"Self-righteous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... encouragement and persuasion to the paths of righteousness and peace. His presence was not needed among those who were whole. He was of course seldom found in their society. He did not desire to rank with the rich, self-righteous pharisee. So ought those, who profess to be the servants of Christ, to go among them, who are most in need of their aid. "The servant is not above his Master." They ought, therefore, to condescend to men of low estate, and visit the abodes of ...
— Twenty-Four Short Sermons On The Doctrine Of Universal Salvation • John Bovee Dods
... exist, for God to answer prayer would be both a dishonour to Himself and a damage to the suppliant. To encourage those who come to Him in their own name, or in a self-righteous, self-seeking, and disobedient spirit, would be to set a premium upon continuance in sin. To answer the requests of the unbelieving would be to disregard the double insult put upon His word of promise and His oath of confirmation, ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... in behavior As thorns in the crown of the Savior, Why are ye so prideful in spirit, Content with your self-righteous merit? ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... it did: really, you know, sir, it was in his sinking frame. We might have got on tolerably, notwithstanding, but for two people—Miss Cathy, and Joseph, the servant: you saw him, I daresay, up yonder. He was, and is yet most likely, the wearisomest self-righteous Pharisee that ever ransacked a Bible to rake the promises to himself and fling the curses to his neighbours. By his knack of sermonising and pious discoursing, he contrived to make a great impression on Mr. ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte
... and dealt gently with his friend, he did not translate evil into good. Through all the generous and kindly narrative we may see clearly that Savage was an impostor. There is the heart of Johnson in the noble appeal against judgment of the self-righteous who have never known the harder trials of the world, when he says of Savage, "Those are no proper judges of his conduct, who have slumbered away their time on the down of plenty; nor will any wise man easily presume to say, 'Had I been in Savage's condition, I should have lived or written ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... My father spoilt them—abominable old limpets. And they're so self-righteous. They think I'm a sort of criminal who has instigated this new devilish system which runs everything so close and cuts it so fine—as if they hadn't made this inevitable by their shameless carelessness and wastefulness in the past. He ...
— Touch and Go • D. H. Lawrence
... could tell thee of that I have seen, where I do verily believe that pride, and naught else—that abominable sin that God hateth—kept His afflicted child up, and smirking with a false smile over the breaking heart; and no sooner was that self-righteous pride subdued, and the child brake forth into open sobbing,—crying, 'Father, Thy rod doth hurt, and I have been a fool!'—no sooner, I say, was this confession made, than God threw away His rod, and took His humbled child to His heart. Dear heart, when God taketh His ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... the somewhat oppressed spirits of historical association with the healthy grandeur of nature. The books my father wrote here embrace this joy of untheoried, peaceful, or gloriously perturbed life of sky and land. Theory of plot or principle was as much beneath him as the cobble-stones; from self-righteous harangues he turned as one who had heard a divine voice that alone deserved to declare. He taught as Nature does, always leading to thoughts of something higher than the dictum of men, and nobler than their greatest beauty of action. He said ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... kindled emotion in dead ones, uplifted base ones, broadened bigoted ones, and made many and many a stricken one glad and filled it brimful of gratitude, figuratively spit upon in his unoffending coffin by this crawling, slimy, sanctimonious, self-righteous reptile! ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... neighbourhood, slain in the sight of her friends who had fought her battles for her because they believed in her, stripped of everything which had gone to make life worth the living, and she would place herself in the power of a man whose only attitude toward the story might be one of self-righteous justification. Was it worth the price? Her own words rose up before her, "Without honesty no other virtue is a virtue at all." Elizabeth pondered a long time, and again her own words rose up to confront her, "It does not matter who is wrong, the thing that matters is what is ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... carnal ends, during many years. It is notorious that five Synods are in organic fellowship, while hardly two of them will hold ministerial or sacramental communion! What a picture does this state of things in the professing church of Christ present to the infidel; how hardening to the self-righteous and the openly profane! And although conventional regulations be lightly looked upon by many, not being based upon express words of scripture; yet when framed and engaged to, according to the general rules of scripture, much sin is the result of violating them, and trampling ...
— Act, Declaration, & Testimony for the Whole of our Covenanted Reformation, as Attained to, and Established in Britain and Ireland; Particularly Betwixt the Years 1638 and 1649, Inclusive • The Reformed Presbytery
... about families in England who live as you describe—you said your mother belonged to one of them. I remember that now." He nodded shortly, as if conceding her a point. "My father was a New Englander. He was narrow and self-righteous, and I hated him, but he came of people who had faced a hundred forms of death to live primitively, ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... of a comrade with whom they played in infancy, or a woman whose favours they had shared—the whole body of these sentiments is outraged. To consider it too closely is to understand, if not to excuse, these fervours of self-righteous old ship-captains, who would man their guns, and open fire in passing, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to the wisdom of the ancients, in whose splendid civilization suicide had as honorable place as any other courageous, reasonable and unselfish act. Antony, Brutus, Cato, Seneca—these were not of the kind of men to do deeds of cowardice and folly. The smug, self-righteous modern way of looking upon the act as that of a craven or a lunatic is the creation of priests, Philistines and women. If courage is manifest in endurance of profitless discomfort it is cowardice to warm oneself when cold, to cure oneself when ill, to drive ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... pity, thronged Lee's mind with sensations and ideas. However, it was the world surrounding the central motive, the action, that most engaged him; hardly a trait of generosity dignified it; and, exaggeratedly as a universal meanness and self-righteous cruelty was shown, it scarcely departed, he felt, from ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... coast, and were already pushing across the mountains to occupy the great interior valleys. And with rapid material development there had come a confident and aggressive spirit, a proud and intractable temper, a certain self-righteous sense of separation from the Old World and its traditions. The very rivalries between colony and colony were the result of close contact and daily intercourse, their very jealousies born of interrelated interests and the recognition of ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker |
