"Self-restraint" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... scrutiny of the Spaniard's eyes, it was no longer necessary for me to maintain that painful self-restraint which had cost me so severe an effort in order that I might not by look or gesture arouse the ghost of a suspicion as to my intentions; so, while I continued to mechanically wave the boat to the right or the left, as circumstances demanded, I now gave my mind ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... time she had ever called him by his Christian name and it went near to toppling down the carefully reared structure of self-restraint. But he made shift to shore the tottering walls with ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... learn, in this Pagan system of education, to press down his rising passions? What precept of positive virtue does he learn? What principle of self-restraint? What does he learn in such a school to make him obedient, honest, chaste, a good citizen, a good Christian? The common school system proceeds on the principle of suffering the passions of youth to take any development which fallen nature may bring about, and then trusting to ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... perhaps, you find that you have gone through this horror for nothing—the august court with its Roman Catholic judge throws out your petition, its suspicions having been excited by the fact that when you discovered your domestic tragedy, you sought to behave like a civilized person, with pity and self-restraint, instead of like a sultan in Turkey, or a basso in an ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... raise the whole man to the human stage, in which every intellectual and physical capacity shall subserve the purposes of the soul. From all this it follows that Theosophists should sound the note of self-restraint within marriage, and the gradual—for with the mass it cannot be sudden—restriction of the sexual relation to the perpetuation ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... but she smiled as she said the words. Was she interrupting an interesting conversation? Cyril was on the couch beside her mother, and he was talking eagerly. Perhaps, though Audrey did not know it, he was making up for his previous self-restraint by pouring out some of his ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... comfortable houses, which stand to this day. These men soon grew to take the leading places in the new commonwealth. They were of good blood—using the words as they should be used, as meaning blood that has flowed through the veins of generations of self-restraint and courage and hard work, and careful training in mind and in the manly virtues. Their inheritance of sturdy and self-reliant manhood helped them greatly; their blood told in their favor as blood generally does tell when other things are equal. If they prized intellect they prized character more; ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... longer; I pant to burst my bonds," cried the impetuous Gaston; and Raymond was in no whit less eager, albeit he had something more of his mother's prudence and self-restraint. ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... "Madame, I am profoundly moved by what you have told me. If I show little emotion, it is because I have suffered greatly from the war. One learns self-restraint, madame, or one goes mad. But as you have spoken to me in your noble English frankness—I have only to confess that I love Doggie with all my heart, with all my soul——" With her two clenched hands she smote her breast—and Peggy ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... trailing his prey through the lounge after dinner. The shawl belonged, most palpably, to a German lady three feet ahead of him, but gripping it triumphantly, he bounded over the six feet which separated him from the Eversham-Beecher triangle and with marvelous self-restraint he touched Miss ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... unanimously, instinctively decided that the Paris of 1914 should in no respect resemble the Paris of 1870, and as though this resolution had passed at birth into the blood of millions born since that fatal date, and ignorant of its bitter lesson. The unanimity of self-restraint was the notable characteristic of this people suddenly plunged into an unsought and unexpected war. At first their steadiness of spirit might have passed for the bewilderment of a generation born and bred in peace, which did not yet understand what war implied. But it ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... of his character had made upon her during the five months they had been together. A complete stranger to the ferment of the lad's imagination, she had been a constant and chafed spectator of his daily life. The strong self-restraint of it had been one of the main barriers between them. She knew that she was always jarring upon him, and that he was always blaming her recklessness and self-indulgence. She hated his Spartan ways—his teetotalism, the small store he set by any personal comfort or luxury, his powers ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... lost to all her friends whom he hated with a jealous hatred. He helped M'Barka to descend from the carriage: then, as she was received at the tent door by the Agha himself, Maieddine forgot his self-restraint, and swung the girl down, with tingling hands that clasped her waist, as if at last ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... lost. Universal acceptance and present change are incompatible. Esperantists, therefore, bow to the inevitable and deliberately choose to concentrate for the present on acceptance. General acceptance, indeed, while it imposes upon the present body of Esperantists self-restraint in abstaining from change, is in reality the essential condition of profitable future amendment. When an international language has attained the degree of dissemination already enjoyed by Esperanto, the only safe kind of change ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... begged him for the gun, but the young man refused to give it up, saying that, without a gun, it would surely cost no self-restraint to refrain from shooting, and that his method of procedure would ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... no further than such lines. The question remains whether dramatic realism is in itself an altogether desirable thing, and whether Swinburne in particular does not lose more than he gains by such self-restraint. ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... humanity, when all that is loftiest in it—when reverence for the Unseen powers, reverence for the heroic dead, reverence for the fatherland, and that reverence, too, for self, which is expressed in stateliness and self-restraint, in grace and courtesy; when all these, I say, can lend themselves, even for a day, to the richest enjoyment of life—to the enjoyment of beauty in form and sound, and of relaxation, not ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... perseverance might have been; but the worst faults of boyhood have something exciting and even romantic about them—they would not be so alluring if they had not—while the homely virtues of honesty, frankness, modesty, and self-restraint appear too often as a dull and priggish abstention from the more daring and adventurous joys of eager living. If evil were always ugly and goodness were always beautiful at first sight, there would be little of ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... unlock our heart. Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour. Speaking of Milton, the damp that fell round his path (in Wordsworth's sonnet) was nothing to the damp that fell round our alert vestiges as we hastened to the Salamis station in that drench this morning. (We ask you to observe our self-restraint. We might have said "drenching downpour of silver Long Island rain," or something of that sort, and thus got several words nearer our necessary total of 1100. But we scorn, even when writing against time, to take petty advantages. Let us be brief, ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... took another stitch. The self-restraint of her New England mother was upon her then. Burr Gordon, betrothed to Dorothy Fair, loving her not, yet still noble enough and kind enough to have perilled his life to save hers, should know nothing of the greater sacrifice she was making ...
— Madelon - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... Mary's self-restraint and in the pathetic tones of her voice, which moved those who stood around ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall
... all his self-restraint, some hint of the wild longing in his heart to tell her once and for all that no power under that of the Almighty should tear him from her side moved her to relent. She took the ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... the New World when they put upon the first flag of the colonies a rattlesnake, with the Latin legend, Nemo me impune lacessit—"No one wounds me with impunity." The flag of independence, however, only half told the real meaning of its emblem—the warning, and not the self-restraint. There is a device, to my notion, much more expressive: a rattlesnake rampant, with the Spanish motto, Ni huyes ni persigues—"Thou needst not flee, but thou must not pursue." Or, in other words, "I impose upon no one; no one must impose upon me." That is the real meaning ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... the celestial Rishis, the Siddhas, and the high- souled Rishis possessing the attributes of tranquillity and self-restraint, beholding that act of universal slaughter, were afflicted with great grief. With passions and senses and souls under complete control, they then went to the abode of the Grandsire, moved by compassion for the universe. Arrived there, they beheld the Grandsire ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... accomplish the business purpose of the organization. The explosive force of passion would have made the gathering a signal for the breaking loose of pandemonium. That it did not always so result is a [Page 30] compliment alike to the self-restraint of the people and to the sway that artistic ideals held over their minds, but, above all, to a peculiar system of discipline wisely adapted to the necessities of human nature. It does not seem likely that a Thespian band of our own race would have held their passions under equal check if surrounded ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... chuckled behind the pencil-end he was chewing, but the officer maintained his solemn air, for which act of self-restraint he was undoubtedly grateful when in another minute she gave a quick impulsive shudder not altogether assumed, and vehemently added: "But I couldn't stand the sight; no, I couldn't! I'm an awful coward when it comes to things like that. Nothing in all the world would induce me to look at ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... His great work is done, and thoroughly done. His lips speak the tremendous word, "It is finished." And He bowed His head and gave up His spirit. It was His own act. The self-restraint was strong upon Him till all was done that was needed for the great purpose in hand. Then His head is bowed, His great heart broke under the terrific strain on His spirit as He allowed His life ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... "It was only the self-restraint," Silas continued, "taught me by bitter years of agony and a message from God that it was part of my punishment not to acknowledge you ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... remember is, that life and property were not secured to the Anglo-Saxon by the State, but by the loyal union of his fellow-citizens; the Saxon guilds are unmatched in the history of their times as evidences of self-reliance, mutual trust, patient self-restraint, and orderly love of ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... for ever in his memory. The sullen, ruthless crowd of dour Scots, the grey rugged houses lit up by the glare of the torches, the irresistible storming of the Tolbooth, the abject helplessness of Porteous in the hands of his enemies, the austere and judicial self-restraint of the people, who did their work as those who were serving justice, their care to provide a minister for the criminal's last devotions, and their quiet dispersal after the execution—all this remains unto to-day the most powerful description of lynch law in fiction. The very ...
— Books and Bookmen • Ian Maclaren
... no immediate answer. "I am not quite sure, Patricia, that your husband is not—to a certain extent—in the right. Believe me, he did not know you were about. He approached me in a perfectly sensible manner, and exhibited commendable self-restraint; he has played a difficult part to admiration. I could not have done it better myself. And it is not for us who have been endowed with gifts denied to Rudolph, to reproach him for lacking the finer perceptions and sensibilities of life. Yet, I must admit that, ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... can't have done justice to the subject. Fenton's one of the finest young officers in Egypt, or indeed, in the service. We're rather proud of him. Lately he's been employed on a special mission, which he has carried out extremely well. Few others could have done it, for a man of great audacity and self-restraint was needed: a combination hard to find. He has been in the Balkans. And since, has had a particularly delicate task intrusted to him, to be conducted with absolute secrecy. No 'kudos' to be got out of it in case of success. And failure ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... against the Milton theory. Each play is preceded by an Introduction, remarkably well digested and condensed, giving an account of the text, and of the sources from which Shakspeare helped himself to plots or incidents. We cannot but commend highly the self-restraint which marks these brief and pithy prefaces, and the pertinency of every sentence to the matter in hand. The Germans, (to whom we are undeniably indebted for the first philosophic appreciation of the poet,) being debarred by their alienage from the tempting parliament of verbal commentary and ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... traced back through a series of years. In a specially marked manner the pan-Serb chauvinism showed itself during the Bosnian crisis. Only to the far-reaching self-restraint and moderation of the Austro-Hungarian Government and the energetic intercession of the powers is it to be ascribed that the provocations to which at that time Austria-Hungary was exposed on the part of Servia, did not ...
— Why We Are At War (2nd Edition, revised) • Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History
... he had only said frankly: "It was too difficult—I didn't know how," the note of truth would have reached and moved her; but he had striven for the tone of ease and self-restraint that was habitual among her friends, and as usual his attempt ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... are needed to supplement the strength of those who fight upon the Lord's side; it was Elisha, too, who proved to the warriors of his day that magnanimity is more potent than violence. He conquered by self-restraint—and "the bands of Syria came no more into the ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... at Madame Wachner. He admired the wife's self-restraint. Her red face got a little redder. ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... most hackneyed passage of 'Comus,' the 'Allegro,' the 'Penseroso,' the 'Paradise Lost,' and see the freshness, the sweetness, the simplicity which is strangely combined with the pomp, the self-restraint, the earnestness of every word; take him even, as an experimentum crucis, when he trenches upon ground heathen and questionable, and tries the court poets at their own ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... the railway-station, whither Viola came with her brother. Dora had been only allowed to come upon solemn promises of quietness, and at the last our attention was more taken up with her than anyone else, for she was very white, and shook from head to foot with the effort at self-restraint, not speaking a word, but clinging to Harold with a tight grip of his hand, and, when that was not attainable, of his coat. Fortunately the train was punctual, and the ordeal did not last long. Harold ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Mr. Phillips, "you have a task of self-restraint before you. It is necessary that this great joy of ours should be kept awhile from your mother. She is not strong enough to bear it. But she must see Mary and get accustomed to her as soon as possible. I have a plan. A new nurse is needed for Lilly; ...
— Stories of Many Lands • Grace Greenwood
... self-control, and hoped to win me over further by extreme docility. I walked away to the window, angry with myself, and yet angry again that that anger should be necessary. I had always been so free till now, able to gratify the fancy of the moment. This need for self-restraint was new ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... for you to remain seated here, and watch the people inside and out as they pass along the way without their seeing you. But take care not to speak violently, for I hold that man to be rather imprudent than brave who goes too far and loses his self-restraint and commits some deed of violence the moment he has the time and chance. So if you cherish some rash thought be careful not to utter it. The wise man conceals his imprudent thought and works out righteousness if he can. ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... high aristocratical breeding. The declaration of the archbishop, therefore, was received as one of the most natural and ordinary things in the world, and all knelt down and received the pontifical benediction with perfect decorum. As soon, however, as they were released from the self-restraint imposed by etiquette, they amply indemnified themselves; and nothing was talked of for a month, in the fashionable saloons of Paris, but the loves of the handsome Viscount and the charming Henrietta; the wickedness of ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... for our diversion Arab music and dancing of a—of a highly recondite character. I should be unworthy of the name of father, sir, if I were to entrust my only daughter's happiness to a young man with so little common sense, so little self-restraint. And she will understand my motives ...
— The Brass Bottle • F. Anstey
... great self-restraint to avoid bitterness toward the Government, but even when Congress refused his wife's petition for the restoration of the mementos of Washington, taken from her home in Arlington during the war, he refrained from ...
— On the Trail of Grant and Lee • Frederick Trevor Hill
... false and the true:—"My own convictions are, that associations, excellent as they are for mechanical objects, are not fit instruments for the achievement of moral aims; that there has been no proof that the principle of self-restraint has been exalted and strengthened in the United States by the Temperance movement while the already too great regard to opinion, and subservience to spiritual encroachment, have been much increased; and, therefore, great as may be the visible benefits of the ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... Cuba will follow your deliberations with the deepest interest, earnestly desiring that you shall reach just conclusions, and that by the dignity, individual self-restraint, and wise conservatism which shall characterize your proceedings the capacity of the Cuban people for representative government may be ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... C, and D of the Twenty-fifth Regiment, United States Infantry, were stationed at Fort Brown, Brownsville, Texas, where they were forced to exercise very great self-restraint in the face of daily insults from the citizens. On the night of the 13th occurred a riot in which one citizen of the town was killed, another wounded, and the chief of police injured. The people of ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... many questions all together, at the mention of a creature with so strange a name, that for the moment he could not for the life of him get any one of them into words. He merely gasped. And Uncle Andy, delighted with this apparent self-restraint, went on graciously. ...
— Children of the Wild • Charles G. D. Roberts
... facts to show that with change of law justice has been promoted. He deems democracy feebleness? Here has been shown its stalwart strength. He is sure workingmen are incapable of managing large affairs? Let him look to the cigar-makers—their capacity for organization, their self-restraint as an industrial army, the soundness of their financial system, the mastery of their employers in the eight-hour question. He believes the intricacies of taxation and estimates of appropriation beyond the average mind? He may see a New England town meeting ...
— Direct Legislation by the Citizenship through the Initiative and Referendum • James W. Sullivan
... of the Restoration and Queen Anne periods—which may be regarded as one, for present purposes—was classical, or at least unromantic, in its self-restraint, its objectivity, and its lack of curiosity; or, as a hostile criticism would put it, in its coldness of feeling, the tameness of its imagination, and its narrow and imperfect sense of beauty. It was a literature not simply of this world, but of the world, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... by Allah, I said but the truth to thee and I am not of those on whom presence imposeth For these three months nature hath not moved thee to take the lute and sing thereto, and this is naught save a rare thing and a strange. But all this cometh of strength in the art and thy self-restraint." Then he bade her sing; and she said, "Hearkening and obedience." So she took the lute and tightening its strings to the sticking- point, smote thereon a number of airs, so that she confounded Ishak's wit and for delight he was like to fly. Then ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... the husky whisper of the corn." Yet I am disposed to think that, like many another finished artist, he has passed through stages of various practice, and has exercised much self-restraint before attaining to that naturalness which, as Goethe reiterates, is the last crown of art-discipline. From sundry indications I conclude that passages of his Fleet-street Eclogues were written independently at different dates, and have been fitted ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... is wholly unlike him. Her most poetical words, 'All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand,' are equally unlike his words about great Neptune's ocean. Hers, like some of her other speeches, are the more moving, from their greater simplicity and because they seem to tell of that self-restraint in suffering which is so totally lacking in him; but there is in them comparatively little of imagination. If we consider most of the passages to which I have referred, we shall find that the quality which moves our admiration is courage ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... of history, biography and miscellany—and none, of like prominence in his day, has dropped more completely out of sight. In common with the other Southern writers we have mentioned, Simms lacked self-restraint and the ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... had listened with considerable patience and self-restraint to this conversation, but as soon as the hope of tea and refreshment died away, and they realised that some one had fooled them, they looked out for a victim, and settled upon ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... too late even at this time to have bloodlessly settled the Transvaal question for ever by a fair but thoroughly firm attitude towards the restored Republic. No doubt British Ministers, conscious of an act of supreme self-restraint and magnanimity, believed that some reciprocal justice would be evoked. At any rate, it is possible that this was the reason which guided them, and not continued callous indifference to the fate of British subjects and the future of South ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... Man obeys two forces—one sensual, one spiritual. Weak or inferior men mistake the first for the last, whilst great souls know how to clothe the merely natural instinct in all the graces of the spirit. The very strength of this spiritual passion imposes severe self-restraint and inspires them with reverence for women. Clearly, feeling is sensitive in proportion to the calibre of the mental powers generally, and this is why the man of genius alone has something of a woman's delicacy. He understands and divines woman, ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... the throne, she threw away her modesty and brawled and rioted with very little self-restraint. The people as a whole found little fault with her. She reminded them of her father, the bluff King Hal; and even those who criticized her did so only partially. They thought much better of her than they had of her saturnine sister, the ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... the wassail is ended; yet I believe, in a general way, few men drink less than he does. At cards he is equally strong; a past-master in all games of skill; and the play is apt to be rather high at one or two of the clubs he belongs to. He has a wonderful power of self-restraint when he cares to exert it; will play six or seven hours every night for three weeks at a stretch, and then not touch a card for six months. Poor old John," said Gilbert Fenton, with a half-regretful sigh; "under happy circumstances, he might be such ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... restraint" universal a socialist State was necessary. In order to avoid the evils of overpopulation, Malthus advised people not to marry, or, if they did, to marry late in life and to limit the number of their children by the exercise of self-restraint. He reprobated all artificial and unnatural methods of birth control as immoral, and as removing the necessary stimulus to industry; but he failed to grasp the whole truth that an increase of population is necessary as a stimulus not only to industry, but also as essential to man's ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland
... discoverers and inventors in science: they were the chief agriculturists and gardeners: they offered an asylum to the poor and the oppressed. 'The friendship of the poor,' said Bernard, 'makes us the friends of Kings.' And in an age of unrestrained passions they showed an example of self-restraint and austerity. The friars did more: they were poor among the poor: no one was below their care and affection: they had nothing—they would take nothing—at first: till the love and gratitude of the people showered gifts upon them and even against their ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant
... as we have seen, was the one fatal mistake made by Pericles. But, once launched in the conflict, they were sure of an easy victory, if they had only shown a very moderate degree of prudence and self-restraint. And we need not blame the great statesmen too harshly for not foreseeing the wild excesses of folly and extravagance which we shall have to record ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell
... well-bred man," a writer once said, "would speak to all kings in the world with as little concern and as much ease as he would speak to you." Confusion is the enemy of eloquence. Self-restraint must be developed before one can hope to be either a good conversationalist or a social success. To create a pleasant, harmonious atmosphere, and at the same time to make one's ideas carry conviction, one must talk with ease and ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... never be countenanced, no matter how abundant the flowers may be. Self-restraint is not inculcated for the sake of saving the flowers so much as for the influence it will have upon the development of the child, although there are parts of the country where one would like to see it exercised for the sake of the flowers themselves. The child ...
— The Renewal of Life; How and When to Tell the Story to the Young • Margaret Warner Morley
... the farmer had to wait for some little time before Mrs. Haddo made her appearance. When she did so a great change was noticeable in her face; it was exceedingly pale. Her lips had lost their firm, their even noble, expression of self-restraint; they were tremulous, as though she had been suffering terribly. Her eyes were slightly red, as though some of those rare tears which she so seldom shed had visited them. She looked first at Farmer Miles and then in great amazement ...
— Betty Vivian - A Story of Haddo Court School • L. T. Meade
... find out. Nor was his obedience of that tame, passive sort which comes from indifference and lack of spirit. We all knew him to be resolute, and to be possessed of strong passions. But his power of self-restraint was equal to his power of reticence. He had, indeed, in a very marked degree, qualities which you look for only in those who have had a long schooling in the stern realities of life, and which you find rarely even then. He was as self-poised ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... His self-restraint made his uncle feel more uncomfortable. He sat down by his bed and lifted him out bodily upon his knees, and he tried to soothe him as ...
— 'Me and Nobbles' • Amy Le Feuvre
... "you were a weak fool when you did that. There's the Coper alongside now; go, get another keg. It is cheap, and you can just take a little drop to relieve that desperate craving. Come, now, be a man, and show that you have powers of self-restraint. You have always boasted of the strength of your will, haven't you? ...
— The Young Trawler • R.M. Ballantyne
... as by abstinence other men acquire the power of self-restraint, so also Christ, in Himself and in those that are His, subdued the flesh by the power of His Godhead. Wherefore, as we read Matt. 9:14, the Pharisees and the disciples of John fasted, but not the disciples of Christ. On which Bede comments, saying that "John drank neither wine ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... in American literature as a poet, and in history as one who was of incredible service, quietly performed, in preserving the Union during the war, was also eminently a wit and humorist. We always read first to one another all that we wrote. He had so trained himself from boyhood to self-restraint, calmness, and the nil admirari air, which, as Dallas said, is "the Corinthian ornament of a gentleman" (I may add especially when of Corinthian brass), that his admirable jests, while they gained in clearness and applicability, lost something of that ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... equipping the lady for her world-mending mission, had forgotten to give her a pleasant voice. Now if there was one thing in the world which made Snarley "madder" than anything else could do, it was the high-pitched, strident tones of a woman engaged in argument. The consequence was that his self-restraint broke down, and before the lady had said half the things she had meant to say, or come within sight of the splendid offer she was going to make on behalf of the Earl of Clodd, Snarley had spoken words and performed actions which caused his benefactress to retreat from the farmyard with her nose ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... beauties, just as the over-emphasis of a tragic actor is the very thing which best appeals to the gallery. But Hall Caine does not address himself to the vulgar and the careless. He is eager to leave his reputation to his peers and to posterity. With every year of ripening power his capacity for self-restraint has grown. When it has come of age in him, there will be nothing but fair and well. There has been no man in his time who has shown a deeper reverence for his work, or a more consistent increase in his command of it. His ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... England. Her father had been one of them. She took after him. Moreover, Lord Loudwater would have induced odd reveries in any wife. He had been intolerable since the second week of their honeymoon. Wholly without power of self-restraint, the furious outbursts of his vile temper had been consistently revolting. She once more told herself that something would have to be done about it—not on the instant, however. At the moment there appeared ...
— The Loudwater Mystery • Edgar Jepson
... exit, and went home to write the foregoing sketch of the scene. Certainly throughout so irritating an interview he had conducted himself with creditable self-restraint and moderation, yet with his closing sentence he had sent home a dart which rankled. He soon heard that his lordship "took great offense" at these last words, regarding them as "extremely rude and abusive," and as "equivalent to ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... that shall blow out of the widening east and with the coming of the light, and shall bring us, with the morning, "murmurs and scents of the infinite sea." Who can doubt that man has grown more and more human with each step of that slow process which has brought him knowledge, self-restraint, the arts of intercourse, and the revelations of real joy? Man has more and more lived with his fellow-men, and it is society that has humanized him—the development of society into a infinitely various school of discipline and ordered skill. He has been made more human by schooling, ...
— On Being Human • Woodrow Wilson
... able to wonder more than ever before at the marvellous whiteness of her skin, the perfection of her small, finely-shaped features, the strange sphinxlike expression of her face, always suggestive of some great self-restraint, mysterious, and subtly stimulating. And as I stood there she seemed again to be occupying the chair, at first a faint shadowy presence, but gaining with every second shape and outline, until I could scarcely persuade myself that it was not she who sat there, ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Wissant need not have been afraid; her husband had his own strict code of manners, and to this code he ever remained faithful. He possessed a remarkable mastery of his emotions, and he had always showed with regard to herself so singular a power of self-restraint that Claire, not unreasonably, doubted if he had any emotions to master, any ...
— Studies in love and in terror • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... a census of faults and defeats named by the teacher. Here inattention by far led all others. Defects of sense and speech, carelessness, indifference, lack of honor and of self-restraint, laziness, dreamy listlessness, nervousness, mental incapacity, lack of consideration for others, vanity, affectation, disobedience, untruthfulness, grumbling, etc., follow. Inattention to a degree that makes some children ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... going on in everything: truth and lies always at battle. Pleasure is always warring against self-restraint. Doubt is always crying Psha, and sneering. A man in life, a humourist in writing about life, sways over to one principle or the other, and laughs with the reverence for right and the love of truth ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... lake alone, but the lake and the solitary oarsman (124). The poet loves the work of human hands and especially its highest form, that of art. Thus a Roman fountain (119), a picture, a statue become the subject of his verse. Of all the arts he loved sculpture most, and in its chaste self-restraint his poetry is like marble. Give marble a voice and you have a poem of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. His poetry is also akin to marble in its perfection of form that is faultless, because it is the living rhythmic embodiment ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... fairly adored the tall, brawny man, whose whole bearing bespoke self-restraint, and the calm exercise of authority, and if his attitude towards them was both chivalrous and tender, theirs to him ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... had considered more than once during the last twenty-four hours. The excitement of the evening, the excitement of his unwonted outburst, was still troubling him. It was not often that he had so far overstepped the bounds which his natural caution, his ever-present self-restraint, imposed upon him. He paced restlessly to and fro from the sitting room to the bedroom and back again. He had told the truth,—the bare, simple truth. He had seen the letters of fire in the sky, and he had read them to these people because of their kindness, because of a certain ...
— The Illustrious Prince • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... resignation: he felt how mean and unmanly it would be to give way to that rebellious rage which was burning in his veins. Three years under the orders of ofttimes brutal petty officers had taught him a measure of self-restraint; the two further years of hard, unceasing toil under foreign climes, the patient amassing of florin upon florin to enable him to come back and claim the girl whom he loved, had completed the work of changing ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... thought it was the continuation of a blissful dream. For many a long year she had retired to rest, and arisen in the morning calm, resigned, nay, cheerful; but it was the calmness and resignation of a soul attuned by prayer and self-restraint to an equanimity that rarely was disturbed by mirth or pleasure. Now, that soul seemed to dance within her to exhilarating melodies. So happy had been her dreams, so joyous her sleep, that her eyes sparkled unwonted fires when she opened them; and as she jumped out of bed, there was an elasticity ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... people of all ages, sexes, conditions, professions, arts, and trades assembled on that day to greet their youthful sovereign. The ceremony was conducted with great harmony: happiness and cheerful good humour prevailed among the enormous multitude which thronged the streets; and courtesy and self-restraint were everywhere conspicuous. The coronation was succeeded by a series of fetes and banquets, and many weeks elapsed before the metropolis had ceased to hold festivals in its remembrance. In a word, the utmost enthusiasm for the youthful sovereign prevailed on ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... protest paid to the rectory. The principal discussion, however, always took place at the regular meetings of the Ladies' Aid Society. This was done most of all for Mrs. Royal's benefit. She knew this, and with much self-restraint she resisted making any reply for some time. But at one meeting, when the criticism became extremely severe, she could stand it no longer. Mrs. Harmon had just been indulging in one of her long dissertations, and finished by asking the rector's wife if she did not consider it ...
— Rod of the Lone Patrol • H. A. Cody
... poor, how corrupt, did the life look that he was leading now, by comparison with the life that he had led in those earlier and happier days! How shamefully he had forgotten the simple precepts of Christian humility, Christian sympathy, and Christian self-restraint, in which his teachers had trusted as the safeguards that were to preserve him from the foul contact of the world! Within the last two days only, he had refused to make merciful allowance for the errors of a man, whose life had been wasted ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... Masterly was the regular breathing that indicated slumber, and the stiff fingers when she washed her hands and smelt them to see if there were blood upon them. But Mme. Favart, who with artistic self-restraint co-ordinated herself into the whole, without any virtuosity at all, produced no less an effect upon me. As the leading character in Feuillet's Julie, she was perfection itself; when I saw her, it seemed to me as though no one at home in Denmark had any idea of what ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... the privilege was only converted into a right after violent convulsions, and was never able to maintain itself. That under such a system the functions of government could have been carried on at all was due entirely to the habits of self-restraint which the Romans had engraved into their nature. They were called a nation of kings, kings over their own appetites, passions, and inclinations. They were not imaginative, they were not intellectual; they had little national poetry, little art, ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... said the child jumping up. She turned and faced her friend, with a face so wistful and searching, so patient, yet so strained with its self-restraint and fear, that the doctor felt it was something serious with which he had to do. He did not attempt a light tone before that little face; he felt that it would ...
— Melbourne House, Volume 2 • Susan Warner
... and even encourage them to draw upon him liberally; it is only a partial failure of the crop, or some intimation of the negro's intention to shirk his obligations, that induces his country factor to preach the virtue of self-restraint, or moralize upon ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... She dreaded the worst when she saw him thus lose the self-restraint hitherto so remarkable in him. She leaned from her bed, threw her arms round him, and drew him to her, kneeled, laid his head on her bosom, and wept as she had ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... coaxed; in vain she was threatened; in vain she was deprived of food; in vain shut up in a dark hole; in vain was the lash held over her. Rugge, tyrant though he was, did not suffer the lash to fall. His self-restraint there might be humanity,—might be fear of the consequences; for the state of her health began to alarm him. She might die; there might be an inquest. He wished now that he had taken Mrs. Crane's suggestion, and re-engaged ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... happier way than any other man; nevertheless, it is carried so far that one understands what M. Guizot meant, when he said that Shakespeare appears in his language to have tried all styles except that of simplicity. He has not the severe and scrupulous self-restraint of the ancients, partly, no doubt, because he had a far less cultivated and exacting audience: he has indeed a far wider range than they had, a far richer fertility of thought; in this respect he rises above them: in his strong ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... attendant to watch the room. Here indeed is a blessing in disguise. This idea that the children must be watched all the time, that they cannot be left alone a minute, is fatal to all teaching of honor and self-restraint and self-help. It will take time and determination and tact, but I know that it is possible to train the children—not the untrained city slum children perhaps, but the average town children—to behave like ladies and gentlemen ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... face was older, sterner, and sadder than when he faced Mary three years before. No trace of boyhood was in his manner. Seven years of life on the long trail and among the mountain peaks had taught him silence, self-restraint, and had also deepened his native melancholy. He had ridden into Wagon Wheel from the West, eager to see the great mining camp whose ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... number of others. Such cases illustrate forcibly this truth: we have, by careful training of the modern sailor, added to the traditional bravery of the class a quality, not lacking, but never properly developed, in the old type, that is, the dignity of coolness and self-restraint, the perfect control of men in the supreme moments of excitement ...
— The Naval Pioneers of Australia • Louis Becke and Walter Jeffery
... became so monstrous that he lost his last shred of self-restraint in contemplating it. What if he were really the victim of some mocking experiment, the centre of a ring of holiday-makers jeering at a poor creature in its blind dashes against the solid walls of consciousness? But, no—men were not so uniformly cruel: there were flaws in the ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... king, to prevent a meeting of the citizens to condemn his presence in the town—for the meeting was the "Port Bill meeting," adjourned from time to time since the previous May. And on the other side were the citizens, legally protesting and exasperatingly defiant, evidently under perfect self-restraint, determined not to ...
— The Siege of Boston • Allen French
... mighty qualities; and we must make the new days great by showing these same qualities. We must insist upon courage and resolution, upon hardihood, tenacity, and fertility of resource; we must insist upon the strong, virile virtues; and we must insist no less upon the virtues of self-restraint, self-mastery, regard for the rights of others; we must show our abhorrence of cruelty, brutality, and corruption, in public and in private ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... Usurtasen I., which had probably begun to decay, and, recognizing its importance as the very penetrale of the temple, he resolved to reconstruct it in granite, instead of common stone, that he might render it, practically, imperishable. With a reverence and a self-restraint that it might be wished restorers possessed more commonly, he preserved all the lines and dimensions of the ancient building, merely reproducing in a better material the work of his great predecessor. Having accomplished this pious task, he gave a vent to his constructive ambition by a grand ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... counter to our desires. A bottle or two of wine may make a sensible object appear double; what wonder, then, if our moral perceptions are sometimes warped and distorted by such powerful agencies as an evil education or an habitual absence of self-restraint. In neither case does occasional distortion invalidate the accuracy ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... the beautiful centre of Finiteness into the boundless. Complete Definiteness, on the other hand, throws itself with a bold leap out of the blissful dream of the infinite will into the limits of the finite deed, and by self-refinement ever increases in magnanimous self-restraint and beautiful self-sufficiency. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... much occupied, however, to attend at all to the well-being of his children, and his wife 'has no taste for anything of the kind.' So, as I said, Belle grows up a spoiled child. She has never been subject to control, and has not the slightest idea of self-restraint. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... the man must have the first consideration. She tried to judge fairly as to whether she or Evelyn would on the whole be the best for him. She estimated herself, and she estimated Evelyn, and she estimated the man. Wollaston Lee was a man of a strong nature, she told herself. He was capable of self-restraint, of holding his head up from his own weaknesses forever. Maria reasoned that if he had been a weaker man she would have loved him just the same, and in that case Evelyn would have been the one to be sacrificed. She thought that a girl like Evelyn would not have been ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... for he was aware that his unbidden companions had received unexpected reinforcement. A third guest had arrived, and looked hard and critically at him. It's name was Old Age, and he found something sardonic in its glance. With all his gentleness of soul, all his innate self-restraint, there remained fighting blood in Dominic Iglesias. Therefore, for the moment, recognising with whom he had to deal, a light anything but mild visited his eyes, and a rigidity the straight lines of his ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... Christian, society is founded on the theory that men look forward and expect to carry on business for several years, and to lay up money for their old age, and establish their children in life, and that they recognize the necessity of self-restraint and loyalty to engagements. The doctrines, on the other hand, which are preached in Congress about the best mode of dealing with debts—that is, with other people's money—have never before been heard in a civilized legislature, or anywhere outside of a council of buccaneers, ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... suppose must have been my feelings, after this rejection, at the thought of my own dishonour? And yet I could not help wondering at his natural temperance and self-restraint and manliness. I never imagined that I could have met with a man such as he is in wisdom and endurance. And therefore I could not be angry with him or renounce his company, any more than I could hope to win him. For I well knew that if Ajax could not be wounded ...
— Symposium • Plato
... her, his face was flushed and reckless, his collar was open, showing the base of his great, corded neck, while the lust of the game had coarsened him till he was again the violent, untamed, primitive man of the frontier. His self-restraint and dignity were gone. He had tried the new ways, and they were not for him. He slipped back, and ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... mightier grief than that which could be felt by any others—a grief unspeakable—beyond words, and beyond thought. White-haired, and with a face which now seemed turned to stone in the fixedness of its great agony, this figure tottered rather than walked into the room. There was no longer any self-restraint in this woman, who for years had lived under a self-restraint that never relaxed; there was no thought as to those who might see or hear; there was nothing but the utter abandonment of perfect grief—of grief ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... since they are young: but men and women who have lived long and are tired,—who want rest,—who have done with aspirations and ambition,—whose life has been a broken arch,—feel this repose and self-restraint as they feel nothing else. The quiet strength of these curved lines, the solid support of these heavy columns, the moderate proportions, even the modified lights, the absence of display, of effort, of self-consciousness, satisfy them as no other art does. They come back ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... heart, a reconciliation, and then Walter's sudden death. Sorely tried as it had been, the father's love had never weakened; and after those inexpressibly sad days at Versailles, recorded with such self-restraint in his letters to his daughter, his health declined rapidly. On July 5, 1853, he notes that his doctors agree that he must not attempt the next Review, and a few days later, he writes, "I suppose my last number of the Quarterly ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... had thoroughly frightened her. Nevertheless, now, for the first time, he was inclined to accept his chief's opinion of her. She was not only too clumsy and inexperienced, but she totally lacked the self-restraint of a spy. Her nervous agitation in the lane was due to something more disturbing than his mere possible intrusion upon her confidences with the mulatto. The significance of her question, "Then it IS war?" was at best a threat, and that implied hesitation. ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... certain whether his companion is a gentleman. Breakfasts, lunches, and dinners hold a great place in his thoughts. He gives far too much attention to rum-and-water, brandy-and-water, and the varieties of drinking and eating in general. He has neither the ease nor the self-restraint which mark the thoroughly well-bred man of the world; but he is, nevertheless, good-natured, amusing, and likable. The chief merit of his book arises from the fact that he has seen much and many parts of the world, has been a student of life and manners, and thus has acquired skill ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... of conclusions from general truths . priori, usually requires a long chain of arguments, and, moreover, very great caution, acuteness, and self-restraint - qualities which are not often met with; therefore people prefer to be taught by experience rather than deduce their conclusion from a few axioms, and set them out in logical order. (69) Whence it follows, that if anyone wishes to teach a doctrine to a ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part I] • Benedict de Spinoza |
