
— Border Ghost Stories • Howard Pease
... on me the effect of a pedagogic exuberance. Even the occasional good views (on harmony, for example) that it contains are obscured by a self-sufficiency in the tone and manner of them, of which one may well complain as insupportable. What Raff wishes to appear spoils four-fifths (to quote the time which he adapts so ridiculously to "Lohengrin" of what he might be. He is perpetually getting on scientific stilts, which are by no means of a very ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... most part this traffic of the night was conducted by men—young or old, as may be. The capa hid them all, kept their semblance as secret as their affairs. Here and there, but rarely, walked a woman, superbly, as Spanish women will, with a self-sufficiency almost arrogantly strong, robed in white, hooded with a white veil. The mantilla came streaming from the comb, swathed her pale cheeks and enhanced her lustrous eyes; but from top to toe she was (whatever else; she may have ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett
... address themselves to the eye." It was this principle, derided by the many, dimly perceived by the few, which led to the development of the sign-language, the means which God had appointed to unlock the darkened understanding of the deaf-mute, but which man, in his self-sufficiency and blindness, had over-looked. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... If I am asked to say what that is, I should say that it is the imbibing instinctively of what is eminently a fine, manly, and graceful convention. Its good side is a certain chivalrous code of courage, honour, efficiency, courtesy, and duty. Its fault is a sense of perfect rightness and self-sufficiency, an overvaluing of sport and games, an undervaluing of intellectual interests, enthusiasm, ideas. It is not that the sense of effortless superiority is to be emphasized or insisted upon—modesty entirely forbids that—but it is the sort of feeling described ironically in the book of ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... nature. To take the commonest instances, when you are told to go to bed, or to mend your dress, or to put on a wrap, or to tidy your room, are you in any way a finer nature if you dawdle and argue and resent the order? Nothing is so small as self-sufficiency and self-centredness, whereas humility and obedience are of the Nature of our Lord Himself, and every humble and obedient soul is in communion with His Greatness. Dante's hierarchy of heaven, "in order serviceable," in ordered ranks, ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... Self-confidence, Love of Power, Ostentation, Ambition, Business Energy, Adhesiveness, Self-sufficiency, Playfulness, Approbativeness, Oratory, ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various
... could while parleying with Berenice, he at last obtained speech of Lucien; and, arrogant publisher though he was, he came in with the radiant air of a courtier in the royal presence, mingled, however, with a certain self-sufficiency and easy good humor. ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... about at the other laborers. Fully three-quarters of them were beri-rabza ridden. A cure for the skin fungus had not yet been found; the men's faces and hands were scabbed and red. The colony had grown to near self-sufficiency, would soon have a moderate prosperity, yet they still lacked adequate medical and ...
— Monkey On His Back • Charles V. De Vet
... his sensations was reached, his self-sufficiency collapsed and he entered into ceaseless supplication of the gods. He vowed costly sacrifices to them, adding promises of self-abnegation which became more comprehensive as his distress increased. At the end of a month he had consecrated ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... not savage in the common signification of this term. They were men each one of whom constituted himself willingly a centre for others, or, if this was not the case, renounced them in proud self-sufficiency. All the glory and all the disgrace of our race lies in the power of individualizing which is divinely breathed into our veins. As a natural element, if this be not controlled, it degenerates easily into intractableness, into violence. The Germans need ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... despotic self-sufficiency of this easy and indifferent existence may expose us to taunts; but how sublimely ineffective the taunts which are never heard and which, if heard through echoing mischance, would provoke but serene ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... one is its inferiority to preceding Houses of Commons, and the presumption, impertinence, and self-sufficiency of the new members.... There exists no party but that of the Government; the Irish act in a body under O'Connell to the number of about forty; the Radicals are scattered up and down without a leader, numerous, restless, turbulent, bold, and active; the ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... will agree to achieve certain economic reform milestones, such as building anticorruption measures into Iraqi institutions, adopting a fair legal framework for foreign investors, and reaching economic self-sufficiency by 2012. Several U.S. and international officials told us that the compact could be an opportunity to seek greater international ...
— The Iraq Study Group Report • United States Institute for Peace
... ignorant of her friend's promise. There were moments when Mrs. Ford's tongue itched to speak. There were others, it is true, when she dreaded any explanation which would compel her to forfeit her displeasure. Lizzie's happy self-sufficiency was most irritating. She grudged the young girl the dignity of her secret; her own actual knowledge of it rather increased her jealousy, by showing her the importance of the scheme from which she was excluded. Lizzie, being in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various |
