"Self-made" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... boy, the self-made man, the hopeful, buoyant soul in the face of all difficulties and odds, constitute an example for the American youth, which will never be lost ...
— From Canal Boy to President - Or The Boyhood and Manhood of James A. Garfield • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... "mill-boy of the slashes," was one of seven children of a widow 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
... 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 dining room and the bedroom, filling the place with smoke and stench. ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... woollen stockings, the few decent shirts that Isaac had left, his winter flannels, which had already served six years, his comb and brush, a hand mirror that had been one of his mother's wedding presents, likewise a couple of towels that had formed a part of her self-made trousseau; and we must not forget the neckties that Abbie had sewed from remnants of her dresses, and which Isaac naively considered masterpieces of ...
— McClure's Magazine, January, 1896, Vol. VI. No. 2 • Various
... she will surely return like a darkly brilliant butterfly, and the Village will again thrill to her dancing. There is Hyppolite, the anarchist, dark and fervid; there is "Bobby" Edwards, the Village troubadour, with his self-made and self-decorated ukelele, and his cat, Dirty Joe; there is Charlie-immortal barber!—whose trade is plied in sublime accordance with Village standards, and whose "ad" ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... no reply. He was a rough self-made man—a Roman Catholic, although not a churchman, who could give them points on charity and who did his good deeds quietly and without boasting. Mr. Casey was a Scout, although not a young one, for that was the way they were taught to do their ...
— Ethel Hollister's Second Summer as a Campfire Girl • Irene Elliott Benson
... phrasing which does not always escape obscurity. But how much better this than a limpid flow of words without notable content! Souls in the Making (CHAPMAN AND HALL) is mainly an analysis of two love episodes in the life of a young man, the liberally educated son of an ambitious self-made soapmaker. The first—with Sue, the pretty waitress—is thwarted by a very persistent and unpleasant clerk; the second—with Virginia, a girl of birth and breeding—is threatened by the intrusion of the girl's cousin, a queerly morbid ne'er-do-well. There is no action to speak of, ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 153, November 7, 1917 • Various
... gleam of hope for civil freedom under the rule of the Duke of York and the county Democracy, but when the duke became James II. he was just like other people who get a raise of salary, and refused to be privately entertained by the self-made ancestry of the American. ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... is a curious fact that 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 I am, on the whole, ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... the most efficient leaders in the formation of the Catholic Committee of 1790—John Keogh, Edward Byrne, and Richard McCormick. They were all men who had acquired fortunes, and who felt and cherished the independence of self-made men. They were not simply Catholic agitators claiming an equality of civil and religious rights with their Protestant fellow-countrymen; they were nationalists, in the broadest and most generous meaning of the term. They had contributed to the ranks and expenses of the Volunteers; ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... with his fellow-man, industry in business, and large and comprehensive views, marked his career. Step by step he fought his way up from a humble station in life to one of the grandest positions that has ever been attained by a self-made man. More than one state feels the results of his tireless energy and successful commercial schemes. He is now the sole proprietor of two railroads, and the owner of a magnificent fleet of steamers which ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... any conqueror is therefore more likely than not to be an illusion produced by the incapacity of his adversary. At all events, Caesar might have won his battles without being wiser than Charles XII or Nelson or Joan of Arc, who were, like most modern "self-made" millionaires, half-witted geniuses, enjoying the worship accorded by all races to certain forms of insanity. But Caesar's victories were only advertisements for an eminence that would never have become popular without them. Caesar is greater ...
