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More "Self-preservation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to the frightful consequences of a wholesale exhibition of melodious irritants, that a natural love of order and desire for self-preservation has prompted them to raise numerous obstructions to the free development of musical science in their peculiar localities of town. In the Inns of Court and Chancery Lane professional etiquette forbids barristers and solicitors to play ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... Riis; "Civilization has been making of the world a hothouse. Man's instinct of self-preservation rebels; hence the appeal for the return to the simple life that is growing loud." Boys need to get away from the schoolroom and books, and may I say the martyrdom of examinations, high marks, promotions and exhibitions! ...
— Camping For Boys • H.W. Gibson
... desperate struggle for a tremendous stake. Everything dear to nations was wagered on both sides: nor can we justly blame either the Irishman or the Englishman for obeying, in that extremity, the law of self-preservation. The contest was terrible, but short. The weaker went down. His fate was cruel; and yet for the cruelty with which he was treated there was, not indeed a defence, but an excuse: for, though he suffered all that tyranny could inflict, he suffered ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... divine laws to regulate their ways and keep them in mind of Him who made them, the Africans were excluded from this dispensation, and consequently have no idea of an overruling Providence or a future state; they therefore trust to luck and to charms, and think only of self-preservation in this world. Whatever, then, may be said against them for being too avaricious or too destitute of fellow-feeling, should rather reflect on ourselves, who have been so much better favoured, yet have neglected to ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... had a genius for getting the bull by the tail with a tight grip, and holding on with both hands and an obstinacy born of ignorance—and not necessarily for the sake of self-preservation or selfishness—while all the time the bull might be, so to speak, rooting up life-long friendships and neighbourly relations, and upsetting domestic customs and ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson
... went far to change the current of feeling among the passengers. When they learned that there would be danger for themselves in the course that had been proposed their humanity proved to be less strong than their desire for self-preservation. Nevertheless, as we shall see, the Ark ultimately went back to America, though not for any reason that ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... looked abroad into the prairie, as if his instinct apprised him of the presence of still another visitor. Then, seemingly content with his examination, he returned to his comfortable post and disposed of his weary limbs, with the deliberation and care of one who was no novice in the art of self-preservation. ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... and her resources to our enemies, the whole contest is changed: and the question is how far Great Britain may, by every means in her power, destroy or render useless, a connection contrived for her ruin, and the aggrandizement of France. Under such circumstances, the laws of self-preservation must direct the conduct of Britain, and, if the British colonies are to become an accession to France, will direct her to render that accession of as little avail as possible to ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... by a sort of instinct of self-preservation, has perverted even the idea of association, as something that might infringe upon it, or, to speak more accurately, has ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... licentious, and will, by agreement, submit to no order;—the most troublesome of them will yet be easily discerned; and the chance is that the best man among them knocks him down. Common instinct of self-preservation will make the rioters put a good sailor at the helm, and impulsive pity and occasional help will be, by heart and hand, here and there given to visible distress. Not so in the ship of the realm. The ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin
... into their feelings, but I suppose they are reasonable. I conclude that one would like to have a salary, and to be paid it punctually. Self-preservation is a law that we all recognise; and some of these officials may possibly feel that there is no other line of life open to them, and that, if you take away from them their mission, they will be poor indeed. You will think me perhaps as absurd as Mrs Nickleby, ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... within one single revolution of the moon. For all the rebel movements, subsequent to the morning of Vinegar Hill, are to be viewed not at all in the light of manoeuvres made in the spirit of military hope, but in the light of final struggles for self-preservation made in the spirit of absolute despair, as regarded the original purposes of the war, or, indeed, as regarded any purposes whatever beyond that of instant safety. The solitary object contemplated was, ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... self-preservation, she forcibly summoned back her composure. She knew with whom she had to deal. She must guard ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... promise an easy egress from the river. In the first and second attempt to get on shore, the horse was frustrated by the nature of the ground, and nearly fell backwards on his rider. The instinct of self-preservation seldom fails, even in the most desperate circumstances, to recall the human mind to some degree of equipoise, unless when altogether distracted by terror, and Morton was obliged to the danger in which he was placed for complete recovery of his self-possession. A third ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... cast off her yoke. However, in my next I pledge myself to demonstrate that the Mexicans are wholly incapable of self-government, and that on that principle we are bound by the first law of nature—self-preservation—to dissolve all connexion, and take care ...
— Texas • William H. Wharton
... again at the beginning. My parents abandoned me. Why? They were starved to it, forced to it. Self-preservation is the first law. I don't clear them, but I understand. They were starving and irresponsible. I merely paid the price of relief, the price ...
— The Dominant Dollar • Will Lillibridge
... phase of this is the individual's estimate of his own powers. We may inquire what is the man's appreciation of his own worth. This is precarious because of two difficulties. There is an egotistical element in individuals. It is inherent as a historical agent of self-preservation. Most of us are like primitive groups. The ethnologist expects to find every tribe or horde of savages claiming to be THE PEOPLE. They ascribe superior qualities to their group. In their names for their group they call themselves ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... his might, and poking about with his nose to the earth. At length he came upon a nook under a projecting rock, which seemed to promise a slight shelter from the cold night air. Perhaps it was the instinct of self-preservation which led him to attract the attention of his helpless companion to it. Several times he returned to her, looked beseechingly into her face, then ...
— Apples, Ripe and Rosy, Sir • Mary Catherine Crowley
... humiliation too deeply not to be inspired, like Prussia, with an instinct of self-preservation. The imperial dignity and catholicism were here closely associated with the memory of the Middle Ages, whose magnificence and grandeur were once more disclosed to the people in the masterly productions of the writers of the day. Hence the unison created ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... never angry in her life," cried her father, "it is her only fault that she has not anger enough in her nature for self-preservation." ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... before recovering foothold on the frail embarkation. This the ducked individual would be certain to do. Drunk as he might have been, and maudlin as he might be, his instincts were never so benumbed as to render him regardless of self-preservation. Even from out his haggard eyes still gleamed enough of intelligence to tell that those dark triangular objects, moving in scores around the raft, and cutting the water, so swift and sheer, were the dorsal fins of the dreaded ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... Japan throw down the gauntlet to Russia for less cause than the Empress Dowager had for desiring that "each strive TO PRESERVE FROM DESTRUCTION AND SPOLIATION HIS ANCESTRAL HOME AND GRAVES"? It was not for conquest but for self-preservation the Empress Dowager was ready to go to war; not for glory but for home; not against a taunting neighbour, but against a "ruthless invader." Her unwisdom did not consist in her being ready to go to war, but in allowing herself to be allied to, and depend upon, the superstitious rabble of Boxers, and ...
— Court Life in China • Isaac Taylor Headland
... of mankind informs us that a single power is very seldom broken by a confederacy. States of different interests, and aspects malevolent to each other, may be united for a time by common distress; and in the ardour of self-preservation fall unanimously upon an enemy, by whom they are all equally endangered. But if their first attack can be withstood, time will never fail to dissolve their union: success and miscarriage will be equally destructive: after the conquest of a province, they will quarrel in the division; after ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... sentiment for human liberty and human rights which has saved American idealism from the demoralization of narrow selfishness, and has given to American democracy its true world power in the virile potency of a great example. It responded to the instinct of self-preservation in an intensely practical people. It was the result of conference with Jefferson and Madison and John Quincy Adams and John C. Calhoun and William Wirt—a combination of political wisdom, experience, and skill not easily ...
— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root
... other feelings exaggerated into a fancy to die rather than face the family. She burnt the provisions in a rage at their being forced on her, and she slept most of the time—torpor without acute suffering. Last night in sleep she lost her hold of her resolution, and woke to the sense of self-preservation.' ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Bland was confused, and that Miss Jewett too was under the influence of some new emotion which made her appear less hard, less dry, more like a human being. Hope ran through the veins of Marie in a vital tide. The desperate instinct of self-preservation had put the right weapon in her hand. She must go on and use it mercilessly, for she had touched the weak spot in her enemy's armour. Those two women did not know everything, after all. Idina had somehow overreached ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... giving to each servant five to be kept in the spick-and-span array demanded by the master's position and taste. As a matter of course something was neglected in every department, the instinct of self-preservation being innate and cultivated in Abigail, Phyllis and Gretchen, "Jeems" and "Chawls." Even more as a matter of course, the nominal mistress supplemented ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... instinct induced it to make use of the dreadful means of destruction and self-defence which it possesses, it would become so great a scourge as to render the parts in which it is found almost uninhabitable: but, except when violently irritated, or for the purpose of self-preservation, it seldom employs the fatal power bestowed upon it. The rattlesnake inserts its poison in the body of its victim by means of two long sharp-pointed teeth or fangs, which grow one on each side of the forepart of the upper jaw. The construction of these teeth is very ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... the King's hand and the impulse of self-preservation were however not the only reasons why they yielded. It is undeniable that the conception of the Universal Church, according to which the National Church did but form part of a larger whole, was nearly as much lost among the ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... all the service that its political interests, according to former standards of expediency, justified; and it could have been plausibly suggested that the ordinary considerations of prudence and the instinct of self-preservation required it, in the face of the deadly assault by the greatest military power in the world, to reserve its little army for the defense of its own soil. England never hesitated, when the Belgian frontier was crossed, but moved with such extraordinary speed that within four days after its declaration ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... evidence, the sense of danger was increased tenfold. The conclusion was inevitable, that the conspiracy embraced every black man in the city, and was thoroughly organized. In short, the whole place was, beyond doubt, resting over a concealed volcano, and the instinct of self-preservation demanded the most summary work. Let the inhabitants of any city become thoroughly possessed of such an idea, and they will act with no more prudence or reason than the people of New York at that time did. ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley
... like this that our poor wanderers whiled away their weariness. The love of life, and the exertions necessary for self-preservation, occupied so large a portion of their thoughts and time, that they had hardly leisure for repining. They mutually cheered and animated each other to bear up against the sad fate that had thus severed them from every kindred tie, and shut them ...
— Lost in the Backwoods • Catharine Parr Traill
... Clara began weakly, but stopped as she felt herself being seized by one of the men and lifted roughly to the saddle of a wiry little gray horse which was dancing around in a most disconcerting manner. It was a time for self-preservation and not for protest. She grasped the pommel desperately with one hand and the reins with the other, while her feet were being thrust into the straps of the stirrups—the stirrups themselves being ...
— Across the Mesa • Jarvis Hall
... into which the wild reports of the soldiers and the bird-rider had thrown the frantic populace. The soldiers still within the walls could not restrain the people, or did not try. If there was any government, it lacked a head or could not command attention. The stubborn instinct of self-preservation was king. Distracted throngs surged out at one gate, to separate and waver and hesitate, and finally to fight for a speedy entrance at another. On one side soldiers were apparently ordering people down from the wall, while on another the excited populace was hauling sentinel soldiers from the ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... by exuberances quite as startling as this, nor has any English politician found it damaging to be bold. On this occasion indeed (in 1836) Lincoln was far from damaging himself; the Whigs had not till a few years later been induced, for self-preservation, to copy the Democratic machine. But it is striking that the admiring friend who reports this declaration, "too audacious and emphatic for the statesmen of a later day," must carefully explain how it could possibly suit the temper of a time which ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... any mode of development by which that lofty ideal would suffer. Anything which tends in the least to unsex, to unsphere woman, by so much works with a reflex influence on man and on society, and produces in both a gradual and dangerous deterioration. And self-preservation is the first instinct of society as well as of the individual being. Man, and the eternal and infinite order of the world, require that woman keep her proper place, and that she demand nothing which, granted, would introduce confusion and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... night, however, he was wakeful, and had seen that which even made him a trifle nervous. He had visited every sentry post, finding his men alert and vigilant. 'Tonio's words had already been communicated to the guard, and self-preservation alone prompted every man to keep a sharp lookout. Bonner had noted as he stepped out on the side porch of his quarters, where hung the big earthen olla in its swathing bands, that 'Tonio lay, apparently sound asleep, at the side door of ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... he developed an exaggerated love for solitude, a predilection for self-preservation and still worse, a constant fear of death and mania of persecution, which ran like a black thread through all his writings and brought on gradually the final tragic catastrophe.—He became insane in 1891 and died in 1893 without having ...
— Mademoiselle Fifi • Guy de Maupassant
... it. It had put him thirty miles and more from Sunset, against which he felt a resentment which it little deserved; of a truth it was as inoffensive a hamlet as any in that region, and its sudden, overweening desire for a jail was but a legitimate impulse toward self-preservation. The fault was Ford's, in harassing the men of Sunset into action. But several times that day, and again while he was pulling the stale-odored blankets snugly about his ears, Ford anathematized the place as "a damned, rotten hole," and was as nearly thankful as his mood ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower
... for support, for daily bread, and work which is done because certain faculties of mind and heart and soul demand expression, development, and scope. We all have powers which are willing to be set in action primarily for self-preservation—for personal, material, and transitory ends. We are also endowed with faculties which react, primarily, in behalf of universal aims, though that may not debar them from also bringing an advantage to ourselves. In proportion as we are talented, magnanimous, and high-minded, we delight in spending ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... shuddered, and there pulsed through him that tremendous and passionate instinct for self-preservation which comes to every man at such a time. What Tex meant to do he could not guess, but he knew that if he were left alone with the fellow he might as well give up all hope. He was weak as a cat, and felt sure that no appeal ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... Nature,—of Nature which is as yet unequal to the task that is being set it, owing to its having been through all these centuries identified with its lower self, taught to distrust itself, and otherwise misinterpreted and mismanaged, but which, in obedience to the primary instinct of self-preservation, will gradually rise to the level of the responsibility that is being laid upon it. With the further secularisation of Man's life, the need for religion to make effective the control of Nature, by pointing out to it its own ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... cabal against him. I know if I'd found that Joe Kivelson and Oscar Fujisawa were in any kind of a conspiracy together, I wouldn't pick Joe for the mastermind. It was just possible, I thought, that Oscar had been fostering this himself, in case anything went wrong. After all, self-preservation is the first law, and ...
— Four-Day Planet • Henry Beam Piper
... prayer is in the sense of dependance, and in the instinct of self-preservation or self-interest. The first objects of prayer to the infant man will be those on which by his localities he believes himself to be most dependant for whatever blessing his mode of life inclines him the most to covet, or ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... mention of us, "the only disfranchised class now remaining," in his last Liberator. It is fitting that we should be recognized in his valedictory. We have now boosted the negro over our own heads, and we had better begin to remember that self-preservation is the first law of nature. Will you see if you can get our petition in your city and county papers? Sign it yourself and send it to your representatives in Senate and Congress, and then try to galvanize the women of your ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... pockets, his head poked forward; what is going on is quite beyond his comprehension. He vaguely wonders what his wife will do next; her manoeuvres quite transcend him. Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns always succeeds. She is never at fault; she is as quick as the instinct of self-preservation. She is the little London lady who is determined to be a greater one—she pushes, gently but firmly—always pushes. ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... one feeling, that of self-preservation; only one desire, that of preserving our lives, which each of us believed to be threatened. You had your neighbour's head cut off so that your neighbour should not have ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... is only the coward that does not welcome it with gladness. Life is of no value in comparison with the spiritual principles from which it gains its worth. No matter how many lives it costs to defend or secure truth or justice or liberty, truth and justice and liberty must be defended and secured. Self-preservation must yield to Truth's preservation. The little human life is for to-day,—the principle is eternal. To die for truth, to die open-eyed and resolutely for the "good old cause," is not only honor, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... they may be, they know that they are here at the peril of their lives, facing a stern, vigilant, and relentless foe. To subdue this foe, to cripple and destroy him, is not only their duty, but the purpose to which the instinct of self-preservation concentrates all their energies. Is it to be supposed that men who, like the soldiers of the Guard, last week pursued Rebellion into the very valley and shadow of death, will be solicitous to protect the system which incited their enemies ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... easily done, if the proper course be pursued, and necessity will hold them together as it holds together the United States of North America—self-preservation. As the British nation serves to keep in check the Americans; so would the United States serve to keep in Union the ...
— The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States • Martin R. Delany
... others to assail, and the attack which Japan has made upon us in the Far East forced us to defend it sword in hand. There is not a single right-minded man in the whole world who could level a reproach at us for this war, which has been forced upon us. But in our present danger a law of self-preservation impels us to inquire whether Japan is, after all, the only and the real enemy against whom we have to defend ourselves; and there are substantial reasons for believing that this question should be answered in the ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann
... warning against challenging his own happiness—that was the way she had put it. Perhaps he was galled the less because others had striven for the same prize, and had been thrust back, with an almost tender misgiving as to their sense of self-preservation and sanity. Some of them were eligible enough, and all were of some position in the West. Yet she smiled them firmly away, to the wonder of Jansen, and to its satisfaction, for was it not a tribute to all that she would distinguish no particular ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... the Beacon brig and the Topaz steamer, one of the passengers, anticipating the sinking of both vessels, and being strongly embued with the great principle of self-preservation, immediately secured himself the assistance of the anchor! Did he conceive "Hope" to have been unsexed, or that that attribute originally existed as a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... to show us that the war that the church makes with Antichrist is rather defensive than offensive. Shields and targets are weapons defensive, weapons provided for self-preservation, not to hurt others with. A Christian also, if he can but defend his soul in the sincere profession of the true religion, doth what by duty, as to this, he is bound. Wherefore though the New Testament admits him to put on ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... his effort was a failure. The interesting tangle of facts and circumstances faded from his mind, and he resorted instinctively to nature's first law. With an agitated countenance, he sought self-preservation by waving Sandy's letter behind him in a frantic effort to banish, if possible, ...
— Sandy • Alice Hegan Rice
... the aged and helpless in savage life, nor can we wonder that it should be so, since self-preservation is the first law of nature, and the wandering native who has to travel always over a great extent of ground to seek for his daily food, could not obtain enough to support his existence, if obliged ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... restraint of competition, corresponds to the action of a trades union, and is attained by many trades whose capital is not large or business highly developed. Neither does it imply close union of friendly relations between the combining parties. It is a policy dictated by the barest instinct of self-preservation. We see it regularly applied in certain local trades, especially in the production and distribution of perishable commodities. Our bakers, butchers, dairy-men, are everywhere in a constant state of suspended hostility, ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson
... a delicate operation; and the paper may be hidden elsewhere into the bargain. We venture, we lose or we win; only this is somewhat out of my line of work. Self-preservation is not theft; let us ease our conscience with this sophism . . . Ha! the ladder. Those twenty louis were well spent. This is droll, good heart. An onlooker would swear that this is an assignation. Eh well, Romeo was a ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... for self-preservation in the most desperate danger, so man follows an instinct of self-justification in the most ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... his own way, lost in admiration of this opponent's intellect, but forced to admit his mistakes—the mistakes of a too ardent mind. The more bitter and caustic the sarcasms that leaped from Hamilton's tongue, the more suave he grew, for placidity was his only weapon of self-preservation; a war of words with Hamilton, and he would be made ridiculous in the presence of his colleagues and Washington. Occasionally the volcano flared through his pale eyes, and betrayed such hate and resentment that Washington elevated his hands ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... beyond it has breathed his soul into it; her architecture was first the Gothic from over the Alps, and then of the Renaissance which built the palaces of her merchants in a giant bulk and of a brutal grandeur. She had not the political genius of Venice, the oligarchic instinct of self-preservation from popular misgovernment and princely aggression. Her story is the usual Italian story of a people jealous of each other, and, in their fear of a native tyrant, impatiently calling in one foreign tyrant after another and then furiously expelling ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... remained only to post the duplicate for the Home Office. Mr. Eden directed it and waxed it, but even as he leaned over it sealing it the room suddenly became dark to him, and his head seemed to weigh a ton. With an instinct of self-preservation he made for the sofa, which was close behind him, but before he could reach it his senses had left him, and he fell with his head and shoulders upon the couch but his feet on the floor, the memorial tight in his hand. ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... certain of the lower animals. Thus, it is stated on good authority that "almost every animal becomes panic-struck at the sight of the rattlesnake, and seems at once deprived of the power of motion, or the exercise of its usual instinct of self-preservation." Other serpents seem to share this power of fascination, as the Cobra and the Bucephalus Capensis. Some think that it is nothing but fright; others attribute it ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... face of the convict murderer turned pale at the sound, and at the sight of the glowing eye-balls his ugly teeth clattered against each other. Nevertheless, the instinct of self-preservation made him crouch low, deadly knife in hand, to receive ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... nothing but ruin would attend them; that he never repented him of any thing so much, as his being drawn in to that faction; in which he found himself so greatly involved, he could not retire with any credit; but since self-preservation was the first principle of nature, he had resolved to make that his aim, and rather prove false to a party, who had no justice and honour on their side, than to a King, whom all the laws of heaven and earth obliged ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... penetrated by the last bullet; the bull was blinded! A terrible revulsion of feeling, a sudden sense of remorse that was for the moment more awful than even his previous fear, overcame him. HE had done THAT THING! As much to fly from the dreadful spectacle as any instinct of self-preservation, he took advantage of the next mad paroxysms of pain and blindness, that always impelled the suffering beast towards the left, to slip past him on the right, reach the incline, and scramble wildly up to the plain again. ...
— A Waif of the Plains • Bret Harte
... stake a crown of life. But they go far beyond that. They carry the great truth that to hug self and to make its preservation our first aim is ruinous, and the corresponding one, that to slay self for Christ's sake is to receive a better self. Self-preservation is suicide; self-immolation is not only self-preservation, but self-glorification with glory caught from Jesus. Give yourselves to Him, and He gives you back to yourselves, ennobled ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... of them a week, and they madden me. They keep my brain in a frenzied whirl. Grady, this man must die. Self-preservation is the first law of nature. I have a wife and children; I conduct a great paper; I educate the public mind. My life is valuable to my country. Destroy this poet, and future generations will praise your name. He must be wiped out, exterminated, obliterated from the face of the earth. Kill him ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... Captain suffered next day, whenever a bonnet passed, or how often he darted out of the shop to elude imaginary MacStingers, and sought safety in the attic, cannot be told. But to avoid the fatigues attendant on this means of self-preservation, the Captain curtained the glass door of communication between the shop and parlour, on the inside; fitted a key to it from the bunch that had been sent to him; and cut a small hole of espial in the wall. The advantage ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... have thought he must have leveled his gun and fired. Jerry or Frank would, in all probability, have done that very thing. But Bluff seemed to go back to the first law of Nature, which is self-preservation. ...
— The Outdoor Chums After Big Game - Or, Perilous Adventures in the Wilderness • Captain Quincy Allen
... him to health seemed to absorb all regard for their own situation. I witnessed with peculiar pleasure this conduct, so different from that which they had recently pursued when every tender feeling was suspended by the desire of self-preservation. They now no longer betrayed impatience or despondency but were composed and cheerful and had entirely given up the practice of swearing, to which the Canadian voyagers are so lamentably addicted. Our conversation ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin
... hand. All was over. That despair which a moment before had intensified his efforts now relaxed his strength. He felt himself dragged back to the shore from which he had been flying. He was lost! He struggled no longer to escape, but only to keep his head above water, from an instinct of self-preservation. And in that anguish of fear and despair that now settled upon his soul he had a vague terror that on the moment of landing he ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... beneficient experiment in government that has ever been made, was in obvious economic and administrative decay by the middle of the fourth century. Christianity perhaps was already undermining the servile state, which in its effort of self-preservation adopted an economic system hopelessly at variance with the facts of the situation; while the weakness of its frontiers offered a military problem which the empire was unable to face. Diocletian had attempted to solve it by dividing the empire, but the division he made was rather racial that strategic, ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... have thee do unto him; but if thy neighbor, failing in this sacred duty, attempt against thy life, thy liberty and thy interests, then thou shalt destroy and annihilate him for the supreme law of self-preservation prevails. ...
— Mabini's Decalogue for Filipinos • Apolinario Mabini
... destruction as long as it can. This is the struggle for existence, one of the primary laws of nature. Man has intelligence and power over himself, that he may conduct his own struggle well and wisely. He may struggle more or less, as he sees expedient, looking to higher goods even than self-preservation in this mortal life: but he may not take that power of managing himself, which nature invests him with for his preservation, and use it to his own destruction. Should he do so, he perverts the natural ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... in whom there is an unquenchable and insatiable desire for independence. The effort to escape from the bondage of nature is not solely a human instinct; animals burrow or build retreats through the instinct of self-preservation. But this instinct in animals is soon satisfied, whereas in human beings it has been leading ever onward toward ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... situations of life. While in the habitual fabricator the most prominent motives are those of an egotistic nature, a craving for self-esteem as compensation for an inherent defect, in the malingerer we see a resort to this form of reaction as a means of self-preservation, as a means of escape from a particularly ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... engulfed him on that night of his arrest when his defenseless cheek had reddened to the blow of humiliation. This had been, however, a flash of passion. But once, meeting a man who blocked his path in the first upper reaches of the hills, beyond Fairview, he had felt the even more primitive itch of self-preservation urging him to the ultimate crime. Would he end by going a step farther and planning the destruction of life in ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... and comfort all the inhabitants of the island. That wealth must not leave us another year, not until every grain of it is fought for in every stage, from the tying of the sheaf to the loading of the ship; and the effort necessary to that simple act of self-preservation will at one and the same blow prostrate British dominion and landlordism together." In reference to this piece of writing, and many others of a similar nature, his lordship remarked that no effort had been made to ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... redounded greatly to the tenderness and humanity of Captain Cheap, if at this time he had remitted somewhat of that attention he shewed to self-preservation, which is hardly allowable but where the consequence of relieving others must be immediately and manifestly fatal to ourselves; but I would venture to affirm, that in these last affecting exigencies, as well as ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... might be, and whether the original homicide was justifiable or not, were questions not regarded by primitive man; motives were abstract ideas with which he had no concern; he only knew that a piece of the common life had been lopped off, and the instinct of self-preservation of the clan demanded that a piece of the life of the offending clan should be cut off in return. And the tie which united the kin was eating and drinking together. "According to antique ideas those who eat and drink together are by this ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... uninterpretative. It was repeated in rapid succession, and speedily construed itself into the sound of mailed footsteps racing up the long flight of stairs at the end of the corridor leading to my room. Dreading to think what it might be, and seized with a wild sentiment of self-preservation, I made frantic endeavours to get out of bed and barricade my door. My limbs, however, refused to move. I was paralysed. Nearer and nearer drew the sounds; and I could at length distinguish, with a clearness that petrified my very soul, the banging and clanging ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... not very unjust to chastise beings, who could not act otherwise than they have done?" If the wicked act necessarily according to the impulses of their evil nature, society, in punishing them, acts necessarily by the desire of self-preservation. Certain objects necessarily produce in us the sensation of pain; our nature then forces us against them, and avert them from us. A tiger, pressed by hunger, springs upon the man, whom he wishes to devour; but this man is not ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... like about you is your caution. The very soul of prudence, that's what you are. Your instinct for self-preservation is exceeded by only ...
— Smugglers' Reef • John Blaine
... "Police!" the crowd had seemed to melt away from him like the bank fog at the sweep of a breeze. A dozen comrades had seized the prostrate Jean and hurried him away, and Pete, with the instinct of self-preservation, had snatched up his clothes and dodged down a dark alley toward the dirty ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... in this, as in a thousand other matters, Nature will burst out laughing in the face of the would-be philosopher, and bringing forward her town boy, will say, 'Look here!' For the town boys are Nature's boys after all, at least so long as doctrines of self-preservation and ambition have not turned them from children of the kingdom into dirt-worms. But I must stop, for I am getting up to the neck in a bog of discrimination. As if I did not know the nobility of some townspeople, compared with the worldliness of some country folk. I give it up. We ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... I felt as if I should fall. Then the instinct of self-preservation moved me to act, and with my hands stretched out before me I went quietly ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn
... alone tarnished the glory of that day's action, but it seems to have been dictated by fear as a means of self-preservation. After the enemy had been completely routed in front, and a multitude of prisoners taken, the King, hearing that some detachments had got round to his rear, and were endeavoring to plunder his baggage, gave orders to ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... beyond a swift look at me made no sign connecting me, either with the wreck or the rescue. I think she had even then abandoned all hope of safety; and in my own heart, such, also, was the rising conviction which I concealed. Under the inborn habit of self-preservation, under the cultivated habit of the well born, to show no fear and to use the resources of a calm mind to the last in time of danger, we stood now, at least, in some human equality. And again I lied and said, "There is no danger," though I could see the white rollers and could hear their ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... Basilio to salute the jeweler as though he had been a saint passing. Basilio realized from the expression of Simoun's face that he was leaving the fated house forever, that the lamp was lighted. Alea jacta est! Seized by the instinct of self-preservation, he thought then of saving himself. It might occur to any of the guests through curiosity to tamper with the wick and then would come the explosion to overwhelm them all. Still he heard Simoun say to the cochero, ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... watches of the night.... Sometimes even your four hours' sleeping time is rudely broken into by half a dozen alarms; for separated sometimes by hundreds of feet from your comrades of the next post, the instinct of self-preservation makes you line your loopholes and peer anxiously into the gloom beyond, when any one of the enemy shows that he is afoot. A single rifle-shot spitting off near by is as often as not the cause of the alarm; for that rifle-shot cracking out discordantly and awakening ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... was at least ten feet, and the refraction made him think it was only two. The vertigo then seized him, and, without knowing why, he began to call for help, though he had not been injured by the fall. The cold began to take him, and he rose with pain, urged by the sense of self-preservation. ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... see fit to make them prisoners. The Marechal possessed too much tact, however, to make such an attempt, as in the one case he must incur the everlasting enmity of the heir-presumptive to the Crown, or, in the other, Gaston, roused by a feeling of self-preservation, might attempt to renew the conflict, and finally retrieve the fortunes of the day. By the fall of Montmorency, moreover, sufficient had been accomplished to annihilate the faction of Monsieur; and ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... Wales, and a third figure (?), are in a boat pushing off from shore, with Burke looking over a wall with a large bag in his hand. He says, "D——me, Charley, don't leave me in the lurch;" who replies, "Self-preservation is the first law of nature." His companions joining with "Push off, Charley, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 233, April 15, 1854 • Various
... I should be choked to death; and the instinct of self-preservation took possession of me. I sprang at the throat of my old tyrant. He went down upon the floor, and I on the top of him, before my father or any other person could come to my aid. As he went down he released his grasp on my throat in his ...
— Up the River - or, Yachting on the Mississippi • Oliver Optic
... was not through any peculiar presence of mind on my part, but simply from the instinct of self-preservation, which is common to every living creature, that I made an effort to save myself. This I did by throwing out my hands, and endeavouring to seize hold of something, just as drowning men will catch even at straws. ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... has been successfully terminated, and the mere instinct of self-preservation no longer absorbs the activities of a people, then the three chief motive forces of civilization begin to operate. These are cupidity, or the desire of wealth and all that it procures; curiosity, or the desire to discover new facts about the world and ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... meeting on November 30, he definitely announced in his last Presidential address his resignation of that] "honourable office" [which he could no longer retain] "with due regard to the interests of the Society, and perhaps, I may add, of self-preservation." ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... heels: and "Faster! faster!" he cried, regardless of their prayers: and he beat the rearmost of the horses with his scabbard. A waiting-woman shrieked that she should fall, but he answered ruthlessly, "Fall then, fool!" and the instinct of self-preservation coming to her aid, she clung and bumped and toiled on with the rest until they reached the first houses of the town about the bridges, and Badelon raised his hand as a signal that they might ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... Europeans and Americans can only reply that the instinct of self-preservation, which is strong within them, points clearly to the absolute necessity of excluding the Chinese carpenters and bricklayers; and, further, as regards the missionaries, that there can be but one answer, and ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... individual, made hopeless Helots of the multitude. Henceforward CASTE must virtually be at an end. Upon caste has our Bengal army founded a final treason bloodier and larger than any known to human annals. Now, therefore, mere instincts of self-preservation—mere shame—mere fiery stress of necessity, will compel our East India Directory (or whatsoever power may now under parliamentary appointment inherit their responsibilities) to proscribe, once and for ever, ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... his affections upon pleasure, and become a representative of Egoistic Hedonism, the variety of egoism normally treated as typical and made the subject of criticism in ethical treatises. But there is nothing to prevent him from making his aim, not so much pleasure, as self-preservation; or from taking as his goal wealth, power, reputation, intellectual or moral attainment, or what not. [Footnote: Thus, Hobbes made his end self-preservation; Spinoza takes much the same position; Nietzsche makes that which is ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... state of the stairs leading to the successive stones of the tower, we were almost tempted to believe that her instinct of self-preservation had reached its climax here,—that we might break our necks, if we liked,—she preferred not to run the risk. Resolved to satisfy our suspicions, we pressed the point, and, after many inquiries and waiting a considerable time upon the motions of the child ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... is naturally egoistic; his appetites all tend to self-preservation. There are even then, however, great individual differences, and we meet with children who are endowed with a remarkable sentiment of duty and a great sensibility to the troubles of others. After ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... attached unduly to her personal interests; yet she owned that, since it had been the pleasure of Heaven to combine those interests with the weal of her subjects, she did only her duty when she adopted such measures of self-preservation as circumstances forced upon her; and if the council in their wisdom should be of opinion that it was needful to continue some restraint on the person of her unhappy sister of Scotland, she trusted they would not blame her if she requested of the Countess of Shrewsbury ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... extensive in its fatal effects. Anglo-Saxons wish to destroy despotism, lest they or their descendants might again become what their ancestors once were—its victims. This, then, is one motive of their conquests, and it is nothing more than the naked instinct of self-preservation. But there is another motive—a nobler and more generous one. They have drunk from the cup of Liberty—the draught has pleased them, has given them happiness and joy; and, urged by that better part of our nature, ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... vocation. Certainly, if I was back with my rocker on the Tuolumne, I'd make it rattle livelier than ever I did before. I have occasionally thought of London Bridge, but the Thames is now so d—-d cold and dirty, and besides I can swim, and any attempt at drowning would, through the mere instinct of self-preservation, only result in my swimming ashore and ruining my best clothes; wherefore I should be worse off ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... identity had paralysed them, until some contrary wind of doctrine blew them into action again, and they hurled themselves upon his trail, filled with the single intention to rush between his legs. Nothing but that instinct of self-preservation that operates independent of the reason, preserved Larry from frequent and violent overthrow. His head was in the clouds; he was abandoning himself to dreams, with the very same headlong enthusiasm that Scandal and Steersman brought ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... of ruthless criticism is to concentrate the Frenchman's attention, even to excess, on the motives of conduct, and to bring him more and more inevitably to regard self-love, self-preservation, personal vanity in its various forms, as the source of all our apparent virtues. Even when we appear to be most disinterested, even when we are most clearly actuated by unselfish devotion, by honour, ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... returned lightly, but still breathing hard; "it was the instinct of self-preservation. I was unsteady on my feet for a moment, and sought something to take hold of. That pirate was the nearest thing, and I caught hold of his cloak; I'm sure it was a cloak, and that makes me sure he was a human villain of some sort. He didn't feel in the ...
— The Port of Missing Men • Meredith Nicholson
... that thought, that awful knowledge, determinedly away from her. The instinct of self-preservation possessed ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... stipulation for national ignominy; an illusory expedient, to baffle the resentment of the nation; a truce without the suspension of hostilities on the part of Spain; on the part of England a suspension, as to Georgia, of the first law of nature, self-preservation and self-defence—surrender of the rights and trade of England to the mercy of plenipotentiaries, and in this infinitely highest and sacred point, future security, not only inadequate, but directly repugnant to the resolutions of Parliament, ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... gloomy or sad; and a general "Hark!-from-the-tombs-a-doleful-sound" style of conversation seemed to be the fashion: a state of things which caused one coming from a merry, social New England town, to feel as if she had got into an exhausted receiver; and the instinct of self-preservation, to say nothing of a philanthropic desire to serve the race, caused a speedy change ...
— Hospital Sketches • Louisa May Alcott
... out of all they'll fabricate a charge So specious, that I must myself stand dumb. I am caught in my own net, and only force, Naught but a sudden rent can liberate me. 50 How else! since that the heart's unbiass'd instinct Impelled me to the daring deed, which now Necessity, self-preservation, orders. Stern is the On-look of Necessity, Not without shudder many a human hand 55 Grasps the mysterious urn of destiny. My deed was mine, remaining in my bosom, Once suffered to escape from its safe ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... power, she must use that power for the common good. Upon this point they would not compromise, nor would they permit delay. During the chaos of the ninth century turmoil and violence reached a stage at which the aspirations of most Christians ended with self-preservation; but when the discovery and working of the Harz silver had brought with it some semblance of order, an intense yearning possessed both men and women to ameliorate their lot. If relics could give protection ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... purposes of gain, got the Indians drunk, the law was strangely inactive. Everyone knew that drink might incite the Indians to uprisings and imperil the lives of men, women and children. But the considerations of trade were stronger than even the instinct of self-preservation and the practice went on, not infrequently resulting in the butchery of innocent white victims and in great cost and suspense to ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... to hasten over, when "Private, and no thoroughfare," appeared at the end nearest me, in large letters of fire. I started back with amazement, and would not, dared not pass them. When all of a sudden, a figure in white appeared by my side, and said to me, pointing to the bridge, "Self-preservation is the first ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... book, reflecting, as he prepared to resume it, on the wonderful provision of nature which endows the growing animal not only with such strong instincts of self-preservation, but with the power to gratify them, and to take itself off at the same time and be happy in so doing, thus saving those who have outgrown these natural proclivities from some ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... the man to serve the dreaded, summons. An instant of panic seized her. Fortunately her persecutor was regarding his stubborn coffee as he stirred it. Her heart, which had stopped, started with a thump. Her thoughts cleared. Instinct, self-preservation, asserted itself. She thought hard and fast. The first ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... was long and tedious, but Mr. Scutts, beyond remarking that he felt chilly, made no complaint. He endeavoured, but in vain, to perform the tests suggested, and even did his best to stand, supported by his medical attendant. Self-preservation is the law of Nature, and when Mr. Scutts's legs and back gave way he saw to it ...
— Night Watches • W.W. Jacobs
... an agony which took his actions entirely out of voluntary control, eclipsing the higher ideals and heroisms of his imagination at once, and reducing him to that automatic condition in which the nervous system issues and enforces only those edicts which are counselled by pure animal self-preservation. Whatever may have been the patient's responsibility in beginning the use of narcotics or stimulants (and I usually find, in the case of opium-eaters, that its degree has been very small indeed, ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... sympathies were with the seceding States. Most of its people felt also that if coercion was attempted, the issue would become for Virginia and North Carolina, no less than for South Carolina and Alabama, simply a matter of self-preservation. As early as January, in the exciting days when Floyd's resignation was being interpreted as a call to arms, the Virginia Legislature had resolved that it would not consent to the coercion of a seceding State. In May the Speaker of the North Carolina Legislature ...
— The Day of the Confederacy - A Chronicle of the Embattled South, Volume 30 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... primitive instinct of self-preservation combating her inclination, urging her on to make one more final effort. Back and forth, through the snow about the lake she wandered; without being able to decide. Her strength was fast ebbing. Which—which, should it be? "God have mercy!" ...
— 'Way Down East - A Romance of New England Life • Joseph R. Grismer
... adopted with an intention of remedying this evil, though the origin of it is beyond the reach of decree. It originates in that distrust of government which reconciles one part of the community to starving the other, under the idea of self-preservation. While every individual persists in establishing it as a maxim, that any thing is better than assignats, we must expect that all things will be difficult to procure, and will, of course, bear a high price. I fear, ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... calmness and resignation. But the terrific noise of her maddened assailants, as they leaped up, snapping, snarling, and howling, in demoniac chorus, and made nearer and nearer approaches every moment to her person, once more aroused her natural instinct for self-preservation; and she arose, and, standing upon her feet, involuntarily bent over one end of her support to catch a view of what was ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... the people of the Southern States, can be executed? I tell them, no; it is impossible—why? Because no man will inform—why? Because to inform will be to lead to an evil which will be deemed greater than the offence of which information is given, because it will be opposed to the principle of self-preservation, and to the love of family. No, no man will be disposed to jeopard his life, and the lives of his countrymen. And if no one dare inform, the whole authority of the Government cannot carry the law into effect. ...
— The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America - 1638-1870 • W. E. B. Du Bois
... been adopted with an intention of remedying this evil, though the origin of it is beyond the reach of decree. It originates in that distrust of government which reconciles one part of the community to starving the other, under the idea of self-preservation. While every individual persists in establishing it as a maxim, that any thing is better than assignats, we must expect that all things will be difficult to procure, and will, of course, bear a high price. I fear, all the empyricism of the legislature cannot produce ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... the illusion again, there fell upon him a realization of the tremendous strain he had been under for many hours. It had been days since he had slept soundly. Yet he was not sleepy now; he scarcely felt fatigue. The instinct of self-preservation made him arrange his sleeping-bag on a carpet of spruce boughs in the tent and go ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood
... only to stamp themselves with terrible force on my memory, so that I could hardly keep from repeating them aloud like a dull, miserable, unconscious echo; but my brain was numb to the sense of what they said, unless I myself were named, and then, I suppose, some instinct of self-preservation stirred within me, and quickened my sense. And how I strained my ears, and nerved my hands and limbs, beginning to twitch with convulsive movements, which I feared might betray me! I gathered every word they spoke, not knowing which proposal to wish for, but feeling that whatever was finally decided ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... deed sobered the half crazy woman," continued the speaker. "Her usual resourcefulness returned to her. Self-preservation had to be considered before remorse. Mrs. Irvin had swooned, and"—he hesitated—"Mrs. Sin saw to it that she did not revive prematurely. Mareno was summoned from the room above. The ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... to the world I don't," Stubby replied. "It's self-preservation with me. Let old Horace look out for himself. He had his fingers in the pie while we were in France. I don't have to have four hundred per cent profit to do business. Get the fish if you can, Jack, old boy, even if it busts old Horace. Which it won't—and, as ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... man, but his first thought was "Sharks!" and the horror of it caught his throat with a sensation of nausea. The instinct of self-preservation is strong in all healthy men, and, though an instant later he was ashamed on realizing it, the fear that thrilled him was for himself. He expected, as his momentarily scattered senses told him what ...
— The Castle Of The Shadows • Alice Muriel Williamson
... prisoner of the octopi, but a prisoner of the glass jar, unable ever to leave it, and more than ever at the mercy of his captor's least whim. Not that he had any delusion that he would live long in any case: it was just the simple strong instinct of self-preservation that made him grab at ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... languor passed away. She had scarcely glanced at him while at dinner, but she had felt, by some subtle power of perception, that he was furtively watching her, and she also felt there was more of curiosity than kindliness in his regard. With an instinct as strong as that of self-preservation, she sought to hide her secret, and when a few moments later the stage was driven to the door, she was prepared to welcome the man she now detested, in order to conceal her heart from the ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... fifteen months of war there was little about self-preservation that you could have taught them. Lean, sinewy, and bearded kind—they represented the English fighting man at his best. And well might the inexperienced have asked if they were Boers. Lance and pennon were gone. ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... presidential election of the following year. The Abolitionists had laid siege to the conscience and humanity of the people, and their moral appeals were to be a well-spring of life to the nation in its final struggle for self-preservation; but as yet they had agreed upon no organized plan of action against the aggressions of an institution which threatened the overthrow of the Union and the end of Republican government. But now they were divided into two ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... her attitude of folded arms. I saw before me the daughter of the refined poet accepting life whole with its unavoidable conditions of which one of the first is the instinct of self-preservation and the egoism of every living creature. "The fact remains nevertheless that you—yourself—have, in your own words, pulled her in," I insisted in a jocular ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... will be admitted, is innocent, and human nature is preserved by our following the lead of its innocent instincts. Therefore, in seeking to gratify this instinct in question, we are following the instinct of self-preservation in humanity. ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... affected by the destructive conflict of the powers of nature, and that great disasters lead to striking changes in general civilisation. For all that exists in man, whether good or evil, is rendered conspicuous by the presence of great danger. His inmost feelings are roused—the thought of self-preservation masters his spirit—self-denial is put to severe proof, and wherever darkness and barbarism prevail, there the affrighted mortal flies to the idols of his superstition, and all laws, human and ...
— The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker
... little what my notions or what their own notions on the subject may be; because, according to the exigence, they will take, in fact, the steps which seem to them necessary for the preservation of the whole: for as self-preservation in individuals is the first law of Nature, the same will prevail in societies, who will, right or wrong, make that an object paramount to all other rights whatsoever. There are ways and means by which a good man would not even save the commonwealth.... All ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... seen,—not even excepting the burning of Eliphalet Loop's straw-ricks in 1897,—edged farther and farther away, pursued by the relentless heat-waves. The fire-fighters withdrew in good order, obeying the instinct of self-preservation somewhat in advance of the command of their superior, who, indeed, had anticipated such a man[oe]uvre by taking a position from which he could lead the retreat. By the time the fire was at its height, "lighting the way clear to heaven," according to Miss Sue Becker, ...
— Anderson Crow, Detective • George Barr McCutcheon
... the instinct of self-preservation. I count on no life beyond the grave. I would defy the grave, and ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... The window was wide open, and the children were standing beside it. Magdalen, who was at the other side of the table on which stood the cage, hurried forward, but too late. Startled by Hoodie's loud voice, not recognizing in the furious little girl its gentle mistress, and with some instinct of self-preservation, the greenfinch, with a frightened uncertain note, flew off Duke's finger, alighted for one instant on the window-sill, from which it seemed for a moment to look at the group in the room, as if in farewell, then, before ...
— Hoodie • Mary Louisa Stewart Molesworth
... breathed his soul into it; her architecture was first the Gothic from over the Alps, and then of the Renaissance which built the palaces of her merchants in a giant bulk and of a brutal grandeur. She had not the political genius of Venice, the oligarchic instinct of self-preservation from popular misgovernment and princely aggression. Her story is the usual Italian story of a people jealous of each other, and, in their fear of a native tyrant, impatiently calling in one foreign tyrant after another and then furiously expelling him. When she would govern herself, she first ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... colonies throw down the gauntlet to England for less cause? Did not Japan throw down the gauntlet to Russia for less cause than the Empress Dowager had for desiring that "each strive TO PRESERVE FROM DESTRUCTION AND SPOLIATION HIS ANCESTRAL HOME AND GRAVES"? It was not for conquest but for self-preservation the Empress Dowager was ready to go to war; not for glory but for home; not against a taunting neighbour, but against a "ruthless invader." Her unwisdom did not consist in her being ready to go to war, but in allowing herself to be allied to, and depend ...
— Court Life in China • Isaac Taylor Headland
... generations to regard marriage as giving respectability to an otherwise wicked inclination. The task of devising a sane approach is only just begun. But the menace of prostitution and of the social diseases has become so great that society is compelled from an instinct of sheer self-preservation to drag into the open some of the iniquities which ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard
... lamentable weakness of the men's unions large sections of farmers may break away from the recommendations of their leaders; and that if depression continues and war savings become depleted farmers will tend to push wages down in self-preservation. These things must be watched. If the general condition of agriculture improves without a corresponding improvement in the workers' condition, or if conditions get worse and the brunt of the burden is transferred to the labourer, we ought to be prepared to advocate a return to the old Wages ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... machine must be modern and efficient: and that in fact no clear line of distinction can be drawn between the problems of constitutional structure which concern Socialism and those, if any, which do not concern it. In the case of the South African war it was mainly the instinct of self-preservation that actuated us; it is certain that any other decision would have destroyed the Society. The passions of that period were extraordinarily bitter. The Pro-Boers were mobbed and howled down, their actions were misrepresented, ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... calculations and acts. We do nothing more than classify and arrange these, in order to better understand them. It is so little opposed to practice, that it is in fact only practice explained. We look upon the actions of men as prompted by the instinct of self-preservation and of progress. What they do freely, willingly,—this is what we call Political Economy, or economy of society. We must repeat constantly that each man is practically an excellent political economist, producing or exchanging, as his advantage dictates. Each ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... the consciousness that Idina Bland was confused, and that Miss Jewett too was under the influence of some new emotion which made her appear less hard, less dry, more like a human being. Hope ran through the veins of Marie in a vital tide. The desperate instinct of self-preservation had put the right weapon in her hand. She must go on and use it mercilessly, for she had touched the weak spot in her enemy's armour. Those two women did not know everything, after all. Idina had somehow overreached herself. It ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... personality is self-preservation, but personality itself is not a static but a dynamic thing. The basic factor in its development, is integration: each new situation calls forth a new adjustment which modifies or alters the personality ...
— Breaking Point • James E. Gunn
... novices who, though they had never even seen Skis before, by dint of studying the technique in theory before they came out, were able immediately to apply it in practice. Most beginners find, however, that the moment the Skis start sliding, all theory is thrown to the winds. Instinct of self-preservation prevails and they sit down. Kind friends looking on say, "That was because you were leaning backwards. You must lean forwards." Off they start again, carry out the advice, their Skis stick for some reason and down they go head foremost—the most difficult fall of all to get ...
— Ski-running • Katharine Symonds Furse
... vulgar adventurers who had taken the Democratic party and the city of New York by the throat. He had no sympathy with their coarse and reckless measures. Aside from his abhorrence of their riotous corruption every instinct of self-preservation impelled him to desire their overthrow, for while they ruled he had little hope of influence or preferment. When the exposure of their monstrous robberies had opened the way to their downfall, Mr. Tilden grappled with the menaced Ring ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... conclusive, of that fixed and settled hostility to slavery on the part of the North which should and will satisfy every reasonable man that peace between us is impossible; and then a necessity stronger than all law, the necessity of self-preservation, will demand at our hands a separation from those who use the relationship of brotherhood only for the purpose of inflicting upon us the worst acts of malignant hostility." The supineness of the South upon this subject is very warmly censured, and the hostility ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... 2: Since an effect is preserved by its proper cause on which it depends; just as no effect can be its own cause, but can only produce another effect, so no effect can be endowed with the power of self-preservation, but only with the power of ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... food, which other feelings exaggerated into a fancy to die rather than face the family. She burnt the provisions in a rage at their being forced on her, and she slept most of the time—torpor without acute suffering. Last night in sleep she lost her hold of her resolution, and woke to the sense of self-preservation.' ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... returned to his book, reflecting, as he prepared to resume it, on the wonderful provision of nature which endows the growing animal not only with such strong instincts of self-preservation, but with the power to gratify them, and to take itself off at the same time and be happy in so doing, thus saving those who have outgrown these natural proclivities from some of their less ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... he seems almost wilfully blind to the true solution round and about which his writing goes. He suggests as his most hopeful satisfaction for the cravings of the human heart, such a scientific prolongation of life that the instinct for self-preservation will be at last extinct. If that is not the very "resignation" he imputes to the Buddhist I do not know what it is. He believes that an individual which has lived fully and completely may at last welcome death ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... room; now, she was told to go forth—whither? She knew not—cared not—took her way towards the River, as by that instinct which, when the mind is diseased, tends towards self-destruction, scarce less involuntarily than it turns, in health, towards self-preservation. Just as she passed under the lamp-light at the foot of Westminster Bridge, a man looked at her, and seized her arm. She raised her head with a chilly, melancholy scorn, as if she had received an insult—as if she feared that the man ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... fireplace, and wrapped in furs. He got up to receive his guest, and Phineas saw at once that during the two years of his exile from England Lord Brentford had passed from manhood to senility. He almost tottered as he came forward, and he wrapped his coat around him with that air of studious self-preservation which belongs only ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... "Hark!-from-the-tombs-a-doleful-sound" style of conversation seemed to be the fashion: a state of things which caused one coming from a merry, social New England town, to feel as if she had got into an exhausted receiver; and the instinct of self-preservation, to say nothing of a philanthropic desire to serve the race, caused a speedy change in Ward ...
— Hospital Sketches • Louisa May Alcott
... there pulsed through him that tremendous and passionate instinct for self-preservation which comes to every man at such a time. What Tex meant to do he could not guess, but he knew that if he were left alone with the fellow he might as well give up all hope. He was weak as a cat, and felt sure that no appeal from him would move Lynch a particle. His only chance lay with ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... say that Falk is absolutely true to my experience of certain straightforward characters combining a perfectly natural ruthlessness with a certain amount of moral delicacy. Falk obeys the law of self-preservation without the slightest misgivings as to right, but at a crucial turn of that ruthlessly preserved life he will not condescend to dodge the truth. As he is presented as sensitive enough to be affected permanently by a certain unusual experience, that experience had to be set by me before the ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... lawless one, are not, however, necessarily and always of this character. Divine Providence, in making men gregarious in nature, has given them an instinct of organization, which is as intrinsic and as essential a characteristic of the human soul as maternal love or the principle of self-preservation. The right, therefore, of organizations of men to establish law and order among themselves, and to extend these principles to other communities around them, so far as such interpositions are really ...
— Darius the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... life, and the law of self-preservation ought, to teach her, that she is throwing herself away, if she, is not determined to stand by her banners and to defend her position." p. 11. Whatever definition we may adopt of the indefinite and cloudy term "life" ...
— American Lutheranism Vindicated; or, Examination of the Lutheran Symbols, on Certain Disputed Topics • Samuel Simon Schmucker
... every dissenter among themselves with a jealous eye? Within two years after their landing, they beheld a rival settlement attempted in their immediate neighborhood; and not long after, the laws of self-preservation compelled them to break up a nest of revellers, who boasted of protection from the mother country, and who had recurred to the easy but pernicious resource of feeding their wanton idleness, by furnishing the savages ...
— Orations • John Quincy Adams
... says: "If the American position was right in relation to taxation, the destruction of the tea was warranted by the great law of self-preservation. For it was not possible for them by any other means within the compass of probability to discharge the duty they owed to ...
— Tea Leaves • Various
... little Katy had a good hold. Helen Minorkey was quite as self-possessed, but her chief care was to get into a secure position herself. Nothing brings out character more distinctly than an emergency such as this. Miss Minorkey was resolute and bent on self-preservation from the first moment. Miss Marlay was resolute, but full of sympathy for the rest. With characteristic practical sense, she did what she could to make herself and those within her reach secure, and then with characteristic ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... ut." I jumped up and went to the colonel and begged a hatful of his precious oats, not for my sake, but for Van's. "Self-preservation is the first law of nature," and your own horse before that of all the world is the cavalryman's creed. It was a heap to ask, but Van's claim prevailed, and down the dark ravine "in the gloaming" Preuss and I hastened with ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... was inconceivable, he told himself, that a mind cunning enough to have executed this murder would give itself away in such a fashion. If she had indeed pried among her mistress' papers and found the will and note, would she not, from the most primitive instinct of self-preservation, have pretended total ignorance of the ...
— Murder at Bridge • Anne Austin
... a crisis as this," he said, "when everything dear and valuable to us is assailed, when this party hangs upon the wheels of government as a dead weight, opposing every measure that is calculated for defense and self-preservation, abetting the nefarious views of another nation upon our rights, preferring, as long as they dare contend openly against the spirit and resentment of the people, the interest of France to the welfare of their own country, justifying the former at ...
— George Washington, Vol. II • Henry Cabot Lodge
... hostile to liberty for a sex supposed for wise purposes to have been subordinated to man by divine decree. The equality of woman as a factor in religious organizations would compel an entire change in church canons, discipline, authority, and many doctrines of the Christian faith. As a matter of self-preservation, the church has no interest in the emancipation of woman, as its very existence ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... said, "it justifies itself. Take, for example, a strong instinct, like that of self-preservation. How completely it stands above all criticism! Not that it cannot be criticised in a kind of dilettante, abstract way; but in the moment of action the criticism simply disappears in face of ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... or two I felt as if I should fall. Then the instinct of self-preservation moved me to act, and with my hands stretched out before me I went quietly towards ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn
... ourselves to a raft, rather than to these burning planks; and that, if we wait till daylight, so many will be attempting to get on it, that we shall be all lost together. I don't ask you to desert your shipmates, Peter; but self-preservation, you know, is ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... his advocates say, to restore the constitution of his country. It was plain that there was too much party animosity and party ambition to permit the protector, shackled by the law, to carry out his designs of order and good government. Self-preservation compelled him to be suspicious and despotic, and also to prohibit the exercise of the Catholic worship, and to curtail the religious rights of the Quakers, Socinians, and Jews. The continual plottings and ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... spoken word. The faculties which make up the human mind are different and complex, and mysteriously blended. It may be that when tragedy upsets the frail structure of human life the brute instincts of watchfulness and self-preservation come uppermost, guarding against chance suspicion, or the loud word of accusation. Perhaps through Musard's mind was passing the thought of the strange manner in which the murder had been committed, and how he, by detaining everybody downstairs at the dinner table ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... on which I hung were carried away. The next moment I found myself struggling amid the foaming waters. The ship flew on. To heave-to or lower a boat I knew was impossible. I gave myself up for lost: still I struck out with the instinct of self-preservation. The seas dancing wildly around circumscribed my view, and I could only just see the masts of the ship as she receded from me. Several other poor fellows I knew had been hove into the sea off the yard with me. Though dressed only in a light shirt and trousers, I ...
— Charley Laurel - A Story of Adventure by Sea and Land • W. H. G. Kingston
... he was just an ordinary person with nothing to distinguish him from his neighbours, excepting perhaps that he was not anxious to get rich and was more neighbourly or more brotherly towards his fellows than most men. The sense of danger, the instinct of self-preservation supposed to be universal, was not in him, and there were occasions when this extraordinary defect produced the keenest distress in my mother. In hot summers we were subject to thunderstorms of an amazing violence, and at such times, when thunder and lightning were ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... mentioned that it was largely the acquirement of social foresight which made the first step in a moral advance which finally won the day. In this whole matter the first ethical instruction may well be based upon the idea of self-preservation—after all the backbone of much of our morals. When it comes to specific details of treatment these must be educational, alterative, and constructive. In Cases 1 and 3 under treatment we know that when the lying was discovered or suspected the individual was at once checked up and made to ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... admiration of this opponent's intellect, but forced to admit his mistakes—the mistakes of a too ardent mind. The more bitter and caustic the sarcasms that leaped from Hamilton's tongue, the more suave he grew, for placidity was his only weapon of self-preservation; a war of words with Hamilton, and he would be made ridiculous in the presence of his colleagues and Washington. Occasionally the volcano flared through his pale eyes, and betrayed such hate and resentment that Washington elevated his hands an inch. The President sat like a stoic, ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... him. He plunged. He staggered. . . . His senses after a few moments were bludgeoned into numbness by the roar of the sea; his body was sore from the impact of beating water and stinging gravel. He struggled on step by step, feeling his way along the shifting beach, until only the primal instinct of self-preservation was guiding him in the ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... at the beginning. My parents abandoned me. Why? They were starved to it, forced to it. Self-preservation is the first law. I don't clear them, but I understand. They were starving and irresponsible. I merely paid the price of relief, the price society ...
— The Dominant Dollar • Will Lillibridge
... Ann Walden stood and looked at the vacant spot whence the blow had come. The restraint she had put upon herself in Marcia Lowe's presence faded gradually; but presently a sensation of faintness warned the awakening senses of self-preservation. Slowly she reached for the letter which lay near—no one must ever see that! She would not read it, but it must be destroyed. And even as she argued, Ann Walden's hot, keen eyes were scanning the pages that unconsciously she had ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock
... bodies then congregating around him, Henry instantly countermanded the order, and saved the remainder of the prisoners. The bare facts of the case, from first to last, admit of no other alternative than for our judgment to pronounce it to have been altogether an imperative inevitable act of self-preservation, without the sacrifice of any life, or the suffering of any human being, (p. 174) beyond the absolute and indispensable necessity of ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 2 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... agreed that the Roman Catholic religion should in the prospective State have equal rights with the Orthodox. One would be disposed to criticize the Serbian Premier on account of a narrow policy dictated by his excessive wish for self-preservation—he saw very well that these clauses of equality might undermine the long reign of the Radicals—but it must be acknowledged that if the Southern Slavs had limited themselves to a Greater Serbia, in which the Radical party had been supreme, ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... outside, and biscuits into wardrobe, cup in alcove.] It's hell forty ways from the Jack. It's tough for me, but for a pretty woman with a lot o' rich fools jumping out o' their automobiles and hanging around stage doors, it must be something awful. I ain't blaming the women. They say "self-preservation is the first law of nature," and I guess that's right; but sometimes when the show is over and I see them fellows with their hair plastered back, smoking cigarettes in a [LAURA crosses to chair right of table and leans over back.] holder long enough to reach from ...
— The Easiest Way - Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911 • Eugene Walter
... structure is, in this moving world, a sufficient principle of permanence and individuality. The same mechanical principles, in more complex applications, insure the persistence of animal forms and prevent any permanent deviation from them. What is called the principle of self-preservation, and the final causes and substantial forms of the Aristotelian philosophy, are descriptions of the result of this operation. The tendency of everything to maintain and propagate its nature is simply the inertia of a stable juxtaposition of elements, which are not ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... whole soul; love itself, in the full blaze of happiness, could not illumine it. But it has sent its daughter, Pity, more familiar with gloomy misfortune, and she has dispelled the cloud, and opened again all the avenues of my soul to sensations of tenderness. The impulse of self-preservation awakes, when I have something more precious than myself to support, and to support through my own exertions. Do not let the word "pity" offend you. From the innocent cause of our distress we may hear the ...
— Minna von Barnhelm • Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
... the present opportunity, and take advantage of a like zeal in the Protestants of Scotland; nor could any doubt be entertained with regard to the justice of a measure founded on such evident necessity, and directed only to the ends of self-preservation: that though a French war, attended with great expense, seemed the necessary consequence of supporting the malecontents in Scotland, that power, if removed to the continent, would be much less formidable; and a small disbursement at present would, in the end, be found the greatest ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... development by which that lofty ideal would suffer. Anything which tends in the least to unsex, to unsphere woman, by so much works with a reflex influence on man and on society, and produces in both a gradual and dangerous deterioration. And self-preservation is the first instinct of society as well as of the individual being. Man, and the eternal and infinite order of the world, require that woman keep her proper place, and that she demand nothing which, granted, would introduce confusion and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... together, but now he sometimes went alone. In these absences he found relief from the stress of his constant vigilance; he was able to cast off the bond which enslaves the physician to his patient, and which he must ignore at times for mere self-preservation's sake; but there was always a lurking anxiety, which, though he refused to let it define itself to him, shortened the time and space he tried to put ...
— Between The Dark And The Daylight • William Dean Howells
... general emancipation and expatriation could be effected, and gradually and with due sacrifices I think it might be. But as it is, we have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other." ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... the very moment when the abbe, yielding to the instinct of self-preservation, uttered one last call for help, in a heart-piercing voice, the door against which he leaned opened behind him, and a firm hand caught hold of him, and pulled him into the church. Thanks to this movement, performed with the rapidity of lightning, ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... husband, her children, or her sister. Marie Antoinette might have saved her life twenty times, had not the King's safety, united with her own and that of her family, impelled her to reject every proposition of self-preservation.] ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 4 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... which the origin mounts up to the very infancy of civilisation. Still, neither the interest nor the security of Rome permitted him to be quite outlawed. All ancient communities ran the risk of being overthrown by a very slight disturbance of equilibrium, and the mere instinct of self-preservation would force the Romans to devise some method of adjusting the rights and duties of foreigners, who might otherwise—and this was a danger of real importance in the ancient world—have decided their controversies by armed strife. Moreover, at no period of Roman history was foreign trade ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... well-defined and useful place in rural morality, and witches, too, were indirectly teachers of charity, for no farm wife would refuse refreshments to the destitute lest vengeance should overtake her. In this way the deserving beggar obtained needed assistance from motives of self-preservation from benefactors whose fears ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... instantly. With rude hand he had suddenly toppled into the dust this child's dream-castle of love and happiness which he had himself helped her build. He felt like a criminal. But partly from a sense of duty, chiefly from the cowardice of self-preservation, he made no effort to ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... interest seemed to attract this future leader of mankind. The fact is that Lord Castleton had been taught everything that relates to property,—a knowledge which embraces a very wide circumference. It had been said to him, "You will be an immense proprietor: knowledge is essential to your self-preservation. You will be puzzled, bubbled, ridiculed, duped every day of your life if you do not make yourself acquainted with all by which property is assailed or defended, impoverished or increased. You have a vast stake in the country, you must learn all the interests of Europe,—nay, of the civilized world; ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... expressions included in these nine categories and let us note that they have the following characters in common: They are grouped in combinations that are often new and unforeseen; they are not a repetition of daily life, acts necessary for self-preservation. At one time the movements are combined simultaneously (exhibition of beautiful colors), again (and most often) successively (amorous parades, fights, flight, dancing, emission of noises, sounds or songs); but, under one form or another, there is creation, invention. Here, the imagination ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... the manifest necessity of a belligerent and constitutes restrictions upon the rights of American citizens on the high seas which are not justified by the rules of international law or required under the principle of self-preservation. ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... politic progress; And out of all they'll fabricate a charge So specious, that I must myself stand dumb. I am caught in my own net, and only force, Naught but a sudden rent can liberate me. 50 How else! since that the heart's unbiass'd instinct Impelled me to the daring deed, which now Necessity, self-preservation, orders. Stern is the On-look of Necessity, Not without shudder many a human hand 55 Grasps the mysterious urn of destiny. My deed was mine, remaining in my bosom, Once suffered to escape from its safe corner Within the heart, its nursery and birthplace, Sent forth into the Foreign, it belongs ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... think——" Clara began weakly, but stopped as she felt herself being seized by one of the men and lifted roughly to the saddle of a wiry little gray horse which was dancing around in a most disconcerting manner. It was a time for self-preservation and not for protest. She grasped the pommel desperately with one hand and the reins with the other, while her feet were being thrust into the straps of the stirrups—the stirrups themselves being ...
— Across the Mesa • Jarvis Hall
... when he whose strength was least stepped into a hole and fell, and his leg-bone snapped like a dry twig. He struggled and tried to rise; but his story was told, and before morning he was dead. For once our Buck's instinct of self-preservation had carried him too far. He had taken all the food for himself, and had starved his enemy; and now he was bound face to face ...
— Forest Neighbors - Life Stories of Wild Animals • William Davenport Hulbert
... is the lot of man. Even to the cares of self-preservation pain is joined. Happy are we, who in childhood are acquainted with only physical misfortunes—misfortunes far less cruel, less painful than others; misfortunes which far more rarely make us renounce life. We do not kill ourselves on account of the pains of gout; seldom ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... The vertigo then seized him, and, without knowing why, he began to call for help, though he had not been injured by the fall. The cold began to take him, and he rose with pain, urged by the sense of self-preservation. ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... attachment to the word of God because of gainsayers, is the instinct of self-preservation. The sight of so many making void the law makes a man bethink himself of what his own standing is. We, as they, are the children of the age. The tendencies to which they have yielded operate on us too, and ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... who durst execute it? The habit of seeing death ready to devour us; the certainty of our infallible destruction without this monstrous expedient; all, in short, had hardened our hearts to every feeling but that of self-preservation. Three sailors and a soldier took charge of this cruel business. We looked aside and shed tears of blood at the fate of these unfortunates. Among them were the wretched Sutler and her husband. Both had been grievously ...
— Perils and Captivity • Charlotte-Adelaide [nee Picard] Dard
... course, in this, as in a thousand other matters, Nature will burst out laughing in the face of the would-be philosopher, and bringing forward her town boy, will say, 'Look here!' For the town boys are Nature's boys after all, at least so long as doctrines of self-preservation and ambition have not turned them from children of the kingdom into dirt-worms. But I must stop, for I am getting up to the neck in a bog of discrimination. As if I did not know the nobility of some townspeople, compared with the ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... enterprise. The process of forcing an entrance into this over-world has to be repeated time after time. There are no enemies in front, but the man is surrounded by them from around and behind him. The indifference, in a large measure of the natural process, the rigid instincts of mere self-preservation, the temptation to smugness and ease, the cold conclusions of the understanding when satisfied with explanations from the physical world, the hardness of the heart—these and many other enemies fight for supremacy, and the soul is often torn in ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones
... simplified, in whom the merely primitive instincts have been accentuated by the force of circumstances—the instinct of self-preservation, the hard-gripped hope of living through, the joy of food, of drink, and of sleep. And at intervals they are cries and dark shudders of humanity that issue from the silence and the shadows of their great ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... to own land and droves of stock, and make deals with ranchmen, deals advantageous to himself. Why should a man want to make a deal or trade a horse or do a piece of work to another man's disadvantage? Self-preservation was the first law of life. But as the plants and trees and birds and beasts interpreted that law, merciless and inevitable as they were, they had neither greed nor dishonesty. They lived by the grand rule of what was best ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... greatest among themselves, and each one fearful that his own betrayal might come next, every crook, every thug in the Bad Lands now eyed his oldest pal with suspicion and distrust, and each was a self-constituted sleuth, with the prod of self-preservation behind him, sworn to the accomplishment of that unhallowed slogan—death to the Gray Seal. Almost daily now he must show himself as Larry the Bat in some gathering of the underworld—a prolonged absence from his haunts was not merely to invite certain suspicion, where all were ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... other hand, sudden prosperity has deranged more heads and killed more people than reverses and grief; either because it takes a longer time to get convinced of utter ruin than great good fortune, or because the instinct of self-preservation compels us to seek, in adversity, for resources to mitigate despair; whereas, in the assault of excessive joy, the soul's spring is distended and broken when it is suddenly compressed by too many thoughts and too many sensations. Sophocles, Diagoras, Philippides, died of joy. Another Greek ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... sort of instinct of self-preservation, has perverted even the idea of association, as something that might infringe upon it, or, to speak more accurately, ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... there gasping, then almost mechanically, guided by the sheer instinct of self-preservation, he not merely attempted, but actually succeeded in raising himself so as to bring his side against the gutter. Then continuing gradually to raise himself until his waist was on a level with the edge, he threw the weight of his trunk forward upon the roof, and slowly brought his right ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... mysterious vengeance, of supernatural punishment. And so it is, too, with the thunderstorm, with illness, with death, with the myriad phenomena and accidents of life. It would seem as though the true alarm of our soul, the great fear which stirs other instincts within us than that of mere self-preservation, is only called forth by the thought of a more or less determinate God, of a mysterious consciousness, a permanent, invisible justice, or a vigilant, eternal Providence. But does the "interpreter of life," who ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... wheeled about, it was a beast at bay, vibrant with the instinct of self-preservation, that faced a huge bull-ape that was ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... birds, their sweethearting and mating calls, seem only to be intelligible to birds of the same race, yet each bird takes warning with equal quickness from the danger-cry of every other. Here is, at least, an avian "Volapuk," a universal language understanded by the freemasonry of mutual self-preservation. ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... practical farmer, fills him with wrath when this immigrant takes possession of his pastures. Cattle will not eat the acrid, caustic plant - a sufficient reason for most members of the Ranunculaceae to stoop to the low trick of secreting poisonous or bitter juices. Self-preservation leads a cousin, the garden monk's hood, even to murderous practices. Since children will put everything within reach into their mouths, they should be warned against biting the buttercup's stem and leaves, that are ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... imagine that Steyn, Fischer, and the other educated men of the Free State did not know that, following Kruger's hostile policy of eliminating the preponderating Power in South Africa, meant that that Power would be forced either to fight in self-preservation or to disappear ignominiously? For I maintain that there were only two courses open to England in answer to Kruger's challenging policy—to fight or to retire from South Africa. It was only possible for men suffering from tremendously swollen ...
— The War in South Africa - Its Cause and Conduct • Arthur Conan Doyle
... civilisation seem to sleep. It was in this state of the country, when every man's hand was against his neighbour, when law was unheard amid the strife, that feudalism arose, a natural development of the desire for self-preservation, which led to associations to supply the mutual protection which there was no strength behind the law to enforce. In all these movements the Church had an active part. [Sidenote: The influence of the Church.] It ...
— The Church and the Barbarians - Being an Outline of the History of the Church from A.D. 461 to A.D. 1003 • William Holden Hutton
... hands, should he see fit to make them prisoners. The Marechal possessed too much tact, however, to make such an attempt, as in the one case he must incur the everlasting enmity of the heir-presumptive to the Crown, or, in the other, Gaston, roused by a feeling of self-preservation, might attempt to renew the conflict, and finally retrieve the fortunes of the day. By the fall of Montmorency, moreover, sufficient had been accomplished to annihilate the faction of Monsieur; and thus the royal general ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... fight my kiss more than a couple seconds. Then it was a pure case of self-preservation for me. This girl was a tiger. Looks can be awfully deceiving. But ...
— Card Trick • Walter Bupp AKA Randall Garrett
... virtue. It is a means of self-preservation—without this degree of initiation into the boundless area of universal, or cosmic consciousness, we may not ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... a soldier on the eve of, or in battle, or at its close. It is no use denying it, all soldiers feel as other people do, and when a soldier tells as a fact that he "went into battle without fear," he simply tells "what George Washington never told." It is human, and "self-preservation is the first law of nature." No one wants to die. Of course ambition, love of glory, the plaudits of your comrades and countrymen, will cause many a blade to flash where otherwise it would not. But every soldier who reads this will say that this is honest and ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... money, etc., etc. At any other time it would have provoked Brown excessively to see the unceremonious manner in which the thieves shared his property, and made themselves merry at the expense of the owner. But the moment was too perilous to admit any thoughts but what had immediate reference to self-preservation. ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... Fillmore sidled off like a bird hopping from the compelling gaze of a snake. He was not quite sure that he was acting correctly in allowing his sister to roam at large among the somewhat Bohemian surroundings of a training-camp, but the instinct of self-preservation turned the scale. He had breakfasted early, and if he did not eat right speedily it seemed to him that dissolution would ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... your enemies by thrusting before them aims and visions of the future, calculated to arouse in them most serious alarm and apprehension, and thus eventually caused them to unite against you—not, as you think, through envy or hate, but through the much more powerful motives of self-preservation, and of fear of your aims ...
— Right Above Race • Otto Hermann Kahn
... SELF-PRESERVATION; a popular Essay on the Concealed Causes of Nervous Debility, Local and General Weakness, Indigestion, Lowness of Spirits, Mental Irritability, and Insanity; with Practical Observations on their Treatment and Cure. By SAMUEL LA'MERT, Consulting Surgeon, 9 Bedford street, Bedford square, London; ...
— The Economist - Volume 1, No. 3 • Various
... himself, capable of hewing to the line of his own desires at any cost. She realized her utter helplessness, and the realization left her without words. He had drawn a vivid picture, and the instinct of self-preservation asserted itself. ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... of you must fall, Self-preservation is the first of laws; And if, when subjects are oppressed by kings, They justify rebellion by that law, As well may monarchs turn the edge of right To cut for ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... fear beyond which, for self-preservation, a kind of calm strength lies that suggests ways of safety. Nancy did not run or cry out, she did not withdraw her icy hands from the brown, claw-like fingers that held them; she even smiled a faint, ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... with nations and governments, as with individuals, is self-preservation. It was the vital interests of national defence that caused Pitt to undertake the difficult and thankless task of creating the legislative union. If that union was necessary for the salvation of England and the foundation of ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... it has not done it here. The question here is, whether the treaty be really so very fatal as to oblige the nation to break its faith. I admit that such a treaty ought not to be executed. I admit that self-preservation is the first law of society, as well as of individuals. It would, perhaps, be deemed an abuse of terms to call that a treaty, which violates such a principle. I waive also, for the present, any inquiry, what departments shall represent the nation, and annul the stipulations ...
— American Eloquence, Volume I. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... the vital forces with which living things are endowed, the two most potent are the instinct for self-preservation and the instinct for race-preservation. This latter gives rise to the reproductive urge. So deep-seated is this instinctive force, that in many instances in the vegetable world, the threat of individual death results in a special effort of reproduction ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray
... among the masses, the most influential element in their character, is the religious element. It is as instinctive and elemental as the law of self-preservation. It informs the whole intellect and personality of ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... generation after generation; where they pursue each other in the struggle for life, and carry on their love affairs with the same feelings, the same sufferings, and the same joys that permeate every living being from these microscopic animalcules up to man—self-preservation and propagation—that is the whole story. Fiercely as we human beings struggle to push our way on through the labyrinth of life, their struggles are assuredly no less fierce than ours—one incessant, restless hurrying to and fro, pushing all others aside, ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... ulterior yet perfectly definite and concrete object, to gain which he is prepared to sacrifice the immediate gratification of his senses. That this is or may be so, the examples I have cited are amply sufficient to prove. They show that where the instinct of self-preservation, which manifests itself chiefly in the search for food, conflicts or appears to conflict with the instinct which conduces to the propagation of the species, the former instinct, as the primary and more fundamental, is capable of overmastering the latter. ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... The police function. The police function is that of public defense and the maintenance of domestic order. In family or patriarchal communities all share a common income and combine in the common defense, but self-preservation often has compelled such small communities to form a larger, stronger state for the common defense. Public defense requires sacrifice of some independence on the part of the family and of the individual. Personal service in the field gives place later in some measure to the payment ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... between men and gods as insubordinate and poor as himself. No one having superfluities to give, there existed no parasite by the name of priest, no tribute by the name of victim, no empire by the name of altar. Their dogmas and their morals were the same thing, it was only self-preservation; and religion, that arbitrary idea, without influence on the mutual relations of men, was a vain homage rendered to the ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... Russia will endure great hardships, in the years to come as before. But the Russians are inured to misery as no Western nation is; they can live and work under conditions which we should find intolerable. The Government will be driven more and more, from mere self-preservation, into a policy of imperialism. The Entente has been doing everything to expose Germany to a Russian invasion of arms and leaflets, by allowing Poland to engage in war and compelling Germany to disarm. All Asia lies open to Bolshevik ambitions. Almost the whole of the former Russian ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... may take his novel up and put it down, spend days upon it in vain, and write not any more than he makes haste to blot. Not so the Beginner. Human nature has certain rights; instinct—the instinct of self-preservation—forbids that any man (cheered and supported by the consciousness of no previous victory) should endure the miseries of unsuccessful literary toil beyond a period to be measured in weeks. There must be something for hope to feed upon. The beginner must have a slant of wind, a lucky vein ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... gasp rose to his lips, and died there. Scarcely a dozen paces from him stood a poised and hooded figure, a squat, fire-eyed apparition that looked more like monster than man in that first glance. Something acted within him that was swifter than reason—a sub-conscious instinct that works for self-preservation like the flash of powder in a pan. It was this sub-conscious self that received the first photographic impression—the strange poise of the hooded creature, the uplifted arm, the cold, streaky gleam of something in the dawn-light, and in response ...
— The Golden Snare • James Oliver Curwood
... said, the real sense of hunger passes away quickly there remains the instinct to eat. That is the working of the first law of nature—self-preservation. It prompts one to eat anything that one can chew or swallow, and it is what makes men eat refuse the thought of which would sicken them at other times. Of course, Easton and I were like everybody else under similar conditions. ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace
... where they are led and to do as they are bid. They are tough, and able to bear a great deal. Simple men who have been artificially simplified yet more, and in whom, by the force of circumstances, the primitive instincts have become accentuated: the instinct of self-preservation, egoism, the dogged hope of living through, the lust of eating, drinking, and sleeping." Even amid the dangers of an artillery attack, within a few hours they get bored, yawn, play cards, talk nonsense, "snatch forty winks"—in a word, they are bored. "The overwhelming vastness of these great bombardments ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... disposition that does not become tyrannical. All animated nature is despotic, the strong preying upon the weak. If men and women do not devour one another, it is merely because they dare not. The law of self-preservation prevents them from becoming anthropophagi. A knowledge that the eater may in his turn be eaten, is not appetizing. Materially and professionally successful, possessed of a physique that did honor to his ancestors and Nature, no shadows fell on Landor's ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... quite as startling as this, nor has any English politician found it damaging to be bold. On this occasion indeed (in 1836) Lincoln was far from damaging himself; the Whigs had not till a few years later been induced, for self-preservation, to copy the Democratic machine. But it is striking that the admiring friend who reports this declaration, "too audacious and emphatic for the statesmen of a later day," must carefully explain how ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... injunction had been given. But, mark well, it is not after the manner of men that Jesus warns his disciples to take heed to themselves. He does not mean that they should be solicitous to protect themselves from receiving injury: he leaves that to the natural instincts of self-preservation, and warns them against danger on another side, where nature supplies no defence. He does not mean, Take heed lest you suffer by the stroke which an enemy may deal against you; he means, Take heed lest you sin in spirit and conduct ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... closely allied! Otherwise his condition manifested itself by complete loss of memory;—the impossibility of concentrating his attention upon anything, lack of judgment, delirium and incoherence. He no longer even possessed the natural animal instinct of self-preservation, and had to be watched like an infant whom one never permits out of one's sight. Therefore a warder was detailed to keep close watch over him by day and by night in Pavilion No. 17, at the end of Healthful House Park, which had been specially set ...
— Facing the Flag • Jules Verne
... sentence had let loose upon him. So long was it since he had placed these weightier matters of diplomacy and government in other hands, that the renewed sense of responsibility and the imminent need for action seemed to be crushing in his brain. But the instinct of self-preservation, backed by the one kingly attribute left him—love of his country—strengthened him to attempt a final effort to combat the overpowering odds which he felt rather than ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... a refined sarcasm which maddened me, and, as he concluded, he began to edge stealthily toward me. So strong is the instinct of self-preservation within us that I doubt not a would-be suicide, caught in the act of hanging himself, would struggle madly for his life were someone else to forcibly adjust the noose about his neck. At all events, I found myself unwilling, at the last moment, to have someone else launch me into eternity and, as ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... a rhetorical question, though she didn't know it under that name; she made no reply. She would really have preferred no more questions of any sort—what was the use of them? In her, as in all the Maker's creatures, the instinct for self-preservation was planted to work resistlessly. Small wonder, indeed, if, in the unexpected discovery that dependence on Dalhousie's dubious gentlemanliness was unnecessary, the uprush of relief should have swept away all lesser considerations, ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... house at which I intended to dine. There I heard that the reason for this slave being thus punished, was on account of his having killed the overseer of the plantation. They told me that the laws of self-preservation rendered such executions necessary; and supported the doctrine of slavery with the arguments generally made use of to justify the practice; with the repetition of which I shall ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... in making it illegal to teach a colored person to read and write struck this spark from his pen: "There is something unspeakably pitiable and alarming," he writes in the Philanthropist, "in the state of that society where it is deemed necessary, for self-preservation, to seal up the mind and debase the intellect of man to brutal incapacity.... Truly the alternatives of oppression are terrible. But this state of things cannot always last, nor ignorance alone shield us from destruction." His interest ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... to be regretted, that a practice so horrid in its own nature, and so destructive of that inviolable right of self-preservation which every one is born with, should be found still existing; and (such is the power of superstition to counteract the first principles of humanity!) existing amongst a people, in many other respects, emerged from the brutal manners of savage life. What is still worse, it is probable that ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... living is the function which education is to discharge. We must therefore classify the leading kinds of activity which constitute human life. In order of importance they are (1) those which directly minister to self-preservation, (2) those which by securing the necessaries of life indirectly minister to self-preservation, (3) those which have for their end the rearing and discipline of offspring, (4) those which are involved in the maintenance of proper social and political relations, ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... and the government. The organ of the Austrian Foreign Office, the Fremdenblatt, expressed regret that the Slav parties in the Reichsrat "place obstacles in the way of peace." It also regretted that "some parties in the Austrian Parliament should take up an attitude incompatible with our state's self-preservation." On the next day, M. Stanek made a declaration in the delegations in the name of Czechs and ...
— Independent Bohemia • Vladimir Nosek
... she returned lightly, but still breathing hard; "it was the instinct of self-preservation. I was unsteady on my feet for a moment, and sought something to take hold of. That pirate was the nearest thing, and I caught hold of his cloak; I'm sure it was a cloak, and that makes me sure he was a human villain of some sort. He didn't feel in the least like a sea-serpent. ...
— The Port of Missing Men • Meredith Nicholson
... exceptions. The Commissioners observed, that hitherto the hopes of a reunion had checked the extremes of war. Henceforth the contest would be changed. If the British colonies were to become an accession to France, the law of self-preservation must direct Great Britain to render the accession of as little avail as possible to her enemy. Mr. Fox and others in the House of Commons inveighed with great plausibility against this passage, us threatening a war of savage desolation. Others again, as friends ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... make him in after years a leader and a teacher: to strive with all his strength for the conservation of all that, was best in the ancient life, and to fearlessly oppose further introduction of anything not essential to national self-preservation, or helpful to national, self-development. Fail he well, might, and without shame; but he could hope at least to save something of worth from the drift of wreckage. The wastefulness of Western life had impressed him more than its greed of pleasure and its capacity for pain: ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... deal only in facts. Computers are machines; they have no sense of self-preservation. If Merlin ought to be destroyed, ...
— The Cosmic Computer • Henry Beam Piper
... her capability of performing her duty to herself, her family, and to society, taking self-preservation as the first law of her nature. At present she does not fully act in her sphere. The lid of the ballot-box shuts out more than one-half of her duty to herself, family, and society. The eye of the law ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... connection, but they could hardly regard it as reassuring. He made a brief prowl then through the main sections of the level. Evidence everywhere of a short and furious struggle, a struggle between men panicked and enraged almost beyond any regard for self-preservation. It must have been over in minutes. He found that the big hall portal to the ground level had been sealed, whether before or after the shooting he couldn't know. There would have been around twenty members of the Brotherhood on the ...
— Lion Loose • James H. Schmitz
... or different the intensity of its manifestation. It guides us all from the cradle to the grave. It may be restricted within certain limits, but never entirely extinguished. It is, in the domain of economy, what the instinct of self-preservation is to our physical existence, a powerful principle of creation, preservation and of renewed life (I. Thessal., 4, 11, seq.).(106) Then there is the incentive of the demand of God's voice within us, the voice of conscience, whether we call it, in philosophic ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... dignity of his character on any occasion. His friends say that he was as genial and approachable as a school boy, and that is what I should expect to find in a head like his. We might have contented ourselves, however, with a more distant manner and a more haughty nature, for the sake of his self-preservation. ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
... the Musick of their Chains, which was, indeed, the greater Part of the Inhabitants of the Globe, would brand this generous Crew with the insidious Name of Pyrates, and think it meritorious, to be instrumental in their Destruction.—Self-Preservation therefore, and not a cruel Disposition, obliged him to declare War against all such as should refuse him the Entry of their Ports, and against all, who should not immediately surrender and give up what their Necessities required; but in a more particular Manner against ...
— Of Captain Mission • Daniel Defoe
... hand fell powerless by his side. The pirates, though they still fought on, were evidently disheartened at the fall of their leaders; but the English were proportionately encouraged, and dashing on once more, they cut down every pirate opposing them. Some attempted to fly, prompted by the instinct of self-preservation; but they were met by a party under O'Grady, sent round to attack them in the rear, and at last, in the hopes of prolonging their lives, they threw down their arms and begged for quarter. However fierce men may be, very few will fight on with the certainty of being ...
— Paul Gerrard - The Cabin Boy • W.H.G. Kingston
... at the moment I can't say; for with that selfish instinct of self-preservation which makes a man in the instant of danger grasp anything, regardless of what his comrades in distress might be doing, I grappled hold of one of the oars and the pork breaker, besides the stern-sheet grating, which I forgot to say also floated ...
— The Penang Pirate - and, The Lost Pinnace • John Conroy Hutcheson
... although to my mind their cause was not so precious as that of the Hollanders, who had not only to fight against overwhelming forces, but to preserve religious as well as civil liberties. The Dutch fought for religion and self-preservation; the Americans, to resist a tax which nearly all England thought it had a right to impose, and which was by no means burdensome,—a mooted question in the highest courts of law; at bottom, however, it was not so much to resist a tax as to gain national independence ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord
... president wants him to say. It is a sort of begging the question. The average college student is apt to have too much respect for the president's feelings to be frank in such a case. He likewise has a keen sense of self-preservation. He does not want to incur the ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... daily as a man takes his bitters, and then fall silent and think they are thinking. But the mind goes out under this regimen, like a fire without a draught; and it is not very strange, if the instinct of mental self-preservation drives them to brandy-and-water, which makes the hoarse whisper of memory musical for a few brief moments, and puts a weak leer of promise on the features of the hollow-eyed future. The Colonel was kept pretty well in ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... 1795, concluded at Basle that treaty to which we owe all our conquests and Germany and Italy all their disasters? It is not probable that the parent of pacification will destroy its own progeny, if self-preservation does not ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... friends of civil liberty throughout the world, and in the midst of public and individual prosperity unexampled in history, we are called to decide whether these laws possess any force and that Union the means of self-preservation. The decision of this question by an enlightened and patriotic people can not be doubtful. For myself, fellow-citizens, devoutly relying upon that kind Providence which has hitherto watched over our destinies, and actuated by a profound reverence ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, - Vol. 2, Part 3, Andrew Jackson, 1st term • Edited by James D. Richardson
... from their dominion, conscience, reason, all the spiritual tests she had lived by, looked like far, pale clouds floating over some somber, burning landscape, where, among flames and darkness, she was running for her life. Reason, conscience, were still with her, but turned to the task of self-preservation. "He is mine. I know it. I felt it. They shall not take him from me. It is my right, my duty, to keep him, for he is all that I have left in life." The last veil descended upon her soul when, her frosty young nature fired ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... the agent. "It's hell forty ways from the Jack. It's tough for me, but for a pretty woman with a lot o' rich fools jumping out o' their automobiles and hanging around stage doors, it must be something awful. I ain't blaming the women. They say 'self-preservation is the first law of nature,' and I guess that's right; but sometimes when the show is over and I see them fellows with their hair plastered back, smoking cigarettes in a holder long enough to reach from ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... Express could never have existed on its high plane of efficiency, without an abundance of coolheaded, hardened men; men who knew not fear and who were expert—though sometimes in vain—in all the wonderful arts of self-preservation practiced on the old frontier. That these employees could have performed even the simplest of their duties, without stirring and almost incredible adventures, it is needless ...
— The Story of the Pony Express • Glenn D. Bradley
... drought she had been compelled to venture into the unknown land. The streams and lagoons had dried; those of the animals that did not perish outright migrated, and Suma had followed the living stream as a matter of self-preservation for, without food and water, life could not be sustained. But the venture had proved painful in at least one respect for men dwelt along the border of the master river, and in the very first encounter ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller
... laying his hand gently on her own, "I have always known you to be wiser than most women, the result no doubt, of your early life and training in the wilds where people must live by their wits for self-preservation if for nothing else." He paused that he might the better collect his thoughts. She guessed what was coming and began toying with her fan, an arch smile playing about her delicate, sensitive mouth as she regarded him out of the corners ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... his manner was bad, as on that occasion; it was now very good, as being modest, gracious, and ready. Yet the something never left it. It has been written of men who have undergone a cruel captivity, or who have passed through a terrible strait, or who in self-preservation have killed a defenceless fellow-creature, that the record thereof has never faded from their countenances until they died. Was there ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... hours when I was obeying the great imperative law of self-preservation, was clutching at every log that floated by me regardless of whether it was my property or not so long as it would help me keep my head above water—what was going on all around me? In every office of the downtown district—merchant, banker, broker, lawyer, man of commerce or finance—was not ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
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