"Self-righteous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... victim had been slain at home, and men banqueting on the poor clay of a comrade with whom they played in infancy, or a woman whose favours they had shared—the whole body of these sentiments is outraged. To consider it too closely is to understand, if not to excuse, these fervours of self-righteous old ship-captains, who would man their guns, and open fire in passing, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 'sinners.' So you should not be surprised if I, being the healer, turn away to them, and prefer their company to yours.' But there is more than taking them at their own estimate in the great words, for to conceit ourselves 'whole' bars us off from getting any good from Jesus. He cannot come to the self-righteous heart. We must feel our sickness before we can see Him in His true character, or be blessed by His presence with us. And the apparent distinction, which seems to limit His work, really vanishes in the fact ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... me, then!" he said, in self-righteous wrath. "After all I said to you that evening at Tryland, and what you promised then! Yes, you ...
— Red Hair • Elinor Glyn
... people and drew them to Him. It would have been a long while before any penitent woman would have come in and wept over the feet of Gamaliel and his like. It would have been a long while before any sinful men would have found their way, with tears and yet with trust, to these self-righteous hypocrites. But perfect purity somehow draws the impure, though assumed sanctity always repels them. And it is a sign, not that a man is bad, but that he is good in a Christlike fashion, if the outcasts that durst not come near your respectable people find themselves drawn ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... is impossible to ignore the fact that you are late. The self-righteous hands of clocks point out your guilt whichever way you look. Your eye and your ear are accused on every side. You long for the courteous clocklessness of the country; there, mercifully, the sun neither ticks nor strikes, nor cavils ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... of Assisi and a few others. But the rest of us have caught the patter and it makes us 'feel good'. We wallow in it. We feel warm and self-righteous—comfy, mother says, when she wants to tuck me up at night same as she used to after I'd been in swimming and got licked. Yes, we're compassionate and ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... community who are really happy in their life's work, as they fantastically call it, are those commercial ruffians whose brutal, self-righteous, puritanical countenances one is swamped by—as if by a flood of suffocating mediocrity—in the streets of all ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... bitterly ironic because the self-righteous opponents of Birth Control practise themselves the doctrine they condemn. The birth-rate among conservative opponents indicates that they restrict the numbers of their own children by the methods of Birth Control, or are ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... to-morrow the severing of the cords and the stepping forth with freedom from obligation. He knew that the very best people, being those who are most sensitive to gratitude and to other people's pains, are incessantly let in for complications that never involve selfish or self-righteous persons. ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... that very inability to believe of which you complain so sadly. For that inability does not lie, as you fancy it does, in the impossibility of your performing aright the great act of faith, but of ceasing from all such self-righteous attempts to perform any act, or do any work whatsoever in order to your being saved. So that the real truth is, that you have not yet seen such a sufficiency in the one great work of the Son of God upon the cross, as to lead you utterly to discontinue your mistaken and aimless efforts to work ...
— God's Plan with Men • T. T. (Thomas Theodore) Martin
... taken place; the brother demanding as free gift the property of Welzheim, which the Landhofmeisterin had lent him. This Wilhelmine refused; she did not relish her brother's way of asking, and she bitterly resented the pompous, self-righteous, disapproving manner which he had adopted towards her of late. After all, he owed her everything, she told herself. Her sister, Sittmann, was a useless parasite. The Landhofmeisterin accounted her as one who would ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... the victim, but, for reasons which seem good to him, turns tail, breaks his arranged part, and is very nearly accessory to a murder. At the other end of the story, carrying out his general character of prig-pedant, as selfish as self-righteous, he meets Valjean's rather foolish and fantastic self-sacrifice with illiberal suspicion, and practically kills the poor old creature by separating him from Cosette. When the eclaircissement comes, it appears to me—as Mr. Carlyle ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... You take it for granted that she is a scholar; you are aware of her intellectual gifts, I mean, only as you are aware of her breeding. The main impression she makes is one of full humanity, humanity at its best, humanity that is pure but not self-righteous, charitable but not sentimental, just but not hard, true but not mechanical in consistency, frank but not gushing. Out of all this come two things, the sense of two realisms, the realism of her political faith, and the realism of her religious faith. ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... said in your last letter, some allusion to religion, I didn't quite like, and at any other time I would have written you a sermon on the subject. In Calcutta (where I felt so self-righteous) nothing would have prevented me—but now I haven't the spirit. Mark, please, how the whirligig of Time brings its revenges! In Calcutta I thought myself a saint, in Takai I am regarded as a Brand Unplucked. It is rather dispiriting. I am beginning to wonder if I really am as nice ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... low-browed aesthetic parlor, where, when Gaites arrived and passed to a belated dinner in the dining-room, an orchestra, consisting of a lady pianist and a lady violinist, was giving the closing piece of the afternoon concert. The dining-room was painted a self-righteous olive-green; it was thoroughly netted against the flies, which used to roost in myriads on the cut-paper around the tops of the pillars, and a college-student head waiter ushered Gaites through the gloom to his place with a warning and hushing hand which made him feel as if he were ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... we're the U. S. A. ordering 'em to stop. Say it strong enough to make us believe it, too, Gates—so we'll feel self-righteous when the ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... that a work of its character, should have been so much read and admired! We may boast of our intelligence and virtue to our hearts content, the reception of this work is a sad commentary on the age in which we live. We may boast of our religion; it is little else at last, but self-righteous phariseism! We throw around ourselves religion as a cloak; the more effectually to conceal our dark designs! Yes, verily, while we stab an erring, or unerring brother in the dark! We are all prostrate before the god of mammon, and there are but few of us, who would ...
— A Review of Uncle Tom's Cabin - or, An Essay on Slavery • A. Woodward
... said Grace. "Rose and Letitia will, certainly; and the others will follow suit. After all, John, perhaps we old families, as we call ourselves, are a little bit pharisaical and self-righteous, and too apt to thank God that we are not as other men are. It'll do us good to be obliged to come a little out of ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Inhabitants and every caution should be used to continue to them the enjoyment of those civil and religious Rights which were secured to them by the Capitulation or which have since been granted by the liberal and enlightened spirit of the British Government.' Except for its rather too self-righteous conclusion this confidential announcement really is an admirable statement of the 'liberal and enlightened' views which prevailed ...
— The Father of British Canada: A Chronicle of Carleton • William Wood
... there are in addition, as there are in every building set apart for the purposes of piety, several who have "more frill than shirt," and much "more cry than wool" about them—rectified, beautifully self-righteous, children who would "sugar over" a very ugly personage ten hours out of the twelve every day, and then at night thank the Lord for all his mercies. In Lune-street Chapel faction used to run high and wilfulness was a gem which many of the members ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... that teaching, in its intolerance, its mixture of sanctimoniousness and covetousness, and its self-righteous assumption of a world-improving mission, is closely akin to the spirit from which were bred the religious wars of the past through the long and dark years when Protestants and Catholics killed ...
— Right Above Race • Otto Hermann Kahn
... was long remembered both by friends and neighbours with veneration. She was sensible and intelligent, polite, agreeable, and of unbounded charity; but Miss Burney, who knew her, depicts her as ostentatious in her exertions, and somewhat self-righteous and vainglorious. She was, however, fervently beloved by her daughter, who afterward made several pecuniary sacrifices to ensure her mother's comfort. The earliest years of Lady Georgiana (as she became after her father was created an earl) ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson |
