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More "Selfishness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... never crossed that threshold, or crossing it had never brought ruin to one of its inmates. Agnes was not the same woman whom we first knew. All hope of the doctor had long since been given up, and as Jessie grew older the mother nature was stronger within her, subduing her selfishness, and making her far more gentle and considerate for others than she had been before. To Maddy she was exceedingly kind, and never more so in manner than now, when they sat talking together in the humble ...
— Aikenside • Mary J. Holmes
... and Chouteau had disgusted him by their trickiness and low selfishness, stealing whatever they could lay hands on and never dividing with their comrades, while no good was to be got out of Lapoulle, the brute, and ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... the beginnings of a successful career, for humanity with all its selfishness takes a generous pleasure in the advancement of those who have made an honest fight for fame or wealth. The first success of Dickens came with the publication of the Pickwick Papers, by the publication of which the publishers, ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... yet. And I don't care if they do." To which he straightway added, as if to deal with the charge of selfishness that his words, sounding for himself, struck him as enabling her to make: "Why not have done with it all and face the music as we are?" It broke from him in perfect sincerity. "Good God, ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... the cry is "Each for himself!" But in a cataclysm, the obvious wise selfishness is generosity, and the cry is, "Stand together, for, singly, we perish." This was a cataclysm. No one could save himself, except the few who, taking my often-urged advice and following my example, had entered the ark of ready money. ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... Mr. Haw. Why, I should be a traitor to the whole village if I were to encourage such a scheme. The hill is the one thing which gives Tamfield the slightest individuality. It would be the height of selfishness to sacrifice it in order to improve the ...
— The Doings Of Raffles Haw • Arthur Conan Doyle
... tender and fatherly things to the bereaved family and to the church, one of which was that we who knew of our brother's sufferings, could have had but the one motive of selfishness for detaining him an hour longer than he ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... no adaptation of the whole nature for each other; they will not appreciate the sacred mysteriousness of marriage; instead of the moral and religious development of the spiritual nature, there will be the evolution of selfishness and sensuality as the leading motives of domestic life. We see, then, that the Christian cannot with impunity, violate the scripture law, "Be not unequally ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... readers of his time because they will not endure with patience the true picture of a natural man. "Even the gentlemen of our age," he says,—adding that the story of Pendennis is an attempt to describe one of them, just as he is,—"even those we cannot show as they are with the notorious selfishness of their time and their education. Since the author of Tom Jones was buried, no writer of fiction among us has been permitted to depict to his utmost power a MAN. We must shape him, and give him ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... are practical, and are used as motives to purity, love and beneficence. All the promises are given to support and cheer people in the faithful discharge of their duty. All the warnings are to keep men from idleness, selfishness and sin. The Church and all its ministries; the Scriptures and all their revelations; Providence and all its dispensations; nature and all her operations, are all presented as means and motives to a ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... sullen. He was an utterly spoiled boy, if one can be called spoiled, who had so few good qualities which admitted of being spoiled. He inherited his father's bad traits, his selfishness and unscrupulousness, in addition to a spirit of deceitfulness and hypocrisy from his mother's nature. He was not as censurable as he would have been had he ...
— Tom, The Bootblack - or, The Road to Success • Horatio Alger
... past there is much to deplore, the blunders of English ministers, the want of judgment on the part of governors, the selfishness of "family compacts," the arrogance of office-holders, the recklessness of Canadian politicians. But the very trials of the crisis through which Canada passed brought out the fact, that if English statesmen had mistaken ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot
... and quick-witted, and take a dislike to the petted one. Do not rouse the old Adam in them. Let children be taught to be "kindly affectioned one to another with brotherly love;" let them be encouraged to share each other's toys and playthings, and to banish selfishness. ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... to Congress when he once snuffed the air of Washington. There was something grateful to Abel Newt in the wide sphere and complicated relations of the political capital, of which the atmosphere was one of intrigue, and which was built over the mines and countermines of selfishness. He hoodwinked all Belch's spies, so that the Honorable Mr. Ele could never ascertain any thing about his colleague, until once when he discovered that the report upon the Grant was to be brought in within a day or two by the Committee, and that it would be recommended, upon which ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... said to me this morning, when I offered to share my wealth with them, God knows as honestly as I offered to share my heart with you. I suppose that you are both right; that there must be some curse of pride or selfishness upon the money that I have got; but I have not felt it yet, and the fault does ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... Duff, it had a deeper root in my regard for his sister, and one yet deeper in my regard for myself—for had I not longed to show off in her eyes? I suspect almost all silly actions have their root in selfishness, whether it take the form of vanity, of conceit, of greed, or ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald
... occurrence as a death in a lazaretto, mere selfishness renders striking. We were walking with him but two days ago on deck. One has a sketch of him, another his card, with the address written yesterday, and given with an invitation to come and see him at home in the country, where his children are looking ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... form of selfishness, however abstract and unhuman, requires the support of at least one meal a day; and though Lapidoth's appetite for food and drink was extremely moderate, he had slipped into a shabby, unfriendly form of life in which the appetite could not be satisfied without some ready money. ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... was most reluctant to part with his nephew at such a time, he deemed that it would be an exhibition of selfishness on his part to compel his attendance upon himself when it was possible that by remaining he might save the lives of some of the unfortunates within the fort. Therefore he reluctantly gave his consent that Rene should remain behind for a short time, but charged him not to unnecessarily ...
— The Flamingo Feather • Kirk Munroe
... so teeming with intelligence, so rich in philosophy, was poor in faith, bankrupt in morals, without religion, without poetry, and without imagination. The divine ideals of virtue and renunciation were drowned in a sea of selfishness and materialism. The austere devotion of Pascal was out of fashion. The spiritual teachings of Bossuet and Fenelon represented the out-worn creeds of an age that was dead. It was Voltaire who gave the tone, and even Voltaire was not radical enough for many of these iconoclasts. "He is a ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... that capacity seven years before, since that alert nomenclator would have recognized me at once. But he had died of the plague and his successor had never set eyes on me. Vedius himself would certainly have known me for my true self but for his inveterate selfishness, and self-absorption and his incapacity for being diverted from whatever thought or idea happened to be uppermost in his narrow mind. He was, for some reason, eager to be done with his reception and had no eyes for any visitors except those from whom he expected immediate and positive ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... it. It was gripped in a baby pressure, and I stood there enraptured, feeling as if a flower had caressed me. I was thrilled through and through with happiness, and with love for this little creature, whom my selfishness might have destroyed. There was nothing in what had happened during this moment or two when I stood by her side to assure me that all was well with her; but I did so believe, and I said over and over: "Thank you, God! ...
— Painted Windows • Elia W. Peattie
... sins were the ruin of others, Though the chief sinner's own guilt may be waived: What! shall the doom of those sisters and brothers Not be a sorrow to thee that art saved? Can utter selfishness be God's Nirwana, Blest—with our brethren of blessing bereft? Must not His Heaven seem poorer and vainer, Where one is taken and others ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... all, so he told himself, really rooted in masculine selfishness,—the absorbing selfishness of old bachelorhood, which had grown round him like a shell, shutting him out altogether from the soft influences of feminine attraction,—so much so indeed that he had even come to look upon his domestic indoor servants as obliging machines rather ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... be compromised in that way in my last week with the company.' Paul stared at her with a face so disconsolate that she laughed; but she put on a tender seriousness a moment later. 'Do you call that love, Paul? Ah, no! Few men—very few—ever so much as learn the meaning of the word. It is pure selfishness. You don't think of poor Claudia. You would let her reputation be torn to rags and tatters, but what would that amount to if only you could ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... the Kindergarten has its great value. In the true Kindergarten the children live under a dispensation of loving justice, and selfishness betrays itself instantly there, because it is alien to the whole spirit of the place. Showing itself, it is promptly condemned, and the child stands convicted by the only tribunal whose verdict really moves him—a jury of his peers. Normal children hate selfishness and condemn it, and the selfish ...
— Study of Child Life • Marion Foster Washburne
... at liberty himself to seek relief in his duties and avocations, he can scarcely enter into the privations and embarrassments of those to whom all is so new and painful. But, in the patron of the Winkelried, there existed a natural in difference to the grievances of others, and a narrow selfishness of disposition, in aid of the opinions which had been formed by a life of hardship and exposure. He considered the vulgar passenger as so much troublesome freight, which, while it brought the advantage of a higher remuneration than the same cubic measurement ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... and to give him the sympathy and help which she should have been the first to offer, and which would have counted more when coming from her than from any one else. She determined to make amends at once for her thoughtlessness and selfishness, and her brain was pleasantly occupied with plans and acts of kindness. It was a new entertainment, and she found she delighted in it. She directed the cabman to go to Solomons's, and from there sent Philip a bunch of flowers and a line saying that on the following day she was coming to take ...
— The Exiles and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... little known to me since my childhood, was so old and infirm, and so entirely cheerful, resigned, and even desirous of leaving this world, that few, even of those who knew and loved him better than I did, could, without selfishness, lament his release. Mr. Twiss, the father of my cousin Horace, is dead lately; and it is of him that I speak. He has unfortunately left three daughters, who, though doing well for themselves in the world, ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... hours, I will use my influence at court to have you put to death as an impostor." Poor Ahmed was thunderstruck. He stood long without being able to speak, reflecting on his misfortunes, and grieving, above all, that his wife, whom he so loved, had, by her envy and selfishness, brought him to such a fearful alternative. Full of these sad thoughts, he exclaimed aloud, "O woman! woman! thou art more baneful to the happiness of man than the poisonous dragon of the desert!" Now the lost ruby had been secreted by the jeweller's ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... people had lost the Saviour's blessed lessons of self-sacrifice and unselfish love. They had been led away from the practice of self-denial for the good of others. The rich had found no rebuke for their oppression of the poor, the poor no help for their servitude and degradation. The selfishness of the wealthy and powerful grew more and more apparent and oppressive. For centuries the greed and profligacy of the noble resulted in grinding extortion toward the peasant. The rich wronged the poor, and the poor ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... said 'give,' but I was afraid it would hurt your pride. My stepfather gave me some money to buy jewellery for a wedding present, and as a pure matter of selfishness I'd get more pleasure out of helping you than out of a stupid brooch. And listen, Sophie, listen! I'm going to explain.—I chose to take up teaching because I wanted to be independent, and I knew my mother would be happier without me during the first ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... perfectly understand," replied Lady Selina, scornfully, "that your side—and especially your Socialist friends, put down all that we do and say to greed and selfishness. It is our ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of courtship. Perhaps this consideration impelled me. I have but little confidence in the cold heart that is won by a series of assiduities. There is too much calculation of after-events—too much selfishness. ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... flies, And then doth perch so nearly, that a word May lure him back to his accustomed nest; And Duty lingers even when Love is gone, Oft looking out in hope of his return; And, after Duty hath been driven forth, Then Selfishness creeps in the last of all, Warming her lean hands at the lonely hearth, And crouching o'er the embers, to shut out Whatever paltry warmth and light are left, 50 With avaricious greed, from all beside. So, for long months, the sister ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... base. The false word, the unjust deed, the foul action, seen as a surrender to evil, appears hateful and guilty. It deserves the indignation and the shame which attach to all treason. And the spirit which lies behind all these forms of disloyalty to the good,—the spirit which issues in selfishness and sensuality, cruelty and lust, intemperance and covetousness,—this animating spirit of evil which works against the Divine will and mars the peace and order of the universe is the great Adversary against whom we must fight for our ...
— Joy & Power • Henry van Dyke
... were now considered a luxury. The most trifling article of food, a lemon, a small bottle of spirituous dentrifice, a little garlic, became causes of contention; and every daily distribution of wine awakened a spirit of selfishness and ferocity, which common sufferings and common interest could not ...
— Thrilling Stories Of The Ocean • Marmaduke Park
... her schemes, an her selfishness and her wiles, all her wit and genius had come to this bankruptcy. The woman closed the curtains and, with some entreaty and show of kindness, persuaded her mistress to lie down on the bed. Then ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... feathers. I decided to take anything honourable as an occupation, even though it were not in one of the learned professions. I began to answer advertisements and apply at business offices for something to give me a living, but with no success. I began to feel the selfishness of men. God pity the warm and tender heart of youth when it begins to harden and grow chill, as mine did then; to put away its cheery confidence forever; to make a new estimate of itself and others. Look out for that ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... the words of Mr. Talfourd, "to mourn the severance of a life-long association, as free from every alloy of selfishness, as remarkable for moral beauty, as this world ever witnessed in brother and sister. "I have felt desirous to place in relief, as far as might be, such an interesting union—to show how blest a fraternal marriage may be, and what sufficient helpmates a brother ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... in the aggregate May average on the whole with parturition. But as to women, who can penetrate The real sufferings of their she condition? Man's very sympathy with their estate Has much of selfishness, and more suspicion. Their love, their virtue, beauty, education, But form good housekeepers, to ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... the deeper insight into motive and the faith in goodness which are shown by Browning, are read by us as utterances of a past age. We have grown used to a presentment of human life such as Ibsen's in which the customary morality is regarded as a thin veneer of convention which hardly covers the selfishness in grain, or to the description of life as a tangled mass of animal passions,—a description which, in spite of the genius of Zola, does not fail to weary and disgust,—or perhaps as only a spectacle in which what men call good and evil are the light and shade ...
— Recent Tendencies in Ethics • William Ritchie Sorley
... not but notice how particular Elmer was to use the plural pronoun. But then, that was always his way. Whatever faults the boy may have had—and the best of fellows comes far from being perfect—selfishness was not one of them. Impatiently they waited for the coming of the six scouts forming the last detachment. This would increase their roll-call to sixteen, lacking only one of the number that had ...
— Pathfinder - or, The Missing Tenderfoot • Alan Douglas
... then Dawson, shortsighted as he was in his selfishness, began to perceive that things were not coming all right, as he had expected. Once or twice when I went into his shop, I caught him sitting idle before his lathe, with a most woe-begone look ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett
... thing you are not easily moved. But you have a mean, grasping disposition and a tendency to want more than your share. You have formed an attachment which you hope will be continued throughout life, but your selfishness threatens ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... any member of their families. Occasionally, when his rheumatism was exceptionally severe or his cough racking, this reflection embittered the Doctor. At other times—and this was generally—he accepted with philosophy this integral selfishness of clients as a part of their inevitable constitution. They were a set of people necessarily immersed and absorbed in their own woes, or in that extension of their woes which was still more passionately their own, and even more unmercifully insisted upon in proportion to the decent veneer of ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... superstitiously afraid of taking part against the Emperor, but they were sybarites, or rather sots, to whose gross hearts no noble thought could find its way. Their inaction was almost justified by the conduct of the Protestant chiefs, whose councils were full of folly and selfishness, whose policy seemed mere anarchy, and who too often made war like buccaneers. The Evangelical Union, in which Lutheranism and political quietism prevailed, refused its aid to the Calvinist and usurping King of Bohemia. Among foreign powers, England was ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... life, was hideous in death—a mask of selfishness, duplicity and venomous cunning from which departing life had taken its one charm of intelligence. He looked at the wound again. The blow must have been sudden and of great force. Acting on an impulse, he tiptoed to one of the curtained windows, unlocked the fastening and raised ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... Alfred. I see somebody on your porch. I think it is your wife. We must be careful to do no wrong in the sight of the world. You owe that poor woman all the happiness you can give her. To think of what we might want would be downright selfishness. We know what we know, and that is sweet enough. Don't think of me marrying anybody. I've got Joe and my duties, and—and you know what else. I shall never ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... character he is elaborate and distinct. His principles are those of honest love for all which is good and admirable in human character wherever he finds it, while he unaffectedly hates oppression, and despises selfishness ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... didn't have a king, she had slaves; oh, dozens and dozens of error-fairies, to do her will. Creepin' shadders they was, too, till somebody listened to 'em and give 'em a backbone. There's—let me see"—the apple woman looked off to jog her memory—"there's Laziness, Selfishness, Backbitin', Cruelty—oh, I ain't got time to tell 'em all; an' not one mite o' harm in one of 'em, only for some silly mortal that listens and gives the creetur a backbone. They jest lop over an' melt away, the whole batch of 'em, when Love comes near. She knows what no-account humbugs ...
— Jewel's Story Book • Clara Louise Burnham
... allow children to turn all the rooms into places to play in, and to demand constantly that their elders shall interest themselves in them, is one of the most dangerous species of pampering common to the present day. The children become accustomed to selfishness and mental dependence. Besides this constant educational effort brings with it the dulling of the child's personality. If children were free in their own world, the nursery, but out of it had to submit to ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key
... necessarily magnifies the apparent force of the one remaining sentiment which sighs through the barren chambers, or clings inextricably round the chasms of ruin; nor can it but regard with awe the unconquerable spirit which still tempts or betrays the sagacities of selfishness into error or frenzy which is ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... to this disregard of vital details, there was a tinge of selfishness in everything which Rhodes undertook and which gave a personal aspect to matters which ought to have been looked upon purely from the objective. The acquisition of Rhodesia, for instance, was considered by ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill
... remarkable boys, who, through the ages, have left their mark upon their times,—lads who, even had they died "in their teens," would still have been worthy of record as "historic boys." The lessons of their lives are manifold. They tell of pride and selfishness, of tyranny and wasted power, of self-reliance and courage, of ambition and self-conquest, of patience and manliness. History is but the record of opportunities for action availed of or neglected. And opportunities are never wanting. They exist ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... feast;" but we pray you not to forget that God himself has said that a visit to the house of mourning is better than a visit to the house of feasting: and, strange to say, it is productive of greater joy; for to do good is better than to get good, as surely as sympathy is better than selfishness. ...
— Martin Rattler • R.M. Ballantyne
... in a drawing-room with the leaders of the party of the Gironde. Their sombre countenance, their anxious look, attracted my attention. There were there, written in visible letters, strong and powerful interests. They were men of too much heart for those interests to be tarnished by selfishness; I saw in them the manifest proof of the danger of my country. All come to enjoy pleasure; not one thinking of it! They began to discuss; they touched on the most thrilling questions of the day. It was grand! Methought I was attending ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... then. But it did not succeed in turning her from him. She stood wondering at her own passive consent, yet could not bring herself to risk his offence by declaring that she would not stay. Of his selfishness, she saw nothing. Had his attitude in the affair been pointed out to her as frankly inconsiderate, she would have denied it with fervour. Inconsiderate? It was only her weakness of spirit. Why should he be blamed for that? If she loathed the sight of what was taking place before her, ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... and exhorted her by no means to mention it; after which she got into her chair, and returned home; pitying Miss Belfield for the unjust partiality shewn to her brother, and excusing the proud shame he had manifested of his relations, from the vulgarity and selfishness of her who was at the ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... up thus: "If you can find any method to improve the state of affairs which will not subject us to the smallest cost, risk, or responsibility, you can employ it; if not, let them fight it out." Perhaps Lord Kimberley may live (officially) long enough to find out that meanness and selfishness do not always pay, and that it is not always desirable, thus to sacrifice the respect, and crush the legitimate aspirations of ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard
... attended, she was soon among his congregation and remained there. He became a constant guest at the castle, and Lady Montfort presented his church with a reredos of alabaster. She did more than this. Her enthusiasm exceeded her selfishness, for though the sacrifice was great which would deprive her of the ministrations and society of Nigel in the country, she prevailed upon the prime minister to prefer him to a new church in London, which ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... cunning—a freeman, and not a slave. His tenderness had rendered him ductile in a priest's hands, his affection, his devotedness, his sincere pious enthusiasm blinded his kind eyes sometimes, made him abandon justice to himself to do the work of craft, and serve the ends of selfishness; but these are faults so rare to find, so costly to their owner to indulge, we scarce know whether they will not one day be ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... desperately attempted to free himself, but Mrs. Shuster "persuaded" him to stick to his bargain. How she managed I don't know, but there are lots of ways, and Larry with all his faults is a gentleman. He even has a chivalrous vein which, though lying deep under selfishness, crops up near the surface occasionally. I wish he'd been chivalrous with his daughter, while there was time for it to do good, instead of at the last moment with this silly middle-aged woman who wants to get "into ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... Chagrin," which is a powerful satire on the vice and selfishness of the day, suffers in its allegorical, though not in its humanly interesting side, by the vivid picture it gives of Balzac's youth; as, in spite of the introduction of the influence of the magic Ass Skin, the account of Raphael in the early part of the ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... born in the same year in which France annexed his country. He will avenge it, and, since he can never feel himself a Frenchman, he will exploit our country only for his own purposes. But nevertheless, in spite of his unparalleled selfishness, his wickedness and crimes, he ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... have a tendency in the matter of payments to keep strictly to the letter of the law. Is this from poverty, or from the selfishness to which their isolation condemns them, thus encouraging the natural inclination of all men to avarice; or is it from a conscientious parsimony which saves all it can for deeds of charity? Each nature will give a different answer to this question. ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... maternal duties should not undertake to defeat the intentions of nature, simply because they love ease and dislike responsibility. Such persons may be considered genteel ladies, but, practically, they are indifferent to the claims of society and posterity. How such selfishness contrasts with the glorious, heroic, Spartan spirit of the young woman who consulted us in reference to the acceptance of a tempting offer of marriage! She was below medium size and delicately organized. She hesitated in her answer, because she was uncertain as to her ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... thought unites them. The nearer any two of them tend to approach a recognisable type, the more magnificently is the individuality of each vindicated. The elderly middle-class woman, harassed by ignoble cares ignobly borne, driven by a lack of fortitude into querulousness, and into injustice by the selfishness of her affections, is illustrated both in Mrs. Scholz and Mrs. Kramer. But, in the former, bodily suffering and nervous terror have slackened the moral fibre, and this abnormality speaks in every word and gesture. Mrs. Kramer is simply average, with the tenacity and the ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... have gone alike, the wheat of honest endeavour and hardship well borne, and the tares of class hatred and selfishness. Had ever reaper nobler task in front of him than the burning of those tares and the gathering of that wheat into the nation's barn? ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... alarmed. I have suffered enough from my selfishness. It was my bad temper drove my daughter from me.' She bowed her silver head till her form seemed as bent as Natalya's. 'What can I do to repair—to atone? Will you not come and live with me in the country, and let me care for you? I am not rich, but I ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... thought that all improvement must come solely through the continued selfish shifting of that burden from side to side, from shoulder to shoulder; through the violent or cunning destruction of some of the intolerable effects of selfishness in the past by selfishness in the present and the future. And that in the midst of this terrible but salutary scuffle for ease and security, the ideals of those who are privileged enough to have any, may be not much more useful than the fly ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... The too great condescension and mistaken humanity of the government on the one hand, and the fraud and selfishness of the provincial sub-delegates or collectors, on the other, have concurred to change a contribution, the most simple, into one of the most complicated branches of public administration. The first ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... viewed in the light of its historical and spiritual causes, is (i) the revelation of the malignity of sin. There we see our favourite sins stripped of all pleasing disguise, and revealed in their true horror, and cruelty, and selfishness. The Incarnate Son of God put Himself at the disposal of sinful men, and His violent and shameful death was the result. There is the true meaning of the sins in which we delight. (ii) It reveals the disastrous result of sin, the death of the Divine Man within each one of us. There is no sin ...
— Gloria Crucis - addresses delivered in Lichfield Cathedral Holy Week and Good Friday, 1907 • J. H. Beibitz
... The stubborn selfishness of the theocracy led to the adoption of a less liberal policy toward Massachusetts. The nomination of the executive officers was retained by the crown, and the governor was given very substantial means of maintaining his authority; he could reject the councillors elected by the Assembly; he ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... and fine—certain phases of it were heroic—and I hate to see it all pass, but some of us began to realize that it was not all poetry. The plain truth is my companions for over twenty years were lawless ruffians, and the cattle business as we practiced it in those days was founded on selfishness and defended at the mouth of the pistol. We were all pensioners on Uncle Sam, and fighting to keep the other fellow off from having a share of his bounty. It was all wasteful, half-savage. We didn't want settlement, ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... Roumovski's level voice took on a note of deep emotion and his blue eyes gleamed. "Why, the degradation is horrible to think of, sir, if you will face the truth—and this is the fate to which you would condemn this young and tender girl for your own selfishness, knowing ...
— The Point of View • Elinor Glyn
... dropping from the high place, he once held in his estimation, and every action now exhibited his selfishness to Archer, who, with all his laziness, was a boy of ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume XIII, No. 51: November 12, 1892 • Various
... perilous as it was, when the heroine of this story was buried, and the tower of C——r church is no longer a necessary land-mark, still her grave remains a pleasing memorial of one, whose active benevolence rose superior to the selfishness both of sorrow and of sickness; and enabled her, even on the bed of death, to contrive and will for ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, No. - 288, Supplementary Number • Various
... medicine and divinity, before he finally settled down into the law. Such a compound of shrewdness, impudence, common-sense, pretension, humility, cleverness, vulgarity, kind-heartedness, duplicity, selfishness, law- honesty, moral fraud and mother wit, mixed up with a smattering of learning and much penetration in practical things, can hardly be described, as any one of his prominent qualities is certain to be met by another quite as obvious that ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... only another form of selfishness," said Lord Evelyn, laughing. "I fear you are as yet of weak ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... to the nursery for snap-dragon; but while they were busy with this most shadowy of games, nearly all the Shadows crept downstairs again to the dining-room, where the old man still sat, gnawing the bone of his own selfishness. They crowded into the room, and by using every kind of expansion—blowing themselves out like soap-bubbles—they succeeded in heaping up the whole room with shade upon shade. They clustered thickest about the fire and the lamp, till ...
— Cross Purposes and The Shadows • George MacDonald
... born rulers who impress their own views on masses of men by force of will. He made the country believe that it was with him. But behind the dominant force of will, he possessed the instinctive sense of its limits, besides being endowed with that final remorseless selfishness which made him ready to make scape-goats of the most loyal servants, to deny responsibility himself and to fling the odium upon them, as soon as he found that those ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... career, that it is with reluctance that one joins their names even for the moment that this phrase is used. Napoleon was eager to sacrifice the whole of Europe to satisfy the claims of his personal ambition; Lincoln was always ready to stand aside and sacrifice himself for the country. The one was selfishness incarnate; the other was a noble example of a man who never hesitated to subordinate his own welfare to the general good, and whose career came to its climax in his martyrdom. Whether the presidency was or was not, ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... this pride, vanity, selfishness, self-righteousness, hypocrisy and human frailty are the Outside ...
— The University of Hard Knocks • Ralph Parlette
... not a class because one has committed a fault. Selfishness is not one of the divisions ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... not an atom of selfishness about him. I remember his making little of the difficulties some people used to raise in connection with the planning of a Home Rule Bill, and saying, "Three men sitting round a table could in a short time draw up a plan of Home Rule for ...
— The Life Story of an Old Rebel • John Denvir
... much poetical merit, but they have sincerity in them, and there is one line which shows, I think, that Mary, young as she was, already watched her heart, lest that fatal pride should invade it; that sin by which, we are told, Satan fell from his high place, and which, on earth, is sure to lead to selfishness and impiety. ...
— The Young Lord and Other Tales - to which is added Victorine Durocher • Camilla Toulmin
... you two space-crawling rats!" snapped Connel. "I'm not going to lock you in the brig; I'm not going to confine you in any manner. But if you make one false move, I'll court-martial you right here and now! You've caused enough trouble with your selfishness, jeopardizing the lives of six men. If we fail to get off this satellite, it'll be because you put us in this position. Now get below and see what aid you can give Astro. And if either of you so much ...
— Danger in Deep Space • Carey Rockwell
... to pass that Augustus had determined that his spendthrift brother should fall under his own power, and that the bride should be the reward. How it was that two brothers, so different in character, and yet so alike in their selfishness, should have come to love the same girl with a true intensity of purpose, and that Harry Annesley, whose character was essentially different, and who was in no degree selfish, should have loved her also, must be left to explain ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... egotists, and it is right that we should be, up to a point. But I would urge the young actor or actress to be always on the watch against developing, especially in success, an extreme egotism which induces a selfishness of outlook, an egregious vanity that in the long run weakens the character, induces disappointment and discontent, and bores ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... Irina, in "Smoke;" and Maria Nikolaevna, in "Torrents of Spring." All three are wealthy and love luxury; all three are professional wreckers of the lives of men. The evil that they do rises from absolute selfishness, rather than from deliberate sensuality. Not one of them could have been saved by any environment, or by any husband. Varvara is frivolous, Irina is cold-hearted, and Maria is a super-woman; she makes a bet with her husband that she can seduce any man he brings to the house. To ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... seem ever absent to ever-present selfishness or material sense. Hence this asking amiss and receiving not, and the common idolatry of man-worship. In divine Science, God is recognized as the only power, ...
— No and Yes • Mary Baker Eddy
... pleasures, they require that the good of others for which they make the sacrifice shall be plainly preponderant. And, even then, there is a wide margin between the acts which we praise for their heroism, or generosity, or self-denial, and those which we condemn for their baseness, or meanness, or selfishness. It must never be forgotten, in the treatment of questions of morality, that there is a large number of acts which we neither praise nor blame, and this is emphatically the case where the competition is between ...
— Progressive Morality - An Essay in Ethics • Thomas Fowler
... of some valuable booty to offer it to their chief, and selfishness was not so general that this noble French courtesy did not reappear from time to time to recall the happy days of France. Straw was the bed of all; and those of the marshals who in Paris slept on most luxurious beds of down did not find this ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... dislike of England, but have by no means exhausted the explanations of the fact There are explanations which do not justify and the most important of all seems to me to come under that head. The greatest danger to the contented union of the Empire is the protecting of a selfishness so abnormal as to excite anger and impatience. But since anger and impatience are the worst weapons with which it is possible to fight, it will be wise to lay them by, and to discuss the question unemotionally. Australia is governed by ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... will be on my side in that. But she will be hard upon me. She will point out all my faults, my execrable folly. Ah, if I could but live my time over again, I'd pray night and day for selfishness. They teach us girls to pray for this and that virtue, which we have too much of already; and what we ought to pray for is selfishness. But no! I must think of my father, and think of that hypocrite: but the ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... the laws, so that they may be the unfailing defense and security of those who respect and observe them, and that neither wealth, station, nor the power of combinations shall be able to evade their just penalties or to wrest them from a beneficent public purpose to serve the ends of cruelty or selfishness. ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... the letter through to the end, and it is possible (for women are blind in such matters) failed to perceive the selfishness in every line of it. Then, with the message of happiness in her hand, she returned to the chair she had just quitted, with a vague wonder in her mind, and the very human doubt that accompanies all possession, as to whether the price paid ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... connection with the other social facts with which they are intimately related, we are able to see how foolish has been the outcry against a falling birth-rate, and how false the supposition that it is due to a new selfishness replacing an ancient altruism.[128] On the contrary, the excessive birth-rate of the early industrial period was directly stimulated by selfishness. There were no laws against child-labour; children were produced that they might be sent out, when little ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... befriended him, or who would, on any other occasion, share their bed and their last morsel with him, would even touch his person, much less allow him, when thus plague-stricken, to take shelter under their roof. Such are the effects of selfishness, when it is opposed only by the force of those natural qualities that are not elevated into a sense of duty by clear and profound views of Christian truth. It is one thing to perform a kind action from constitutional impulse, and another to perform ...
— The Poor Scholar - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... began to fade and his selfishness began to give way to better understanding and kindlier counsels. That much the River Spirit had done for him. He would not give up the search, but rather would he increase its thoroughness, and redouble his efforts. But he would never again be quite without sympathy, quite without understanding ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... the transition is obvious and direct. Be the explanation what it may, the whole atmosphere of this school is evidently fatal to selfishness and self-assertion; and in such an atmosphere good manners will spring up spontaneously among the children, and will scarcely need to be inculcated, for the essence of courtesy is forgetfulness of self and consideration of others in the smaller affairs of social life. The general ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... energies in the profitless outcry of economists that people like Nelse should be prohibited from having children. It occurs to us that perhaps the handsome fellow's immense good-humor and generosity are as good inheritance as the selfishness and cold avarice of priggish young Horace Gallatin, who never drinks a drop. Perhaps at some future date all people who are not perfectly worthy to have children will be kept from it by law. In Hillsboro, we think, that after such a decree the human race would last just ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... face hardened, and all the suave polish and cool concentration and dominant magnetism fell away. What remained was the man as shaped by the ruling passions of years, from whose control only divine power could bring deliverance. And when he spoke there was a remorseless cruelty and selfishness ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter
... de corps, the passionate loyalty, of a monk to his monastery is a sentiment which we in our time find it so extremely difficult to understand that we can hardly bring ourselves to believe that it could exist without some subtle intermixture of crafty selfishness as ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... I should die to-night, My friends would call to mind, with loving thought, Some kindly deed the icy hand had wrought, Some gentle word the frozen lips had said— Errands on which the willing feet had sped; The memory of my selfishness and pride, My hasty words, would all be put aside, And so I should ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... impression made upon her by the spectacle she had just witnessed was stronger than any other consideration. The revelation of de Ferrieres's secret poverty seemed a chapter from a romance of her own weaving; for a moment it lifted the miserable hero out of the depths of his folly and selfishness. She forgot the weakness of the man in the strength of his dramatic surroundings. It partly satisfied a craving she had felt; it was not exactly the story of the ship, as she had dreamed it, but it was an episode in her experience of it that broke its ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... me think," said the little Pilgrim. "If I have died as you say—which is so strange and me so living—if I have died, they will have found it out. The house will be all dark, and they will be breaking their hearts. Oh, how could I forget them in my selfishness, and be happy! I so lighthearted ...
— A Little Pilgrim • Mrs. Oliphant
... "that we have done unwisely. The violence and selfishness of the man's character are but too well known, and Seymour is in ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... by calling the man a 'suist', as one seeking his own things ('sua'), and the sin itself, 'suicism'. The gap, however, was not really filled up, till some of the Puritan writers, drawing on our Saxon, devised 'selfish' and 'selfishness', words which to us seem obvious enough, but which yet are little more than two hundred [and ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... tint. The good were those who loved their fellow-creatures, especially their relations, and were kind to them in word and deed. The bad were those who gave pain to others by their brutality and selfishness, by untruthfulness and deceit, and by ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... hateful he will think me—and I am, I am, and I can't tell him I don't really mean to be," and then her tears burst forth, and she cried, and cried until all the bitterness and selfishness were washed from her heart, and only ...
— The Making of Mona • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... the awakening of the soul to love that matters; and it has been to me one of the sweetest experiences of my life to see you and Maud awaken to love. But you will not stay there—nothing is ultimate, not the dearest and largest relations of life. One climbs from selfishness to liking, and from liking to passion, and from passion ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... might have used, they 'liked each other well enough'—that is, each found something in the other he 'could get on with'; but there was no stronger tie of regard or friendship between them, and each thought he perceived some flaw of pretension, or affected wisdom, or selfishness, or vanity, in the other, and actually believed he amused himself by its display. In natures, tastes, and dispositions, they were miles asunder, and disagreement between them would have been unceasing on every subject, had they not been gentlemen. It was this alone—this gentleman element—made ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... her death, and after his second marriage. Do then men love dead women better than they do the living? Perhaps. And then a certain writer has said: "To have known a great and exalted love, and have had it flee from your grasp—flee as a shadow before it is sullied by selfishness or misunderstanding—is the highest good. The memory of such a love can not die from out the heart. It affords a ballast 'gainst all the sordid impulses of life, and though it gives an unutterable sadness, it ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... unexpected, extraordinary, or amazing situations, but merely four volumes on four characters. With only just these characters, that is, with hidden feelings, everyday thoughts, with friendship, love, selfishness, devotion, self-respect, persistency, melancholy, sorrow, ingratitude, disappointment, hope, and all the mixed-up medley of the human mind, is it possible to write four volumes which will not bore people? I am afraid of boring people, of boring ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... health attract him, and he does not quietly notice the ebullitions of her temper. She is divine to him; and, though she snarls at her younger brother, insults her mother, and to outsiders plainly exhibits all sorts of petty selfishness, yet the stripling rushes on to his fate; and at the end of a few miserable years he is either a broken and hen-pecked creature or a ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... sizes too large," he observed. "Odd creatures you women are," he went on suddenly, after a brief silence. "You shy wildly at the idea of letting a man see the foot God gave you, but you've no scruples at all about letting any one see the selfishness that the devil's ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... dim past. "The earliest and longest have still the mastery over us," says George Eliot. This was the first church erected by the Spaniards in Mexico, and was in constant use by Cortez, who, notwithstanding his heartless cruelty, his unscrupulous and murderous deeds, his gross selfishness, faithlessness, and ambition, was still a devout Catholic, never omitting the most minute observances of church ceremonies, and always accompanying his most questionable deeds with the cant phrases of religion. The roof of the church of San Francisco is a curiosity in itself, being upheld by elaborately ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... exists in the discussion of love by Renouvier and Prat in La Nouvelle Monadologie (pp. 216 et seq.). In considering whether love is or is not a delusion, they answer that it is or is not according as we are, or are not, dominated by selfishness and injustice. "It was not an essential error which presided over the creation of the idol, for the idol is only what in all things the ideal is. But to realize the ideal in love two persons are needed, and therein is the great difficulty. We are never ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... of the tender passion, or rather their descriptions of its effects. Kindly observe that I am far from accepting either one or the other. Love is, according to me, somewhat akin to mania, a temporary condition of selfishness, a transient confusion of identity. It enables man to predicate of others who are his other selves, that which he is ashamed to say about his real self. I will suppose the beloved object to be ugly, stupid, vicious, perverse, selfish, low minded, or the reverse; man finds it charming ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... in me confirmed bitterness. I persuaded myself that the interest which people appeared to take in me was mere polite pretence. There may be enough selfishness in the world to explain misanthropy, but there is never enough to justify it, and what we imagine to be indifference to us is often merely the reserve caused by our own refusal to surrender ourselves to legitimate and generous emotions. Oddly enough, I frequently made ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... his own attributes and degrade hers; that through this teaching her abiding belief in his superior capacity to interpret scriptural truths for her has been the means of sacrificing her power of mind, her tender affections, her delicate sensibilities, on the altar of his base selfishness throughout the ages. Orthodoxy recognizes no "inspiration" for woman to-day. She is not "called" save to serve man. Under its teaching her thought has been padlocked in the name of Divinity, and her lips sealed in sacrilegious pretense of authority from ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... "Just selfishness, ma'am. I could not bring myself to run the risk of having to give her up. She was mine as much as his, and was a hundred times more to me than she could be to him. I took her a baby from her dead mother's arms. I fed her and ...
— With Wolfe in Canada - The Winning of a Continent • G. A. Henty
... selfishness and coarseness of this strange girl there was a certain frankness and freedom which pleaded in her favor—to my mind, at any rate. I answered frankly and ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... in the presence of others, to lounge, to put your feet on a chair, to stand with your back to the fire, to take the most comfortable seat in the room, to do anything which shows indifference, selfishness, or disrespect, ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... letters in ages yet to come may bring light the history of this shore or of this day. I am sure, Ludlow citizens, that whoever shall hereafter read it will perceive that our pride and joy are dimmed by no stain of selfishness. Our pride is for humanity; our joy is for the world; and amid all the wonders of past achievement and all the splendors of present success, we turn with swelling hearts to gaze into the boundless future, with the earnest conviction that will develop a universal ...
— California, Romantic and Resourceful • John F. Davis
... I observed, roused by what I took to be his selfishness, 'it always grieves me to contemplate the initiation of children into the ways of life, when they are scarcely more than infants. It checks their confidence and simplicity—two of the best qualities that Heaven gives them—and demands that they share our sorrows before they are capable ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... hopeless mystery, the work of some prodigious power who neither loved or hated, but just chose to act so. In any case it was a very slow process; the world was bound with innumerable heavy chains. There was much cruelty, stupidity, selfishness, meanness abroad; all those ugly things decreased very slowly, if indeed they decreased at all. Yet there seemed, too, to be a species of development at work. But the real mystery lay in the fact that, while our hopes and ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... become of my wife and daughter; but, what is to become of "me!" I do not blame him for this. Naturally enough, people who have always been used to everything become, unconsciously, monsters of egotism and selfishness; it is natural, too, that they should imagine themselves liberal and generous if they give away occasionally something that costs them, at most, nothing more serious than the foregoing of some ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... Selfishness is a rooted principle of action in nations not less than in single persons. It seems to draw a certain perfume from the virtue of patriotism, which lies upon its borders. It stalks abroad with a semblance of decency, nay, even of excellence. ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... official as love-making or wine-bibbing seem to a strait-laced parson. It was inevitable, therefore, that he should never avert by his words any ill-will naturally caused by his acts; that he should never soothe disappointment, or attract calculating selfishness. He was an adept in alienation, a novice in conciliation. His magnetism was negative. He made few friends; and had no interested following whatsoever. No one was enthusiastic on his behalf; no band worked for him with the ardor of personal devotion. ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... seventeen, proved that there was a strength in her nature no less than a devotion in her love. The sacrifice she had made brought its own reward. She believed St. Amand was happy, and she would not give way to the selfishness of grief; she had still duties to perform; she could still comfort her parents and cheer their age; she could still be all the world to them: she felt this, and was consoled. Only once during the year had ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... forms met his view. No one greeted him, no hand of friendship was held forth to welcome him. All the world seemed rushing on for something, he knew not what; and, disheartened at the apparent selfishness that pervaded society, he returned to his room, and wished for the quietness of his own sweet village, the companionship ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... is painted in some passing fashion of gown. She tends to become obsolete along with her frame. Here also is the dainty "Diana," the egoist with immortal Willoughby Pattern, eternal type of masculine selfishness, and "Harry Richmond," the first chapters of which are, in my opinion, among the finest pieces of narrative prose in the language. That great mind would have worked in any form which his age had favoured. He is a novelist by accident. As an Elizabethan he would have been ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... right, dearest,' he said quietly. 'It would be mere selfishness for me to wish to take you away from this beautiful home until I have made one that shall in some degree be fitting for you. You will not expect a grand one; you know you have linked your lot to ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... in existence for more than half a century. Yet it was still in a pitiable state of weakness and destitution. The care and maintenance of the settlement had devolved upon trading companies, and their narrow-minded mercantile selfishness had stifled its progress. From other causes, also, there had been but little growth. Cardinal Richelieu, the great French minister, had tried at one time to infuse new life into the colony; [Footnote: For the earlier history of New France the reader is referred ...
— The Great Intendant - A Chronicle of Jean Talon in Canada 1665-1672 • Thomas Chapais
... seems to mean good dressing, yet their clothes jar, cry out, even "scream out their unfitness and unwholesomeness, and betray their dishonesty, shame and sacrifice." Clothes show silliness, conceit, and selfishness more than any other thing, and often they shame a home, so a colored girl should study her individuality and her life position and dress accordingly. She should wear only becoming colors, and she might affect a certain color to her advantage. ...
— The Colored Girl Beautiful • E. Azalia Hackley
... statesman and a man of high aims; he was a gentleman as well as a strong ruler. The Peloponnesian war, on the contrary, was a civil war, and it divided the Greeks among themselves and roused the evil passions of friend against friend all over their country. It was the cause of selfishness, treachery, and immorality, and one of its worst effects was seen in the loss of religious tone among the people: their old contented simplicity of life and thought was gone; every man thought only of himself, and the nation began to sink into the condition ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... death of his son more deeply than I should have thought possible; but that son had been the last being who had continued to interest his cold heart. Perhaps the pride which he felt in his child had in it more of selfishness than of any generous feeling. But, be this as it may, the melancholy circumstances connected with Ellen Heathcote had reached him, and his conduct towards her proved, more strongly than anything else could have done, that he felt keenly and justly, ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume II. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... called in vain; he was left to struggle through his difficulties by himself; and of all his dear friends not one turned back to help him. At last, torn and terrified, he got through the hedge and ran home, despising his companions for their selfishness. Nor could he help observing that Tarlton, with all his vaunted prowess, was the first to run away ...
— The Parent's Assistant • Maria Edgeworth
... enough, however, and as they walked beneath the snow-clad pines they drew up a scheme of life which was astonishingly unlike the dreams and aspirations of most lovers. For it was devoid of selfishness, and they looked for happiness—not in an immediate gratification of all their desires and an instant fulfilment of their hopes, but in a mutual faith that should survive all separation and bridge the longest span of ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... superintend the female department of a Spanish queen's education, than the bigoted and afrancesada dowager-marchioness who preceded her in the office, and in the selection of whom Maria Christina, with her usual selfishness, had probably thought more of the political principles and opinions in which she wished Isabella to be brought up, than of her daughter's future welfare and happiness. The universal complaint of the Spanish or national party in the time of Christina was, that the queen's education was neglected, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... the selfishness of an epicure and the tastes of a savant, he surrounded himself with the most luxurious elegance. The book-cases of carved ebony that run along two sides of the apartment, were filled with rare books, accumulated during his travels, some of them worth their weight in gold. Doors of plate glass protected ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... succeeded his brother, and then, with the characteristic inconsistency of selfishness and ambition, he employed all the power of his realm in helping the King of France to subdue his younger brother, who was evincing the same spirit of seditiousness and insubmission that he had himself displayed. His assistance was of great importance to King Henry; ...
— William the Conqueror - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... Charteris. I do," said Mrs. Ashmeade, placidly. "Charteris is simply a baby with a vocabulary. His moral standpoint is entirely that of infancy. It would be ludicrous to describe him as selfish, because he is selfishness incarnate. I sometimes believe it is the only characteristic the man possesses. He reaches out his hand and takes whatever he wants, just as a baby would, quite simply, and as a matter of course. He wants your wife now, and he is ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... the soil from the indifference and greed and selfishness wherein this generation unwittingly robs succeeding generations of their rightful inheritance, and to rescue the very vocation of agriculture from mercenary interests is a mission worthy of the best leadership ...
— The Stewardship of the Soil - Baccalaureate Address • John Henry Worst
... papa and mamma; and if I sometimes thought Herbert's too feeble a nature to guide hers, or if Uncle John sometimes talked with or listened to him as if he were measuring his depth and then went away with an anxious expression of face, who shall say how much of selfishness influenced us both? for was he not to take from us the pet ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... stares at him with vaguely frightened eyes.) It's had a good start—thanks to her father's blind selfishness—but let's hope that can be overcome. The important thing is to ship her off to a sanatorium immediately. Carmody wouldn't hear of it at first. However, I managed to bully him into consenting; but I don't trust his word. ...
— The Straw • Eugene O'Neill
... a friend by the Queen, and the sudden elevation of that friend to the highest station in the royal household, could not fail to alarm the selfishness of courtiers, who always feel themselves injured by the favour shown to others. An obsolete office was revived in favour of the Princesse de Lamballe. In the time of Maria Leckzinska, wife of Louis XV., the office of superintendent, then held ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 4 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... accident, not habit; and some condemned by that last calamity incident to society, the mistakes of public justice. A much larger class were victims of early neglect: parental example, or of the social evils which are incident to the refinement, corruption, and selfishness of the age; but very many, whatever the cause of their depravity, were really and recklessly depraved. The pitying eye of the philanthropist, glancing at their history, would find his compassion in the ascendant, ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... I should encourage him in nothingness. What's more, I want extra brains and hands. It's not altogether a pleasant thing, is it ... the selfishness of the hard ...
— Waste - A Tragedy, In Four Acts • Granville Barker
... on the truth that "it is more blessed to give than to receive" his congregation might turn its attention to its own affairs at once because the topic promises no novelty. But if he declares that he is going to make a defense of selfishness he would surely startle his hearers into attention, so that he could go on to describe the personal satisfaction and peace of mind which comes to the doers of good deeds. A speaker could arrest attention by stating that he intended ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... possessed extraordinary attributes if his vanity had not been flattered, by being conscious he was thought worthy of such flattering attention; though his thoughts were tinged with cynicism when exhibitions of selfishness were not wanting in his fair friends, and as, sometimes, delicate hints were faintly outlined which darkened character, and inuendoes were whispered to the detriment of rivals, by lips that seemed moulded only to breathe blessings ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... so happy, that in her selfishness she did not perceived his troubled and care-worn looks. "Oh" said she, kissing his hand, "I am so happy at last to find you alone at home. Several times have I sought ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... forest. Hilda was an essential part of his life and being, without which he could imagine no future. Year by year it grew harder to say good-bye, and the happiness of meeting grew deeper and more real. There was a pride in the knowledge that she was for him only, which played upon the unconscious selfishness of his young nature and gave him the most profound and exquisite delight. At three and twenty he was old enough to understand the world about him, he had accomplished his year of obligatory service in the army, and had come into contact with all sorts of men, ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... goes out like a sick man's night-lamp, in the morning light of truth. In the courts of God only spiritual distinctions prevail. That you were a lord in this life will be of no account there, where the humblest Christian love is preferred before the most brilliant selfishness,—where the master is degraded, and the servant is exalted. And so forth, and so forth; a brief, but eloquent address, of which it is to be regretted ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... disposition, for he refused to share the possession of his floral treasure with any of his countrymen. For ten years the new anemone from the East was to be seen no where in Europe but in Monsieur Bachelier's parterre. At last a counsellor of the French Parliament disgusted with the florist's selfishness, artfully contrived when visiting the garden to drop his robe upon the flower in such a manner as to sweep off some of the seeds. The servant, who was in his master's secret, caught up the robe and carried it away. The trick succeeded; ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... recognition of individual rights shall prevail. One who really prays that this kingdom come will strive to hasten its coming by living according to the law of God. His effort will be to keep himself in harmony with the order of the kingdom, to subject the flesh to the spirit, selfishness to altruism, and to learn to love the things that God loves. To make the will of God supreme on earth as it is in heaven is to be allied with God in the affairs of life. There are many who profess belief that as God is ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... unable to choose for ourselves which impulse that shall be? Even now, in decreeing my own destruction, do I exercise free-will, or am I the sport of hereditary tendencies, of mistaken views of honour, of a seeming self-sacrifice, which, perhaps, is but selfishness in disguise? I blight my unfortunate father's old age; I destroy the last of an ancient house; but I remove from the path of Olive Dunne the shadow that must rest upon the sunshine of what will eventually, I trust, be a happy life, unvexed by memories of ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... His part all these years, and He has carried you over from year to year, hoping that you will pay up without harsh proceedings. You are a rich man in this world's goods, but your soul is lean and hungry and naked. Selfishness and greed have blinded your eyes. If you could see what a contemptible, good-for-nothing creature you are in God's sight, you would call on the hills to fall on you. Why, man, I'd rather take my chances ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... sorrow, and death; plague, pestilence, and famine; inundations, droughts, and frosts; catastrophes world-wide and accidents in corners; cruelty, perversity, stupidity, uncertainty, insanity; virtue begetting vice; vice working for good; happiness without sense, selfishness without gain, misery without cause, and horrors undefined. The students in public dared not ask, as Voltaire did, "avec son hideux sourire," whether the Lisbon earthquake was the final proof of God's infinite goodness, but in private they used the argumentum ad personam ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... because he spent all in the service of the King. He needed not to commit any act of treachery or villany to obtain wealth— he had an ample competence in his own possessions. For Markham Everard— he knows no such thing as selfishness—he would not, for broad England, had she the treasures of Peru in her bosom, and a paradise on her surface, do a deed that would disgrace his own name, or injure the feelings of another—Kings, ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... utmost candor should be used towards the client. This is imperatively demanded alike by considerations of duty and interest. It is much better for a man occasionally to lose a good client, than to fail in so plain a matter. It is nothing but selfishness that can operate upon a lawyer when consulted to conceal from the party his candid opinion of the merits, and the probable result. It is fair that he should know it; for he may not choose to employ a man whose views ...
— An Essay on Professional Ethics - Second Edition • George Sharswood
... at all here of the part which a perverted will may play in the entanglements of life; no intimation of the immense force of the emotional side of life; no intimation here of the immense part which sheer selfishness plays. Mrs. Eddy's sin is far too simple. There is, once more, a sound reason for that. Mrs. Eddy is twice-born, if you will, but the struggle from which she finally emerged with whatever measure of victory she attained was not fought out ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... bodily and mental. They pursue sensual indulgences to the injury of health, though perfectly aware that health is the greater good. It may be further objected, that many who begin with youthful enthusiasm for everything noble, as they advance in years sink into indolence and selfishness. But I do not believe that those who undergo this very common change, voluntarily choose the lower description of pleasures in preference to the higher. I believe that before they devote themselves exclusively to the one, they have ...
— Utilitarianism • John Stuart Mill
... Russell, though a man of a gentle, tranquil spirit, had a great sympathy with youth. He was, like all his race, a Whig, and a Moderate, in every human function and aspiration. He did not, however, allow that liberal spirit to be dimmed by fear or by selfishness. He was one of those fortunate men who are not awed by rumour or carried away by prejudice. Still less was there any touch of pride or vulgarity in his nature Meanness and commonness of mind were as far from him as from any man I have ever known. Yet there was nothing either of the recluse or of ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... folded up their wearied eyes to dark unhallow'd dreams— The soldier to his scenes of blood, the merchant to his schemes: Pride, jealousy, and slighted love, robb'd woman of her rest; Revenge, deceit, and selfishness, sway'd man's unquiet breast. Some, turning to the days of youth, sigh'd o'er the sinless time Ere passion led the heart astray to folly, care, and crime; And of that dizzy multitude, from found or fancied woes, Was scarcely one whose slumbers fell ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... the sacrifice of national welfare to commercial manoeuvres is a condition peculiar to war. Modern commerce is essentially an art; the art of making people pay more than they are worth for things which they do not require. And it is with all the selfishness of the artist that it performs its usual operations. Among all the unpublished detail of modern life hardly any class of facts is more disquieting than that of commercial procedure and achievement. The subject is too large to be reviewed in less than a volume; and I can do no more ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato
... the benevolent rich and the pious poor; the former bestows subsistence, the latter blessings. How miserable, how deservedly miserable is an incommunicative selfishness! Happy the man who can say with Job, "When the ear heard me then it blessed me; and when the eye saw me it gave witness to me: because I delivered the poor that cried, and the fatherless, and him that had none to help him. The blessing ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... was thinking about," said Grandma. "I have seen children who were like this flower in the weeds. They had beautiful faces; but they let the weeds of disobedience, selfishness, deceit, and pride grow all about them until you could not see their beauty ...
— A Hive of Busy Bees • Effie M. Williams
... Mr. Pickwick; 'but old men may come here through their own heedlessness and unsuspicion, and young men may be brought here by the selfishness of those they serve. It is better for those young men, in every point of view, that they should not remain here. ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... 'His instinct of selfishness,' I said. 'His talk was all of glory, but it was of his own glory, not his duty nor the good of his country. He seems to me to have absolutely ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of all men, no longer came each day to teach Charles patience and amiability, and he fell into the ways of short temper and selfishness. ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... to do mighty things; and of how he would say to them always, if they sought to bless his name, "Nay, do not thank me—thank Rubens. Without him, what should I have been?" And these dreams—beautiful, impossible, innocent, free of all selfishness, full of heroical worship—were so closely about him as he went that he was happy—happy even on this sad anniversary of Alois's saint's day, when he and Patrasche went home by themselves to the little dark hut and the meal of black bread, while in the mill-house all the children of the village ...
— Stories By English Authors: Germany • Various
... visitors, were attacked in the dusk so fiercely with stones, that we were obliged to forbear going out unless in broad daylight. Luckily the Bishop of Killala had shown himself a Christian pastor, and now he reaped the fruits of his goodness. The public selfishness gave way when the danger of the bishop was made known. The boats, the carts, the horses were now liberally brought in from their lurking-places; the artillery and stores were landed; and the drivers of the carts, &c., were paid in drafts ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... it the 'Lily of Life.' For as the plant begins in the black earth to end in the sunny ether, so the world, the universe, begins in chaos and darkness, to end in light and order; begins in matter and force, to end in life and spirit—begins in hate and selfishness, to end in love and self-sacrifice—begins in ugliness, to end in beauty. Thus the flower and root stand for the upper and lower limits or poles of nature, and the stalk which joins them for the upward range ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... from the coal-black aborigines; varna in Sanskrit means "caste" and "colour". Their aesthetic instinct finds expression in a passionate love of poetry, and a tangible object in the tribal chiefs. Loyalty is a religion which is almost proof against its idol's selfishness and incompetence. ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... his dagger, rushed toward the nobleman, and attempted to stab him. He commenced his imperious and haughty course of procedure even before his marriage, and continued it afterward, growing more and more violent as his ambition increased with an increase of power. Mary felt these cruel acts of selfishness and pride very keenly, but, womanlike, she palliated and excused them, ...
— Mary Queen of Scots, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... legislators, and the Western legislators who first granted property rights to married women, were actuated less by a sense of justice towards women than by enlightened selfishness. The effect of so much freedom on women themselves was a matter for grave conjecture. It was not suggested by any of the American debaters, as it was later on the floors of the English Parliament, that women, if they controlled their own property, would ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr
... physiocrats that agriculture was the one source of real wealth, and took Smith to be too much on the side of commerce. Young, however, was as enthusiastic a free-trader as Smith. He naturally denounces the selfishness of the manufacturers who, in 1788, objected to the free export of English wool,[58] but he also assails monopoly in general. The whole system, he says (on occasion of Pitt's French treaty), is rotten to ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... you propose. I suppose you think your proposition very grand and chivalric. It endangers the continuance of our stay on the cape; it rebels against the rule we are under here; and it would make our parents unhappy. Its spirit of selfishness and indifference to everything but your own impulse is the same which causes and continues our quarrelling. But I shall be a fool with you this time. I have not the courage to balk your desire. I agree to the contest, if ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... jilt that ever yet halted between two minds! There has been no touch of selfishness in your fickleness. I think I could be hard enough upon a woman who had left me for greater wealth, for a higher rank,—who had left me even that she might be gay and merry. It has not ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... burthen. At this period of my career, the character of Mr Clayton appeared to me bright and fixed as a spotless star. He seemed the pattern of a man, pure and perfect. The dazzling light of pious fervour consumed within him the little selfishness that nature, to stamp an angel with humanity, had of necessity implanted there. He was swallowed up in holiness—his thoughts were of heaven—his daily conduct tinged and illumined with a heavenly hue. Nothing could surpass the intense devotedness of the child of God, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... captivated the heart of one of the royal princesses. The historical reader must strike a sort of balance for himself in getting at an estimate of Hervey's character. No man has been more bitterly denounced by his enemies or more warmly praised by his friends. Affectation, insincerity, prodigality, selfishness, servility to the great, contempt for the humble, are among the qualities his opponents ascribe to him. According to his friends, his cynicism was a mere affectation to hide a sensitive and generous nature; his ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... the camp; the shrieks and blasphemies, and all the horrors of the battle-field; the desolation of the harvest, and the burning cottage; the storm, the sack, and the ruin of cities;—if we desire to unchain the furious passions of jealousy and selfishness, of hatred, revenge, and ambition, those lions that now sleep harmless in their den;—if we desire that the lake, the river, the ocean, should blush with the blood of brothers; that the winds should waft from the land to ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... these into a single electro-magnetic force, and with this force the power of gravitation will be neutralized. Then the world's traffic will be as readily carried in the air as now it is upon the ground. The forces of the Universe await only the dissipation of ignorance, selfishness, and greed to bless and harmonize ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... need strength to stretch forth my hand for that which is dearer to me than all the world beside? Oh, there is selfishness in my love, Riccardo, for it loses sight of the dangers that will threaten thee on the day when thou ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... was quivering all over. "Would it—would it mean that we should be together? No," she caught herself up sharply, "that is sheer selfishness. I shouldn't have ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... of woman. If I cannot obtain the one that is noble and simple, the woman who will faithfully and truly share my life, well then I don't want anything half-way or lukewarm. Then I would rather be subject to a woman without virtue, fidelity, or pity. Such a woman in her magnificent selfishness is likewise an ideal. If I am not permitted to enjoy the happiness of love, fully and wholly, I want to taste its pains and torments to the very dregs; I want to be maltreated and betrayed by the woman ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
... three years in the classics, and turned his attention towards medicine and divinity, before he finally settled down into the law. Such a compound of shrewdness, impudence, common-sense, pretension, humility, cleverness, vulgarity, kind-heartedness, duplicity, selfishness, law- honesty, moral fraud and mother wit, mixed up with a smattering of learning and much penetration in practical things, can hardly be described, as any one of his prominent qualities is certain to be met by another quite as obvious that is almost its converse. Mr. Bragg, in short, ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... the psychological side, the further assumption of a general selfishness or self-seeking as the principal motive of the individual in the economic sphere. Oddly enough this assumption—the most warrantable of the lot—was the earliest to fall under disrepute. The plain assertion that every ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... very strange that Ella should be so selfish, for her father is not at all so, and I know it must grieve him to have a child of his so forgetful of the enjoyment of others. This selfishness does not make her happy. It occasions her much trouble, and it ...
— The Nest in the Honeysuckles, and other Stories • Various
... enter into the privations and embarrassments of those to whom all is so new and painful. But, in the patron of the Winkelried, there existed a natural in difference to the grievances of others, and a narrow selfishness of disposition, in aid of the opinions which had been formed by a life of hardship and exposure. He considered the vulgar passenger as so much troublesome freight, which, while it brought the advantage of a higher remuneration than the same cubic measurement of inanimate ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... nation was against him and the times were against him. He exasperated alike the priests, the nobles, and the populace by his rebukes. As a prophet he had no honor in his native place. He uniformly opposed the current of popular prejudices, and denounced every form of selfishness and superstition; but all his protests and rebukes were in vain. There were very few to encourage him or comfort him. Like Noah, he was alone amidst universal derision and scorn, so that he was sad beyond measure, more filled with grief than ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume II • John Lord
... there is a pride that apes humility, so there is an egotism that apes selfishness, a cowardice that apes stoicism and an indolence that apes effort. This is especially apparent ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... had cost her the forfeiture of the good-will of the people. To add to the confusion, the jealousy between the king and his brother Anjou had reappeared, and the chancellor had lost his characteristic courage and avowed his utter despair of being able to stem the fierce tide of human selfishness and passion. Cardinal Lorraine was realizing his long-cherished hope: "for this one man's authority had been the greatest countermand of ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... his followers find out that it is all for him and none for them. And in business we are all on our guard against the man who wants the whole thing, and will take it if he is not watched. Even when selfishness succeeds, it never satisfies. It is ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... it was that ... exactly. Well, anyway, she said that if I was willing to risk my life to save yours, she couldn't protect her father any more. Said she was doing it out of selfishness, really, since he's her only living relative. I don't believe she meant that, ...
— The Dueling Machine • Benjamin William Bova
... she! And were there not thousands equally and more miserable in the world—people wrapped in no tenderness, to whom none ministered, left if not driven—so it seemed at the moment to Hester—to fold themselves in their own selfishness? And was there nothing she, a favored one of the family, could do to help, to comfort, to lift up one such of her own flesh and blood?—to rescue a heart from the misery of hopelessness?—to make this one or that feel there was a heart of love and refuge ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... men, animated by selfishness, by jealousy, by greed for gain, by sentimentalism, or by hypocritical patriotism, Matius stands aloof, and stands perhaps alone. For him the death of Caesar means the loss of a friend, of a man in whom he believed. He ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... character, go as the White Moll—because that was the lesser danger, the one that held the only promise of success. There wasn't any other way. She could not very well refuse to risk her capture by the police, could she, when by so doing she might save another's life? She could not balance in cowardly selfishness the possibility of a prison term for herself, hideous as that might be, against the penalty of death that the Sparrow would pay if she remained inactive. But she could not leave here as the White Moll. Somewhere, somewhere out in the night, somewhere away from this garret where ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... taken but little thought for those who had bread and to spare, so now she felt but transient interest in those among her new associates who were successfully struggling against the blackmail of luxury, the leprosy of worldliness, the selfishness that at last coffins the soul it clothes. Her heart yearned instead towards the spiritually starving, the tempted, the fallen in that great little world, whose names are written in the book, not of life, but of Burke—the little world ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... his view. No one greeted him, no hand of friendship was held forth to welcome him. All the world seemed rushing on for something, he knew not what; and, disheartened at the apparent selfishness that pervaded society, he returned to his room, and wished for the quietness of his own sweet village, the companionship ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... example; release us Into the larger coming time: And into Christ's broad garment piece us Rags of virtue as poor as crime, National selfishness, civic vaunting. ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... as a rule, be compared with the numbing torpor of winter, necessary doubtless in our human economy, but lacking the charm and vitality of the expansive phase. Often, indeed, it is disgraced by the characteristics of a slavish populace, a mean selfishness, a mad frivolity, and fawning adulation on the ruler who dispenses panem et circenses. Such has been the course of many a political reaction, from the time of degenerate Athens and imperial Rome down to the decay of Medicean Florence ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... that, when one's spirit is sick, sore, and lame, as if it was a body, and it goes looking for a place to lie down where nobody will disturb it, and it can feel its dizzy self going into a long sleep. I'll never forget how sick my soul was then—sick of all the false ways and selfishness and all the old scenes, and all big cities and the flow of faces on the streets and the memory of our elegant apartments in Paris, with their pale brocades at the windows and on the furniture, and sick of the sordid surroundings in the cheap ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... poor Clery swallow some essence of soap, bought for the king to shave with. All these things show the dread entertained by the newly freed people of being crushed by foreign powers, and the opinion that prevailed of the selfishness and tyrannical habits of the king and queen. The jealousy and cruelty from which they were now suffering were signs, perhaps, of the ignorance of the people; but they told quite as plainly of a condition ...
— The Peasant and the Prince • Harriet Martineau
... forced from the outside, with no help from within. Of course this is equally true of insurance and railroad corporations, of food purveyors, mine owners, cotton merchants, and a score of other interests. It is due not merely to human selfishness but to shortsightedness; in other words, to a lack ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... for those who not only will never appreciate it, but who will never be worth it. I think I do you no harm by telling you that you are worth all the rest of your family put together. The self-sacrifice which pampers the selfishness of others is NOT creditable. It is weak. It is unworthy. Remember what I say to you—make a fight for your rights, just as soon as you are old enough—your right to be a woman instead of a chattel and ...
— Tillie: A Mennonite Maid - A Story of the Pennsylvania Dutch • Helen Reimensnyder Martin
... is that principle. Jesus showed clearly—so clearly that the wonder is men could have missed the mark so completely—that the great principle becomes available only when men empty their minds of pride, selfishness, ignorance, and human will, and put in their place love, humility and truth. This step taken, there will flow into the human consciousness the qualities of God himself, giving powers that mortals believe utterly impossible to ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... elsewhere for more effectual support. The King of Prussia had been resting for the last two years, a curious and an interested spectator of the contests which were bathing Europe in blood, and which answered his purpose by enfeebling his rivals. He frankly and coolly flaunted his selfishness. "In a previous war with France," he says in his memoirs, "I abandoned the French at Prague, because I gained Silesia by that step. If I had escorted them to Vienna, they would never have given me so much." ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... himself, never to leave anything which he had taken in hand uncompleted, unless he could see his place satisfactorily supplied. And he could not but hold in small respect, persons who introduce confusion around themselves only to make their absence felt and are ready to disturb in wanton selfishness what they will not be at ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... play in, and to demand constantly that their elders shall interest themselves in them, is one of the most dangerous species of pampering common to the present day. The children become accustomed to selfishness and mental dependence. Besides this constant educational effort brings with it the dulling of the child's personality. If children were free in their own world, the nursery, but out of it had to submit to the strict limits imposed by the habits, wills, work, and repose ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key
... he should only throw away a good life after a damaged one. Right well would he justify himself that evening as he told his adventure in the pass to his friends or his family in Jericho. Love saw no excuses for leaving the man lying in his blood, for it was not looking for them; but selfishness saw them at a glance, and would have created them in plenty if there had been none ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... little lady tossed her head and spoke with emphasis. "Marcia's selfishness and thoughtlessness and indifference toward one who should be the dearest thing on earth to her is very hard to bear, very; but I am not made of the stuff that could break under an affliction of that kind. Mr. Oldham used ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... blindly trust all your affairs; and, in order to inspire you with confidence, extols him as a prudent man who thoroughly understands his own interest, and is so indefatigably active that he lets slip no opportunity of advancing it; lastly, lest you should be afraid of finding a vulgar selfishness in him, praises the good taste with which he lives; not seeking his pleasure in money-making, or in coarse wantonness, but in the enlargement of his knowledge, in instructive intercourse with a select circle, and even ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... desire seized us to look upon that life out there in its unveiled nakedness, its horrible cruelty. This curiosity meant more than narrow selfishness; it had a ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... presume to fall in love, or that another should dare to love her, until I had made up my mind whether I should take her myself: and this after so long an absence, and their having given up all hopes of ever seeing me again. The reader may smile at the absurdity, still more at the selfishness of this feeling; so did I, when I had reflected upon it, and I despised myself for my ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... I may say, on behalf of all those whose names are mentioned (for the Leadership of the House of Commons), that we do not understand what selfishness is in the Public Service. Everyone of us would prefer that someone else should hold that high and honourable ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 24, 1891 • Various
... refused as an article of barter by many of the ship's company. On my accepting this, from an unwillingness to affront them, they were uneasy and dissatisfied till I had given them something in return, though their hands were full of the presents which I had just made them. Selfishness is, in fact, almost without exception, their universal characteristic, and the mainspring of all their actions, and that, too, of a kind the most direct and unamiable that can well ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... visibly. Doris's flagrant selfishness to Basil hurt almost more than her faithlessness ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... distinction between the selfish man and the virtuous man is, that the imagination of the former is confined within a narrow limit, whilst that of the latter embraces a comprehensive circumference. In this sense, wisdom and virtue may be said to be inseparable, and criteria of each other. Selfishness is the offspring of ignorance and mistake; it is the portion of unreflecting infancy, and savage solitude, or of those whom toil or evil occupations have blunted or rendered torpid; disinterested benevolence is the product of a cultivated ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... having exhausted all the nourishment the frying-pan contained, sought to develop its brain faculty by thumping itself over the head with the flat of the thing. With the selfishness of the average parent—thinking chiefly of what the Coroner might say, and indifferent to the future of humanity, my friend insisted ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... about. In truth he made everything give way to his freaks and self-will; and he was a harsh and unkind husband, and insolent to his father-in-law; and, as time went on, he offended a great many persons by his pride and rudeness and selfishness, so that his brilliancy ...
— Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Greek History • Charlotte M. Yonge
... dark and sullen. He was an utterly spoiled boy, if one can be called spoiled, who had so few good qualities which admitted of being spoiled. He inherited his father's bad traits, his selfishness and unscrupulousness, in addition to a spirit of deceitfulness and hypocrisy from his mother's nature. He was not as censurable as he would have been had he not possessed these ...
— Tom, The Bootblack - or, The Road to Success • Horatio Alger
... appears, there is no juggling with occasion or ceremonious tradition. The instinct of helpless selfishness clothes him on the spot with ...
— Oklahoma Sunshine • Freeman E. (Freeman Edwin) Miller
... of them at least; and the awful selfishness and cowardice of it only brands me deeper. It was because I was afraid to have him become a Christian man! I knew if he did I should have no excuse for breaking the pledges that had passed between us; in plain ...
— The Chautauqua Girls At Home • Pansy, AKA Isabella M. Alden
... was so perfectly free from selfishness at this moment, that he would cheerfully have spared a few words from Miss Whedell's delightful monologue for the gratification of his late rival ("late" was now decidedly the word, in Maltboy's opinion) ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... extent this confusion perhaps exists in the discussion of love by Renouvier and Prat in La Nouvelle Monadologie (pp. 216 et seq.). In considering whether love is or is not a delusion, they answer that it is or is not according as we are, or are not, dominated by selfishness and injustice. "It was not an essential error which presided over the creation of the idol, for the idol is only what in all things the ideal is. But to realize the ideal in love two persons are needed, and therein is the great difficulty. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... of vital details, there was a tinge of selfishness in everything which Rhodes undertook and which gave a personal aspect to matters which ought to have been looked upon purely from the objective. The acquisition of Rhodesia, for instance, was considered by him as having been accomplished for the aggrandisement ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill
... us since the world began so many lies, that I for one have determined never to believe anything again. Labour leads to greed, and greed to selfishness, and selfishness to treachery, and treachery straight to the devil,—straight to the devil. Ha, my friend, all your leading articles won't lead you out of that. What's the news? Who's alive? Who dead? Who in? Who out? What think you ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... man. He revelled in the changing colour tones of the rugged ice cliffs, of the mountain mists and of the rolling deliberate smoke-cloud. Grand, too, was the space of it all, wonderful the air, and here, high on this ridge, human selfishness scarce seemed to be of this world. Sometimes, when he had been out here ready to start mustering at dawn, he had watched the first glow of coming daylight on the summit of Ruapehu, and again, at the end ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... not ask for gold. Wealth breeds false aims, and pride, and selfishness; In those serene, Arcadian days of old Men gave no thought to princely homes and dress. The gods who dwelt on fair Olympia's height Lived only for dear love and ...
— Poems of Power • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... lift the burden Of man's selfishness and sin; And to open wide earth's treasures Of God's storehouse, full of pleasures, For my dumb and human kin, And to ...
— Poems of Progress • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... that will make for the comfort and progress of the entire body, and we experience disappointment if we fail to discover some pleasure in connection with these concessions. We expect to see good will banishing selfishness and every semblance of monopoly. We expect to find every pupil glad to share the time and strength of the teacher with his fellows even to the point of generosity, and to find joy in so doing. We expect to ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... every way. Secret discipleship does not fulfil love's duty to the world. If we have found that which has blessed us richly, we owe it to others to tell them about it. To hide away in our own heart the knowledge of Christ is to rob those who do not know of him. It is the worst selfishness to be willing to be saved alone. Further, secret discipleship misses the fulness of blessing which comes to him who confesses Christ before men. It is he who believes with his heart and confesses with his mouth, who has promise of salvation. Confession is half of faith. Secret ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... was sodden with selfishness; to pretend not to be as full of meanness as I really was! Doesn't that seem to ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... here the objection reappeared on firmer ground—in this fever of high fortune which had seized him all had not been unwholesome. Perhaps there would have been selfishness in renunciation; perhaps he had done his duty in the acceptance. Suddenly transformed into a lord, what ought he to have done? The complication of events produces perplexity of mind. This had happened to him. Duty gave contrary ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... alien note it was, but a wonderfully sweet one. We three men had drifted away from the whole world of our womenkind. She seemed to bring us back instantly into touch with some of the few better and rarer memories round which the selfishness of life is always building a thicker crust. For one thing, at that moment I was deeply grateful—that I knew my friends. My task was ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... way we need not now inquire, that higher powers exist who can, if they will, defend and prosper him, in this way he has religion, he keeps up intercourse with higher powers. And thus religion is not necessarily, even in its most primitive form, a manifestation of mere selfishness. Though gifts are offered which are expected to please the higher beings, and though benefits are asked of which the worshipper is urgently in need, such transactions are not necessarily sordid any more than similar ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... within her own, the tears stood in her eyes, and she spoke some little words of tenderness, which showed that her heart was full. I could scarcely refrain from mingling my tears with hers, as I thought on all the sorrow and desolation that one man's selfishness had occasioned. ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... to have been devoted to business. She liked him, however, upon the whole, much better than she had expected, and in her heart was not sorry that she could like him no more; not sorry to be driven by the observation of his epicurism, his selfishness, and his conceit, to rest with complacency on the remembrance of Edward's generous temper, simple taste, and ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... deeply, and found no words to say. Thoughts came crowding on her mind, remembrance of many things left undone, of many complainings of others, of duties neglected, of selfishness—known to no one but herself—and her heart grew shamed and very humble. How many times since she had come home had she not preached what ...
— Anxious Audrey • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... Festing lit his pipe. Something stood between them, and she felt that it was not less dangerous because their motives were good. Had they differed from selfishness, agreement might have been easier, but an estrangement that sprang from principle was hard to overcome. She wanted to help her husband and keep him to herself; he meant to save her hardship and carry out a task that was properly his. But perhaps their motives ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... position of the married pair may be, while the worst evils of life are lightened and made bearable by its presence. Marrying for love need not mean improvidence. Only an unreasoning passion based on selfishness will plunge the beloved into privation and want. The highest, truest love has its substratum of common sense, self-restraint, and ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux
... prepossession in my own favour, I believed I was. Still, in every page of this enlightened writer, I find some captivating hypocrisy which has never occurred to me before, or some superlative piece of selfishness to which I was utterly a stranger. I should quite blush for myself before this stupendous creature, if remembering his precepts, one might blush at anything. An amazing man! a nobleman indeed! any King or Queen may make a Lord, but only the Devil himself—and the Graces—can ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... construct him a tomb, which should put to shame all previous monuments, and should with difficulty be surpassed, or even equalled. He must have possessed much elevation of thought, and an intense ambition, together with inordinate selfishness, an overweening pride, and entire callousness to the sufferings of others, before he could have approved the plan which his master-builder set before him. That plan, including the employment of huge blocks of stone, their conveyance to the top of a hill a hundred feet high, and their emplacement, ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... the masses, and niggardly in the support of colleges. Her ancient university foundations dwindled and withered under the foul breath of slavery; and even since the war they have fought a failing fight for life in the tainted air of social unrest and commercial selfishness, stunted by the death of criticism, and starving for lack of broadly cultured men. And if this is the white South's need and danger, how much heavier the danger and need of the freedmen's sons! how pressing here the need of broad ideals and ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... as a trust to be performed under the active vigilance of political adversaries and the partial scrutiny of friends, but with the sole object of promoting the honor and prosperity of the United States. I can have no motive of selfishness or ambition to turn me from a faithful performance of every duty attached to ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... the sand-hills. He looked sorter uplifted—jest like you did, Dr. Blythe, when you brought Mistress Blythe in tonight. I thought of him the minute I seen you. And he told me that he had a sweetheart back home and that she was coming out to him. I wasn't more'n half pleased, ornery young lump of selfishness that I was; I thought he wouldn't be as much my friend after she came. But I'd enough decency not to let him see it. He told me all about her. Her name was Persis Leigh, and she would have come out with him if it hadn't been for her ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... had been till now no special reason why it should. Thought, strong feeling, suffering, those were what changed faces; Sylvia had never thought very deeply, never suffered much, till now. And was it for him, who had been careful of her—very careful on the whole, despite man's selfishness, despite her never having understood the depths of him—was it for him of all people to hurt her so, to stamp her face with sorrow, perhaps ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... doing all day the first thing she does in the morning. She begins by taking the linen from the bed of her guests, and pulls off piece after piece of linen. A friend of hers learns this and determines to do the same, but is punished by the Lord for her selfishness.[3] ...
— Italian Popular Tales • Thomas Frederick Crane
... had large dark eyes set off by long curling black lashes, black hair that crinkled close to his head in satiny sleek sheen, well-chiselled features, all save a loose-hung, insolent lip that gave the impression of great self-indulgence and selfishness. He was dressed with a careful regard to the fashion and with evidently no regard whatever for cost. He bore the mark at once of wealth and snobbishness. Howard, in spite of his newly-acquired desire to look upon all men as brothers, found himself disliking ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... friends, I led a restless, careless life, devoted to the field and the chase. I live contented among this people, who honor me as their chief; for though my Asiatics are not quite so refined as your Europeans, yet are they far removed from envy and slander, from selfishness and ambition." ...
— The Oriental Story Book - A Collection of Tales • Wilhelm Hauff
... the arbitrary will and unreasonable caprice of a husband, who was scarcely her equal in intellect, and far her inferior in all the genial qualities of our nature, but who governed her by his iron selfishness. ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... them, he would not have pronounced his celebrated eulogium on their love of liberty;—he would not have ascribed to them any love of liberty, but the spurious kind which the other orator, impliedly, ascribes to them—that which "pride and selfishness" beget and foster. Genuine love of liberty, as Mr. Pinckney clearly saw, springs from "principle," and is found no where but in the hearts of those who respect the liberties and the ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... the other. Everything we can think or say or do is in one or other of these directions; we are either living for the self at the expense of the whole, or we are fulfilling the self by serving the whole. Sin is therefore selfishness. If the true life is the life which is lived in terms of the whole, then the sinful life is the life which is lived for self alone. No man, however depraved, succeeds in living the selfish life all the time; if he did he would sink below ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... all wants money. Selfishness could not thrive without money. I will give you all the money that you want, ...
— In The Boyhood of Lincoln - A Tale of the Tunker Schoolmaster and the Times of Black Hawk • Hezekiah Butterworth
... peculiar and well-defined move on the part of humanity towards self-preservation, righteousness, at the last, being only a form of common-sense. That greed, selfishness, pomp and folly in all the million forms which idleness can invent, investing itself in the name of religion, will cause certain people to come out and lead lives of truth, sobriety, method, industry ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... me a coxcomb, vain and pretentious, for all this. In my inmost heart I had no feeling of selfishness mingled with the consideration. It was from no sense of my own merits, no calculation of my own chances of success, that I thought thus. Fortunately, at eighteen one's heart is uncontaminated with such an alloy of vanity. The first emotions of youth are pure and ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... d'), born about 1769, mother of Diane d'Uxelles; beloved by the Duc de Maufrigneuse, and about 1814 gave him her daughter in marriage; ten years later she withdrew to her Uxelles estate, where she lived a life of piety and selfishness. [The Secrets ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... must be all in all. We must love our friends as we love our children,—for them, not for ourselves. Self is the cause of misery and grief. My soul is capable of soaring higher than the eagle; there is a love which cannot fail me. But to live for this earthly life is too debasing,—here the selfishness of the senses reigns supreme over the spirituality of the angel that is within us. The pleasures of passion are stormy, followed by enervating anxieties which impair the vigor of the soul. I came to ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... help a companion out of a difficulty. You may be surprised to hear me—an old soldier and an Irishman—talking in this way; but I give you the advice, because I have seen so many act differently, and, wrapped up in intense selfishness, become utterly regardless of others,—reaping the consequences by being disliked and neglected, and finally deserted by all who were their friends. There's another point I must speak to you about, and ...
— Paddy Finn • W. H. G. Kingston
... sacrificed to save him. Her own desire must stand aside, whatever the suffering might be. Thus, through the fierce fire of temptation Frina Mavrodin came forth a stronger woman, a keener slave to duty, because that duty must cost her so much. And having shaken herself free from the fetters of selfishness, her thoughts and conceptions became ...
— Princess Maritza • Percy Brebner
... strength of its life passing through the ground into the oak tree. With Cercyon, but first named, (Plato, Laws, book VII., 796), Antaus is the master of contest without use;—[GREEK: philoneikias achrestou]—and is generally the power of pure selfishness and its various inflation to insolence and degradation to cowardice;—finding its strength only in fall back to its Earth,—he is the master, in a word, of all such kind of persons as have been writing lately about the "interests of England." He is, therefore, the Power invoked by ...
— Mornings in Florence • John Ruskin
... look at everything with as much indifference as the swinging! But it is all selfishness. It is as easy to be selfish for one's own good as for one's own pleasure; and I dare say, the first is as bad ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... no more that they can do: but I will forewarn you whom you shall fear; him who, after he has killed, has power to destroy both body and soul in hell." Let a man fear him, the destroying devil, and fear therefore cowardice, disloyalty, selfishness, sluggishness, which are his works, and to be utterly afraid of which is to be truly brave. God grant that we of the clergy may remember this during the coming war, and instead of weakening the righteous courage and honour ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... needn't have taken so much of my time; but I was protecting myself, you see, gold-bricking myself—trying to find a way out that would not deprive me of things I liked to do, of pleasures I wanted to enjoy. It was pure selfishness that dominated me and made me do so much figuring on a proposition I knew was contained in a sentence; but I did fight to hang on to ...
— The Fun of Getting Thin • Samuel G. Blythe
... I ventured to break the ice of unchristian silence. Why should not selfishness be buried beneath the Atlantic in ...
— The Biography of Robert Murray M'Cheyne • Andrew A. Bonar
... rests on my intense desire that you should come out here, to Prague, even to the terrace of my choice, and look at the scene through my eyes while I would endeavour to see it through yours. This, I admit, is undiluted selfishness on ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... exaggerated by his detractors, it cannot be questioned that either through indolence, or love of money, or some other kind of selfishness, he was very neglectful of his hospitable duties to the bench and the bar. "Verily he is working off the arrears of the Lord Chancellor," said Romilly, when Sir Thomas Plummer, the Master of the Rolls, gave a succession ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... surrender to evil, appears hateful and guilty. It deserves the indignation and the shame which attach to all treason. And the spirit which lies behind all these forms of disloyalty to the good,—the spirit which issues in selfishness and sensuality, cruelty and lust, intemperance and covetousness,—this animating spirit of evil which works against the Divine will and mars the peace and order of the universe is the great Adversary against whom we must fight for ...
— Joy & Power • Henry van Dyke
... for the maiden, and sorrowfully for me. Yet, when she reproached herself for her selfishness in robbing me of my sweetheart, I had not the heart to show her all I felt. In sooth, this maiden needed a friend and comforter sorely; and how was she to fare on that long troublesome journey with no comrade but a rough man, and perchance a half-witted ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... that if you submit yourself to Him, you are owning Him as Lord, whom the God of all the world has made Lord and Christ; and so if you are meek and gentle, when something wrong tempts you to be passionate and proud, if you are kind and helpful to others, when selfishness tempts you to please yourself, you are acknowledging this blessed Master as yours. Is not this a happy thought, my Arthur? and do you not like to give pleasure to the One who loves you so, and who did for you ...
— Left at Home - or, The Heart's Resting Place • Mary L. Code
... Mason's sermon, "I have refined thee, but not with silver, I have chosen thee in the furnace of affliction." What must Sarah Temple have suffered since those days! I remembered her in her prime, in her beauty, in her selfishness, in her cruelty to those whom she might have helped, and I wondered the more at the change which must have come over the woman that she had won the affections of this family, that she had gained the untiring ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... illness, and inability to play: they declared it would knock the whole thing on the head, for Hanmer would be sure to turn sulky, and there was an end of the eleven; and they looked so really chagrined at my continued refusals, that at length I conquered my selfishness, (I had had a lesson in that,) and, though really feeling indisposed for any exertion, went down with them to the ground. I was in momentary dread of seeing Clara arrive, (for all the world was to be there,) and felt nervous and low-spirited. The strangers' ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... so brilliant and satisfactory a son. Hilary's likes and dislikes in the matter of food, Hilary's preference for silk underwear, Hilary's love of art and music, were all matters of equal and supreme importance to Mrs Ffolliot, and in every way she fostered the strain of selfishness that exists even in the ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... simply because he found more amusement in her conversation, a more comprehensive understanding, and a more noble cast of thoughts and sentiments, than his beautiful consort exhibited. Berengaria did not hate Edith on this account, far less meditate her any harm; for, allowing for some selfishness, her character was, on the whole, innocent and generous. But the ladies of her train, sharpsighted in such matters, had for some time discovered that a poignant jest at the expense of the Lady Edith was a specific for relieving her Grace of England's low spirits, and the ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... Countesses of Poictiers and Provence, and the widowed Countess of Artois, among the number, bewailed the fate of their lords; the queen was afflicted to a terrible degree as she thought of the king's peril; and many people only felt concerned about their own extreme peril. Of course much selfishness was exhibited under the circumstances; and the Pisans and Genoese set a bad example by preparing to save themselves, and leave the city to its fate. But, on hearing of their intention, the queen ordered that the chief persons among them should be brought to her presence, and addressed ...
— The Boy Crusaders - A Story of the Days of Louis IX. • John G. Edgar
... my experiences at that stage are to be found in every moral text-book, but are not therefore to be despised. That which keeps our appetites confined within us, and checks their free access to the outside, poisons our life. Such is selfishness which refuses to give free play to our desires, and prevents them from reaching their real goal, and that is why it is always accompanied by festering untruths and extravagances. When our desires find unlimited freedom ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... further and higher step, to purify the soul: for the man who refuses to do evil is not so far on as the man who refuses to feel and think evil. It is however possible for him to reject evil only because it is bad for himself. A life of selfishness may be wonderfully free from the doing of evil. The Revelation in Jesus Christ is the Revelation of God as the highest Aim, and of the Unselfish Life as the ...
— The Prayer Book Explained • Percival Jackson
... He saw that he had lived a life of almost untouched egoism, setting his own wrongs above all the other wrongs in the world, counting his own griefs the greatest of all griefs, nursing his own tragedy as if it had been the first tragedy and the last. Bitterly, remorselessly he reviewed his selfishness, his hatred, his senseless rage, the heartlessness wrought by himself in a nature that had been, in the beginning, as pure, if not as precious and fine ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... the Raven, had fallen the curses of the Wise Man. Three curses: Blackness, Hoarseness, and the Keeping of One Shape. And as his feathers were blackened, so, thereafter, was his heart darkened with eternal selfishness." ...
— In the Time That Was • James Frederic Thorne
... Every symptom of selfishness should be discouraged, for if suffered to take root in a child, it lays the foundation of much that is ...
— Domestic Cookery, Useful Receipts, and Hints to Young Housekeepers • Elizabeth E. Lea
... your gift. Perhaps I act selfishly in taking it, but a day may come when I shall justify that selfishness to you. In the meantime, once again farewell. You are my only friend, and these are the saddest words I have ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... took such short steps when she walked, that her brother, Joe Vavrika, always called her his duck. She adored her niece because of her talent, because of her good looks and masterful ways, but most of all because of her selfishness. ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... the road to happiness but it is the way, not the destination, and the action of the Buddha and his disciples is something beyond it. They had obtained the goal, for they were all Arhats, and they might, if they had been inspired by that selfishness which some European authors find prominent in Buddhism, have entered into their rest. Yet the Buddha bade them go among men and preach "for the gain and welfare of many" and they continued their benevolent activity although ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... only by fate, which builds our destiny for us out of our own deeds, but by every other person with whom we come in contact. Our fellows check off daily against us so much vitality, so much magnanimity, so much idleness, cruelty, spite, goodness, selfishness, meanness, or loving-kindness. Life holds a record of our every deed, and from no least responsibility can we make our escape. We are the prisoners of events which ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... "In short, man is an animal equally selfish and vain. Vanity, indeed, is but a modification of selfishness. From the latter, there are some who pretend to be free: they are generally such as declaim against the lust of wealth and power, because they have never been able to attain any high degree in either: they boast of generosity and feeling. They tell us (perhaps they tell ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... that it was unavoidable for one of so generous and self- sacrificing a nature. I may add, that my aunt Lily is much touched, and thoroughly approves, and my uncle Jasper says imprudence is better than selfishness." ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... was there not a certain honesty and frankness in the evil that argued a saner morality? There are more merchants today, surer deliveries, and wider well-being, but are there not, also, bigger thieves, deeper injustice, and more calloused selfishness in well-being? Be that as it may,—certainly the nicer sense of honor that has risen ever and again in groups of forward-thinking men has been curiously and broadly blunted. Consider our chiefest industry,—fighting. Laboriously the Middle Ages built its rules of ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... pride, there seems to me nothing surprisingly characteristic in any nation. Given its history, everything appears natural; each people's wealth and misery seem in direct proportion to its freedom and its prejudices, and in consequence, in proportion to the self-sacrifice or selfishness of ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... not sure that it is not his good qualities that make him so hard to deal with. The want of selfishness and vanity seem to take away two common springs of action, but I do believe that patience will bring out something much higher when you have found the way to ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... will not, because I'm the only man in the world who can talk to you like this without being knocked down. You mustn't take all that I've said to heart in this way. I only spoke—a lot of it at least—out of pure selfishness, because, because—Oh, damn it all, old man,—I don't know what I shall do without you. Of course, you've got the money and the place and all that—and there are two very good reasons why you ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... less than a fine piece of engineering on the part of the patricians to defeat the whole movement and could have resulted in nothing less. Licinius was disappointed but not confounded. With a sneer at the selfishness as well as the blindness of those who had voted only for what they themselves most wanted he bade them take heed that they could not eat if they would not drink.[18] He refused to separate the bills. ...
— Public Lands and Agrarian Laws of the Roman Republic • Andrew Stephenson
... had been spared the gluttonous selfishness and infantile jealousy which are the commoner results of early political education. He had neither past nor future, and could afford to be careless of his company. Adams found him surrounded by all the active ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... relinquished by mutual consent of both parties, or this contract is legally dissolved. If the man is dominant over the animal, he will count the conse- quences of his own conduct; will consider the effects, [25] on himself and his progeny, of selfishness, unmerciful- ness, tyranny, ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... or in the long run—in this world or the next. Why do this, that, or the other? because you will gain most by it, in the end. At bottom, the motive is taken for granted, whether openly admitted or more or less thinly disguised—self, self-interest, selfishness. ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... of the United States could know for a surety of the avarice, the selfishness, the cynicism which have marked every step of the negotiations relative to the settlement of the Near Eastern Question, if they were aware of the chicanery and the deceit and the low cunning practised by the European diplomatists, ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... statesman without a statesman's craftiness, politician without a politician's meanness, a great man without a great man's vices, a philanthropist without a philanthropist's dreams, a christian without pretensions, a ruler without the pride of place or power, an ambitious man without selfishness, and a successful man without vanity. Humble man of the backwoods, boatman, axman, hired laborer, clerk, surveyor, captain, legislator, lawyer, debater, orator, politician, statesman. President, savior of the republic, emancipator of a ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... of Shakespeare's observation of Florio he appears to have been more amused than angered, but as the years pass his dislike grows, as he sees more clearly into the cold selfishness of a character, obscured to his earlier and more casual view by the interesting personality and frank and humorous worldly wisdom of the man. However heightened and amplified by Shakespeare's imagination the characterisation of Falstaff may now appear, a consideration of the ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... a dream of youth that there may be here a satisfaction of the heart, without which, and in comparison with which, all worldly success is failure. In spite of the selfishness which seems to blight all life, our hearts tell us that there is possible a nobler relationship of disinterestedness and devotion. Friendship in its accepted sense is not the highest of the different grades in that relationship, but ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... that, weary-eyed and dry-souled, she roamed the earth in feverish search of solace and refreshment. Her husband, a generous, affectionate man, condemned by her selfishness to a waste of arid years empty of wife-love or children, had died of overwork, dyspepsia, and general dissatisfaction some eight years before, leaving his widow with an income of two thousand pounds a year, a sum she found all ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... shall not be the true sulphurous article that sometimes takes a fancy to fly away with his conjurer. Rene says: "In my madness I had gone so far as even to wish I might experience a misfortune, so that my suffering might at least have a real object." But no; selfishness is only active egotism, and there is nothing and nobody, with a single exception, which this sort of creature will not sacrifice, rather than give any other than an imaginary pang to his idol. Vicarious pain he is not unwilling to endure, nay, will even ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
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