"Self-renunciation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... all; why a human being loves what it loves and hates what it hates; why it is faithful when it could be unfaithful and faithless when it should be true; how civilized man can fight single handed against the ages that were his lower past—how he can develop self-renunciation out of selfishness and his own wisdom out of surrounding folly,—all these are questions that mean more and more. My work is but beginning and the ...
— Bride of the Mistletoe • James Lane Allen
... opposite to Emmeline's feeble character, the heroine of the present story is intended to set forth the manner in which a Christian may contend with and conquer this world, living in it but not of it, and rendering it a means of self-renunciation. It is therefore purposely that the end presents no great event, and leaves Marian unrecompensed save by the effects her consistent well doing has produced on her companions. Any other compensation would render ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... may have written a book that teaches, of all others, self-renunciation, but the way they taught it was self-assertion. The Bible begins with a meek Moses who teaches by saying "The Lord said unto Moses," and it comes to its climax in a lowly and radiant man who dies on a cross to say "I and the Father are ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... you? You're not the same as you used to be," Mamma Delobelle would say, surprised to see her in such high spirits and above all so active. For instead of remaining always buried in her easy-chair, with the self-renunciation of a young grandmother, the little creature was continually jumping up and running to the window as lightly as if she were putting out wings; and she practised standing erect, asking ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... familiar earth never again to be trodden by her feet, the awful chasm set between them made him feel as if he was for the first time separated from her. Only an hour ago and his voice could have reached her in words of entreaty and of passionate repentance and humble self-renunciation. They could have spoken face to face, and he might have had a brief interval for pouring out his heart to her. But there had been no word uttered between them. There had been only that one moment in which her soul ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... her—a dead woman. Whatever the nature of those immature sensations with which, as a girl of twenty, she had accepted her husband, in her feeling towards Miltoun there was not only abandonment, but the higher flame of self-renunciation. She wanted to do the best for him, and had not even the consolation of the knowledge that she had sacrificed herself for his advantage. All had been taken out of her hands! Yet with characteristic fatalism she did not feel rebellious. If it were ordained ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... came to board with her. Mary was now more comfortable than she had heretofore been. She was, comparatively speaking, prosperous. She had much work to do, but by it she was supporting herself, and at the same time advancing towards her "clear-purposed goal" of self-renunciation. Then she had cause for pleasure in the fact that Eliza was now really free, Bishop having finally agreed to the separation. Mary Wollstonecraft, at the head of a house, and mistress of a school, was a very different person from Mary Wollstonecraft, simple companion to ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... actions, white or virtuous (s'ukla), black or wicked (k@r@s@na), white-black or partly virtuous and partly vicious (s'ukla-k@r@s@na) as most of our actions are, neither black nor white (as'uklak@r@s@na), i.e. those acts of self-renunciation or meditation which are not associated with any desires for the fruit. It is only when a person can so restrain himself as to perform only the last kind of action that he ceases to accumulate any ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... no difficulty about the succession. His ministers seem to have thought it necessary to offer some opposition to his project; but their resistance was feeble, perhaps because they hoped that a young prince would be more entirely guided by their counsels. Narses was allowed to complete his act of self-renunciation, and, after crowning his son Hormisdas with his own hand, to spend the remainder of his days in retirement. According to the native writers, his main object was to contemplate death and prepare himself for it. In his youth he had evinced some levity of ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... is to be done to the glory of God, how much more the playing in His church! Let none take this noble work in hand without a desire to give, in its degree, the best work that can be given in absolute self-renunciation, humility, and reverence. ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII: No. 353, October 2, 1886. • Various
... own shadow she set her teeth for that answer. It was to be the crowning act of her self-renunciation, and it strained every fibre of her resolution. She could not allow him to stay where he was, even in uniform. The danger was two-fold. In a moment of weakness he would probably shoot Conward, and in a moment of weakness she would ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... age, imbibed sceptical views in reference to the truths of revealed religion; and as she seldom read the Holy Scriptures, and was almost a stranger to their sacred contents, her imagination pictured an easier way to escape from the power and the consequences of sin than in that self-renunciation which the Gospel enjoins. In some memoranda of her experience, she says, in reference to the snares by which her mind was entangled:—"I was led to a love of metaphysical studies, and fancied I discovered, with clearness, that human vice, and consequently human misery, sprang from ignorance ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley
... And when finally, from the couch upon which he had drawn her, Dolly opened upon him her blue eyes, humid as twin stars at dawn, he placed her little scissors in her hand, and with head bowed low, in an ecstatic agony of self-renunciation bade her do her duty. The little scissors could not do it this time, though. It took ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... had taught her; and the one bitter truth of self-renunciation she had wrung out of it must tell itself somehow. No man's history is dumb. It came out vaguely, an inarticulate cry to God and man, in the songs she sang, I think. That very night, as she stood there with her gray eyes very ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... only for Apostles or missionaries of great causes; it is the condition of all true, noble life, and prescribes the path not only for those who would live for others, but for all who would truly live their own lives. Self-renunciation guards the way to the 'tree of life.' That lesson was specially needed by 'Greeks,' for ignorance of it was the worm that gnawed the blossoms of their trees, whether of art or of literature. It is no less needed by our sensuously luxurious and eagerly acquisitive generation. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren |
