"Sense of responsibility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... answering to the description of Byers, "mor' 'n half full," staggeringly but hurriedly walking along the road "two miles back." There seemed to be no doubt that the missing man had taken himself off in a fit of indignation or of extreme thirst. Either hypothesis was disagreeable to Abner, in his queer sense of responsibility to Mrs. Byers, but he accepted it ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... haste came over her—a new sense of responsibility—there were so many things to be done. She roused the fat pony from his pleasant dream, to a quicker gait, and drove home with the strange glamour on ...
— Purple Springs • Nellie L. McClung
... idea they were displeased because he did not countenance their attempt to wreck the cattle-train. Then, I believe he held some dollars in trust for them, and, as they presumably wanted them for some fresh outrage, would not give them up. Mr. Grant is evidently a man with a sense of responsibility." ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... heavy sense of responsibility that Geoffrey returned from a visit to Savine's offices in Vancouver, and yet there was satisfaction mingled with his anxiety. Thomas Savine, who knew little of engineering, was no fool at finance, and the week they spent together made ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... enough to become a source of positive harm. To obey means to act in accordance with another's wishes. To act in this manner does not call upon the exercise of judgment or responsibility, and too many grow up without acquiring the habit of using judgment and without acquiring a sense of responsibility. They are only too willing to leave choice and decision to others. Decision of character and habitual obedience do not go well together. Moreover, it is now coming to be more fully recognized that the progress of society depends not upon closer obedience ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... he would have felt a certain embarrassment, a certain shame, even—a false shame, possibly—if he had caught himself looking intellectually into the mirror. Neither in this nor in any other respect had Newman a high sense of responsibility; it was his prime conviction that a man's life should be easy, and that he should be able to resolve privilege into a matter of course. The world, to his sense, was a great bazaar, where one might ...
— The American • Henry James
... flashing glance that Colin McKeith's gaze had been all the while riveted upon that figure. Not in astonishment—a proof to Joan that he had seen it before—but in a kind of unwilling fascination, most upsetting to Mrs Gildea's sense of responsibility ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... mind was a large, looming sense of responsibility for the car. It was his mother's car, and it was new and shiny, and his mother liked to drive flocks of fluttery, middle-aged ladies to benefit teas and the like. It had taken a full hour of coaxing to get the car ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... ecstatic sense of responsibility, bent over her paper on the table for a full minute, then diffidently pushed it across to me; and I read, in strong Roman capitals, the inscription, MRAY, with the M containing an extra angle—being, so to speak, ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... excitement burned in June's cheeks. Tolliver never would let her drive the colts because of the danger. She loved the stimulation of rapid travel, the rush of the wind past her ears, the sense of responsibility at ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... great body of men and women is improved less by general outcry against its collective characteristics than by the inculcation of broader views, higher motives, and sounder habits of judgment, in such a form as touches each man and woman individually. It is better to awaken in the individual a sense of responsibility for his own character than to do anything, either by magnificent dithyrambs or penetrating satire, to dispose him to lay the blame on Society. Society is after all only a name for other people. An instructive contrast might be drawn between the method of ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... to commission such a one as you, my Calabressa, to institute inquiries, and perhaps to satisfy those two appellants that no injustice has been done, you would undertake the task with diligence, with a sense of responsibility, would ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... across them both how far they had travelled since their first meeting in the spring. Her mind filled with a kind of dread, an uneasy sense of responsibility—then with a tremulous consciousness of power. It was as though she felt something fluttering like a bird in her hands. And all the time there echoed through her memory a voice speaking in a moonlit garden—"You know—you don't mind my ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... longer possible. Machinery then did two things. On the one hand, it destroyed the position of the workman as a self-sufficing industrial unit, and made him dependent on a capitalist for employment and the means of supporting life. On the other hand, it weakened the sense of responsibility in the employer towards his workmen in proportion as the dependence of the latter ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson
... with the selfishness and mediocrity of other French-Canadian leaders, and the result was that the Rouge party was growing in strength both in the House and in the country. With the growth of strength there had come a growing sense of responsibility, greater moderation and prudence. In the legislature, at least, the Rouges had not expressed a single sentiment on general policy to which a British constitutional Reformer might not assent. They were the true allies of the Upper Canadian Reformers, and in fact the only Liberals ...
— George Brown • John Lewis
... do, Natalie, is to consult me. I want you to have a free hand, but some one with a sense of responsibility ought to check up these expenditures. But it isn't only that. I'd like to have a hand in the thing myself. I've rather looked forward to the time when we could have the sort of country ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... and others of a similar character, from the same hand, have not been composed without a deep sense of responsibility. The author regards children as sacred, and would not, for the world, cast any thing into the fountain of a young heart, that might embitter and pollute its waters. And, even in point of the reputation to be aimed at, juvenile literature is as well worth cultivating ...
— True Stories from History and Biography • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... such a girl would not have been safer forever in the convent where she had lived most of her years. And though she herself was four years younger, she felt old and mature, and terribly wise compared with Sister Rose. An awful sense of responsibility was upon her. She was afraid of it. Her pretty blond face, with its bright and shrewd gray eyes, looked almost drawn, and lost the fresh colour that made the little golden freckles charming as the dust of ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Greatorex understand what was wanted and why. The poor lady's deafness had increased since her fright and exposure at the time of the fire and, now that she had been put into a position of greater trust than ever before, her sense of responsibility weighed heavily upon her. At parting, her principal, Miss Rhinelander, ...
— Dorothy's Travels • Evelyn Raymond
... the eye of thought; she would not argue even with herself; gallant, desperate little heart, she had accepted the command of that supreme attraction like the call of fate and marched blindfold on her doom. But Archie, with his masculine sense of responsibility, must reason; he must dwell on some future good, when the present good was all in all to Kirstie; he must talk - and talk lamely, as necessity drove him - of what was to be. Again and again he had touched on marriage; again and again ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of Henry Clay, now untrammeled by any sense of responsibility, for he was a free lance in the House of Representatives once more, the emancipation of South America was a thrilling and sublime spectacle—"the glorious spectacle of eighteen millions of people struggling to burst their chains and to be free." In a memorable speech in 1818 he had expressed ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... the hospital and learned that Glory was out for the day. Where she could have gone, and what she could be doing, puzzled him grievously. That she had not put herself under his counsel and direction on her first excursion abroad hurt his pride and wounded his sense of responsibility. As the night fell his anxiety increased. Though he knew she would not return until ten, he set out ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... crime and ignorance with which the worthful elements of society had to contend. The alarm felt by good men in the result of these revelations strengthened the hands of government in passing the bill. Objections were raised by many in view of the magnitude of the evil to be encountered, and a sense of responsibility in connection with some immediate and extensive action. The reverend Doctor Guthrie, on a different and subsequent occasion, eloquently expressed what was at this juncture so generally felt:—"When men die, corruption commonly begins after death, but when nations die, it always begins ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... to recommend to others what they would not do themselves. If it be true that women can not be prevented from exercising political influence, is not that only another reason why they should be steadied in their political action by that proper sense of responsibility ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... chiefly from the evil in himself. No taint must touch that spotless life with which God had entrusted him!—sorrow might come—nay, MUST come, since, so long as humanity errs, so long must angels grieve,—sorrow, but not sin! A grand, awed sense of responsibility filled him,—a responsibility that he accepted with passionate gratitude and joy ... he had attained a vaster dignity than any king on any throne, ... and all the visible Universe was transfigured into a golden pageant of loveliness and ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... governor on the nobleman or son of an official who is minister, the minister on the member of the royal family who occupies the post of Tzar, and the Tzar again on all these officials, noblemen, merchants, and peasants. But that is not all. Besides the fact that men get rid of the sense of responsibility for their actions in this way, they lose their moral sense of responsibility also, by the fact that in forming themselves into a state organization they persuade themselves and each other so continually, and so indefatigably, that they are not all equal, ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... development in any youth for whom I am responsible. I cannot say that the trial made me alter my course of life, of the rightness of which I was too convincingly persuaded, but it made me much more careful, and it probably sharpened my sense of responsibility for the young. Reviewing the results of the trial as a whole, it doubtless did incalculable harm, and it intensified our national vice of hypocrisy. But I think it also may have done some good in that it made those who, like myself, have thought and experienced deeply in the ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... a good Infant," Otway observed; and then, sinking his voice a tone, "Lord, if at his age I'd had his sense of responsibility ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... chronology. The objections of the present generation of "infidels," he says, are the same which have been refuted again and again, and are such as a child might answer. The young man just entering upon the possession of his intellect, with a sense of responsibility for his belief, and more anxious for truth than for success in life, finds when he looks into the matter that the Archbishop has altogether misrepresented it; that in fact, like other official persons, he had been using merely a stereotyped form ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... my relief when those handcuffs were put upon us. At times before, the sense of responsibility almost overpowered me. Then I felt like a man who has just come into a fortune. The wonder to me now is, how the Colonel could have trusted so much ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... feeling that it was really serious this time. Her gravity was even more charming than her gayety. As she lifted her face to him, with large solemn eyes, expressive of her sense of responsibility, Hardyman would have given every horse in his stables to have had the privilege of taking her in his arms ...
— My Lady's Money • Wilkie Collins
... soft words would save him from defeat. Blaine lacked the moral courage and the indifference to immediate results which were necessary for so exalted an action. Cleveland had more of the reformer in his nature, and had so keen a sense of responsibility and duty that his political career was a succession of battles against things that seemed wrong to him. Blaine accepted the party standards as they were; he belonged to the past, to the policies and ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... A sense of responsibility came over me. She was my cousin, my own blood relation. I must protect her, must think for her if she would not think ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... of it, there was nothing in his face or manner to betray the fact. He appeared to be "all business," and to have a keen sense of responsibility which, however, did not dismay him in the least. No soldier could gaze at that young officer and feel that the detachment was badly commanded. Such is the ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys in the Philippines - or, Following the Flag against the Moros • H. Irving Hancock
... communication which meant his nomination as candidate at the next election for the state Legislature. It was pointed out to him that in all likelihood greater honors might await him at the hands of his district, as of the county. He found in this not so much personal pride as a sense of responsibility. Yet there remained comfort in the fact that he was growing, that he was in some measure attaining. As with any man truly great, this left him no more selfish, no more egotistic, than is the stringed instrument which, under the miracle of a higher ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... aching also, and he went back into the house with a sense of responsibility which exalted ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... universal and the effect of this belief is so vast that one is appalled at the thought of what social conditions would be if reverence for God were erased from every heart. A sense of responsibility to God for every thought and word and deed is the most potent influence that acts upon the life—for one man kept in the straight and narrow way by fear of prison walls a multitude are restrained by those invisible walls that conscience rears about us, ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... was a supremely ethical nature. This perhaps was his fundamental peculiarity. Life could under no circumstances have seemed to him a trifle. The sense of responsibility was strong in him from the beginning. He was trained in a strict school; for the law of life prescribed to the race of which he was a member was a severe one; but he responded to it, and there never was a time when the ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... demerits, such as apply to details he develops in the course of his statements of several cases of Referendum. In summing up, he further points out what seem to him two objections to the principle. One is that direct legislation "tends to lower the authority and sense of responsibility of the legislature." But this is precisely the aim of pure democracy, and from its point of view a merit of the first order. The other objection is, "it refers matters needing much elucidation by debate to the determination of those who cannot, on account of their numbers, meet ...
— Direct Legislation by the Citizenship through the Initiative and Referendum • James W. Sullivan
... one act or one single error however it may be regretted at the moment. That is what I said then, with regard to Sir James Hudson, and what I say now with regard to Sir Bartle Frere. But I do not wish to rest on that. I confess that, so keen is my sense of responsibility, and that of my colleagues, and I am sure also that of noble lords opposite, that we would not allow our decisions in such matters to be unduly influenced by personal considerations of any kind. What we had to determine is this, Was it wise ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... philosophy, was its appeal to the individual conscience, its exclusive concern with the elect, its strong flavour of self-accusing. Even the rage against slavery was, in large measure, an emotion of the mourners' bench. The thing that worried the more ecstatic Abolitionists was their sneaking sense of responsibility, the fear that they themselves were flouting the fire by letting slavery go on. The thirst to punish the concrete slave-owner, as an end in itself, did not appear until opposition had added exasperation to fervour. In most of the earlier ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... direct teaching, but that on many occasions they could supplement and strengthen moral teaching, because the dramatic appeal to the imagination is quicker than the moral appeal to the conscience. A child will often resist the latter lest it should make him uncomfortable or appeal to his personal sense of responsibility: it is often not in his power to resist the former, because it has taken possession of him before he ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... flow of our Sunday oratory that we have come to think of speeches as mere preliminaries to copious draughts of porter in public-houses—a sort of grace before drink, to which no sensible man attaches any particular importance. But the orators of M'Cracken's day spoke seriously, with a sense of responsibility, because all of them—Flood, Grattan, and the rest—spoke to armed men, who might at any time draw swords to give effect to the speaker's words. M'Cracken spoke to men with swords already drawn and muskets loaded. Therefore, he had some ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... aspirations of an intelligent and generous nation. To subordinate these to the narrow advantages of partisanship, or the accomplishment of selfish aims, is to violate the people's trust and betray the people's interests. But an individual sense of responsibility on the part of each of us, and a stern determination to perform our duty well, must give us place among those who have added, in their day and generation, to the glory and prosperity of our ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... Here she rose as with a sudden sense of responsibility and brought the interview to an end. I think she read farther than I did. "At all events we know that they are all alive," she said with a smile. "Perhaps no great damage ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... for Dill before, but never with the present sense of responsibility, born of his new connection with the family. He knew that his only chance of getting him ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... engagements, proves either a snare to those who trifle with their engagements, or an insupportable burden to those who do not. For the inculpation of the party imposing such oaths, it is essential that the party taking them should be in a childish condition of the moral sense, and the sense of responsibility; whereas, amongst the Oxonian under-graduates, I will venture to say that the number is larger of those who rise above than of those who fall below twenty; and, as to sixteen (assumed as the representative age by Lord Radnor), ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... Tom proved to be correct. He turned out to be very trifling, and I was much annoyed by his laziness, his carelessness, and his apparent lack of any sense of responsibility. I kept him longer than I should, on Julius's account, hoping that he might improve; but he seemed to grow worse instead of better, and when I finally reached the limit of my patience, ...
— The Conjure Woman • Charles W. Chesnutt
... lesson, however, remains for us that we should look beyond our petty, personal interests, because no act can be merely personal. The stone which we throw spreads widening circles to all eternity, and to realize that fact is to intensify the sense of responsibility; but the same doctrine translated into the theological dialect becomes shocking ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... Aunt Mary will be worried, won't she?" asked Miss Leicester, whose quick wit suspected a deep-laid plot. She was already filled with a spirit of adventure; she really looked pleased, but was not without a sense of responsibility. ...
— Betty Leicester - A Story For Girls • Sarah Orne Jewett
... upon it again. What thoughtful man is not struck with the variety of ethical standards which obtain in the same community? The clergyman who has a strong sense of responsibility for the welfare of his flock is sometimes accused of not sufficiently realizing the importance of a frank expression of the whole truth about things; the man of science, whose duty it seems to be to peer ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... every one of our experiments in the way of befriending people to whom we do not belong, for every active occupation, however estimable, which may make us diverge from our principal object:—aye, and even for every virtue which would fain protect us from the rigour of our most intimate sense of responsibility. Illness is always the answer, whenever we venture to doubt our right to our mission, whenever we begin to make things too easy for ourselves. Curious and terrible at the same time! It is for our relaxation that we have to pay most dearly! ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... of the station in his pocket, and would have thanked the men and bid them "good evening," had they not, rather clamorously, deprecated his intention. Living, as they did, far from all organised justice, there was in them a rough sense of responsibility for each other which is not ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... some diseased way, without conveying them in words. We then gravely called one another to witness, that we were not there to be deceived, or to deceive—which we considered pretty much the same thing—and that, with a serious sense of responsibility, we would be strictly true to one another, and would strictly follow out the truth. The understanding was established, that any one who heard unusual noises in the night, and who wished to trace them, should knock at my door; lastly, ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... Representatives of the Earth, and of all humanity past and present, they felt that it was with their eyes that the race of man contemplated the lunar regions and penetrated the secrets of our satellite! A certain indescribable emotion therefore, combined with an undefined sense of responsibility, held possession of their hearts, as they moved silently from window ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... silence. "Yes, sir, I knew the background. It's part of my job to know things like that. You'll find, sir, that I have a strong sense of responsibility. If it's part of my job, I'll know ...
— General Max Shorter • Kris Ottman Neville
... enable us, when the time comes to set forward again, to do so with better equipment and more intelligent purpose. It will not do to be always at a prophetic heat of enthusiasm, sympathy, denunciation: the coolly critical mood is also useful to prune extravagance and promote a sense of responsibility. The novels of Mr. James and of Mr. Howells have taught us that men and women are creatures of infinitely complicated structure, and that even the least of these complications, if it is portrayed at all, is worth portraying truthfully. But we cannot ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... however, on hearing of them was roused to a sense of responsibility toward his father, and as a practical proof that he and his sisters were willing to do what they could, proposed to them that they should give up half their weekly allowance of pocket-money. The twins assented with filial fervour, and Johnnie ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... learn all that the Church had to teach him, the boy conscientiously tried to obey. He was reminded again that, though taught to obey, he was being trained to lead. This in a sense pleased him, as offering surcease from an erking sense of responsibility. Nevertheless, though he constantly wavered in decision; though at times the Church won him, and he yielded temporarily to her abundant charms; the spirit of protest did wax steadily stronger within ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... is noticeable that since these school children are engaged in lucrative work which does not go beyond their strength, and since they see with their own eyes the results of their labor, a sense of responsibility is engendered which has a beneficial influence upon school work also. Respect for all kinds of labor and a decrease in the destructiveness so often found among boys are unmistakable effects of the arbor gardens. It is not easy work which the children ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... time—for we are given to understand in the last line of the third stanza that Aix must learn the news by a certain hour; we feel the despair of the two who are forced to give up the attempt, and the increased sense of responsibility of the only remaining rider; and we fairly hold our breath in our fear that the gallant Roland will ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... arising from a defective or injudicious education seem, in the immediate future, to threaten the richer rather than the poorer classes. Over-indulgence and the encouragement of luxurious habits during childhood; the weakened sense of responsibility, on the part of the parent, which is often caused by the transference to others of authority and supervision during boyhood or girlhood; the undue stimulation of the love of amusement, or of the craving for ...
— Progressive Morality - An Essay in Ethics • Thomas Fowler
... universally prevailed—a system in which the supreme power was considered as rightfully belonging to some sovereign who derived it from his ancestors by hereditary descent, and who, in the exercise of it, was entirely above all sense of responsibility to the subjects of ...
