"Self-accusation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... appears as the distinctive colour of prelates, divests itself of its usual meaning of self-accusation and mourning, to assume a certain dignity and simulate ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... never extorted from the defendant by means of torture, but no attempt is ever made to lead him on to self-incrimination. Moreover, a voluntary confession on his part is not admitted in evidence, and therefore not competent to convict him, unless a legal number of witnesses minutely corroborate his self-accusation.'—Mendelsohn, p. 133. ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... often forego the living for the dead. Worse yet, he must accept—how often!—poverty and solitude. For the ease and pleasure of treading the old road, accepting the fashions, the education, the religion of society, he takes the cross of making his own, and, of course, the self-accusation, the faint heart, the frequent uncertainty and loss of time, which are the nettles and tangling vines in the way of the self-relying and self-directed; and the state of virtual hostility in which he seems to stand to society, ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... and all her praying had been of no avail! She sat there in the most violent agitation! Her grief that she could thus be overcome caused her in despair to begin the bitterest self-accusation. Again she felt the scorn of the crowd at her foolish bridal procession; again she loathed herself for her own weakness—that she could not stop her crying then, nor her thinking of it now—that with her want of self-control ...
— The Bridal March; One Day • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... day upon the water Janet fell a victim to mal-de-mer, and 'twas Katherine who turned nurse; and after four or five days Janet grew better and was half ashamed, veiling her confusion with self-accusation: "'Tis good enough for me, 'twas wrong to be eating pork, 'tis positively forbidden us. I lay it to that! I gave myself over to eating to make up for a fast of nine long years. Thou hadst not a qualm because thou hast been fed on wine and porridge and beef ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... incensed against the follies and vices of mankind, as delighted with the distress of his fellow-creatures. Thus he put the most unfavourable construction on the principles of his friend, because he found himself justly fallen under the lash of his animadversion. Thus self-accusation very often dissolves the closest friendship. A man, conscious of his own indiscretion, is implacably offended at the rectitude of his companion's conduct, which he considers as an insult upon his failings, never to be forgiven, even though he has not tasted the bitterness of reproof, ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... comfort in it, deadly cold comfort if he were about to leave her. She knew that night as she lay awake that she had not quite trusted him up till now, by the sense of entire trust and faith in him which rose up to meet his self-accusation. What might have turned away Rachel's heart from him had had the opposite effect. "He told me the worst of himself, though he risked losing me by doing it. He wished me to know before he asked me to marry him. ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... place to youth, and, allowing for the vanity of self-accusation, there can be little doubt that the youth of Saint Augustine was une jeunesse orageuse. "And what was that wherein I took delight but to love and to be beloved." There was ever much sentiment and affection ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... has seen fit to accuse me of—of—" For the life of him, he could not at once say of just what he had been accused, unless he allowed self-accusation to prompt his words. "Some sheepherders have been murdered, I believe," he went on, "and Wade seems to think that Moran and I ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... the self-accusation, I told her that though she had been very foolish she had punished herself severely enough; that her reaction was that of an essentially moral person; that an essentially immoral woman would have continued in her career, and at least would not have been ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... be on us before morning, dearest," he said, and it was only by the greatest effort he could check a tide of self-accusation. But the ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... days and nights, bitterly blaming himself as the guilty cause of the mighty catastrophe, and is with difficulty prevented by his friends from casting himself into the sea, and thus putting an end to a life made miserable by such self-accusation. At length the swell subsides; a favourable breeze springs up; the shattered ships return, with few oars and garments spread for sails; some are towed by others more efficient; these being hastily repaired are sent ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... by Bunyan, after his conversion, on his former self, must not mislead us into supposing him ever, either as boy or man, to have lived a vicious life. "The wickedness of the tinker," writes Southey, "has been greatly overrated, and it is taking the language of self-accusation too literally to pronounce of John Bunyan that he was at any time depraved." The justice of this verdict of acquittal is fully accepted by Coleridge. "Bunyan," he says, "was never in our received sense ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... the commission with which I had been invested, and I besought heaven to degrade the wretch who could not speak at the seasonable moment, and to bestow it upon one worthier of its love, and abler to perform his duty. I passed a miserable night of remorse, and bitter self-accusation, and in the morning was distracted by the battling feelings that were marshalled against each other in my soul. Now, a sense of my unworthiness was victorious over every other thought, and I resolved to resign my trust, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... self-accusation does not poke a finger through it—is that the Blockses were mainly of the dry land, and never went to sea when they could help it. If they had lived beyond the two trees and the stile that marked the parish boundary upon the hill towards London, they might have been ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... was piteous to hear him sobbing, his head upon his raised arm, his whole frame quivering with emotion. I had never seen any one weep like that before. So I sat dumb, trying in vain to answer this bewildering self-accusation. At last there came out of the folds of the chair the ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 6 • Various
... says a biographer who knew him well. His contempt for base actions; his love of equity; his passion for truth, which was carried almost to a hatred of cant and hypocrisy, were the immediate causes of his want of fairness in his opinion of himself and of his self-accusation of things most contrary ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... to Timea a great burden was lifted from the soul of Timar. Since the day when the treasure of Ali Tschorbadschi had enabled him to achieve power and riches, Timar had been haunted by the voice of self-accusation; "This money does not belong to you—it was the property of an orphan. You are a man of ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... succeed in persuading generations unborn to yield His demand, when they heard it. The strangest thing in the world's history is that to-day there are millions who do love Jesus Christ more than all besides, and whose chief self-accusation is that they do not love Him more. The strange, audacious claim is most reasonable, if we believe that Jesus is the Son of God, who died for each of us, and that each man and woman to the last of the generations had a separate place in His divine human love when He died. It ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... for such idle, presumptuous, fluttering, and inquisitive spirits as you." And everybody will recollect the story of the self-complacent cardinal who went to confess to a holy monk, and thought by self-accusation to get the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... of the tinker has been greatly over-charged; and it is taking the language of self-accusation too literally, to pronounce of John Bunyan that he was at any time depraved. The worst of what he was in his worst days is to be expressed in a single word ... he had been a ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... and cruel death, and of His divine faithfulness. Oh, Ruth!" exclaimed he, "when I look and see what you may be—what you must be to that boy, I cannot think how you could be coward enough, for a moment, to shrink from your work! But we have all been cowards hitherto," he added, in bitter self-accusation. "God help us ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... oil on the troubled waters,—to speak peaceably, and to refrain from sour looks, or even the shadow of a frown. Archie was never cross with Grace: therefore it must be she, Mattie, on whom the blame lay; she was such a silly little thing, And so on. There is no need to follow the self-accusation of one of the kindest hearts that ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... I can not speak for the others, although there was a wondrous maze of lies put forth that night by way of explanation that I might repeat. All I know is that through my mind kept running against my will self-accusation, self-condemnation, self-contempt! I had permitted my love for Ranjoor Singh to be corrupted by most meager evidence. If I had not been his enemy, I had not been true to him, and who is not true is false. I fought with a sense of shame ...
— Hira Singh - When India came to fight in Flanders • Talbot Mundy
... led to go to Iowa a few weeks to be what help I could to a dear sister who was going through some deep trials. Her difficulty seemed to be mainly self-accusation. In other words, she had set her spiritual standard so high that she could not live up to her own ideal. Like nearly all people who undergo that difficulty, she was good at heart, but the struggle to get out of her difficulty was severe. God came to her help, ...
— Trials and Triumphs of Faith • Mary Cole
... lycanthropy was at its zenith, there was an extraordinary readiness among the accused to confess, and even to give circumstantial evidence of their own metamorphosis; and that this particular form of self-accusation at length became so popular among the leading people in the land, that the judicial court, having its suspicions awakened, and, doubtless, fearful of sentencing so many important personages, acquitted the majority of the accused, announcing them ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... weeks elapsed; I found it pleasant to work, but very trying to wait. At the end my courage very nearly failed. I reached the era of self-accusation; to make myself forget myself I took long, ardent marches into the open country; followed the authors I had worshipped through the localities they had made reverend; lost myself in dreaminesses,—those precursors of death ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... religion to her feet, and lifted her to virtuous matrimony, only to banish her lover from the hearthstones of his race and make them both outcasts, the poorest of the creatures of God, even on Chincoteague. A slight sense of self-accusation ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... Cain with his attempt? This, that his powerful effort to excuse himself becomes a forcible self-accusation. Christ says, "Out of thine own mouth will I judge thee, thou wicked servant," Lk 19, 22. Now, this servant wished to appear without guilt, saying: "I knew thee that thou art a hard man, reaping where thou didst not sow; and I was afraid, and hid thy talent," Mt 25, 24-25. Could ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... self-accusation—yes, but how often we are given the opportunity of undoing our mistakes. It is a hard, hard lesson you have to learn, but isn't there a star of hope somewhere that you can fix your eyes upon. Forgive me for pressing your own moral upon you, but it has helped ...
— The Spectacle Man - A Story of the Missing Bridge • Mary F. Leonard
... Germany—"I am dying, dear Klopstock; and, as a dying man will I say, in this world we have not lived long enough together and for each other; but in vain would we now recal the past!" What tenderness in the reproach! What self-accusation ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... his mind when he had looked on his brother's inanimate form had not been wholly forgotten since; he felt something like self-accusation whenever he saw, in some gray summer dawn, as he had seen now, the boy's bright face, haggard and pale with the premature miseries of the gamester, or heard his half-piteous, half-querulous lamentations over his losses; and he ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... new birth from above. Her whole wounded heart seemed to go out to him in one trembling sigh, as she turned to go back to the room where her husband sat with hopeless gaze fixed on the fire. She had but strength to reach the side of the bed, and fell senseless upon it. He started up with a sting of self-accusation: he had killed her, exacting from her a promise that by no word would she welcome the wanderer that night. For she would not have her husband imagine in his bitterness that she loved the erring son more than the father whose heart he had all but broken, and ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... this to be a savage self-accusation which sprang from long self-bereavement, and yet there was something terrifying in its brutal frankness. She stood in silence till her mother left the room, then went to her own chamber with a painful knot in her throat. What ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland |
