"Self-destruction" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the king he was much troubled, and would fain have had masses said for the repose of the soul of the unfortunate keeper, but the priests refused to perform them, alleging that he had 'committed self-destruction, and was therefore out of the ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... kindly Joseph Addison. So potent was that magic, such vivid impression did the fate of the grand old Roman make on more than one mind, when thus retold in lofty verse, that the tragedy was cited as a justification of self-destruction. ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... Various correspondents point to the discrepancy between this account and that given by Thiers, and some other authorities, who represent that Robespierre fired the pistol himself, in the attempt to commit self-destruction. In our account of the affair, we have preferred holding to Larmartine (History of the Girondists), not only in consequence of his being the latest and most graphic authority on the subject, but because his statement seems to be verified by the appearance of the half-signed document ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 430 - Volume 17, New Series, March 27, 1852 • Various
... dead; though we know full well that some of the best men that ever lived, in a fit of insanity, or under depression quite impossible for them to control, have passed, by their own hand, out of this world, yet we cannot hide from ourselves that self-destruction is an act of cowardice, that where men and women break down is not in physical courage, but in moral courage, and that those lines penned ...
— The After-glow of a Great Reign - Four Addresses Delivered in St. Paul's Cathedral • A. F. Winnington Ingram
... bound to secure the enrichment and social advantage of his fellows. To love one's self at the expense of one's fellows is for selfness to become malignancy. To love one's neighbors more than one's self is foolishness and self-destruction. ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... Ceremonial Mutilations.—Turning now to the subject of self-mutilation and self-destruction from the peculiar customs or religious beliefs of people, we find pages of information at our disposal. It is not only among the savage or uncivilized tribes that such ideas have prevailed, but from the earliest times they have had their influence ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... never makes Orestes even think of pleading Apollo's command to him to slay his mother. He is concerned with the defence which a contemporary matricide might make before a modern Athenian assembly and with the fitting doom of self-destruction which would overtake him. Like Vanity Fair, the play shows us the life of people who try to ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... doing anything with or for these people. The fiat for their overthrow had evidently been issued. The fatuity which leads to self-destruction was fixed upon them; and, with a feeling rather of commiseration than anger, I prepared to leave the house. In this interview, I made a discovery, which tended still more to lessen the hostility ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... to take the responsibility of opposing it, it was carried out: Greece rushed headlong into war with a superior power and was smashed. Upon King Constantine, then Crown Prince, had devolved the tragic duty of leading the Greek army to self-destruction, and it was upon his devoted head that afterwards the nation visited the criminal levity of M. Delyannis. Was he to suffer calmly a repetition of the same catastrophe on an infinitely larger scale—to see his country trampled ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... ride through the zone controlled and swept by effective Infantry fire may be looked on as synonymous with self-destruction, only such moments must be chosen for a charge during which the enemy is prevented from bringing his full fire power to bear against the assailants. These, however, only occur—except always where the nature of the ground allows of a thorough surprise action—when the moral disintegration ...
— Cavalry in Future Wars • Frederick von Bernhardi
... outstretched to grasp it, and forces His pity and forgiveness on the unwilling soul. Finding that it was the principle of life which grew stronger within him, the young man at last meditated an awful crime. The thought of self-destruction haunted him day and night. He lingered around the wharves, gazing into the deep waters, and was restrained from the deed only by the memory of the last loving voice he had heard. One gloomy evening, when even this memory had faded, and he awaited the approaching darkness to make his ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... inner struggles, and alternations. I am very pitiably a woman no doubt, weak in my will, strong only to love. Oh, I despise myself. At night, when all my household was asleep, I would go out bravely as far as the lake; but when I stood on the brink, my cowardice shrank from self-destruction. To you I will confess my weakness. When I lay in my bed, again, shame would come over me, and courage would come back. Once I took a dose of laudanum; I was ill, but I did not die. I thought I had emptied the phial, but I had only ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... said McCloskey, somewhat startled and alarmed at Stevens's threat of self-destruction—"well, I'll come ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... sin, and there is no expiation for it. I think a reluctant sacrifice of one's own self is better than the reluctant sacrifice of a Brahmana. O blessed lady, in sacrificing myself I do not become guilty of self-destruction. No sin can attach to me when another will take my life. But if I deliberately consent to the death of a Brahmana, it would be a cruel and sinful act, from the consequence of which there is no escape. The ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... head and turned his irresolute feet towards the upper extremity of the garden, indicated by the priest, which seemed to offer more seclusion and security than the avenue of pear-trees. He was dazed and benumbed. The old dogged impulses of self-destruction—revived by the priest's reproaches, but checked by the vision of his dead and forgotten father, which the priest's words had called up—gave way, in turn, to his former despair. With it came a craving for peace ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... possible motive, then,—his interest, his jealousy, his longing for revenge, and now his fears for his own safety,—urged him to regard the happening of a certain casualty as a matter of simple necessity. This was the self-destruction of Mr. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... the window, on the spot where William Barton had been murdered, lying cold and dead, with a ghastly gash in her neck, and her white garments dyed red with her life-blood. A razor, the instrument with which she had accomplished her self-destruction, was clutched, with the grip of death, ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... favour of suicide, which, in these very Letters, Lyttelton says that he cannot defend by argument.* That Lyttelton made his will 'a few weeks before his death,' providing for his fair victims, may be accounted for, as we shall see, by the threatening state of his health, without any notion of self-destruction. Walpole, in his three letters, only speaks of 'a pistol' as the common construction of 'sudden death;' and that remark occurs before he has heard any details. He rises from a mere statement of Lord Lyttelton's, that he ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... to do with the matter. If he was a deep man, and knew the stupidness of Scotland Yard, he probably sent the notes to an enemy. If not, they may have been given to a friend. Nothing is more calculated to prepare the mind for self-destruction than the prospect of a night ride on the Scotch express, and the view from the windows of the train as it passes through the northern part of London is particularly conducive ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr
... and distressing enough, and Kendrick, although he did not take the threat of self-destruction very seriously—somehow he could scarcely fancy George Kent in the role of a suicide—was sincerely sorry for the boy. He did his best ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... These frenzied attempts at self-destruction, which seem to have taken the place of the epileptic seizure, were related to my father casually by the boy's mother; but in other cases, similar incidents, although of the utmost importance to the criminologist, often ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... bitter agony of his spirit, come upon him an idea of blood. He himself must go,—or the man. Then he remembered that she was the man's wife, and that it behoved him to spare the man for her sake. Then, when he came to think in earnest of self-destruction, he told himself that it was a coward's refuge. He took to his classics for consolation, and read the philosophy of Cicero, and the history of Livy, and the war chronicles of Caesar. They did him good,—in the same way that the making of many shoes ...
— An Old Man's Love • Anthony Trollope
... renewed life came the fatal news that Mars was undoubtedly preparing to deal us a death blow. The sudden revulsion of feeling flitted like the shadow of an eclipse over the earth. The scenes that followed were indescribable. Men lost their reason. The faint-hearted ended the suspense with self-destruction, the stout-hearted remained steadfast, but without hope and knowing not ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putnam Serviss
... passed them by, Saying: 'Not you, not you. Another day, when we shall come again Unto the haunts of men, Then we will call your names; But God has asked us first to bring to him Those guilty of greater shames Than lust, or theft, or drunkenness, or vice - Yea, greater than murder done in passion, Or self-destruction done in dark despair. Now in His Holy Name we call: Come one and all Come ...
— Poems of Purpose • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... (indeed, but for these extraordinary circumstances, it is probable that we ourselves should never have discovered it,) were under these painful circumstances made aware of my beloved Belinda's partiality for me. Having communicated thus her wish of self-destruction, I thought her example a touching and excellent one, and proposed to all the ladies that they should follow it, and that at the entry of the enemy into the fort, and at a signal given by me, they should one and all make away with themselves. Fancy my disgust ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... hastily jotted down something on a piece of paper which he tossed over to me. It read: 1.Love, family trouble. 2.A romantic disposition. 3.Temporary insanity, self-destruction. 4.Criminal assault. ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... the psychology of self-destruction. It's a sort of subject one has few opportunities to study closely. I knew a man once who came to my rooms one evening, and while smoking a cigar confessed to me moodily that he was trying to discover some graceful ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... weight, they rose up in rebellion against this unalterable fact. They foresaw it, and, by every possible device, resisted it before it came. When it arrived, they resisted still more madly, even to the extent of self-destruction. The minority was arrayed not merely against the majority, but also against the necessary results of our institutions and against the decrees of nature: that is to say, against the law of man, and against the law of God. The majority was expected to give way, and to permit ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... committee on charities, an officer of the infant schools: he will perform all the honorary functions, barring exactly that which would be efficacious, but which is repugnant to his habits. Work without hope of profits! That cannot be, for it would be self-destruction. He would like to, perhaps; he has not the courage. Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor. The retired proprietor is really the owl of the fable gathering beech-nuts for its mutilated mice until it is ready to devour them. ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... over the topmost branch—hurrah! out of sight! Margaret adds her voice to the acclamations. Beat that if you can, Mary! That doubtful wind keeps yours suspended in a graceful minuet; its pace is accelerated—but earthwards! it has committed self-destruction by running foul of a rose-bush. A ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... able to rear them, and often after an attempt had been made to prevent their coming alive. Consequently numbers of them were deformed, not only physically, but mentally. Under these conditions life was a misery to the larger part of the human race, and to end it by self-destruction was taught by their religion to be a crime punishable with ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... unnecessary waste of human life. Among such questions are: Upon what general and world-wide conditions does suicide depend? Are any of its causes removable? What are the reasons for the steady and progressive increase of self-destruction in civilized countries? Is suicide controlled or affected by any natural laws, and, if so, by what laws? These are all questions of practical importance, because upon the answers to them depends the possibility of economizing ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... whole truth. She knew the motivation for their madness of self-destruction. It was not insanity, but the sublime courage of a few human beings sacrificing themselves to save the rest of their civilization. They smashed the Guardian Wheel to keep the Sickness there. And Mryna had already escaped before that happened! She was being hurled through space ...
— The Guardians • Irving Cox
... the house was arrested, myself included. There was an inquest; but no clue to his death, beyond that of suicide, could be obtained. Curiously enough, he had made several speeches to his friends the preceding week, that seemed to point to self-destruction. One gentleman swore that Simon had said in his presence that "he was tired of life." His landlord affirmed, that Simon, when paying him his last month's rent, remarked that "he would not pay him rent much longer." All the other evidence corresponded, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... to my knowledge, through what passed between Mrs. Pocket and Drummle while I was attentive to my knife and fork, spoon, glasses, and other instruments of self-destruction, that Drummle, whose Christian name was Bentley, was actually the next heir but one to a baronetcy. It further appeared that the book I had seen Mrs. Pocket reading in the garden was all about titles, and that she knew the exact date ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... existence of the evil, must admit the necessity of cautious and gradual measures to remove it. The inhabitants of the South cannot, and ought not, suddenly to emancipate their slaves, to remain among them free. Such a measure would be no blessing to the slaves, but the very madness of self-destruction to the whites. In the South, the horrid scenes that would too certainly follow the liberation of their slaves, are present to every imagination, to stifle the calls of justice and humanity. A fell spirit of avarice is thus invigorated ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... been saddened much in the same way through the suicide of his young cousin, Prince Alfred of Coburg; the self-destruction of the young prince, who had been placed under the immediate care and guardianship of his majesty, having been due, as I have intimated, to enormous losses at the card tables of Berlin and Potsdam. In spite of all the well-meant ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... has many a dark page recording how despairing love has ended in self-destruction. At the beginning of the present century, a sad catastrophe befell the Shuckburghs of Shuckburgh Hall. It appears the Bedfordshire Militia were stationed near Upper Shuckburgh, and the officers were in the habit of visiting the Hall, whose hospitable owner, Sir ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... said the other, "I never pass this spot without recalling the time when I stood here without a son, or, as I thought, a chance of one, and impiously meditated self-destruction." ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... not remember that all pure spirits who are in conformity with the divine dispensation live on in the loveliest of heavenly places, and in the course of time they are sent down to inhabit sinless bodies; but the souls of those who have committed self-destruction are doomed to a region in the ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... now recollect the purport of it; but before I had finished it, it appeared demonstratively true to me that it was a libel or satire upon me. The author appeared to be acquainted with my purpose of self-destruction, and to have written that letter on purpose to secure and hasten the execution of it. My mind, probably, at this time began to be disordered; however it was, I was certainly given to a strong delusion. I said within myself, 'Your cruelty shall be gratified; you shall have your ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... away human ambition and initiative, its position will be almost impregnable and become more and more secure as the average citizen becomes more and more servile, lazy and unambitious. Socialism is politically decadent and contains within itself the germ of self-destruction. During this process of self-destruction the people at large will offer a rich field for exploitation by the demagogue, the ...
— Socialism and American ideals • William Starr Myers
... and having a tendency for men of foreign birth, with nothing in their favour but a small share of good looks and some musical ability, might see fit to plant her affections with such, and 'twas plain mischance would kill Cedric outright, for he was passionate to self-destruction; so when he said: "'Twould be instant death to me, Janet. What wouldst thou advise me to do—thou dost so fully understand ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... Mrs Todgers, proceeding with her subject, 'when it was in the paper, and was read out here at breakfast, I thought he had taken leave of his senses, I did indeed. The violence of that young man, my dear Miss Pecksniff; the frightful opinions he expressed upon the subject of self-destruction; the extraordinary actions he performed with his tea; the clenching way in which he bit his bread and butter; the manner in which he taunted Mr Jinkins; all combined to form a picture never ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... rested his every hope and happiness on the love of his wife. Believing that she had proved faithless, that she had played him false, and was unworthy of trust, he admitted no possibility of peaceful joy, and felt tempted to seek consolation from self-destruction. What had he to live for now, save to mourn over the ashes of ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... and a most unhappy one," groaned de Lara, turning toward Alvarado. "Perhaps it is well you did not accomplish your purpose of self-destruction after all, my poor friend. As I said before, Spain hath need of you. You may go back to the old country beyond the great sea. All here will keep your secret; my favor will be of service to you even there. You can make a new ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... the face, the unfortunate victim of play lost all relish for life; and sought in death the only refuge he could fancy from the infamy and misery which he had brought upon himself. But whilst fully resolved on self-destruction, he thought, before carrying his fatal purpose into execution, he might as well do his tradesmen an act of justice, even if in so doing he should do injustice to others. He insured his life to the extent of his debts, amounting to several thousand pounds. Being acquainted with several ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... unlocked a trunk which contained a brace of loaded pistols: I mean to shoot myself. I only entertained the intention for a moment; for, not being insane, the crisis of exquisite and unalloyed despair, which had originated the wish and design of self-destruction, ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... am going! Your daughter will not drive you to self-destruction! Soon I shall be the wife of that man, or—God! No! I do not go begging for happiness—it is misery, the deepest misery that I beg for! You will give me my misery!