— Pyrrhus - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... weather is outrageous; but never more undeniably than in the month of April. The growth of the year is well established, and its manner beginning to be schooled by then; childish petulance may still survive, and the tears of penitence be frequent; yet upon the whole there is—or used to be—a sense of responsibility forming, and an elemental inkling of true duty towards the earth. Even man (the least observant of the powers that walk the ground, going for the signs of weather to the cows, or crows, or pigs, swallows, spiders, gnats, and leeches, or the final assertion ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... think of two little boys who had already impressed upon her their willingness and general ability to think for themselves. As for the young men themselves, they awoke with the lark, and with a heavy sense of responsibility also. The room of Mrs. Burton's chambermaid joined their own, and the occupant of that room having been charged by her mistress with the general care of the boys between dark and daylight, she had gradually lost that faculty for profound slumber which so notably distinguishes the domestic ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... wished the time would come soon. He somewhat felt a great responsibility in the matter. This sense of responsibility caused him to assume more and more optimism as his nervousness increased. Each day of waiting found him covering his disappointment and anxiety with a more ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... deal of intelligence. The present secretary told me that he had been during all his early life a merchant in Germany; and he had the grave and somewhat precise air of an honest German merchant of the old style—prudent, with a heavy sense of responsibility, a little rigid, ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... Queen's character is clearly indicated in the papers, and it possesses an extraordinary interest. We see one of highly vigorous and active temperament, of strong affections, and with a deep sense of responsibility, placed at an early age, and after a quiet girlhood, in a position the greatness of which it is impossible to exaggerate. We see her character expand and deepen, schooled by mighty experience into patience ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria
... old grandfather sat holding a white-haired boy. When dinner was over, the great business of drying the clothes was resumed by the travellers and the family; and we held our wrappings by the fire, and turned them about, until we became so drowsy that we lost all sense of responsibility. We found, the next morning, that our host sat up and finished all that were left undone. He had become so accustomed to this kind of work, that he did not seem to consider it was any thing extra, or that it entitled him to any further compensation than the usual one ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton
... to Stanor becoming engaged to—anybody. He has, no doubt, explained to you our relationship. His parents being dead, I made myself responsible for his training. He may have explained to you also my wish that for a few years he should be free to enjoy his youth without any sense of responsibility?" ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... different from the little fishing-stations on the Isle of Wight; but they are more sheltered, and their inhabitants sing at their work, wear bright colors, and bask in the sun a good deal, feeling no sense of responsibility for the world they did not create. To weave nets, to fish in the bay, to sell their fish at the wharves, to eat unexciting vegetables and fish, to drink moderately, to go to the chapel of St. Antonino on Sunday, not to work on fast and feast ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... reasoning his way to a hollow one with his utmost subtlety and seriousness. On such occasions his disgust did not trouble her in the least; she triumphed in it. She had concluded that marriage was a greater folly, and men greater fools, than she had supposed; but such beliefs rather lightened her sense of responsibility than disappointed her, and, as she had plenty of money, plenty of servants, plenty of visitors, and plenty of exercise on horseback, of which she was immoderately fond, her time passed pleasantly enough. Comfort seemed to her the natural order of life; ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... true that our guide, with that sense of responsibility which seems to weigh heavy on guides even when asleep, had awakened at the usual hour of starting—daybreak—and, from the mere force of habit, had given forth his accustomed and sonorous "Leve! leve!"—rise, rise. ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... noted that the violence with which she had just changed colour had brought into his own face a slight compunctious and embarrassed flush. It was as if he had caught his first glimpse of her sense of responsibility. Neither of them made a movement to get out, and after an instant he said to her: "Look here, if you say so we won't after ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... stood her in good stead all her life; only during those years which followed the birth of her eldest son does it seem to have failed her. Her life was an exceptionally busy one, and her strong feelings and sense of responsibility made even small domestic affairs matters for close attention; yet in the diaries and letters of her later life there are no entries which betray either the lassitude or the restlessness of fatigue. She was not one ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... though he had never been there. It was a distant offset of his own property, and a horrible sense of responsibility for all the crime and misery there came ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... strong sense of responsibility, and would never rest himself by staying the night if it were unnecessary. A rich patient in Devonshire once offered him a large sum to stay until the next morning. "I could do you no good," said Sir Andrew, "and my patients will want ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes
... inevitably turned on broad issues which continued to disturb Irish politics and to perplex English statesmen for the rest of the century. On the one hand, no one could justify "government by ascendency" in Ireland, or the shameful malpractices incident to an exercise of power under no sense of responsibility. On the other hand, no one acquainted with Irish history and Irish character could honestly regard the people as yet qualified for local self-government. In the social and some of the moral virtues they might be favourably compared with Englishmen and Scotchmen; in the political virtues, ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... which, though published separately, is scarcely a full-grown novel, is intended to impress society with a sense of responsibility for its outcasts. While Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson is fond of emphasizing the responsibility of the individual to society, Kielland chooses by preference to reverse the relation. The former (in his remarkable novel Flags are Flying in City and Harbor) selects ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... you know, there is something in the kingship, Firmin. It stiffened up my august little grandfather. It gave my grandmother a kind of awkward dignity even when she was cross—and she was very often cross. They both had a profound sense of responsibility. My poor father's health was wretched during his brief career; nobody outside the circle knows just how he screwed himself up to things. "My people expect it," he used to say of this tiresome duty or that. Most of the things they made him do were silly—it was ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... are intended not only to emphasize independence in self-expression, but also to foster a social spirit through community effort and develop a sense of responsibility through division of labor. A child's shortcomings will be brought home to him much more vividly if he fails to contribute some essential assigned to him in the construction of a cooperative project, and thereby spoils the pleasure of the whole group, ...
— Primary Handwork • Ella Victoria Dobbs
... reaching the ears of Nealie, for surely the elder sister had more than enough of worry and care. Sylvia had never troubled herself about things of this sort in the days at Beechleigh, when she had been as irresponsible in her way as either Don or Billykins, but the long journey and the sense of responsibility in being so peculiarly on their own had steadied her and developed her character ...
— The Adventurous Seven - Their Hazardous Undertaking • Bessie Marchant
... of course, a certain impersonal quality in a great deal of what we, in America, do for children. It is not based so much on friendship for an individual child as on a sense of responsibility for the well-being of all childhood, especially all childhood in our own country. But most of what we do, after all, we do for the boys and girls whom we know and love; and we do it because they are our friends, and we wish them to share in the good things of our lives,—our work ...
— The American Child • Elizabeth McCracken
... denominators in these two quotations which clearly point in one main direction. When we accent the importance of extra initiative, expert knowledge and a sense of responsibility, we are saying in other words that out of unusual application to duty comes the power to lead others in the ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... idle to look for the royally maternal feeling of an Elizabeth towards her people in a wedded constitutional sovereign. The judgment was a mistake. The formal limitations of our Queen's prerogative, sedulously as she has respected them, have never destroyed her sense of responsibility; wifehood and motherhood have not contracted her sympathies, but have deepened and widened them. The very sorrows of her domestic life have knit her in fellowship with other mourners. No great calamity can befall her humblest subjects, and she hear of it, but ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... The call of the New Time, and the appeal of the New Ideal, that came through the railroad, the mine, but, more than both, through the Mission and its founder, found a response in the heart of Jack French. The old laissez faire of the pioneer days gave place to a sense of responsibility for opportunity, and to habits of decisive and prompt attention to the business of the hour. Five years of intelligent study of conditions, of steady application to duty, had brought success not in wealth alone, but in ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... to a calm, whatever Louis XVI, La Fayette and Bailly might do. Grave disorders broke out in many parts of France, and scenes of violence continued in Paris. On the 20th, Count Lally moved a resolution for the repression of the excesses that were being committed, but the assembly, with no sense of responsibility for the conduct of affairs,—directly interested, on the contrary, in weakening the executive,—defeated it. In Paris, these scenes culminated on the 23rd, when Foulon, who had been Controleur des Finances, was brought in to the city from his country ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... difficult of decision to a stranger, that I have finally resolved to send these papers to you, and ask you (mindful of the conversation we had on this head one day, in that renowned oyster-cellar) to resolve the point for me. You need feel no weighty sense of responsibility, my dear Felton, for whatever you do is sure to please me. If you see Sumner, take him into our councils. The only two things to be borne in mind are, first, that if they be published in several quarters, they must be published in all simultaneously; secondly, that I hold them ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... their hopelessness when they looked at the gateways and fields, into any of which Anna might have turned, and the lanes down which she might have wandered. But of her own feelings she could not speak—the awful anxiety and remorse; the sense of responsibility and blameworthiness that filled her; her remembrance of Anna's sacrifice for Dan the night she saved his life; her dread of what they might see or hear—those were feelings too deep for words. So, too, was her agony of ...
— Kitty Trenire • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... of a subject. "Goschen," said a famous First Sea Lord, "was the cleverest man we ever had at the Admiralty, and the worst administrator. He saw so many sides to a question that we could never get anything done." A sense of responsibility, too, is a severe check on action. I doubt whether any one who has dealt with affairs ever made up his mind with more painful questionings than Lord Morley. I have heard him say how burdensome he found the India Office, because day ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... Unfortunately, the very women whom we should tempt to become mothers for the good of the race are the very last people to press their services on their country in that way. Plato long ago pointed out the importance of being governed by men with sufficient sense of responsibility and comprehension of public duties to be very reluctant to undertake the work of governing; and yet we have taken his instruction so little to heart that we are at present suffering acutely from government by gentlemen who will stoop to all the mean shifts of electioneering and incur all its heavy ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... their portion from Nature or else have squandered it for a mess of pottage. Every professor-teacher can bear witness to the truism that one hour in the recitation-room is fully equal, in its drain upon the vital energy, to two passed in private study or authorship. The sense of responsibility, we might say, is omnipresent. It does not cease with the recitation: it follows him to his study, and haunts him with the recollection of absurd blunders made by young men who should have done ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... honour to his heart; in the reverse direction we occasionally feel that George Eliot's effusive playfulness does honour to her head. It lacks simplicity and verve. Even in an invitation to dinner, the words imply a grave sense of responsibility on both sides, and sense of responsibility is fatal to the charm of ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 3 of 3) - The Life of George Eliot • John Morley
... is a generous principle. It is a principle that gives men local duties to discharge, and invests them at the same time with general supervision, and excites a healthy sense of responsibility and comprehension. It is a principle that has produced a wise and true spirit of statesmanship in all countries in which it has ever been applied. It is a principle eminently favourable to liberty, because local affairs are left to be dealt with ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... be a new human soul; a creature like themselves, with a mind of its own, and a sense of responsibility—It would be a man or a woman, independent, self-creating, and knowing naught about this strange inception. And yet, it would be their life also; they had caused it—but for them it would never have been! Blindly, unwittingly, following the guidance of some power greater than themselves, ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... and, although in this ambitious aim she too often sacrificed freshness, ease, and simplicity, the weight of the limits she imposed on herself must fairly be counted in the balance. Romance had never before in England been written with such a sense of responsibility, with such eager subtlety of form, and with such high ethical purpose. The sense of responsibility wearies many readers, and at last crushed the writer; the form became "precious," and at last pedantic; and the ethical purpose was sometimes more visible than the ethical life. In the French ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... were before invisible. Life's most beautiful realities can never be seen with the physical eye. The Journal of John Woolman will help one to increase his range of vision for what is best worth seeing. It will broaden the reader's sympathies and develop a keener sense of responsibility for lessening the misery of the world and for protecting even the sparrow from falling. It will cultivate precisely that side of human nature which stands most in need of development. To emphasize these points, Charles Lamb said, "Get the writings of John Woolman by heart," and Whittier ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... suppose that that woman could be found in Cecilia Travers. An only daughter and losing her mother in childhood, she had been raised to the mistress-ship of a household at an age in which most girls are still putting their dolls to bed; and thus had early acquired that sense of responsibility, accompanied with the habits of self-reliance, which seldom fails to give a certain nobility to character; though almost as often, in the case of women, it steals away the tender gentleness which constitutes the charm of ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... commissioners and officers, and the pains he was taking with the task entrusted to him. For he was above all things a good workman, and like all good workmen he felt a pride and an interest in all the jobs he took in hand. His sense of responsibility and his sensitiveness, indeed, were almost too great at times for his own personal comfort. Things will go wrong now and then, even with the greatest care; well- planned undertakings will not always pay, and the best engineering does not necessarily succeed ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... equal the dignity of Nepomucino, the profound gravity of his bearing and expression forcibly reminding one of an owl. Apparently he had come to look upon himself as the sole head and master of the establishment, and the sense of responsibility had more than steadied him. The negrine propensity to frequent explosions of inconsequent laughter was not, of course, to be expected in such a sober-minded person; but he was, I think, a little ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... back over his shoulder to Lucille's door, as if to intimate that his own charge was, at all events, safe; then he passed me, and pressed his inquiring nose to the threshold of the Vicomte's study door. He was a singular little dog, with a deep sense of responsibility, which he only laid aside in Lucille's presence. In which he resembled his betters. Men are usually at ease of mind in the presence of one woman only. At night I often heard him blowing the dust from his nostrils ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... my admiration for Lord Castleton; it showed me with what forethought and earnest sense of responsibility he had undertaken the charge of a life, the guidance of a character yet undeveloped; it lastingly acquitted him of the levity that had been attributed to Sedley Beaudesert. But I felt more than ever contented that the task had devolved ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... which must slowly though surely undermine the white slave trader's stronghold. Such an education needs to be not merely instruction in the facts of sex and wise guidance concerning all the dangers and risks of the sexual life; it must also involve a training of the will, a development of the sense of responsibility, such as can never be secured by shutting our young people up in a hothouse, sheltered from every fortifying breath of ...
— Little Lost Sister • Virginia Brooks
... bound up in the minds of the most powerful classes with a given ordering of social arrangements, and the consequence of this is that the teachers of the Church have reflected back upon thorn a sense of responsibility for these arrangements, which obscures their spirituality, clogs their intellectual energy and mental openness, and turns them into a political army of obstruction to new ideas. They feel themselves to a certain extent discharged ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... Peninsular Eton or Rugby at work, who is to say what might not come of a people whose intellectual qualities are unquestionably so great? The system which imparts to boys the honourable sense of responsibility, the high value of truthfulness, the scorn of all that is mean,—this is what is wanting here. Let the Italian start in life with these, and it would not be easy to set limits to what his country may ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... burning interest I told her many things I might much better have kept to myself; not only accounts of his work and his household and any new friends in our old circle, but we had all been amazed to see a sense of responsibility develop in Julian in answer to his new wife's dependence on him. With this had come a certain thoughtfulness in small attentions, which, I saw too late, Anne must always have missed in him. She was so much ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... reaped the advantage, so far as advantage was connected with the mere reputation of the voyage; success being of nearly as great account in commerce, as in war. It is true, I worked like a dog; for I worked under an entirely novel sense of responsibility, and with a feeling I am certain that could never have oppressed me in the care of my own property; and I deserved some portion of the credit subsequently obtained. At all events, I was heartily rejoiced when the hatches were on, and the ship was once more ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... forth this appeal under a deep sense of responsibility. We know that business is still depressed and that many of the friends to whom we make this plea have responded generously to the calls of sister missionary societies. But we feel that it is a duty we owe to God and to ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 50, No. 05, May, 1896 • Various
... for yourselves; and observe how it moves in him the sense of responsibility, and the prayer, that if he has in any matter wandered from the right road, if he has forgotten the simplicity of childhood in the toil of life, he may, from this time, remember the vow that he now ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... her portion of inheritance, in the gift the school bestows on the student, there is a large social question involved. The school gives her of its wealth, the result of the accumulation of years and of the civic or philanthropic spirit of many men and women. This, if the girl's sense of responsibility is what it should be, she feels bound to increase and hand on. It is the old noblesse oblige ...
— A Girl's Student Days and After • Jeannette Marks
... conciliating the riff-raff. I don't want to know about men simply because they did honest work, and still less about men who never dared to say what they thought and felt. You can't make a striking picture out of a sense of responsibility! I'm not underrating good work—it's fine in every way, but it can't always be written about. There are exceptions, of course. Nelson and Wellington would have been splendid subjects, if anyone had really Boswellised ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... feeling dull. The Okes lived a remarkably solitary life. There were but few neighbours, of whom they saw but little; and they rarely had a guest in the house. Oke himself seemed every now and then seized with a sense of responsibility towards me. He would remark vaguely, during our walks and after-dinner chats, that I must find life at Okehurst horribly dull; his wife's health had accustomed him to solitude, and then also his wife thought the ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... some parts of their brain develop faster than others, so that their minds are temporarily thrown out of balance, sometimes even to cruel or criminal tendencies, but later the mind becomes more symmetrical and the vicious tendencies usually disappear. Their moral faculties and sense of responsibility unfold more slowly than other traits, and of course, they will do mischievous things; but it is a fatal mistake to be always suppressing them. They must give out their surplus energy in some way. Encourage ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... might have argued that she dreaded the opposition she foresaw to the claim of her nephew; and felt that if her act should have despoiled him of his inheritance, life would be worthless to her. But in truth the cause of her habitual gloom was much deeper. She had from her mother inherited a heavy sense of responsibility, but not the confidence in whose strength her mother had borne it. She had, that is, an oppressive sense of the claims of a supernal power, but no feeling of the relationship which gives those claims, no knowledge of the loving ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... to his efforts, she began to revive. The sense of responsibility, the necessity for action on her part, had been so great immediately before she had fainted under the stress of one overwhelming fear, that her mind, even during unconsciousness, may have put forth effort to regain its hold upon sense. She found herself leaning against a prostrate ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... stimulated to an encouraging degree the forming of an intelligent public opinion upon the problem of the immigrant, and a wholesomely increased sense of responsibility towards the immigrant. And indeed it was time. Miss Grace Abbott, director of the Chicago League for the Protection of Immigrants, tells a story, illustrating how very unintelligent an educated professional man can be in relation ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry
... plantation which shaped the daily life of the Virginian and made him different from the English squire. As he looked out over his wide acres, his tobacco fields, his pastures, his woodlands, his little village of servant and slave quarters, tobacco houses, barn, and stable, he had a sense of responsibility, dignity, pride, and self-reliance. He must look after the welfare of the men and women and children under his care, seeing that they were housed, clothed, and fed, protecting their health, playing the role of benevolent ...
— Patrician and Plebeian - Or The Origin and Development of the Social Classes of the Old Dominion • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... whose stake in the game of life was heavy, who played that game nervously. For this was an ambitious man with wife and child whom he loved. Conyngham's attitude towards Fate was in strong contrast. He held his head up and faced the world without encumbrance, without a settled ambition, without any sense of responsibility at all. The sharp-eyed dog on the hearthrug looked from one to the other. A moment before, the atmosphere of the room had been one of ease and comfortable assurance—an atmosphere that some men, without any warrant ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... a few men, however, that could not forget. An Indian agent here and there with a sense of responsibility beyond the pickings of his post, a Hudson Bay factor whose long experience in handling the affairs of half-breeds and Indians instructed him to read as from a printed page what to others were meaningless and incoherent happenings, and above all the officers of the Mounted ...
— The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail • Ralph Connor |