— Caesar and Cleopatra • George Bernard Shaw
... lives from day to day by the daily exercise in his sphere of hands or head, and seeks to improve himself in such a place as the Athenaeum, acquires for himself that property of soul which has in all times upheld struggling men of every degree, but self-made men especially and always. He secures to himself that faithful companion which, while it has ever lent the light of its countenance to men of rank and eminence who have deserved it, has ever shed its brightest consolations on men ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... 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
... showing their student how to fail in transmuting Saturn into Luna and Sol and making a billionaire of himself. "Success" in its vulgar sense,—the gaining of money and position,—is not to be reached by following the rules of an instructor. Our "self-made men," who govern the country by their wealth and influence, have found their place by adapting themselves to the particular circumstances in which they were placed, and not by studying the broad maxims of "Poor Richard," ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... could not but remark how much better she looked in it than any soldier could ever have done. To tell the truth, we do not really pretend to know why Janet did this, or what taught her how to do it; anyway, she did it; and now, having so easily accomplished one of the most difficult parts of a self-made woman, she fixed it in position with the hatpin, snapped shut her chatelaine bag, and rose ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart
... it was all 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 instant ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... 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 slightest alarm this swollen and puffy importance breaks down completely. Away they scurry, their tails held stiffly and straightly perpendicular, their short legs scrabbling the small stones ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... good type of our American manhood. Although not the wealthiest or the most powerful, he is undoubtedly, in the versatility of his genius and achievements, the greatest of our self-made men. The simple yet graphic story in the Autobiography of his steady rise from humble boyhood in a tallow-chandler shop, by industry, economy, and perseverance in self-improvement, to eminence, is the most remarkable of all the remarkable histories of our self-made ...
— Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... fell from the rich man's table might have placed many a penny-a-liner beyond the reach of mental avarice. One man, indeed, swept up the crumbs into a book that is not half crumby. The man is George Horace Lorimer, and his book is called, "Letters of a Self-Made Merchant to His Son." Lorimer was a department-manager for Armour and busied himself, it seems, a good deal of the time, in taking down disjecta, or the by-product of business. Armour was always sincere, but seldom serious. There is a lot of quiet fun yet among ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... with honor and dignity a name associated with all the glories of France; the general with the gray mustache is a hero, and charged at Rezonville with the intrepidity of a Murat; the painter, the poet, have faithfully served Art and Beauty; the chemist, a self-made man who began life as a shop-boy in a drug-store, and to whom the learned world listens to-day as to an oracle, is simply a man of genius; these high-born dames are generous and good, and they will often dip their fair hands courageously in the depth of misfortune. Why should not these members ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... 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 ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... think that. Whatever her faults, and she has enough, there is no man on earth for her but you. Her love has come to her through a struggle against it because it was her master. That is the strongest and best, in fact the only, love; worth all the self-made passions in ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... 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 ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... or soft as mush. My governor had the iron in his. He banked everything on—me—and I wasn't up to the expectation. I was made out of the odds and ends that were left out of his constitution—and we didn't get on. My mother—" Jock pulled himself together; "she was the sort those self-made men generally hanker after, all lady, and pretty and dainty. You ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... followed with his incomparable lecture on "Self-Made Men." One could but feel in seeing his magnificent physique and his manly bearing as he proceeded, that he was a most notable example of his subject, while to report his lecture, with its impromptu sallies of wit and wisdom, would be almost impossible. He instanced many men as illustrations ...
— The American Missionary — Vol. 48, No. 10, October, 1894 • Various
... was by and by; but I believe the loss of it was providential. I believe it was intended from the first that Ishmael should 'owe no man anything,' for life, or bread, or education, or profession; but all to God and God's blessing on his own efforts. He is self-made. I know no other man in history to whom the term can be so perfectly ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... lesson to the young, dissatisfied officer, was the self-made Emperor of the French and of a great many other nations. He had come to Paris a thin, hollow-cheeked, under-sized boy from the conquered and despised island of Corsica. He stuck in the humble grade of lieutenant for seven ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... means, good and bad. To the child everything American is good and right. There comes a time when the parents cannot guide him or instruct him; he knows more than they; he looks upon their advice as of no value. If ever there was a self-made man, that man is the son of the immigrant. But the street and the street gang have a great responsibility; they are making the children of a hundred various languages from every part of the world into ...
— Aliens or Americans? • Howard B. Grose
... it with ability on the ground that the country needed a broad and stable administration, and declared himself a candidate for office in the future ministry. Pitt, in a speech of great dignity, taunted "the self-made minister," contended that the objections to the peace were simply an attack on Shelburne, and in a fine peroration spoke of himself as caring more for his own honour than for the emoluments of office. ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... follies abroad, I believe; self-made men are always impatient of extravagance. But it is hard upon Frere. He is not a bad sort of fellow for all his roughness, and when a young man finds that an accident deprives him of a quarter of a million of money and leaves him without a sixpence beyond his commission in ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... up from totally different stations in life. Bruno was a man of the people—a self-made man—who bore upon his person the marks of the hammer. Galileo was of noble blood, and traced an ancestry to a Gonfalonier of Florence. From early infancy he had enjoyed association with polite persons, and had sat on the knees ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... dinner-parties and balls, the tour abroad, the children, the nurses, the doctor? I tell you this, Mr. Goldenheart, I'm willing to make a sacrifice to you, as a born gentleman, which I would certainly not consent to in the case of any self-made man. Enlarge your income, sir, to no more than four times five hundred pounds, and I guarantee a yearly allowance to Regina of half as much again, besides the fortune which she will inherit at my death. That will make your income three thousand a year to start with. I know something of domestic ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... There was Simon the Magician, founder of gnosticism, father of every heresy, Messiah to the Jews, Jupiter to the Gentiles—an impudent self-made god, who pretended to float in the air, and called his mistress Minerva—a deification, parenthetically, which was accepted by Nicholas, his successor, a deacon of the church, who raised her to the eighth heaven as patron ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... self-made gibbet fast, Self-pilloried to the public view, A mark for every passing blast ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... redound greatly to the honor of the nation. It ought to be willing to be at some charge to make its treasures useful to its citizens, and, for its own sake, especially to that class which has charge of health, public and private. This country abounds in what are called "self-made men," and is justly proud of many whom it thus designates. In one sense no man is self-made who breathes the air of a civilized community. In another sense every man who is anything other than a phonograph on legs is self-made. But if we award his just praise to the man who has attained any kind ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... then paid a glowing tribute to the worth and integrity of Governor Foraker. 'Has any man said,' he asked, 'that Governor Foraker is a bad man; that he is not a good man? My countrymen, no one has said that. He was a brave soldier. He is a self-made man; the son of good, plain people. He is self-educated. By integrity and toil he mounted, step by step, on the ladder of fame. Nearly every man who has arisen to prominence in our country has arisen from the ranks by toil. Such ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... her sister Kit were extremely well known in London. Their father was a very rich iron-master, a self-made man, who had been created a Baronet and had married an ultra-aristocratic woman, the beautiful Miss Enid Blensover, related to half the Peerage. The blend had resulted in the two girls, who were certainly anything rather than ordinary. They were half Blensovers and half Drakes: ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... never wed beneath me. Prove that your love is not presumption. Show yourself my peer. For I could love a brave and valiant knight before whose spear men bowed as to a king, nor would I ask his parentage, prouder far to know that my children took their nobleness from a self-made nobleman. But a weeping, love-sick page! No! Go, fight and battle—show me something that you do that I can love. Meantime I look for such a lover, and I care not if his name be Guy ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... cabin, of poor, uneducated parents, his only aids untiring industry, determination, and lofty purpose. Hewing out his steps on the rugged rocks of poverty, climbing the mountains of difficulty, and attaining the highest honor within the gift of the nation—"truly a self-made man, the Declaration of Independence," says a writer, "being his daily compendium of wisdom, the life of Washington his daily study, with something of Jefferson, Madison, and Clay." For the rest, from day to day, he lived the life of the American people; "walked in its light; reasoned with its reason; ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... 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
... either because they could better elucidate the Talmud, or because, as they held, it was their truth, of which the nations had deprived them during their long exile.[43] They were unlike their German brethren in another respect. Almost all of them were "self-made men," autodidacts in the truest sense. Lacking the advantages of secular schools, they culled their first information from scanty, antiquated Hebrew translations. Maimon learned the Roman alphabet from the transliteration of the titles on ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... size of a man's head is indicative of his mental power, and these hats certainly bore out the theory, for their owners were mostly self-made men, and were, without exception, men of mark. I will not mention the name of any of those now living, but two of the largest hats there belonged respectively to ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... the archbishop Giovanni marks a new epoch in the despotism of the Visconti. They are now no longer the successful rivals of the Della Torre family or dependents on imperial caprice, but self-made sovereigns, with a well-established power in Milan and a wide extent of subject territory. Their dynasty, though based on force and maintained by violence, has come to be acknowledged; and we shall soon see ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... paper. He could see the whipper-snapper of an editor writing the lines, with a wary eye both to the past and future of the Marsham influence in the division. The self-made, shrewd little man had been Oliver's political slave and henchman through two Parliaments; and he had no doubt reflected that neither the Tallyn estates, nor the Marsham wealth had been wiped out by the hostile majority of last Saturday. At the same time, the ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... his own grit put those dollars there, Jimmie. Just put it out of your head that it's luck makes a self-made man." ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... is a good specimen of a self-made man, who was not spoiled in the making. Hard work did not harden his character, nor has prosperity turned his head. Coming to Cleveland without a dollar, he has built up a large fortune by sheer hard work, close application to business and strict business habits. He at the ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... your son's sake, if not for yours. You pretend to love that boy, and are yet so blind to his interests? He is not the heir to an entailed estate, remember. Granger is a self-made man, and if you offend him, may leave Arden ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... whose hearts most generous sentiments knock in vain, who still are overawed and bowed by the magnitude of this catastrophe. No matter what they believe about it, the effect is the same. The effect is to reduce a man from the swaggering braggart—the vainglorious lord of what he sees—the self-made master of fate, of nature, of time, of space, of everything—to his true microscopic stature in the cosmos. He goes in tears to put together again the fragments of the few, small, pitiful ...
— Sinking of the Titanic - and Great Sea Disasters • Various
... 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 ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... social secretary in the United States, if not in the world, is Maria de Barril, and she is secretary not to one rich woman but to New York society itself. Her position, entirely self-made, is unique and secure, and well ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... for the caller to comprehend the full extent of the power and responsibility of this self-made leader at his desk in a great room overlooking Whitehall Place, for he had so simplified an organization that had been brought into being in two years that it seemed to run without any apparent effort on his part. The methods of men who have great authority interest us all. I had first seen Sir ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... Uncle Ezra Mudge, "Thet the self-made man is always kept so busy tellin' about the fine job of work he turned out, thet he never has time to get the roof on an' the doors an' winders hung. A self-made feller generally shows a rough job put ...
— Oklahoma Sunshine • Freeman E. (Freeman Edwin) Miller
... sails droop, so when excitement ceased, all seemed to me flat and objectless. Heavy, heavy was my heart. Perhaps grief had been less obstinate, but that I feared I had causes for self-reproach. Since then I have been a wanderer, a self-made exile. My boyhood had been ambitious,—all ambition ceased. Flames, when they reach the core of the heart, spread, and leave all in ashes. Let me be brief: I did not mean thus weakly to complain,—I to whom Heaven has given so many blessings! ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... his Wahlverwandtschaften, you feel that extraordinary intimacy—I had almost said identification—with nature, present everywhere. Werther's love springs up with the blossom of all nature; he begins to sink and nears his self-made tomb while autumn, the death of nature, is in the fields and woods. So does the moon spread her mellow light over his garden, as "the mild eye of a true friend over his destiny." Never was there a poet who humanized nature or naturalized human feeling, if I might say so, to ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... 10.—But for the "field gray" coat and the militant mustache, I should have taken him for a self-made American, a big business man or captain of industry, as he sat at his work desk, the telephone at his elbow, the electric push-buttons and reams of neat reports adding to the illusion. Quiet, unassuming, and democratic, he yet makes the same impression of virility and colossal energy ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... slowly; "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
... in newspaper English, and by the production of an imitation of the novela picaresca—a string of adventures as broken and disconnected as the adventures of Lazarillo de Tormes or Peregrine Pickle, and went on to become an exemplar. A man self-made and self-taught, if he knew anything at all about the 'art for art' theory—which is doubtful—he may well have held it cheap enough. But he practised Millet's dogma—Dans l'art il faut sa peau—as resolutely as Millet himself, and that, too, ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... is manifest in the other Swiss, Jakob Schaffner, who in still higher degree than Zahn deserves to be called a self-made man. Schaffner, who was born in 1875 at Basel, belongs with Hans Sachs and Jakob Boehme among the poetic shoemakers. His immature first novel, Wanderings (1905), has its best scenes in the workshop, and his later masterpiece, Konrad ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... number of times that the Russian Government crushed the Cossack revolts, broke up their self-made organisation, and transplanted unruly bands to distant parts, their almost invariable loyalty to the central authority is very remarkable. It may be ascribed either to the veneration which they felt for the Czar, to the ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... 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, and ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... knives and forks had precise uses, or that table-napkins were not meant to be tucked under the chin. In England, especially in the provinces, some men of affairs cultivate these minor defects, deeming them tokens of bluff honesty, the hall-marks of the self-made; and David Verity thought, perhaps, that his pretty, well-spoken niece might be trusted to maintain the social level of his household without any ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... United States, and his popularity, his legal attainments, his congressional services, his attractive eloquence and skill in debate, marked him out as the rising man of his party, He was a Vermonter by birth, and like Lincoln had arisen from nothing,—a self-made man, so talented that the people called him "the little giant," but nevertheless inferior to the giants who had led the Senate for twenty years, while equal to them in ambition, and superior as a wire-pulling politician. He was among those ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord
... is the same to me at any rate. Now, in my time young men had a harder row to hoe, and they hoed it. I am what they call a self-made man and probably I have a harsher opinion of the young men of the present day than I should have. But if I had a son I would endeavor to have him know how to do something, and then I would see that he ...
— The Face And The Mask • Robert Barr
... 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 ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... they proceed to the shop of the recalcitrant debtor or security as circumstances may dictate, and there take up their abode until the amount is paid. If inability to meet the debt has been pleaded, then this self-made bailiff will insist on taking so much per cent. out of the daily receipts; if it is a mere case of obstinacy, a desire to shirk a just responsibility, the place is made so hot for its owner that he is glad to get rid of his visitor at any price whatever. Were manual ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... dealer in orders and tickets rose from a sturdy chair before a large cylinder desk, and Lucien beheld the leader of the claque, Braulard himself, dressed in a gray molleton jacket, footed trousers, and red slippers; for all the world like a doctor or a solicitor. He was a typical self-made man, Lucien thought—a vulgar-looking face with a pair of exceedingly cunning gray eyes, hands made for hired applause, a complexion over which hard living had passed like rain over a roof, grizzled hair, and a somewhat ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... another cigar, or anything in the shape of tobacco." His majesty has kept his word, and the result has been a most noticeable improvement in his health. King Humbert is a man of iron will, and no one doubts that he will keep his self-made pledge. ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, November 1887 - Volume 1, Number 10 • Various
... selected these three men from among a host of applicants for membership in the expedition, because of the special fitness of each one. Dr. Goodsell was a solid, sturdy, self-made physician of Pennsylvania stock. His specialism in microscopy I trusted might give valuable results in a field not hitherto investigated in the North. He was to make microscopic studies of the germ diseases ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... this fierce romanticism even to the lowest of all lordships and serfdoms; the proletarian inequality of today. You do meet now and then, in Scotland, the man you never meet anywhere else but in novels; I mean the self-made man; the hard, insatiable man, merciless to himself as well as to others. It is not "enterprise"; it is kleptomania. He is quite mad, and a much more obvious public pest than any other kind of kleptomaniac; but though he is a cheat, he is not an illusion. He ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... enforcing these titles from one another; how persevering in depriving their employers of any term of respect! One would imagine that they not only considered themselves on an equality, but that ignorance and vulgarity made them vastly superior. It is highly amusing to watch from a distance these self-made ladies and gentlemen ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... bad 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, ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... were the chief instruments of the process were 'self-made'; they were the typical examples of Mr. Smiles's virtue of self-help; they owed nothing to government or to the universities which passed for the organs of national culture. The leading engineers began as ordinary mechanics. John Metcalf ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... to the Corne d'Abondance the self-made victim of this night's madness and his friend exchanged no words. There was nothing to be said. But there was death in the Chevalier's heart; his chin was sunken in his collar, and he bore heavily on Victor's arm; from time to time he hiccoughed. Victor ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... of his success Rantoul, quite by accident, met a girl in her teens named Tina Glover, only daughter of Cyrus Glover, a man of millions, self-made. The first time their eyes met and lingered, by the mysterious chemistry of the passions Rantoul fell desperately in love with this little slip of a girl, who scarcely reached to his shoulder; who, on her ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... 