—Away! Where ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... him a chance to escape, unless they chained him, or, what was far more probable, they decided to bait him to death during an orgy. What they would probably do to him was unthinkable. Somehow he must find a way out by self-destruction. Even should he escape, he would be unarmed and without food, and there was every possibility that they would trail and overtake him in the morning. He was lame and footsore; also he was weak from want of food. Once, when despoiling ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... than death, was past—they were sold to Jamaica. The necessity of doing this was bewailed by the whole family as a most dreadful calamity, and the culprit was carefully watched on his way to New-York, lest he should evade the sentence by self-destruction. ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... exchange around me these dark and dismal weeds. But the old man in the palace deprived of sight, always preserving with tears regret for the unanimity of the brothers which is separated from the family, has madly rushed on self-destruction with the sword and with the noose above the beams of the house, bewailing the curse imprecated on his children; and with cries of woe he is always hidden in darkness. But thou, my child, I hear, art both joined in marriage, and hast the joys of love in a foreign family, and ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... passionate love of beauty; beauty absolute, eternal and immutable. He felt profoundly the need of salvation, and he possessed an unprecedented power of spiritual vision. In the end, added to all these things, came consuming love for a woman, love raised to the pitch of self-destruction, an adoration which entitles us to regard him, next to Dante, as the greatest ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... with an oath and, pulling out a cologne-scented handkerchief, passed it tremulously over his brow and temples. It was no use—he knew he could never do it in that way. His attempts at self-destruction were as futile as his snatches at fame! He couldn't make himself a real life, and he couldn't get rid of the life he had. And that was why he had sent ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... nearly a year in the habit of a page. Love, desperate and all-engrossing, seems to have been the cause of her singular conduct. Neglected at last by the man for whom she had forsaken all that woman holds dear, she resolved upon self-destruction, and provided herself with poison. Her designs were discovered by Lord Byron, who changed the poison for a sleeping potion. Miss G., with that delicate feeling of affection which had ever distinguished her intercourse with Byron, stole privately away to the funeral vault ...
— Whittier-land - A Handbook of North Essex • Samuel T. Pickard
... against the strong grasp of her preserver, the unhappy girl—she was but a girl—shrank down submissively on to the seat, still trembling and moaning, whilst brave-hearted Sally stood over her to prevent any further attempt at self-destruction. Pollie looked on in bewildered surprise at this sad scene, not knowing what to make of it; but she still kept her hold on the woman's dress, as if her small strength could be of any service; but Sally had told her to "hold ...
— Little Pollie - A Bunch of Violets • Gertrude P. Dyer
... Logic is rarely the quality on which kings pride themselves Necessity of deferring to powerful sovereigns Not his custom nor that of his councillors to go to bed Partisans wanted not accommodation but victory Puritanism in Holland was a very different thing from England Seemed bent on self-destruction Stand between hope and fear The evils resulting from a confederate system of government To stifle for ever ...
— Quotations From John Lothrop Motley • David Widger
... why the poor wretch had not made way with herself. Escape seemed out of the question. That must have been clear to her from the beginning, else why was she going back there to give herself up? What better way out of it all than self-destruction? Sara Wrandall reached a sudden conclusion. She would advise the girl to leave the car when they reached the centre of a certain bridge that spanned the river! ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... bled for his poor young wife and two beautiful little children. Visiting him twice daily, and sometimes even more frequently, I found the way somehow into his heart, and he would do almost anything for me and longed for my visits. When again the fit of self-destruction seized him, they sent for me; he held out his hand eagerly, and grasping mine said, "Put all these people out of the room, remain you with me; I will be quiet, I will do ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... of the second of July, 1798, a man at a little old tavern in Bardstown, Kentucky, committed suicide. If ever there was a justifiable case of self-destruction, it was this. No human being is permitted to take his own life, but there are instances in which the burden of existence becomes well-nigh intolerable. In the case just mentioned, the man went to ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... fairly and bravely fought on both sides, but victory inclined to the Caesarians, in two distinct actions, after an interval of twenty days, B.C. 42. Both Cassius and Brutus fell on their own swords, and their self-destruction, in utter despair of their cause, effectually broke ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... active manner, or he must accept the opportunity which is always at hand in "revert to a career of crime," as the saying is. Ex-convicts are often still human enough to be averse from starvation, and even from easier forms of self-destruction; and they yield to the temptation to steal. Like the idiots they are, they may hope to make a big strike and get away with it, and in some remote or foreign place, under another name, live out an unobserved ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... at the Salvation Army Headquarters in Queen Victoria Street. He unfolds an incoherent tale. He is an unpleasant and disturbing person whom any lawyer or business man would get rid of as soon as possible. He vapours about self-destruction, he hints at dark troubles with his wife. He produces drugs or weapons—a point at which most people would certainly show him out. But the Officers in charge do nothing of the sort. They laugh at him or give him a cup of ...
— Regeneration • H. Rider Haggard
... dear Barty,—Don't be in the least alarmed on reading this hasty scrawl, after waking from the sleep you meant to sleep forever. There is no sleep without a live body to sleep in—no such thing as everlasting sleep. Self-destruction seems a very simple thing—more often a duty than not; but it's not to be done! It is quite impossible not to be, when once ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... combined often lead to self-destruction. ... The most common method of suicide in Fiji is by jumping over a precipice. This is, among the women, the fashionable way of destroying themselves; but they sometimes resort to the rope. Of deadly poisons ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... thereof as the flower of grass. The grass is withered, and the flower thereof is fallen away."(54) To the natural man all this is appalling, and how frequently it finds its solution in unbridled self-indulgence, in mental unbalance, and self-destruction! But the saints, and all the truly wise, have viewed the problem of human suffering in a vastly different light. They have discerned it, first of all, as really distinctive of the road to Heaven, and as essentially pertaining ...
— The Shepherd Of My Soul • Rev. Charles J. Callan
... philosophers like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche have embarked on the suicide of thought, and that a later disciple to this self-destruction is Bernard Shaw. ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... looked upon as the most violent of Jacobins, and the sworn enemy of royalty. On that account the sanguinary agents of the self-created Assembly employed him to frequent the Temple. His special commission was to stimulate the King and Royal Family by every possible argument to self-destruction. ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 7 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... slunk home, and gave up all thoughts of self-destruction—even in a noble cause; and there, in penance, I somewhat hastily committed to flame the plodding labor of many midnights—an elaborate copy in pen and ink, line for line, of Retel's immortal wood-engraving "Der Tod als Freund," which Mrs. Lintot ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... useless matter, and yet a restoring power, assisted by heat, moisture, and the nourishment of the earth, resists the tendency to decay and preserves it alive and growing. The air, the earth, nay, the ocean itself, philosophers assure us, contain powers sufficient to self-destruction. But I will not enlarge here. Let the necessary cause be exerted which will give vent to this hidden power and actions the most astonishing and destructive would be the effect. These are often witnessed in the tremendous earthquakes which devastate whole cities, states, ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... Jesus was wilfully incurred? The "orthodox" not merely admit, but maintain it. Their creed justifies it by the doctrine, that his death was a "sacrifice" so pleasing to God, as to expiate the sins of the world. This honestly meets the objections to self-destruction; for how better could life be used, than by laying it down for such a prize? But besides all other difficulties in the very idea of atonement, the orthodox creed startles us by the incredible conception, that a voluntary sacrifice of life should be unacceptable to God, unless offered ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... the promise she had extracted from him, to let her go through with whatever she had under way; though he had no conception of her plan's extent, and could, of course, not know of the intention of her overwrought mind to give her plan its final touch in what amounted to her own self-destruction, and in her vanishing utterly out of the knowledge of all who ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... the moods that came to him. And we have reason to believe that the sublime soliloquy in "Cato" was written by Addison when the blankness of his prospects and the blackness of the future had forced the question of self-destruction upon him. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... being frustrated, I sunk into dreariness and inactivity. I felt as if no dependence could be placed upon my courage, as if any effort I should make for self-destruction would be fruitless; yet existence was as void as ever of enjoyment and embellishment. My means of living were annihilated. I saw no path before me. To shun the presence of mankind was my sovereign wish. ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... the spirit of God. The Tower physician could not tell what they were. He, and apparently Sir Allen Apsley too, at first apprehended another attempt at suicide. They need not. Ralegh, landless, ruined, had no longer aught to gain by self-destruction for his family. Apart from a sense of religious duty, he had every motive for reserving his head for the block, for wishing to 'die in the light.' Wilson's employers might not have been sorry had his view been different. ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... Negroes from the fort and, sending out detachments in various directions, finally forced the insurgents to concentrate on the northeast side of the island, where they were surrounded. After holding the island six months, the blacks, finding all chances of escape cut off, resolved upon self-destruction. "Three hundred," says an historian, "were, after a few days from the time they were surrounded, found lying dead at Brim's Bay, now Anna Burg. In a ravine, a short distance off, were discovered seven ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... highly uncomplimentary estimate of the frivolous character of my quondam fiancee. It could serve no purpose for me to enlighten her as to the real truth, for did she know the truth she might be haunted by the dread spectre of self-destruction. So her last words as we parted were an admonition to me not to think that all women were as blind and ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... animated with divine power to discover the retreats of the unbelievers. In Germany alone they slaughtered more than a thousand Jews, notwithstanding all the efforts of the clergy to save them. So dreadful was the cruelty of their tormentors, that great numbers of Jews committed self-destruction to avoid ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... his head dolefully. "His Reverence has the Talent, there's no doubt of that, but now he's pitted against another man who has it—a man whose mind is bent on self-destruction in ...
— The Eyes Have It • Gordon Randall Garrett
... have brought her to me, brought a note instead. It was dated boldly 'August tenth.' It was without beginning or signature. It said—I can repeat every word—'Of the two roads to self-destruction open to me, I have chosen the one that will, in the end, give the least pain to you. I love you. I have always loved you since I was a child. I do not regret anything yet! Thank God for me that I depart without ever having seen a look of weariness in the eyes that gazed so lovingly ...
— Told in a French Garden - August, 1914 • Mildred Aldrich
... remark that the terms, "rabble," "disorganizers," "jacobins," and "agrarians," [Footnote: It is scarcely necessary to tell the intelligent reader there is no proof that any political community was ever so bent on self-destruction as to enact agrarian laws, in the vulgar sense in which it has suited the arts of narrow-minded politicians to represent them ever since the revival of letters. The celebrated agrarian laws of Rome did not essentially ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... do deadly damage. If I'd make a mild pass, they'd undoubtedly corral me by main force and carry me off kicking and screaming. But if I went at them to kill or get killed, they'd have to move aside just to prevent me from killing myself. I didn't think I'd get to the last final blow of that self-destruction. ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... suicide. She had soothed and comforted then. Since the previous evening, when he had gone out, in spite of her protestations, and left her alone, his manner had changed. He was still nervous and irritable, but no longer threatened self-destruction, and seemed, for some unexplained reason, more hopeful and less desperate. Sylvester had 'phoned, saying that he would call at the apartment at two, and since Stephen had received the message he had been in a state of suppressed excitement, scarcely keeping still for five ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... surroundings. But when it begins to ignore the moral law which is universal and uses it only within the bounds of its own narrow sphere, then its strength becomes like the strength of madness which ends in self-destruction. ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... motive for man. But the deep bishop, in saying all that, is away back at the creation-scheme and Eden-state of human nature. He has not as yet come down to human nature in its present state of overthrow, dismemberment, and self-destruction. But when he does condescend and comes close to the mind and the heart of man as they now are in all men, even Butler becomes as outspoken, and as eloquent, and as full of passion and pathos as if he were an evangelical Puritan. ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... undoing? To ask this, as we can hardly help asking, is to transfer the question of scientific progress into the sphere of morality. It is conceivable that the progress of science might involve for us no progress at all. It might be, and some have feared that it may become, a step towards the self-destruction ...
— Progress and History • Various
... awakes the next morning to a realizing sense of her position her first impulse is to self-destruction, but she deludes herself with the thought that her "dancing" companion will right the wrong by marriage, but that is the farthest from his thoughts, and he casts her off—"he wishes a pure woman for ...
— From the Ball-Room to Hell • T. A. Faulkner
... thought of ending their troubles by death crossed his mind, and from very tenderness kept returning? At the last gasp, as it seemed, in the close and ever closer siege of misfortune, he was almost ready, like the Jews of Masada, to conquer by self-destruction. But ever and again the sad eyes of his wife turned him from the thought, and he would plod on, thinking, as near ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... Australian cannibal, without opium, tobacco, alcohol, or syphilis, may survive with a low morality. The American exposed to these destroyers must be a better man or perish. Personality, thus becoming a keen selective principle, is based not necessarily on overpopulation and competition, but on that self-destruction which comes from vice, disease, and drunkenness. Its degraded offspring will perish or feed the ranks of the hereditary degenerates to be properly segregated ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... mortal. On the old mantel-piece, over the fireplace, there is a vial in which are kept certain poisons. It would seem as if some one had meditated suicide; or else that the foul fiend had put all sorts of implements of self-destruction in his way; so that, in some frenzied ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... O! place no difficulties in my path; your son is dwelling in a burning house, would you indeed prevent his leaving it! To solve a doubt is only reasonable, who could forbid a man to seek its explanation? Or if he were forbidden, then by self-destruction he might solve the difficulty, in an unrighteous way: and if he were to do so, who could restrain ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... from the body of this death?' is a Hebraism for 'this death which the body is.' For matter itself is but 'spiritus in coagulo,' and organized matter the coagulum in the act of being restored; it is then repotentiating. Stop its self-destruction as matter, and you stop its self-reproduction as a vital organ. In short, Taylor seems to fall into the very fault he reproves in Bellarmine, and with this additional evil, that his reasoning looks more like tricking or explaining away a mystery. ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... the criminal futility of the whole thing, doctrine, action, mentality; and on the contemptible aspect of the half-crazy pose as of a brazen cheat exploiting the poignant miseries and passionate credulities of a mankind always so tragically eager for self-destruction. That was what made for me its philosophical pretences so unpardonable. Presently, passing to particular instances, we recalled the already old story of the attempt to blow up the Greenwich Observatory; a blood-stained inanity ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... is present in nations just as in individuals, though probably a nation is less conscious of it than an individual. It is with the nation one of the effects of the instinct of self-preservation, and for a youthful nation to absorb the vices of an old decadent one would be self-destruction. Thus the youthful Rome rejected most of the Etruscan poison, and thus nature purified herself, and Etruria was buried in the ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... to put an end to his life. His mother on discovering this note pinned to her chair gave way to very natural alarm and rushed upstairs to her darling, with whom she remonstrated in terms deservedly severe, pointing out the folly and wickedness of self-destruction and urging that such thoughts were unfit for one of his tender years, for he ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... not safe if I am left at liberty," he exclaimed, frantically tearing his hair. "I have looked at the past. I look at the future. I am miserable. I see nothing but wretchedness before me. I contemplated self-destruction. I purposed dropping quietly over the stern into the water. I did not wish to create confusion. If I had jumped overboard before you all, a boat would have been lowered, and I should have been ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... ordinarily salved by its previous ignorance as to the corrosive properties of fire. You have betrayed confiding womanhood, an act abhorrent to all notions of gentility. There is but one conclusive proof of your repentance.—Need I mention that I allude to self-destruction?" ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... his interesting treatise upon this subject to proving that "the purer the German race—that is to say, the stronger the Germanism (e.g., Teutonism) of a country—the more it reveals in its psychical character an extraordinary propensity to self-destruction." ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... It would seem at first as though nothing but self-destruction could come to that struggling, praying, throat-cutting population that terrorized Italy during the Mediaeval Period. The people were ignorant, the rulers treacherous, the passions strong, and yet out of the Dark Ages came light. In the thirteenth century ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... of morality with the organization of life, serves also to demonstrate life in its unity and larger auspices. Morality harmonizes life and eliminates its wanton {28} self-destruction; but life is not therefore left without an object of conquest. For there is one campaign in which all interests are engaged, and which requires their undivided and aggressive effort. This is the first and last campaign, the war ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... be settling his affairs at the very time when we seem to be emerging from all danger? There must be some method in his madness. Can it be that he contemplates suicide? I remember that upon one occasion he spoke in a deeply reverent manner of the heinousness of the crime of self-destruction. I shall keep my eye upon him, however, and though I cannot obtrude upon the privacy of his cabin, I shall at least make a point of remaining on deck as long as ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... led into frenzy, or even self-destruction, but it will be from overwork and loneliness. I must have ...
— The Flutter of the Goldleaf; and Other Plays • Olive Tilford Dargan and Frederick Peterson
... enough to leap after and try to save him. In all probability, the effort would have been idle, and worse; for the mad fancy that seemed urging him to self-destruction might still influence his mind, and carry another victim into the same vortex with himself. Restrained by this thought, they stood up in the boat, and watched ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... I suspected nothing, feared nothing; I simply felt dedicated to my country. What a stupendous joy there was in this unquestioning surrender. Verily had I realized how, in thoroughness of self-destruction, ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... fighting scrapes with rustlers; but as a patient he showed a most cowardly disposition, developing a ferocious temper, rejecting medical advice, cursing everybody who came around, so that he lay for months at our charge, until we really got to wish that he would carry out his threat of self-destruction. He did not, but he was crippled for life and did ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... in the ground. But if to have dropped it so, dust to dust, would have saved a living man—what then?... Some day, when I have the heart to look for it, you shall see his last note. I understand now that there are touches of desperate pathos—but never could he have meditated self-destruction while writing that note. He said he should write six more lectures—six more volumes. He said he was painting a new background to a picture which made him feel as if his soul had wings... and he repeated an old phrase of his, which I had heard from him often before, ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... guinea pigs would be prejudicial to the interests of the higher and nobler Irish animal who, he would remind the Minister for Public Worship, was not to be confounded with the herd whose example was clearly emulated by the present government in seeking self-destruction by running down a steep place into the sea. (Cries of "Order, order!") If there was any doubt before, the honorable member continued, as to the influence which was at work in that Gadarene herd, which assumed the functions of Her Majesty's government, ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... This would make his natural age one hundred and twenty-five to one hundred and fifty years. There are cases on record that have lived longer and it may be that if man would cease going in the way of self-destruction and spend more thought and time on the welfare of the race, life would be prolonged beyond even one hundred and fifty years. R. T. Trall, M. D., thought that man should live to be two ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... expected by me. I had cast a thought to my understanding that the philosophy of Confucius did not contemplate self-destruction, and had been divided between relief and ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... in History." Within six to ten years the nation will again be fit to act. Palmerston will cut his throat if nothing comes of the Neapolitan business, and just the same if he cannot make "a good case;" the principle of intervention even against Bomba is self-destruction for England, and disgraceful in the highest degree. The fox cannot begin war in Italy at the present moment from want of money, and his accomplices are afraid of losing their stolen booty. So he tries to gain time. He will ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... the most celebrated Roman generals were fighting battles with each other in order to settle to whom the chief command in the Asiatic war should belong. Rome seemed zealously employed in the work of self-destruction: it is no wonder that, though even now minorities everywhere adhered to Rome, the great body of the natives of Asia Minor joined the Pontic king. Hellenes and Asiatics united in the rejoicing which welcomed the deliverer; ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... sensibility and fancy: and those who praise the philosophy of Portia and the heroism of her death, certainly mistook the character altogether. It is evident, from the manner of her death, that it was not deliberate self-destruction, "after the high Roman fashion," but took place in a paroxysm of madness, caused by overwrought and suppressed feeling, grief, terror, and suspense. Shakspeare has ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... remained, a lover, companion of her flight, being wanting? It was a strange thing altogether, and the country was alive with wild theories and wild reports. But in a few days a letter from Mr. Dundas to the rector, and another to Edgar, set the question of self-destruction at rest, though also they gave loose to other energies of conjecture, for in both he said, "No harm has come to her, and I am content to let her remain where she ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... in terror at first, she presently extricated herself from the man's encircling arm, and switched on the light. She dared not lie in the darkness with the thoughts that assailed her. Never for one instant before had the possibility of the wife's self-destruction occurred to her. Yet, all at once, how probable, how almost certain ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... of whom we are told that they might have been able to see it with their bodily eyes were smitten with blindness. And in like manner, neither do we know how the soul, lying, so to speak, in the tomb of self-destruction, is wrought upon by the angel of the Lord in order to call forth the life of God in it. It arises unseen in that grave-like silence, and can not be perceived until it is actually present; what is properly the beginning of it is hidden, as every beginning usually is, ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 3 - Massillon to Mason • Grenville Kleiser
... being an unusually miserable crew, we got breakfast about two P.M. To-day our tent lamp finished its erratic life, according to the Dhobie's account, by self-destruction! That good for nothing piece of charcoal had, however, doubtless dashed the solid cut-glass globe, which formed the chief glory of the instrument, against a rock, while thinking of his hubble bubble, and his ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... miserable existence for two or three months past. Oh, that the seven or eight months past of my existence could be blotted out; but I must go, and, ere this paper is read, my spirit has gone to my Maker, to give an account of my misdeeds here, and to receive the eternal sentence for self-destruction and abused confidence. Relatives and friends I have, from whom I do not wish to part under such circumstances, but necessity compels. Oh, wretch! lottery tickets have been thy ruin. But ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... of cases. They see and hear what none but themselves do. Genius thrown into this peculiar state has produced some noble effusions. KOTZEBUE was once absorbed in hypochondriacal melancholy, and appears to have meditated on self-destruction; but it happened that he preserved his habit of dramatic composition, and produced one of his most energetic dramas—that of "Misanthropy and Repentance." He tells us that he had never experienced such a rapid flow of thoughts and images, and he believed, ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... untenanted recess in the unfathomable depths below. Instantaneous death, and even eternal perdition afterwards, could have presented no new horrors then. It was haply the design of Providence that the thought of self-destruction should not occur to me. With the means in my reach, I would in all probability have rushed, uncalled and unprepared, into the ...
— Wild Western Scenes • John Beauchamp Jones
... sixteen men. The coolie corps here came to the front, and, rushing into the water, held up the pontoons while the French and some English troops dashed across. But all their efforts to scale the wall were baffled, and it seemed as if they had only gone to self-destruction. While the battle was thus doubtfully contested, Major Anson, who had shown the greatest intrepidity on several occasions, succeeded in cutting the ropes that held up a drawbridge, and an entrance was soon effected within ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... and reforming it, but failed, partly because he was himself a man of no ideals but those of the counting-room, and largely because the paper could not recover from the strong slant given it without self-destruction. So the Events continued what Bartley Hubbard had made it, and what the readers he had called about it liked it to be: a journal without principles and without convictions, but with interests only; a map of busy life, indeed, but glaringly colored, with crude endeavors at picturesqueness, and with ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... dismayed, fair lady," she said doffing her bonnet and making a deep courtesy. "I was not planning self-destruction. Life holds too much of promise to end it now. I was but wondering which of these two roads led to Chartley, and thought to follow the one toward which a throw of the ...
— In Doublet and Hose - A Story for Girls • Lucy Foster Madison
... one hand and on the other a widespread effort to bring into existence Acts of Parliament. Self-destruction contrasted ...
— Assimilative Memory - or, How to Attend and Never Forget • Marcus Dwight Larrowe (AKA Prof. A. Loisette)
... mists that prevented her safely leaving the hovel. A sudden, dire, revolution in her religious impressions was wrought, or rather completed, in that dismal scene. David had more than once wrung her very soul by dark hints of self-destruction in the event of her ever forsaking him. He had thus been led into discussions on suicide, and had even argued for the moral right of man to end his own being under circumstances. Persuasion hangs on the lips of those we love. What she would have rejected as impious, from some immoral ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various |
