"Self-sufficiency" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... foreign trade because trade involves foreign connections; he distrusted manufactures because they produced big cities and collected crowds; if he had nevertheless to have manufactures, he wanted protection in the interest of self-sufficiency. When he could not find these conditions in the real world, he went passionately into the wilderness, and founded Utopian communities far from foreign contacts. His slogans reveal his prejudice. He is for Self-Government, Self-Determination, Independence. Not one of these ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... legislative cares, to seize the opportunity for a visit to England, whither he was drawn by feelings which every educated and impressible American feels, in a degree scarcely conceivable by the English themselves. And being here (but he had already too much experience of English self-sufficiency to confess so much) he began to feel the deep yearning which a sensitive American—his mind full of English thoughts, his imagination of English poetry, his heart of English character and sentiment—cannot ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... justice and national honor; but it none the less aims a deadly blow at the tribal autonomy which was made a vital part of the original scheme of Indian control. The declaration cited does not in terms deny the self-sufficiency of the tribe for the purposes of internal self-government; but the immediate necessary effect of it is further to weaken the already waning power of the chiefs, while Congress yet fails to furnish any substitute for their authority, either by providing for the organization ...
— The Indian Question (1874) • Francis A. Walker
... Apart from the cheering voices of my attendants I could better know and feel the loneliness of the Desert. The influence of such scenes, however, was not of a softening kind, but filled me rather with a sort of childish exultation in the self-sufficiency which enabled me to stand thus alone in the wideness of Asia—a short-lived pride, for wherever man wanders he still remains tethered by the chain that links him to his kind; and so when the night closed around me I began to return, to return, ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... watching the world go round. His feet rested upon the rung of his tilted chair, forming his knees into a sort of desk upon which lay a French newspaper. The tilting of his knees, the tilting of his chair, the tilting of his hat and the rakish tilt of his cigar, gave him the appearance of great self-sufficiency, as if, away down in his soul, he knew what he was there for, and cared not a whit whether anyone else did ...
— Tom Slade Motorcycle Dispatch Bearer • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... 1592, it looked as if she were well started on her career as a world-power. But that was not yet to be. The hegemony of her clans passed into the powerful and shrewd Tokugawa family, the policy of which was peace and national self-sufficiency. ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... distressed women under their protection," returned Leo promptly. "Every woman who needs my help is my sister," he added with a look of self-sufficiency which ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... walked away, with that air of not, having seen anything so common to disconcerted people who wish to conceal their disturbance. Into the vacant place dropped the stranger, stretching out his feet, throwing his head back against the wall, and half closing his eyes with the drunkard's own leer of self-sufficiency. During a few moments of agonizing suspense the world waited. Then from those whiskey-scorched and tobacco-stained lips ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... rather than that of pure reason. Taught they are, and taught they must be, however they repudiate it. But the most successful teachers and leaders are those who contrive to wound their sense of intellectual self-sufficiency least, and to offer them the strong food of dogmatic assertion sugared over and sparkling with the show ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... he encountered it in the pages of popular newspapers and magazines, at Mrs. Porcher's dinner-table, or in the good Lovegroves' drawing-room, had small attraction for him, since it appeared to advance chiefly by negations stated with rather blatant self-sufficiency and self-conceit. It might tend to the making of respectable municipal councillors; but, in his opinion, it was idle to pretend that it tended to the making of saints—and for the saints, those experts in the divine science, Iglesias confessed a weakness. Of spirituality ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... carriage over a rough road disturbed the pleasing reveries of revenge, to awaken him to the more probable and less agreeable consequences likely to occur to himself for the blunder he had made; for, with all the puppy's self-sufficiency and conceit, he could not by any process of mental delusion conceal from himself the fact that he had been most tremendously done, and how his party would take it was a serious consideration. O'Grady, another horrid Irish squire—how should he face him? For a moment he thought ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... a little of our skepticism, if but to gratify an habitual craving in us. We do not doubt that Khalid's self-sufficiency is remarkable; that his courage—on paper—is quite above the common; that the grit and stay he shows are wonderful; that his lofty aspirations, so indomitable in their onwardness, are great: but we only ask, having thus fortified ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... of principle between magic and religion sufficiently explains the relentless hostility with which in history the priest has often pursued the magician. The haughty self-sufficiency of the magician, his arrogant demeanour towards the higher powers, and his unabashed claim to exercise a sway like theirs could not but revolt the priest, to whom, with his awful sense of the divine majesty, and his humble prostration in presence of it, ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... finger to their lips, screwing up their eyes to enjoin secrecy. A provincial flavor distinguished them all, with differences of inflection, Southern excitability, the drawling accent of the Centre, Breton sing-song, all blended in the same idiotic, strutting self-sufficiency; frock-coats after the style of Landerneau, mountain shoes, and home-spun linen; the monumental assurance of village clubs, local expressions, provincialisms abruptly imported into political and administrative language, the limp, ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... woman who had been able, for any considerable while, to support both a personal and an intellectual passion. Sitting behind her, he watched her with perplexed admiration, shading his eyes with his hand. In her dinner dress she looked even younger than in street clothes, and, for all her composure and self-sufficiency, she seemed to him strangely alert and vibrating, as if in her, too, there were something never altogether at rest. He felt that he knew pretty much what she demanded in people and what she demanded from life, and he wondered how she squared ...
— Alexander's Bridge and The Barrel Organ • Willa Cather and Alfred Noyes
... cushion. The Akali did not attempt either to give him his blessing or to shake hands with him. The proud expression of his face also changed, and showed confusion and anxious humility instead of the usual self-respect and self-sufficiency. The brave Sikh knelt down before the Takur, and instead of the ordinary "Namaste!"—"Salutation to you," whispered reverently, as if addressing the Guru of the Golden Lake: "I am your servant, Sadhu-Sahib! ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... they are categorematic. In the proposition, 'Of' was used more indefinitely three hundred years ago than it is now, 'of' is categorematic. On the other hand, all substantives may be used categorematically; and the same self-sufficiency is usually recognised in adjectives and participles. Some, however, hold that the categorematic use of adjectives and participles is due to an ellipsis which the logician should fill up; that instead of Gold is ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... beguiled by frivolous applause, has once given way to insolent self-sufficiency, {such} foolish vanity is easily ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... when he first came. But in all school sports he had improved, and was the acknowledged leader and champion in matters requiring boldness and courage; his popularity made him giddy; favour of man led to forgetfulness of God; and even a glance at his countenance showed a self-sufficiency and arrogance which ill became the refinement of his features, and ill replaced the ingenuous ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... war are only part of what has to be considered if we are to provide for the supreme matter of national self-sufficiency and security in all its aspects. There are other great matters which will be thrust upon our attention whether we will or not. There is, for example, a very pressing question of trade and shipping involved in this great problem of ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... with Berenice, he at last obtained speech of Lucien; and, arrogant publisher though he was, he came in with the radiant air of a courtier in the royal presence, mingled, however, with a certain self-sufficiency and easy ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... a subaltern in the army, a Russian officer remarked, with much self-sufficiency, "That his country fought for glory and the French for gain."—"You are perfectly right," answered Napoleon; "every one fights for that which he does ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 343, November 29, 1828 • Various
... stared at the object, a strange, sudden flush of confident vanity and self-sufficiency seemed to pass through him, but it was so momentary that he could ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... eyes, crooked though they were, missed nothing; those sudden spaces of motionlessness, the peculiar, utterly still tilt of the head, were the natural impulses of one ever listening; the calm immobility of the dusky face was bred of a life of self-sufficiency, where muscle and eye were ever-active guardians. The coarse black hair that straggled from beneath a dirty Stetson, the high cheek bones, the swarthy complexion; these the outward signals of his half-breed ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... perceive and frankly admit that there was wrong on my side. I could not have approached you and spoken to you in the right spirit, for if I had, what followed could not have occurred. I fear there was a self-sufficiency in my words and mariner yesterday, which made you conscious of Dr. Marks only, and you had no scruples in dealing with Dr. Marks as you did. If my words and bearing had brought you face to face with my august yet merciful Master, you would have respected Him, and also me, ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... according to this or that expounder of it, may repel him unspeakably; the gospel according to Jesus Christ, attracts him supremely, and ever holds where it has drawn him. To the priest, the scribe, the elder, exclaiming against his self-sufficiency in refusing what they teach, he answers, 'It is life or death to me. Your gospel I cannot take. To believe as you would have me believe, would be to lose my God. Your God is no God to me. I do not desire him. I would ...
— Hope of the Gospel • George MacDonald
... lightning when it strikes its object. I stood confounded, yet enlightened, all ablaze!—but the subject of this discovery did not seem in the least to apprehend it, or to believe it possible, in his mad, mole-like effrontery of self-sufficiency, that by his own ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... thing that strikes one is its inferiority to preceding Houses of Commons, and the presumption, impertinence, and self-sufficiency of the new members.... There exists no party but that of the Government; the Irish act in a body under O'Connell to the number of about forty; the Radicals are scattered up and down without a leader, numerous, restless, turbulent, bold, and active; the Tories, without a ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... the growing interest of the public in instrumental music for its own sake as an incentive, could take advantage of these circumstances to display his genius and to delight his hearers with a piece of genuine music. This he did and his operatic overtures are of such distinct import and self-sufficiency that they are often detached from the opera itself and played as concert numbers. The Magic Flute Overture is also noteworthy because of the polyphonic treatment of the first theme which is a definite fugal ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... a better specimen of the cool self-sufficiency of these young domestics of the Scottish type than the following:—I heard of a boy making a very cool and determined exit from the house into which he had very lately been introduced. He had been told that he should be dismissed ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... wish of every finite rational being, and this, therefore, is inevitably a determining principle of its faculty of desire. For we are not in possession originally of satisfaction with our whole existence- a bliss which would imply a consciousness of our own independent self-sufficiency this is a problem imposed upon us by our own finite nature, because we have wants and these wants regard the matter of our desires, that is, something that is relative to a subjective feeling of pleasure or pain, which determines what ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... were not savage in the common signification of this term. They were men each one of whom constituted himself willingly a centre for others, or, if this was not the case, renounced them in proud self-sufficiency. All the glory and all the disgrace of our race lies in the power of individualizing which is divinely breathed into our veins. As a natural element, if this be not controlled, it degenerates easily into intractableness, into violence. The Germans need therefore, in order to ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... McClellan's self-sufficiency, see vol. i.; on campaign of 1862; on extraordinary powers given ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse
... its equal. It is courtesy without condescension; affability without familiarity; self-sufficiency without selfishness; simplicity without snide. It weighs sixteen ounces to the pound without the package, and it doesn't need a four-colored label ...
— Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... this place at ease and by choice, and had no evils to suffer or to fear; yet the imaginations excited by the view of an unknown and untravelled wilderness are not such as arise in the artificial solitude of parks and gardens, a flattering notion of self-sufficiency, a placid indulgence of voluntary delusions, a secure expansion of the fancy, or a cool concentration of the mental powers. The phantoms which haunt a desert are want, and misery, and danger; the evils of dereliction rush upon ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... scared away into irreligion or unbelief by the wretched delusion, that these creatures, wickedly caricaturing Christianity, are fairly representing it. I have beheld more deliberate malice, more lying and cheating, more backbiting and slandering, denser stupidity, and greater self-sufficiency, among bad-hearted and wrong-headed religionists, than among any other order of human beings. I have known more malignity and slander conveyed in the form of a prayer than should have consigned any ordinary libeller to the pillory. I have known a person who made evening prayer a means ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... have no intention to pay you compliments—To entertain agreeable notions of one's own character is a great incentive to act with propriety and spirit. But I should be sorry to contribute in any degree to your acquiring an excess of self-sufficiency ... I own indeed that when ... to display my extensive erudition, I have quoted Greek, Latin and French sentences one after another with astonishing celerity; or have got into my Old-hock humour and fallen a-raving about princes and lords, knights and geniuses, ladies ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... metallic voice was neither friendly nor hostile. It expressed, more than anything else, a sardonic, bullying self-sufficiency. ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... whatever its outcome may be, we must try to introduce a new era into the history of the world. But our fathers and our fathers' fathers have tried to do this same thing, and we shall not succeed if we go about the work in a spirit of self-sufficiency and hasty pride. Only knowledge of the truth will enable us to succeed. Knowledge of the truth is not an easy thing; it is a question of laborious thought, mental discipline, the humility which is content to learn and the moral courage which can face ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... was true, but it was truth without the needful amount of humility, of meekness, of gentleness, and of self-distrust. It was truth, but it was truth put in such a form as to do the work of falsehood. It was an appeal to pride, to self-conceit, to self-sufficiency. It was truth presented in such a shape, as to abate the sense of my dependence on God; as to make me forgetful of my own imperfections; as to exclude from my mind all thoughts of danger, and so prepare ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... misunderstanding and abuse. He had been berated for coarseness and charged with the half-culture of the West. His sagacity had been caricatured as cunning; his presence of mind taken for vulgar audacity; he was held up as a half-educated debater, filled with a miserable self-sufficiency. He was attacked as a demagogue. The East held itself aloof from him in unctuous self-righteousness, because of his stand in the Mexican War. His fight for Oregon had aligned against him the friends of England in America. Yet men were in power because of him. A Whig had been elected ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... which is poison and bitterness,—worst of it all, the false and arrogant notion that it is duty to force the opinion upon the acceptance of others. But it is because such men themselves hold with so poor a grasp the truth underlying their forms that they are, in their self-sufficiency, so ambitious of propagating the forms, making of themselves the worst enemies of the truth of which they fancy themselves the champions. How truly, in the case of all genuine teachers of men, ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... have arisen within her borders a quarter-century ago. The Scandinavian countries lie so far apart from the chief centres of European thought that they are always in danger of lapsing into a narrow self-sufficiency so far as intellectual ideals are concerned. Danish literature has been made what it is chiefly by the mediation of a few powerful minds who have kept it in touch with modern progress: by Holberg, who may almost be said to have brought humanism ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... in the proper light. The hyper-critical spirit is fatal to growth under any condition. Whenever a teacher has come to the conclusion that he or she has nothing to learn from studying the work of others, anabolism has ceased and katabolism has set in. The self-sufficiency of our craft is one of its weakest characteristics. It is the factor that more than any other discounts it in the minds of laymen. Fortunately it is less frequently a professional characteristic than in former years, but it still persists in some quarters. I recently ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... the more a thing is furnished with the conditions of happiness, the more desirable it is. Also one of the conditions of happiness is that it be self-sufficing, else it would not set man's appetite at rest, as the last end does. Now riches give great promise of self-sufficiency, as Boethius says (De Consol. iii): the reason of which, according to the Philosopher (Ethic. v, 5), is that we "use money in token of taking possession of something," and again it is written (Eccles. 10:19): "All things obey money." ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... two plain things. There have been people in the Christian Church who have said, 'We have all the Spirit, and therefore we do not need one another.' There may be isolation, and self-sufficiency, and a host of other evils coming in, if we only grasp the thought, 'The manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man,' but they are all corrected if we go on and say, 'to profit withal.' For every one of us has something, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... from gifts and parts, than life and power, though they have an enlightened and doctrinal understanding, let them in time be advised and admonished for their preservation, because insensibly such will come to depend upon a self-sufficiency; to forsake Christ the living Fountain, and hew out unto themselves cisterns, that will hold no living waters: and, by degrees, such will come to draw others from waiting upon the gift of God in themselves, and to feel it in others, in order to their strength and refreshment, to wait upon them, ...
— A Brief Account of the Rise and Progress of the People Called Quakers • William Penn
... right to talk, Henry," she would say in the hard practical voice which so completed her self-sufficiency. "You are not earning your living. You are still dependent upon us;" and she would add with a note of triumph: "Remember, if anything were to happen to your dear father you would have to shift for yourself, for everything has been left ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... land per capita among lowest in Europe; one-half of work force engaged in farming; produces wide range of temperate-zone crops and livestock; claims self-sufficiency in ...
— The 1990 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... the sin of making the golden calf, and were threatened with destruction; but God was entreated not to destroy them utterly, and Moses was assured that God would extend mercy as He should see fit. The quotation has a bearing upon the position of the Jews and Paul's argument. They were filled with self-sufficiency and pride, and in great danger. In the reply to Moses, God claimed the right of extending mercy as He pleased, and would not allow Moses to interfere with His prerogative. The Jews were reminded by the quotation that God had a right to say ...
— The Doctrines of Predestination, Reprobation, and Election • Robert Wallace
... of the last rites had indeed arrived, and their heavy tread could be heard in the hall and in the courtyard. M. Casimir, who was bursting with self-sufficiency, hurried here, there? and everywhere, indicating, with an imperious gesture, where he wished the black hangings, embroidered with silver and emblazoned with the De Chalusse arms, to be suspended. ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... had suspected Tom of such a feeling, I fear he would have cared little, save how to restore the balance by making a fool of the man who fancied him a fool: but no male self-sufficiency or pride is proof against the contempt of woman; and Tom slunk along by the schoolmistress's side, as if he had been one of her naughtiest school-children. He tried, of course, to brazen it out ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... struggles to do right, and go down, down. It requires a very hardened sinner to forget the past, and begin again as if nothing had happened; or a very humble Christian to start again, after repeated failures, in dependence upon God. Ruth's self-sufficiency was gone, and she sadly admitted to herself that she was no better than Julia and the other girls. She had given up reading her Bible now, thinking its sweet messages were not for her, a wayward, erring one, and would scarcely dare to pray even for the safety ...
— Ruth Arnold - or, the Country Cousin • Lucy Byerley
... "There is no self-sufficiency about him," said Margaret. "I hope not, and he is so transparent, that it would be laughed down at the first bud: but the universal good report, and certainty of success, and being so often put in comparison with Richard, is hardly safe. I was very ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... the effects of public favor, lest it should kindle that pride of heart and self-sufficiency which dwells in my own as well as in others' breasts, and which, alas! is so ready to be inflamed by the slightest spark of praise. I do indeed feel gratified, and it is right I should rejoice, but I rejoice ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... but his turn of mind was rather grave than gay. He was generally pompous, which together with his self-sufficiency led Cowper, somewhat irreverently, to call him a "prig." Among his few light and humorous snatches, we have lines written in ridicule of certain ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... was more in reproach than anger. Louis felt struck to the heart with shame and anger; but so much had he lately been nursed in conceit and self-sufficiency, that he drove away the better impulse; and, instead of at once acknowledging himself in the wrong and begging pardon, he stood still, endeavoring to look unconcerned, repeating, "I didn't mean ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... they who live in and by him should live poorly and contemptibly. If the presence of low thoughts which he repudiates, yet makes a man miserable, how must it be with him if they who live and move and have their being in him are mean and repulsive, or alienated through self-sufficiency and slowness of heart? ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... selected Knights to be included in the now attenuated ranks of the Senate. 14. ad dandam civitatem Italiae. The claims of the Italians to the franchise were just and pressing, but the overbearing pride and self-sufficiency of the Roman citizens ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... about it, Mr. Slick," I replied; "I plead guilty. You took me in then. You touched a weak point. You insensibly flattered my vanity, by assenting to my self-sufficiency, in supposing I was exempt from that universal frailty of human nature; ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... as a critic," continued De Gollyer, pleasantly aware of the antagonism he had exploded, "you remain children afraid of the dark—afraid of being alone. Solitude frightens you. You lack the quality of self-sufficiency that is the characteristic of the higher critical faculties. You marry because you ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... earnest, headstrong man, the like of whom does not appear a half-dozen times in a century. Being self-educated, he was possessed, like nearly all self-educated men, of a complacency and a self-sufficiency which stood always in his way. Affecting to teach grammar, he was ignorant of all the etymology of the language; knowing no word of botany, he classified plants by the "fearings" of his turnip-field. He was vain to the last degree; he thought ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... to grasp, feel, taste, and love, what finds us fundamentally prejudiced and almost hostile, is precisely the perfection and ultimate maturity in every culture and art, the essentially noble in works and men, their moment of smooth sea and halcyon self-sufficiency, the goldenness and coldness which all things show that have perfected themselves. Perhaps our great virtue of the historical sense is in necessary contrast to GOOD taste, at least to the very bad taste; and we can only evoke in ourselves imperfectly, ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... the shortcomings of the orthodox religious world. Its faults of temper, its repulsive manners, its custom of making home unlovely, its distaste of innocent amusement, its habits of censure, its self-sufficiency and pharisaical character, are touched with a caustic but healing power. Only the hand of a friend could have done this thing. No point of doctrine is questioned, no principle of faith invaded, no charity wounded. She probes in love—her object is ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... out in the morning, go on errands, and such work. Boys must begin at the foot of the ladder. I began at the foot of the ladder," answered Mr. Flint, with an immense self-sufficiency, which Harry, however, failed ...
— Try Again - or, the Trials and Triumphs of Harry West. A Story for Young Folks • Oliver Optic
... Bracebridge household were of a broadening character. This great house was a school to Jennie, not only in the matter of dress and manners, but as formulating a theory of existence. Mrs. Bracebridge and her husband were the last word in the matter of self-sufficiency, taste in the matter of appointments, care in the matter of dress, good form in the matter of reception, entertainment, and the various usages of social life. Now and then, apropos of nothing save her own mood, Mrs. Bracebridge ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... in his languid fashion. If he suspected sarcasm in the first part of the captain's reply, it did not trouble him. His self-sufficiency was proof ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... will rather be, "How can the Holy Spirit have more of me?" The conception of the Holy Spirit as a Divine influence or power that we are somehow to get hold of and use, leads to self-exaltation and self-sufficiency. One who so thinks of the Holy Spirit and who at the same time imagines that he has received the Holy Spirit will almost inevitably be full of spiritual pride and strut about as if he belonged to some superior order of Christians. One frequently hears such persons say, "I ...
— The Person and Work of The Holy Spirit • R. A. Torrey
... defects, redundancies, and errors, is the collected reason of ages, combining the principles of original justice with the infinite variety of human concerns, as a heap of old exploded errors, would be no longer studied. Personal self-sufficiency and arrogance (the certain attendants upon all those who have never experienced a wisdom greater than their own) would usurp the tribunal. Of course no certain laws, establishing invariable grounds of hope and fear, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... had never sought the favor of any man, but, trusting solely to himself, had always relied on his own strength. And now mankind wished to make him feel that he had mortified them by his self-sufficiency—for small natures never forgive one who dares to be independent of others, and finds his source of honor in himself. And this crime Gotzkowsky had been guilty of. What he was, he had made himself. He had owed nothing to protection, nothing to ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... the quiet self-sufficiency with which "I have been determined to try myself" follows the information that "so many great scholars in all ages" have failed. It is an admirable spirit, when accompanied by common sense and uncommon self-knowledge. When I was ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... of seed, is the principal business of this month in the economy of nature; which alone is an invaluable lesson, a "precept upon precept" to a cultivated mind. This is variously effected, besides by the agency of man; and it is a satire on his self-sufficiency which should teach him that Nature worketh out her way by means that ...
— Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 276 - Volume 10, No. 276, October 6, 1827 • Various
... we shall soon feel that in those meagre lines there is indeed an expression of aristocracy in its worst characters; coldness, perfectness of training, incapability of emotion, want of sympathy with the weakness of lower men, blank, hopeless, haughty self-sufficiency. All these characters are written in the Renaissance architecture as plainly as if they were graven on it in words. For, observe, all other architectures have something in them that common men can enjoy; some concession to the simplicities of humanity, some ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... so unaccountably was I urged to do this, that I had actually set out to find the first lieutenant when reflection and common sense came to my aid and asked me what was this thing that I was about to do. The answer to this question was, that with the self-sufficiency and stupendous conceit which my father had especially cautioned me to guard against, I was arrogating to myself the possession of superhuman sagacity, and (upon the flimsy foundation of a wild and extravagant fancy, backed ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... equaling almost one-third of GDP. Except for timber and several minerals, Finland depends on imports of raw materials, energy, and some components for manufactured goods. Because of the climate, agricultural development is limited to maintaining self-sufficiency in basic products. Forestry, an important export earner, provides a secondary occupation for the rural population. Rapidly increasing integration with Western Europe - Finland was one of the 11 countries joining the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) on 1 January 1999 ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... was this principle, derided by the many, dimly perceived by the few, which led to the development of the sign-language, the means which God had appointed to unlock the darkened understanding of the deaf-mute, but which man, in his self-sufficiency and blindness, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... from the noble projects based on so infirm a purpose. Vague recollections of these great abortive schemes of mine left a deceptive glow in my soul and fostered my belief in myself, without giving me the energy to produce. In my indolent self-sufficiency I was in a very fair way to become a fool, for what is a fool but a man who fails to justify the excellent opinion which he has formed of himself? My energy was directed towards no definite aims; I wished for the flowers of life without the toil ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... will to do it. With the gushing self-sufficiency of youth I was feverish to plunge in headlong and achieve a great reform here—until I saw the Mormon women. Then I was touched. My heart was wiser than my head. It warmed toward these poor, ungainly and pathetically "homely" creatures, and as I turned to hide the generous moisture in my ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Dick became possessed with the desire to do everything for himself. As this was a laudable striving for self-sufficiency, I called a halt at about three o'clock one afternoon in order to ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... that unfits men for the reception of Christ as a Saviour, and for the simple reliance on His atoning blood and divine mercy, is not gross, long profligacy, and outward, vehement transgression; but it is self-complacency, clean, fatal self-righteousness and self-sufficiency. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... son drew away from her, in his haughty manner of self-sufficiency, as he spoke. She sighed, shaking her head sadly. "Well, I'll be rackin' off home," ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... be indicated. A policy to which we have referred was most actively followed, aiming at complete independence and self-sufficiency in all matters relevant to production, especially regarding raw materials. We mention later how the war has strengthened the strong prewar position of the I.G. in heavy chemicals needed as raw materials for the intermediates and ...
— by Victor LeFebure • J. Walker McSpadden
... deep dark brown of his skin, the rich over-fullness of his lips, and the close curl of his short black hair were evidences that admitted of no argument. He was a finely proportioned, stalwart-looking man, with a general air of self-possession and self-sufficiency in his manner. There was firmness in the set of his lips. A reader of character would have said of him, "Here is a man of solid judgement, careful in deliberation, prompt in execution, ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... insidious viciousness of French novels. Their fault arises from rather an opposite tendency of mind and a different train of feelings. They are of the world, worldly. They are cold and sarcastic; they inculcate self-sufficiency, and preach to man to be a tower of strength in himself, not always in the praiseworthy Christian way. There is no single word of scoffing or disrespect for religion, no slur upon it whatsoever. Only we are aware, as by an instinct, that in the circle of our characters it is ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... gold, reflecting all that is strong and brave, all that is courageous and magnanimous, all that is patriotic and generous, while from the other shore its appearance is as brass engraven by vanity and vulgarity, by self-sufficiency and infidelity. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... his best friend. He took no thought of another Friend, still kinder, whom he was wounding. And indeed had Donald been able, by an effort of his will, to be at that moment all his uncle desired, he would have done so. But he had cast away his anchor, in a moment of self-sufficiency and it would be hard to find it again. He could not know that a season was coming swiftly upon him, a season of storm and stress, when that discarded anchor would be his only stay, and the nearness with which he came to ...
— Duncan Polite - The Watchman of Glenoro • Marian Keith
... social self-sufficiency lasted in places long after the Revolution. It was a curious little aristocracy—a very faint and faded one, lacking the robustness of the far southern type, and lacking indeed the real essential of an aristocracy, namely political ...
— The Quaker Colonies - A Chronicle of the Proprietors of the Delaware, Volume 8 - in The Chronicles Of America Series • Sydney G. Fisher
... type of woman for whom such men as meet her have the strongest passion of their lives, if for no other reason than because she induces an exaggeration of their best faculties and a consequent exaltation of self-appreciation, as distinguished from mere masculine self-sufficiency. Never is the briefly favoured one so much of a man apart from a type, looking down upon that type with pitying scorn. This is a mere matter of fascination, too subtle, and composed of too many parts for man's analysis, but it is the most telling force in ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... that for inexcusableness was her self-support—and, worse, self-sufficiency. Gilfoyle had sent Kedzie no money beyond returning what he had borrowed, and she had not used that to buy a ticket to Chicago with. She had written rarely, and had not asked him for money. That was mighty convenient for him, but it was extremely suspicious, and ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... justice, be able to form a fair and impartial opinion respecting these people; and the result of an inquiry of this sort must be, in every well-regulated soul, not merely a feeling of thankfulness (still less of self-sufficiency,) that we are far removed from the savage state, but, likewise, a sense of shame, that, with many of our fellow-countrymen, their superior advantages have been productive of little or ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... common way; and as for her eyes, which have sometimes been called so fine, I could never see anything extraordinary in them. They have a sharp, shrewish look, which I do not like at all; and in her air altogether there is a self-sufficiency ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... of God. What is significant about it is the fact that it makes no distinction between God and Nature. God is Nature and Nature is God. The two are related to each other as a force and its operation, and what difference there exists between them is a difference in completeness and self-sufficiency, not in kind. God reveals himself thus in and as the cause of Nature, the whirlwind, the process of life and decay, the development of history. His essence is Change, Force, Time. There is hence no Hebrew ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... familiar expression of the religious emotion, akin to the belief in double-sexed deities,—nay, in its physiological aspect identical with it, as assuming sexual self-sufficiency, is the myth of ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... town An English new-chum did infest: He used to wander up and down In baggy English breeches drest — His mental aspect seemed to be Just stolid self-sufficiency. ...
— Rio Grande's Last Race and Other Verses • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... continue calling for private sector growth to lessen the kingdom's dependence on oil and increase employment opportunities for the swelling Saudi population. Shortages of water and rapid population growth will constrain government efforts to increase self-sufficiency in ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... they were such as I had never heard before, and his congregation, which was numerous, were turning up their ears and drinking in his doctrines with the utmost delight; for Oh they suited their carnal natures and self-sufficiency to a hair! He was actually holding it forth, as a fact, that "it was every man's own blame if he was not saved!" What horrible misconstruction! And then he was alleging, and trying to prove from nature and reason, that no ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... cause them to function as if everything depended upon them, and as if they wanted everyone to depend upon them. Indeed, they may even measure the success of their ministry by the number of people who depend upon them for guidance and support, rather than by the number who are achieving mature self-sufficiency. As a part of this same picture, some ministers are unable to accept suggestions, much less criticism. The clericalized image they hold of themselves is that of an "answer man"; that is, one who has all the answers to human problems, ...
— Herein is Love • Reuel L. Howe
... like a nation, may cherish visions of self-sufficiency, may stretch its tentacles forward to the consumer and backwards to its supplies of raw material; but each fresh extension of its activities serves only to multiply its points of contact with the outside world. When those points ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson
... German, which last, alas! appears since the dissipation of the intoxication of the Revolution of March, 1848, to consist, as far as the great mass of the population is concerned, merely in the egotistic repose of self-sufficiency, weakness, and ignorance. The American finds repose only in his house, in his family circle, and among his children; all without the walls of that home is an incessant working and striving, in politics as in trade—by the streets and canals, as in the woods of the West. Different as the elements ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... incredible snobbery of the mind, so encrusted with the rankest and grossest egotism, that soon they must flutter and die out, leaving him stone-blind against the sunshine and the morning. No scratch could penetrate that Achilles-armor of self-sufficiency. There must be a shock to break it apart, or a vicious stabbing to cut through it to such spark as ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... goods and services which are needed to maintain health and provide for social decency; to produce and distribute goods and services honestly, efficiently and economically; to assure simple necessaries for all, including dependents, defectives and delinquents; to give high priority to local self-sufficiency; to maintain enough central economic authority to guarantee adequate goods and services to successive generations of ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... my shoulders—all these things returned to my memory, with an additional heaviness, like a burden that has been lifted only to drop back more crushingly. And as always in my thoughts now, this sense of my failure came to me in the image of George Bolingbroke, with his air of generous self-sufficiency, as if he needed nothing because he had been born to the possession of all ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... at my patronage, but a self-sufficiency that made my sympathy seem superfluous, giving the impression of an inner harmony ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... altogether as he snuggled forgivingly against her arm. And in her heart was a great shame and an aching feeling of inadequacy and failure. Elliott Cameron had never known so bitter a five minutes. All her pride and self-sufficiency were gone. What was she good for in a practical emergency? Just nothing at all. She didn't know even the commonest things, not ...
— The Camerons of Highboro • Beth B. Gilchrist
... enterprise. He purchased the timber on the stump of the inhabitants, at a price which left him very little profit, and had also been charged an exorbitant price for every thing he got, whether labor or provisions; and so far had that feeling of South Carolina's self-sufficiency been carried out against him in all its cold repulsiveness, that he found much more honesty and true hospitality under the roof of a poor colored man. This so enraged some of the planters, that they proclaimed against ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... imbibing instinctively of what is eminently a fine, manly, and graceful convention. Its good side is a certain chivalrous code of courage, honour, efficiency, courtesy, and duty. Its fault is a sense of perfect rightness and self-sufficiency, an overvaluing of sport and games, an undervaluing of intellectual interests, enthusiasm, ideas. It is not that the sense of effortless superiority is to be emphasized or insisted upon—modesty entirely forbids that—but it is the sort of feeling described ironically in the ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... most comical brutes from whatever angle one views them. They have a patriarchal, self-satisfied, suburban manner of complete importance. The old gentleman bosses his harem outrageously, and each and every member of the tribe walks about with short steps and a stuffy parvenu small-town self-sufficiency. One is quite certain that it is only by accident that they have long tusks and live in Africa, instead of rubber-plants and self-made business and a pug-dog within commuters' distance of New York. But at the slightest alarm this swollen and puffy importance breaks down ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... arts, contrivances, and materials must unquestionably have appeared to them, and eager as they were to profit by this superiority, yet, contradictory as it may seem, they certainly looked upon us in many respects with profound contempt, maintaining that idea of self-sufficiency which has induced them, in common with the rest of their nation, to call themselves, by way of distinction, Innŭee, or mankind. One day, for instance, in securing some of the gear of a sledge, Okotook broke a part of it composed of a piece of our white line, and I shall never forget the contemptuous ...
— Journal of the Third Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage • William Edward Parry
... will permit the supposition, as superior to us in knowledge, and consequently in power, as the Europeans were to the Indians when they first discovered them. All this is very possible, it is only our self-sufficiency that makes us think otherwise; and I warrant the poor savages, before they had any knowledge of the white men, armed in all the terrors of glittering steel and tremendous gunpowder, were as perfectly convinced that they themselves were the wisest, the most ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... adopted Mr. Ryland, was so ill. Nay, Mr. Ryland, for the love of this one honorable and just man, could have almost forgotten that he was surrounded by scoundrels, and would bury in oblivion the mean jealousies of a contemptible self-sufficiency, and the false professions of smiling deceit. But should it please Almighty God to remove the incomparable man, and should there be a chance that the civil government of the province should be ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... essayed to do in this book what should have been done by one of the masters of the science of folklore—Mr. Frazer, Mr. Lang, Mr. Hartland, Mr. Clodd, Sir John Rhys, and others—I hope it will not be put down to any feelings of self-sufficiency on my part. I have greatly dared because no one of them has accomplished, and I have so acted because I feel the necessity of some guidance in these matters, and more particularly at the present stage of inquiry into ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... identified merely with the opportunity of securing material prosperity, and the love of liberty was apt to become, what indeed it too often is everywhere, a purely self-regarding emotion. The distance of the republic from Europe and its controversies, its economic self-sufficiency, its apparent security against all attack, fostered and strengthened this feeling. While the peoples of the Old World strove with agony and travail towards freedom and justice, or wrestled with the ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
... love were not wanting, but they were vague and without heartiness. They savoured of insincerity, though there was nothing in the words themselves to convict them. Few liars can lie with the full roundness and self-sufficiency of truth; and Crosbie, bad as he was, had not yet become bad enough to reach that perfection. He had said nothing to Lily of the hopes of promotion which had been opened to him; but he had again spoken of his own worldliness,—acknowledging that he received an unsatisfying ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... huts surround the salt lake, we found it shoemaker of Castilian descent. He received us with the air of gravity and self-sufficiency which in those countries characterize almost all persons who are conscious of possessing some peculiar talent. He was employed in stretching the string of his bow, and sharpening his arrows to shoot birds. His trade of a shoemaker could not be very lucrative in a country ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... laying his hand upon his nose, blew into his nostrils the breath of hauteur and conceit, so that he magnified and glorified himself and said in his heart, "Who among men is like unto me?" And he became so puffed up with arrogance and self-sufficiency, and so taken up with the thought of his own splendour and magnificence, that he would not vouchsafe a glance to any man. Presently, there stood before him one clad in tattered clothes and saluted him, but he returned not his salam; whereupon the stranger laid ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... true that Perry Tomson and I used to consider George's friends as models in the manner of smoking a pipe, or ordering whiskey-and-soda at Bertrand's to give us an appetite for our mutton-chops or our bifteck aux pommes, and in the delightful self-sufficiency with which in the pleasant spring days they would cut recitations and loll on the grass smoking cigarettes right under the nose, almost, of the professor. But they are both married now, and settled down ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... us the plan," said Ibbotson, not particularly pleased with the self-sufficiency of his ...
— Down the Rhine - Young America in Germany • Oliver Optic
... the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, ...
— Manifesto of the Communist Party • Karl Marx
... the cock-feathers in his hat,' the type of the dissolute man-about-town of the period. To me it seems very natural that, dispirited by his first contact with the outer world—unable to feel any real sympathy with the rollicking and sleek self-sufficiency of that holiday crowd, Faust should turn again to reflexion and speculation, and that when he is in this depressed and metaphysical mood the demonic element in his nature should first present itself—and that too in the disguise of an itinerant professor. ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... characteristics of that "fast-running nation" which is "indivertible in aim," and incredulous of the existence of the unattainable. His dominant failing was a self-dependence, which, in a weaker nature, would have degenerated into self-sufficiency, but just stopped short of that complacent, puerile egotism, which narrows the mind, and rears its own opinions upon a judgment-seat to pronounce verdicts upon the rest of the world. He never doubted his ability to scale any ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... that we must work out our own national salvation, not only without aid, which we had no reason to ask, but without sympathy, which we had every honorable right to expect. But, to be a truly independent people, we must practically prove our self-sufficiency; and at this moment patriotism shows itself not only in defending the nation against the Rebellion, but in the heartiest encouragement of every art and manufacture for which our opportunities ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... of his time at school he was very solitary and futile. He never regretted the time, for it gave him two things, complete mental self-sufficiency and a comprehension ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... individuals so inflated with self-sufficiency, and entertain such an overweaning opinion of their skill in all matters, that they must needs have ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... a being of modern creation, now declares, with the most ludicrous self-sufficiency, that Bailly was not equal to the functions of a Mayor of Paris. It is, he says, by undeserved favour that his statue has been placed on the facade of the Hotel de Ville. During his magistracy, Bailly did not create any large square in the capital, he did not open out any large streets, ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... the sign of a small nature. To take the commonest instances, when you are told to go to bed, or to mend your dress, or to put on a wrap, or to tidy your room, are you in any way a finer nature if you dawdle and argue and resent the order? Nothing is so small as self-sufficiency and self-centredness, whereas humility and obedience are of the Nature of our Lord Himself, and every humble and obedient soul is in communion with His Greatness. Dante's hierarchy of heaven, "in order serviceable," in ordered ranks, culminating in God Himself, gives us a feeling ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... they were, and to deprive them of the credit they might have with the people; and if I had gone at length into their refutation, I thought it right to let my reader have the pleasure of refuting them, supposing him to possess enough good sense and self-sufficiency, to form his own judgment upon them, and feel the same contempt for such stories that I do myself. It is doing too much honor to certain ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... reverence, nor ceremony, "that to great ones 'longs": it breaks in pieces the golden images of poetry, and defaces its armorial bearings, to melt them down in the mould of common humanity or of its own upstart self-sufficiency. They took the same method in their new-fangled "metre ballad-mongering" scheme, which Rousseau did in his prose paradoxes— of exciting attention by reversing the established standards of opinion and estimation in the world. They were for bringing poetry back to its primitive ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... which John Glumm was assailable, and that was ridicule: with all his self-sufficiency he stood in terror of it—and the more covert the ridicule, so long as he suspected it, the more he resented as well as dreaded it. He stepped into the street, and taking a hand from a pocket, pointed up ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... the limitations of human thought grew more frequent as the summer progressed. Day after day my self-sufficiency and conceit were being crushed out of me. I was always in the society of a boy of seven whom I was forced to regard as immeasurably my intellectual superior. There was no department of useful knowledge in which I could ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... now both astonished and discomposed me. A lady, accompanied humbly by a gentleman, burst into the room with a noise, a self-sufficiency, and an assuming confidence of superiority, that would have proved highly offensive, had it not been egregiously ridiculous. Her attire was as flaunting as her air and her manner; she was rouged and beribboned. But English ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... Demorest's resolute face. His old self-sufficiency returned. "Good," he said, with a frank laugh, "that will do for me. Open the door there, Lulu, and take me to him. I'm not ashamed of anything I've done, my girl, nor need you be. I'll tell him my real name is Dick Demorest, as I ought ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... Wotan, whose Olympian self-sufficiency is usually untroubled by what any mean other-person may say, at this cannot contain himself, but starting to his feet cries out a command for the blasphemous fool's annihilation! Before Alberich, however, has caught the words—his ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... was never a woman of any mind, but she may now pass for one of genius. I am sure you will describe her in one of those delightful novels you write. And pray don't forget Vandenesse; put him in to please me. Really, his self-sufficiency is too much. I can't stand that Jupiter Olympian air of his,—the only mythological character ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... the Essay 'On the Folly of Referring the True and the False to the Trustworthiness of our Judgment,' [2] he maintains that 'it is a silly presumption to go about despising and condemning as false that which does not seem probable to us; which is a common fault of those who think they have more self-sufficiency than the vulgar. So was I formerly minded; and if I heard anybody speak either of ghosts coming back, or of the prophecy of coming things, of spells, of witchcraft, or of any other tale I could ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... stars—which very superstition he was later to support by his own authority in the APOLOGY, as we have seen above, in the passage on the "power and domination" of the celestial bodies. The passage in the thirteenth essay is the more notable in itself, being likewise a protest against human self-sufficiency, though the bearing of the illustration is directly reversed. Here he derides man's conceit: "We entertain and carry all with us: whence it followeth that we deem our death to be some great matter, and which passeth not ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... the more a human creature has tasted of bitter things the more it hungers after the sweet things of life. And we, wrapped round in the rags of our virtues, and regarding others through the mist of our self-sufficiency, and persuaded of our universal ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... it clear, by these instances, what is meant by Christian self-denial. If we have good health, and are in easy circumstances, let us beware of high-mindedness, self-sufficiency, self-conceit, arrogance; of delicacy of living, indulgences, luxuries, comforts. Nothing is so likely to corrupt our hearts, and to seduce us from God, as to surround ourselves with comforts,—to have things ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... meditated, on the occasion when he met with his own fate. We hope, for the honour of the English name, that the memory of the late Resident at Cabul may be cleared from this heavy imputation; but he certainly cannot be acquitted of having, by his wilful blindness and self-sufficiency, contributed to precipitate the catastrophe to which he himself fell a victim. In proof of this assertion, it is sufficient to refer to the tenor of his remarks on the letter addressed to him by Sir A. Burnes on the affairs of Cabul, August 7, 1840, which ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... filled with eternal aspirations after life, and unity with her divine original gives herself to such a one as lord Gartley, I cannot help thinking she must have seriously mistaken some things both in him and in herself, the consequence, probably, of some self-sufficiency, ambition, or other fault in her, which ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... practised by those whom South calls "those mighty men at chapter and verse." With a sort of religious coquetry, they were vain of perpetually opening their gilt pocket Bibles; they perked them up with such self-sufficiency and perfect ignorance of the original, that the learned Selden found considerable amusement in going to their "assembly of divines," and puzzling or confuting them, as we have noticed. A ludicrous ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... England during the war which every Englishman must now regret. It should emphatically be added that there were some upon which every Englishman should look back with satisfaction. Many of the expressions of English opinion at that time betray a powerlessness to comprehend another country and a self-sufficiency in judging it, which, it may humbly be claimed, were not always and are not now so characteristic of Englishmen as they were in that period of our history, in many ways so noble, which we associate with the rival influences of Palmerston ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... like a magpie on the road, he was silent and sullen, nursing his injured pride and wounded self-sufficiency. Susan, who was interested in him for the novel reason she disliked him so heartily, parted from him with the air of a duchess, and entered the hotel, holding her head so high that he swore under his breath as he drove away. And, as a result of the quarrel with the lad, he would probably ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... account for this. The tailor is, A far more useful member of society Than is a poet;—then his sprightly wit, His glee, his humour, and his happy mind Entitle him to fair esteem. Allowed. But then, his self-sufficiency;—his shape So like a frame, whereon to hang a suit Of dandy clothes;—his small straight back and arms, His thick bluff ankles, and his supple knees, Plague on't!—'Tis wrong—I do not like ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 495, June 25, 1831 • Various
... charms; the fact of a declaration from such a source carrying with it really more questions than it would answer. She had received a strong impression of his being a "personage," and she had occupied herself in examining the image so conveyed. At the risk of adding to the evidence of her self-sufficiency it must be said that there had been moments when this possibility of admiration by a personage represented to her an aggression almost to the degree of an affront, quite to the degree of an inconvenience. She had never yet known a ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... butchered in feuds, our sons are not sold into slavery, and except in war or in street robberies we are not insulted by brute physical force. Nevertheless we are cheated by scoundrels, oppressed by financial tyranny, wounded by injustice, suppressed by self-sufficiency, rasped by harsh tempers, annoyed by snobbery, and often ruined by unconscious selfishness. We long to strike back at the human traits which have wronged us, and the satiric depiction of hateful characters whose seeming virtues are turned upside down to expose ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... I was very careful to mention none but real errors in Dr. Bree's book, I do not imagine there will be any necessity for my taking any notice of it. It was really entertaining to have such a book to review, the errors and misconceptions were so inexplicable and the self-sufficiency of the man so amazing. Yet there is some excellent writing in the book, and to a half-informed person it has all the appearance of being a most valuable ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... the field. He beheld again the quieter hours when the young men saw visions together and felt themselves called to put shoulder to the car of righteousness, while they discussed with the sublime self-sufficiency of inexperience the politics and sociology of the world. The fellows all believed in him as one of those who are destined to be prime pushers at the wheel. Perhaps he would be among those conquerors who climb aboard and ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... adoration bestowed by the ladies of the family and their endearing adjectives, Mr. Harness is very outspoken on the subject of the handsome Doctor! He disliked his manners, his morals, his self-sufficiency, his loud talk. 'The old brute never informed his friends of anything; all they knew of him or his affairs, or whatever false or true he intended them to believe, came out carelessly in his ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... quite in keeping with the men and the environment. There was no policeman on the corner, no mechanism of law and order visible anywhere. The characteristic attitude of these woodsmen was of intolerance for restraint, of complete self-sufficiency. It had colored her brother's point of view. She perceived that whereas all her instinct was to know the rules of the game and abide by them, he, taking his cue from his environment, inclined to break rules that ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... processing, light consumer goods, textiles, sawmills Agriculture: the agriculture and forestry sectors provide employment for the majority of the population, contributing nearly 25% to GDP and providing a high degree of self-sufficiency in staple foods; commercial and food crops include coffee, cocoa, timber, cotton, rubber, bananas, oilseed, grains, livestock, root starches Economic aid: US commitments, including Ex-Im (FY70-89), $440 million; Western (non-US) countries, ODA and OOF bilateral commitments (1970-89), ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency. |