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 for himself, he has dragged ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... boy, content to follow an honorable profession in a free country. I did n't go off to the Old World to learn my business; no one took me by the hand; I had to grease my wheels myself, and, such as I am, I 'm a self-made man, every inch of me! Well, if our young friend is booked for fame and fortune, I don't suppose his going to Rome will stop him. But, mind you, it won't help him such a long way, either. If you have undertaken to put him through, there ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... ruled 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
... rules which are supposed to guide the rise of a self-made man, Lloyd George should have been a master of routine, with the orderly mind and undeviating habits without which we are sometimes told no person of affairs can secure permanent success. It is much to be regretted that Lloyd George lends no aid to the well-established maxims. ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... Gardner, my age is thirty-six, and I am what is generally known as "a self-made man." But had I really had the making of myself I should have endeavoured to produce a different being. I recollect at the grammar school in Cambridgeshire, where I received a plain education, hearing one ...
— If Only etc. • Francis Clement Philips and Augustus Harris
... obligingly, and Hilary said, "He was one of our least remarkable men." Then, spurred on by that perverse impulse which we Americans often have to make the worst of ourselves to an Englishman, he added, "The defaulter seems to be taking the place of the self-made man among us. Northwick's a type, a little differentiated from thousands of others by the rumor of his death in the first place, and now by this unconsciously hypocritical and nauseous letter. He's what the commonplace American egotist must come to more and more in finance, now that he ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... it occurred to him gradually that this great, cumbersome creature was not a shrewd, thrifty, self-made and self-finished adult at all; only a big, wistful, lonely boy, without comrades and with nowhere to play. On Plank's round face there remained no trace of shrewdness, of stubbornness, nothing even of the heavy, saturnine ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... us from having her as an aunt. You may not admire her type, but you can't deny that it's one which has a legitimate place in American civilization. Ours isn't a society that can afford to exclude the self-made ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... leisure was spent at Master Swift's cottage, and in reading his books. The schoolmaster had marked an old biographical dictionary at pages containing lives of "self-made" men, who had risen as inventors or improvers in mechanics or as discoverers of important facts of natural science. Jan had not hitherto studied their careers with the avidity Master Swift would have liked to see, but one day he found him ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... man likely to be turned away from his purpose of ruling well by personal pride—less likely, we should say, than any self-made despot dealt with in history. He did make efforts to be as he was before. He endeavored to live on terms of friendship with his old friends; but the spirit of pride which had taken hold of him was too much for him. Power had got possession of him, and he could not stand against it. It ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... called for constantly. There are few of our boys and girls who will not gladly take a copy of the life of Abraham Lincoln, or Booker T. Washington and read them over and over, their parents often having them read the same to them also. The self-made element in the lives of these men strikes a responsive chord in the hearts of our young people. They are easily led from the lives of these to the life of Napoleon, Edison, ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... the cushions and studied the grim, square-jawed face of the great man whom everybody was so anxious to please. So this was the way he looked at close range, this self-made, stubborn man of millions who always managed to bend every other man in his line of business to his own iron will! As he looked, Bob felt it was no wonder they all feared him—feared ...
— Sure Pop and the Safety Scouts • Roy Rutherford Bailey
... 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 the ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... An aunt of Caesar had married Caius Marius, the modest bankrupt farmer of revenues, who, having entered politics, had become the first general of his time, had been elected consul six times, and had conquered Jugurtha, the Cimbri, and the Teutons. The self-made man had become famous and rich, and in the face of an aristocracy proud of its ancestors, had tried to ennoble his obscure origin by taking his wife from an ancient and most noble, albeit ...
— The Women of the Caesars • Guglielmo Ferrero
... what clothes to wear and when to wear them, and the civilized practice with knife and fork at table. And because Bourke was a diplomatist of sorts, Marcel acquired the knack of being at ease in every grade of society: he came to know that a self-made millionaire, taken the right way, is as approachable as one whose millions date back even unto the third generation; he could order a dinner at Sherry's as readily as drinks at Sharkey's. Most valuable accomplishment of ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... inconsistency of praying to God to protect us or grant us means of escape, and then refuse to accept a rescue sent to us in our last extremity. We argued that it was surely better to live and work for Jesus than to die as a self-made martyr, who, in God's sight, was guilty of self-murder. His wife wept aloud and pleaded with him, but all in vain! He refused to leave or to unlock his door. I then said, "It is now getting dark. Your ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... looked hard at the three verses in the big Bible the doctor had handed him, with a somewhat suspicious glare. He was a self-made man, with land and houses of his own in plenty, and he didn't quite like this suggestive talk about selling them and laying the prices at the apostles' feet. It savoured to him both of communism and priestcraft. ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... 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 ...
— Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... hour, except for human countenance, he was alone. Friendless, shorn of his sports and the habits of a lifetime, he still lived in a glory of happiness, content with his acquired respectability, and with no care but to support it solemnly. Are we to condemn or praise this self-made dog? We praise his human brother. And thus to conquer vicious habits is as rare with dogs as with men. With the more part, for all their scruple-mongering and moral thought, the vices that are born with them remain invincible throughout; and they ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... knowledge of men, he doubted if Don Ramon, any more than himself, had ever thought of the possibility of a matrimonial connection between the families. He doubted if he would consent to it. And unfortunately it was this very doubt that, touching his own pride as a self-made man, made him first seriously consider his wife's proposition. He was as good as Don Ramon, any day! With this subtle feminine poison instilled in his veins, carried completely away by the logic ...
— A Millionaire of Rough-and-Ready • Bret Harte
... relative, a friend or a dollar in the world, having to make his way upward through the most aristocratic community of the country and the time. Johnson, equally friendless and penniless, started as a poor tailor in a rustic village. Lincoln must therefore, take third place among our self-made Presidents. The Hanks family were not paupers. He had a wise and helpful stepmother. He was scarcely worse off than most young fellows of his neighborhood, first in Indiana and then in Illinois. On this side justice ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... Mob law is worse even than no law at all. Besides," he 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 be a different ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... question of the day if he, too, would succeed in founding a princely house. The greater States had an obvious interest in hindering it, and even Francesco Sforza thought it would be all the better if the list of self-made sovereigns were not enlarged. But the troops and captains sent against him, at the time, for instance, when he was aiming at the lordship of Siena, recognized their interest in supporting him: 'If it were all over with him, we should ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... am human," he said, after a pause. "I do not esteem myself as above temptation. As you probably know, I am a self-made man, of very ordinary extraction. But—I do not feel tempted to take up Burleigh Wentworth's defence. I am sorry if that fact should cause you any disappointment. I do not see why it should. There are plenty of other men—abler than I am—who would, I am sure, be charmed to oblige ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... innuendoes and significant glances of friends which he had put aside—as he had this woman's message! Susy had told him nothing new of his wife—but the truth of HIMSELF! And the revelation came from people who he was conscious were the inferiors of himself and his wife. To an independent, proud, and self-made man it was the ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... the most original of the Latin poets is Lucretius (95-51 B.C.), whose poem "On the Nature of Things" is an effort to dispel superstitious fear by inculcating the Epicurean doctrine that the world is self-made through the movement and concussion of atoms, and that the gods leave it to care for itself. A contemporary of Lucretius, and a poet of equal merit, but in an altogether different vein, is Catullus. He is chiefly noted for ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... a most unlovely face with a thin and bristling growth of whiskers. In giving him features Nature had been generous to a fault. He had a large red nose, and a mouth vastly too big for any proper use. It was a mouth fashioned for odd sayings. He was well to do and boasted often that he was a self-made man. Uncle Be used to say that if Mose Tupper had had the 'makin' uv himself he'd oughter ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller |
