"Self-sufficient" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... weeping and vituperation. Perhaps it was that she had too much pride—or that in general she saw life with too much self-complacency, or that she was not in the habit of yielding to disappointment. It may have been that Jenny belonged to that class of persons who are called, self-sufficient. She plunged through a crisis with her own zest, meeting attack with counter-attack, keeping her head, surveying with the instinctive irreverence and self-protective wariness of the London urchin the possibilities and swaying fortunes of the fight. Emmy, so much slower, so much ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... the gods, were beautiful, strong, happy, self-sufficient, up in the skies; and men on earth were full of sorrow and trouble, disease, accidents, death; and sin, too; quarrelling and killing, hateful and hating each other. How could the gods love men? And then men had a sense of sin; they felt they were doing wrong. Surely the gods hated ...
— The Good News of God • Charles Kingsley
... Contemplation of Wisdom and Beauty: The latter is the peculiar Portion of that Sex which is therefore called Fair; but the happy Concurrence of both these Excellencies in the same Person, is a Character too celestial to be frequently met with. Beauty is an over-weaning self-sufficient thing, careless of providing it self any more substantial Ornaments; nay so little does it consult its own Interests, that it too often defeats it self by betraying that Innocence which renders it lovely and desirable. ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... asked if Clem meant Mr. Fulmort of St. Matthew's, Whittingtonia, and when he said "Yes, he lived in the clergy house," he began regularly to play him off, asking the most absurd questions about fasts and feasts and vigils and decorations, and Clem answered them all in his prim little self-sufficient way, just as if he thought he was on the high- road to be St. Clement the Martyr, till I ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... quietly into the vestibule and the company burst into an incongruous babble. Dorn listened to their voices, again firm and self-sufficient, chattering formalities. He watched Rachel adjusting her hat with over-eager gestures. Her eyes were avoiding him. She seemed breathless, her head squirming under the necessity of having to remain for another moment before the eyes of the people in ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... creature. Judge him as one of a too delicate constitution who ventures out in a storm. His will-power was great enough. He worked night and day, amidst the most violent bodily suffering, with a great ideal steadfastly before him, never satisfied with his own achievements. He was not self-sufficient. ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... doctors are indeed pompous, self-sufficient, affectedly solemn, venal and unfeeling with ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... I could! Don't tell Vic, will you? I'd like to take him by surprise. Boys are so conceited and self-sufficient! You'd think Vic was my grandfather, the way he lords it over me. First of all, what is the right way to get on a horse? I wish you'd teach ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... government of a colony as distracted as it was important, did not arise from the noble lord's fitness, but from his political interest; and that Earl Grey, the whig colonial minister, had performed his official duties in a way crotchety, self-sufficient, and arrogant—in the spirit of the partizan rather ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Commissioners did not thus decide without abundant reason. On the 3rd of March they met at the house of M. Roux, the President, when M. Berna introduced his patient, a young girl of seventeen, of a constitution apparently nervous and delicate, but with an air sufficiently cool and self-sufficient. M. Berna offered eight proofs of Animal Magnetism, which he would elicit in her case, and which he ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... particularly forbidden the house five years ago. He embraced his aunt affectionately before she had collected herself sufficiently to prevent him, and bowed with the utmost grace to a rather vulgar-looking, self-sufficient lady to whom he was presented. This person, however, he contrived to sit out in spite ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... George," the governor said worriedly. "The Belt still isn't self-sufficient enough to be able to afford an Earth embargo. They can hold out longer ...
— Anchorite • Randall Garrett
... aware of the change in Ditmar, and knew the cause of it. Her feelings were complicated. He, the most important man in Hampton, the self-sufficient, the powerful, the hitherto distant and unattainable head of the vast organization known as the Chippering Mill, of which she was an insignificant unit, at times became for her just a man—a man for whom she had achieved ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... elbows on the table and gazed at him curiously and admiringly. "Old fellow, you're a wonder. I can't tell you how proud I am of you. That you could come West weak and sick, and fight your way to health, and learn to be self-sufficient! It is a splendid achievement. It amazes me. I don't grasp it. I want to ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... the Division composed of all arms and self-sufficient. Several divisions may be grouped into a field army, to which are attached field army troops. These are organized into a brigade for purpose of supply and administration ...
— Military Instructors Manual • James P. Cole and Oliver Schoonmaker
... instead of counteracting or alleviating the danger. But if these views be correct, the questions to be determined by society are also two, namely: whether it be possible to get rid of these aggravations; and whether credit itself may not be so organized as to be self-sufficient and self-supporting, whatever the vagaries of the standard. The suppression of small notes might have a perceptible effect in lessening the aggravations of paper, but it would not touch the more fundamental point, as to a stable organization of credit. Yet it is in this ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... purpose and the policy of the new Republican party. Unfortunately, Mr. Greeley's judgment and width of view did not develop with his years and with the increasing influence of his journal. He became unduly self-sufficient; he undertook not only to lay down a policy for the guidance of the constitutional responsibilities of the government, but to dictate methods for the campaigns. The Tribune articles headed "On to Richmond!" while causing irritation to commanders in the field and confusion in the minds ...
— Abraham Lincoln • George Haven Putnam
... belief regards the human body as a self-sufficient machine whose brain generates thought. But the savage has a completely evolved physical body with eyes, ears and other organs like our own. His brain under the microscope shows no trace of difference in its material constitution from the brain of ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... word, a glance, will bring the blood to a maiden's cheek, so may it sow the germ of moral death in the heart of youth. How helpless and ignorant the young are in their seeming strength and smartness: how self-sufficient in their unwisdom, how little amenable to reason, how slow to perceive true ideals. What patient, persevering effort is required to form character, and what a little thing will poison life in its source! How easy it is to see and understand what is coarse and evil, how difficult to appreciate ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... the Nearings homesteaded in the thirties and began proselytizing for the self-sufficient life-style shortly thereafter. Scott was a very dignified old political radical when he addressed my high school in Massachusetts in 1961 and inspired me to dream of country living. He remained active until nearly his hundredth birthday. ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... that is so much a part of your makeup. How can we love our country and not love our countrymen, and loving them, reach out a hand when they fall, heal them when they are sick, and provide opportunities to make them self-sufficient so they will be equal in fact ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... he began a lecture on the theme that for man there exist no laws, no rights, no duties, no honour, no vileness; and that man is a quantity self-sufficient, independent of ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... 2ndly. A being, who has no equal, cannot be susceptible of glory; for glory can result only from the comparison of one's own excellence with that of others. 3rdly. If God be infinitely happy, if he be self-sufficient, what need has he of the homage of his feeble creatures? 4thly. God, notwithstanding all his endeavours, is not glorified; but, on the contrary, all the religions in the world represent him as perpetually offended; ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... consists of the densest aggregation of population in the history of the world. This population is accustomed to a relatively high standard of life, in which, even now, some sections of it anticipate improvement rather than deterioration. In relation to other continents Europe is not self-sufficient; in particular it cannot feed Itself. Internally the population is not evenly distributed, but much of it is crowded into a relatively small number of dense industrial centers. This population secured for itself a ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... The solution of the so-called Negro problem in America, he felt, is to be found along these lines: As his people have more and more opportunity for training and become better and better trained they become more and more self-sufficient. They are developing their own carpenters, masons, blacksmiths, farmers, merchants, and bankers as well as lawyers, teachers, preachers, and physicians. These trained people naturally, for the most part, serve their own race, and to them the members of the race ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... poet's conviction that a spirit not his own is inspiring him? Does he not rather feel self-sufficient as compared with the earlier singers, who expressed such naive dependence upon the Muse? We have been using the name Muse in this essay merely as a figure of speech, and is this not the poet's usage ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... dialectical weapon in the foregoing argument is no longer available. And those who have cared more for this theory than for metaphysical speculation have attempted to stop at this point, and so to construe phenomenalism as to make it self-sufficient on its own grounds. Such attempts are so instructive as to make it worth our while to review them before proceeding with the development of ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... the things which yet I see must be done, is the underside of trust in Him. And that trust in Him brings the power that makes it possible for us to do the things which we cannot of ourselves do, and the consciousness of the impotence to do which is the first step toward doing them. It is the self-sufficient man who is sure to be bankrupt before he has finished his building; but he who has no confidence in himself, and recognises the fact that he cannot build, will go to Jesus Christ and say, 'Lord, I am poor and needy. Come Thou Thyself ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... frequency of renovation, gave but faint promises of immortality; and the mind which, from time to time, sunk gladly into insensibility, had made no very near approaches to the felicity of the supreme and self-sufficient nature. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... the Greek mythology four—the Golden, self-sufficient; the Silver, self-indulgent; the Brazen, warlike; and the Iron, violent; together with the Heroic, nobly aspirant, between the third and fourth. In archeology, three—the Stone Age, the Bronze, and the Iron. In history, the Middle ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... save our own self-sufficient arrogance, to believe that the discovery of these two forces exhausts the treasures of infinite wisdom. Humboldt thus well refutes the folly of such an imagination: "The imperfectibility of all empirical science, and the boundlessness of the sphere of observation, render ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... few specimens you have given of it, is equal to your verse. Yet, even were I the possessor of such a style as yours, I would never employ it to support my Maxims. You would think a writer very impudent and self-sufficient who should quote his own works: to defend them is doing more. We are the worst auxiliaries in the world to the opinions we have brought into the field. Our business is, to measure the ground, and to calculate ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... study, therefore, must be of interest as an analysis of the working of purely social forces in a small population, in which the whole process may be observed, more closely than in the intricate and subtle evolution of a larger, more self-sufficient social aggregate. ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson
... which he filed nearly forty years ago as Solicitor General, in defense of the action of the President in withdrawing certain lands from public entry although his doing so was at the time contrary to express statute. "Ours," the brief reads, "is a self-sufficient Government within its sphere. (Ex parte Siebold, 100 U.S. 371, 395; in re Debs, 158 U.S. 564, 578.) 'Its means are adequate to its ends' (McCulloch v. Maryland, 4 Wheat. 316, 424), and it is rational to assume that its active forces will be found equal in most things ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... lost nothing. Astonishment prevailed over every other sentiment. Many appeared glad, either from hatred to the Duc du Maine, or from affection for the Comte de Toulouse; several were in consternation. The Chief-President lost all countenance; his visage, so self-sufficient and so audacious, was seized with a convulsive movement; the excess alone of his rage kept him from swooning. It was even worse at the reading of the declaration. Each word was legislative and decreed ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... fire but because so many others are running to it. I would that I had the time, and you, kind reader, the patience so that I might enumerate and describe in full detail all the varieties and sub-varieties of our race that we saw—the pert, overfed, overpampered children, the aggressive, self-sufficient, prematurely bored young girls, the money-fattened, boastful vulgarians, scattering coin by the handful, intent only on making a show and not realizing that they themselves were the show; the coltish, pimply youths who thought in order to be high-spirited they must also be ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... Hebbel carried the antithesis farther, asking what is the soul, and what is the body? And he answered, in effect, that the soul is indeed the very essence of personality, but is no original, self-begotten, and self-sufficient entity—on the contrary, it is a fragment, a participant in the animating principle of the universe—and that the body is indeed the medium of contact between person and person, but is also the separating barrier of soul from soul, and of ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... makes them so terribly alive to them as to exaggerate every imperfection. It is hard to say which of the errors is most injurious in its effects. I suppose according as the temperament is desponding and diffident, or sanguine and self-sufficient, the one system or the other is likely to do ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... undercurrent, or the heroic outburst, of natural virtue, as well as the yearnings of the heart after what it has not, and its presentiment of its true remedies, are to be ascribed to the Author of all good. Anticipations or reminiscences of His glory haunt the mind of the self-sufficient sage, and of the pagan devotee; His writing is upon the wall, whether of the Indian fane, or of the porticoes of Greece. He introduces Himself, He all but concurs, according to His good pleasure, and in His selected season, in the issues of unbelief, superstition, and false ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... was a knock on the door of his room and Blair entered. Blair, as always, bright of eye, smiling of lip, erect, proud, self-sufficient, inscrutable and sure. Lane's black demon stole away. Lane saw that Blair was whiter, thinner, frailer, a little farther on that road from which ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... below the knee, Dr. Withers says—poor Joseph! He's been an ambitious boy. So anxious to get ahead, and so self-sufficient. I feel right guilty about Joseph." She ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... contemplation's sake. This act has all the marks of happiness. It is the highest act of man's highest power. It is the most capable of continuance. It is fraught with pleasure, purest and highest in quality. It is of all acts the most self-sufficient and independent of environment, provided the object be to the mind's eye visible. It is welcome for its own sake, not as leading to any further good. It is a life of ease and leisure: man is busy that ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... feebler than cant—ringing the changes on what may be called the stock phrases of one's sect. John Wesley once said, 'Let but a pert, self-sufficient animal, that has neither sense nor grace, bawl out something about 'Christ,' or 'His blood,' or 'justification by faith,' and there are not wanting those who will cry out, 'What a fine Gospel sermon!' For ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... since his parks approach his houses.—Such, in fine, is the character of a "well-appointed household," that is to say, provided with its dependencies and services. Everything is within reach; it is a complete world in itself and self-sufficient. One exalted being attaches to and gathers around it, with universal foresight and minuteness of detail, every appurtenance it employs or can possibly employ.—Thus, each prince, each princess has a professional surgery and a chapel;[2118] it would not answer for the almoner ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... likely to be an easy task, for I plainly saw that she did not quite approve of me. When I was first introduced to her, she looked at me with her great, steady blue eyes, as if analyzing me to the very boots, and evidently set me down as a somewhat arrogant and self-sufficient young fellow who needed a judicious course of discipline to teach him humility. I was generally self-possessed and had no little confidence in myself, but I confess that I was embarrassed in her presence. She was not at all like Bessie, I thought. ...
— That Mother-in-Law of Mine • Anonymous
... you did not make you humble. You took them as a compliment to your powers. And so when you had your chance to go back to help Cynthia, you thought out no plan, you asked no advice. You went down in a very self-sufficient mood, expecting that ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Jesus, Go and do thou likewise." Through the self-sufficient Jewish theologian the command is addressed to us. The direct form of the injunction intimates, what might be gathered from the nature of the case, that this parable is more strictly an example than a symbol. It does not convey spiritual lessons under the veil of material ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... mystery of the swallowing deepened. It was like sinking into a snow bank. There was a sensation of smothering, though it was not uncomfortable because the cabin itself was self-sufficient in all respects to maintain life for a ...
— Lords of the Stratosphere • Arthur J. Burks
... rather than a weakness; it involves interdependence. There is always danger that increased personal independence will decrease the social capacity of an individual. In making him more self-reliant, it makes him more self-sufficient; it may lead to aloofness and indifference. It often makes an individual so insensitive in his relation to others as to develop an illusion of being really able to stand and act alone, an unnamed form of insanity ...
— Creative Impulse in Industry - A Proposition for Educators • Helen Marot
... life, can look back upon his college days and see what a mere smattering of knowledge he gained within the 'classic shades,' and how poorly educated he was, in any and every sense of the word, how ill fitted for the realities of work-day life, when first he emerged in self-sufficient pride from the sacred walls, and launched boldly out upon the world. At the time when, according to the popular acceptation of the term, the education is completed, it is in truth but just begun; and he who, upon the slender capital of college lore, should set himself ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... me; and I was more angry at myself than at him, as well I might be, for wanting the power to render myself intelligible. He as usual was amazed to hear he had not a right to do what he pleased with his own, and to be told it was not his own. Nor was he sparing in pettish reproof to the self-sufficient young lady, who thought proper to dispute the propriety and wisdom of ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... Jasper Penny surveyed with approbation Stephen's full, handsome presence. Jannan was a successful, a big, man. Well, so was he too. But he thought with keen longing of the time when he was twenty-one, and free, free to roam self-sufficient. He thought of that Howat Penny of which they had spoken, black as he was black in the family tradition; he had seen Hesselius's portrait of the other; and, but for the tied hair and continental buff, it might have been a replica of himself. It ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... girl she will be more or less ignored, isolated, humiliated, overlooked outside our own little family circle. Even in that limited mob which the newspapers call New York Society—in that modern, wealthy, hard-witted, over-jewelled, self-sufficient league which is yet too eternally uncertain of its own status to assume any authority or any responsibility for a stranger without credentials,—it would not be possible to make Valerie West acceptable in the slightest ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... Syracusan assembly; but the invaders of Syracuse came, made good their landing in Sicily; and if they had promptly attacked the city itself, instead of wasting nearly a year in desultory operations in other parts of Sicily, the Syracusans must have paid the penalty of their self-sufficient carelessness in submission to the Athenian yoke. But, of the three generals who led the Athenian expedition, two only were men of ability, and one was most weak and incompetent. Fortunately for Syracuse, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... voice extolled the merit of young Scipio: so necessary is it for a man to deaden, if I may be allowed the expression, the splendour of his rising glory, by a sweet and modest carriage; and not to excite jealousy, by haughty and self-sufficient behaviour, as this naturally awakens pride in others, and makes even virtue ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... which is good; but then he makes him self-sufficient for the struggle which such exaltation demands, which is bad. In that partial understanding he departs from truth. And what is it that makes the futility of so much present preaching? It is the acceptance of this doctrine of man's moral adequacy and consequently the almost total lack ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... take prejudices; but I often have an instinct about people before I know them, and this instinct tells me that I am not going to like this Mr. Flint. He is so self-sufficient,—not conceited, but completely satisfied with his own judgments. When he asks any one's opinion, he does it as if it were a mere matter of curiosity how such a person might feel, not with any idea of ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... dependably rainless summers, the realities of self-sufficient living, and my homestead's poor well turned out to be an opportunity. For I continued wondering about gardens and water, and discovered a method for growing a lush, productive vegetable garden on deep soil with little or no irrigation, in a climate that reliably provides 8 ...
— Gardening Without Irrigation: or without much, anyway • Steve Solomon
... you conceive a nation of such men—idolizing what has been, blind to the great vision of the future, fettered by the chains of the past, gripped and held fast in the hand of the dead, a nation of traditionalists, unable to meet the needs of a new day, serene, no doubt self-sufficient, but coming how far short of realizing that ideal of those who praise their God for that they serve ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... forgive an unskillful workman for doing imperfect work, because he must work, well or ill, or starve; this workman is excusable; but your God is not. According to you, He is self-sufficient; in this case, why does He create men? He has, according to you, all that is necessary to render man happy; why, then, does He not do it? You must conclude that your God has more malice than goodness, or you must admit that God was compelled to do ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... been careful to send an abstract of his speech to Carmichael, with a letter enough to melt the heart even of a self-sufficient young clerical; and Carmichael had considered how he should bear himself at the Presbytery. His intention had been to meet the Rabbi with public cordiality and escort him to a seat, so that all men should see that he was too magnanimous to be offended by ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... battles, nor of prestige. This indeed is the superiority of the German character over all others, that it is satisfied when it can acknowledge its own worth, and has no need of recognition, authority, or privilege. It is self-sufficient. This is the course I have steered, and in politics it is much easier to say what one should avoid than to say what one should do. Certain principles of honesty and courage forbid one to do certain things, just as the access to certain fields is interdicted in the army maneuvers. But ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... married life that had never come into her thoughts before. For a moment she longed with all the intensity of a child for her father's house and the shelter of his loving protection, amply supported by her stepmother's capable, self-sufficient, comforting countenance. Her heart sank with the fear that she would never be able to do justice to the position of David's wife, and David would be disappointed in her and sorry he had accepted her sacrifice. She roused herself to do better, and bit her tongue to remind ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... oneself incapable of preparing a volume of travel without inflicting a sermon upon kindly disposed persons, but a book of journeyings loaded with gentle preachment must at least be a novelty. Travel books imparting no patriotic lesson may well be left to authors and readers of older and self-sufficient nations. A work appealing on common lines to a New World audience would be worse than banal, and a conscientious American writer is compelled to describe not alone what he saw, but in clarion notes tell of some ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... together. Two people who can be silent together, and not conscious of one another outwardly. Me in my silence, she in hers, and the balance, the equilibrium, the pure circuit between us. With occasional lapses of course: digs in the ribs if one gets too vague or self-sufficient. ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... living handsomely upon their own brains, and the personals of other people. To say truth, Paul, who at that time was an honest lad, was less charmed than he had anticipated by the conversation of these chevaliers of industry. He was more pleased with the clever though self-sufficient remarks of a gentleman with a remarkably fine head of hair, and whom we would more impressively than the rest introduce to our reader under the appellation of Mr. Edward Pepper, generally termed Long Ned. As this worthy was destined ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... rare occurrence, and, when occurring, isolated and imperfect, there would still be a supernatural character about them, owing to their permanence and self-sufficiency, where no other sensual pleasures are permanent or self-sufficient. But when, instead of being scattered, interrupted, or chance-distributed, they are gathered together, and so arranged to enhance each other as by chance they could not be, there is caused by them not only a feeling of strong affection towards the object in which they exist, but a perception of ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... above all things to act upon them in the life which we, His followers, have in Him; that life whose exercise and outcome means our whole walk here as well as hereafter. I would regard them, as it is apparent that He regarded them, as being (in a sacred sense) self-sufficient; not, indeed, to the self-sufficient reader, but to the reader who prays in reverent simplicity that the Holy Spirit may dispel every moral mist, every hindrance of heart and will, from between him and the meaning of the written Word; ...
— To My Younger Brethren - Chapters on Pastoral Life and Work • Handley C. G. Moule
... latent power of the oil cartel could emerge in full force. Europe and Japan, both heavily dependent on imported oil, now struggle to keep their economies in balance. Even the United States, our country, which is far more self-sufficient than most other industrial countries, has been .put under ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Gerald R. Ford • Gerald R. Ford
... indeed, a visionary, a mystic, and a Christian; none of which names can be truly applied to Milton. And if we wish to find Love enjoying his just supremacy in poetry, we cannot do better than seek him among the lyrists of the Court of Charles II. Milton, self-sufficient and censorious, denies the name of love to these songs of the sons of Belial. Love, he says, reigns and revels in ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... stinted their growth, or the nature unable to cast it off. Miss Carmichael was a woman about six-and-twenty—and had been a woman, like too many Scotch girls, long before she was out of her teens—a human flower cut and dried—an unpleasant specimen, and by no means valuable from its scarcity. Self-sufficient, assured, with scarce shyness enough for modesty, handsome and hard, she was essentially a self-glorious Philistine; nor would she be anything better till something was sent to humble her, though what spiritual ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... strength. "That is what no child ever can be; and let me tell you, the attempt to force one into such an unnatural creature is abominable. You can polish every bit of the modesty and innocence of childhood out of a little girl; but all that you can get for it is affectation and self-sufficient impertinence, becoming neither to the child nor the woman. Why, cousin, the little creature I saw in your parlor—sent there, as she said, to entertain a gentleman—was just an absurdity to him, ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... Dolly's eye saw that his step was unsteady, his face dull and flushed, and his eye had a look which even a very little experience understands. His air was haggard, spiritless, hopeless; so unlike the alert, self-sufficient, confident manner of old, that Dolly's heart got a great wrench. And something in the whole image was so inexpressibly pitiful to her, that she did the very last thing it had been in her purpose to do; she fled to him with one bound, threw herself on his breast, and burst into a heartbreak ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... startled Bruce—shocked him. He never had thought of his father as old, or lonely, but always as tireless, self-centred, self-sufficient, absorbed heart and soul in getting rich. He seemed suddenly to see the bent shoulders, the graying hair and eyebrows, the furrows and deep, drooping lines about the mouth that had not been engraved by happiness. ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... faults which, if no inherent, will naturally be acquired by those who are too early entrusted with power. He was self-sufficient, arbitrary, and passionate. His good qualities consisted in a generous disposition, a kindness of heart when not irritated, a manly courage, and a frank acknowledgment of his errors. Had he been allowed to serve a proper time in the various grades of his profession—had he been taught ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... of one thing. Over and above the good of his soul and other people's souls, a man must eat—to put it baldly. He should earn his keep. He must indeed calculate upon provision for two. Mr. Thompson had made the common mistake of believing himself self-sufficient, and Sophie Carr had unwittingly taught him that a male celibate was an anomaly in nature's reckoning. He had thought himself immune from the ordinary passions of humanity. The strangest part of it was a saddened gladness that he was not. ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... change his habit of living, very little. Long years of loneliness had taught her to be self-sufficient. Linda would be too wise to insist on distasteful regularity in the interest of a comparatively unimportant well-being. In short, she wouldn't bother him. That must be made clear ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... blundered about slowly and awkwardly, he looked with wonder and admiration at the ease and facility with which his teacher and the other men did their work. They were so calm, so precise, and so self-sufficient. He wondered if he would ever be like them, and felt very hopeless as the ...
— The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... Marrast, who had been a political prisoner and a refugee in England, and who returned to France on the amnesty granted on the marriage of the Duke of Orleans. M. Marrast, though a disagreeable, self-sufficient, and underbred person, was unquestionably a writer of point, brilliancy, and vigor. From 1837 to the Revolution of 1848 he was connected with the National, and was the author of a series of articles which have not been equalled since. Like all low, vulgar-bred, and reptile-minded ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... women might take example from these little creatures," said Temperley, who, in common with many self-sufficient persons, was fond of recommending humility to others. "They never attempt to shirk their lowly tasks on the plea of higher vocations. Not one turns from the path marked out by our great Mother, who also teaches her human children ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... the girl again!" he said to his wife. "A small enough loss the sight of her would be, the ugly, common-looking thing! I beg you will save me from it in future as much as you can. She makes me feel as if I should go out of my mind!—so calm, forsooth! so meek! so self-sufficient!—oh, quite a saint!—and so strong-minded!—equal to throwing her father over for a fellow she never saw till ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... the man of her choice had wondrously improved Mabel Ashbourne. She was less self-sufficient and more conciliating. Her ambition, hitherto confined to the desire to excel all other women in her own person, had assumed a less selfish form. She was now only ambitious for her husband; greedy of ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... on trusting in ourselves rather than God; if we keep within us the hard self-sufficient spirit, and boast to ourselves (though we may be ashamed to boast to our neighbours), 'My power and the strength of my hands have got me this and that;' and in fact live under the notion, which too many have, that we could do very well without God's help if God ...
— The Gospel of the Pentateuch • Charles Kingsley
... the baronet, striding up and down, "Peter, you are a fool, sir, a hot-headed, self-sufficient, pragmatical young ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... level of economic activity, high unemployment, and a heavy dependence on foreign grants and technical assistance. Agriculture, including fishing, hunting, and forestry, contributes 40% to GDP, employs 80% of the labor force, and provides most of the exports. The country is not self-sufficient in food production; rice, the main staple, accounts for the bulk of imports. The government - which is hampered by internal political disputes - is struggling to upgrade education and technical training, privatize commercial ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... every sort of machine. I'd like to try getting at some of that water frozen in the Saturnian System. Altogether, I see no end to the jobs. It's no good our depending on Earth for anything. Too expensive, too chancy. The Belt has to be made completely self-sufficient." ...
— Industrial Revolution • Poul William Anderson
... "something which that self-sufficient fool has said has so far done me a service in enabling me to speak upon a subject which I have long had upon my lips, but have not had ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... associated to wind up this particular venture and turn my attention to other things. I have often wondered, in the light of their subsequent actions, why they should have become so pressing just at this time. At the same time, perhaps I was a little vain and self-sufficient. I had once got the better of some agents of another great financier in a Western Power deal, and I felt that I could put this thing through too. Hence I refused to heed the warning. However, I found that all those who were previously interested to buy or at least develop the ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... distance of time—it began in the early and ended in the middle eighties—I see the charm of ingenuous youth stamped on the episode, the touching glamour of limitless faith and expectation. We were, the whole little band of us, so deliciously self-sufficient, so magnificently critical of established reputations in contemporary letters and art. We sniffed and snorted, noses in air, at popular idols, while ourselves weighted down with a cargo of guileless enthusiasm ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... superior education and breeding, and with no eye for the pure gold of as true and loyal a soul as ever offered itself in daily unmurmuring sacrifice for others, and without a thought of sacrifice. Fool and dolt! A self-sufficient prig! That's ...
— The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail • Ralph Connor
... reception. Mr. Hardcastle was the agent of the dowager Lady Ormsby, who had a large estate in my neighbourhood: he was the very reverse of my Mr. M'Leod in his deportment and conversation. Talkative, self-sufficient, peremptory, he seemed not to know what it was to doubt; he considered doubt as a proof of ignorance, imbecility, or cowardice. "Can any man doubt?" was his usual beginning. On every subject ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... would condescend to do private teaching, particularly here, in Beldover, I don't know. But it would be just the thing. Winifred has got a special nature. And if you can put into her way the means of being self-sufficient, that is the best thing possible. She'll never get on with the ordinary life. You find it difficult enough yourself, and she is several skins thinner than you are. It is awful to think what her life will be like unless she does find a means of expression, ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... me your attention, I will tell you what I am: I'm a genuine philanthropist — all other kinds are sham. Each little fault of temper and each social defect In my erring fellow-creatures, I endeavour to correct. To all their little weaknesses I open people's eyes; And little plans to snub the self-sufficient I devise; I love my fellow creatures — I do all the good I can— Yet ev'rybody says I'm such a disagreeable man! And I can't ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... "I," "me," "my," occur forty-three times! I was dimly conscious of the accursed fact. He says it can be explained phrenologically, which I suppose civilly means, that I am the most egotistically self-sufficient man alive; perhaps so. I wonder whether he will print this pleasing fact; it beats hollow the parentheses in ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... and his lady; her friend, a woman of good family; and an old Baron Triste, of a sixteen-quartering family. At the name of Mayor of Bruges, you probably represent to yourself a fat, heavy, formal, self-sufficient mortal—tout au contraire: our Mayor was a thin gentleman, of easy manners, literature, and amusing conversation: Madame, a beautiful Provinciale. M. Lerret, the Mayor, found us out to be the Edgeworths described by M. Pictet in the Journal Britannique. Since we came to France we have found M. ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... brought up never to be demonstrative—that was one thing. But that wasn't the main trouble—the main trouble was her most curious, most frigid self-sufficiency. Until her children came she was the most wholly self-sufficient person I've ever known. She was really only happy when she was entirely alone, always. It wasn't egotism exactly—she's always had a very-well-mannered conviction of her own relative unimportance—it ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... mountain and plain have become wards of the Government, debased and denuded of whatever dignity they once possessed, ascribe what cause you will for their present condition. But the Pueblo Indian has absolutely maintained the integrity of his individuality, and is self-respecting and self-sufficient. He accepted the form of religion professed by his Spanish conquerors, but without abandoning his own, and that is practically the only concession his persistent conservatism has ever ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... he said, and ticked them off on his fingers: 'the first is that you took the woman that I wanted. To a man of my temperament that is an unpardonable crime. I have never wanted women either as friends or as amusement. I am one of the few people in the world who are self-sufficient. It happened that I wanted your wife and she rejected me ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace
... amiable, accommodating fellow. He is also an excellent cook, being a child of Italy, that land of gluttons. And finally, you have myself, who as the father of the company very properly play as Pantaloon the roles of father. Sometimes, it is true, I am a deluded husband, and sometimes an ignorant, self-sufficient doctor. But it is rarely that I find it necessary to call myself other than Pantaloon. For the rest, I am the only one who has a name—a real name. ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... contrary to his custom, could not help speaking the first. "Expound unto us, noble sir," he said, "by what mysterious means the production of this simple toy could so far move your spirit, and overcome your patience, after you had shown yourself proof to all the provocation offered by this self-sufficient ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... said to the contrary, are one of the modern aids to domesticity and preventives of gadding, while still keeping one not only in touch with a friend but within range of the voice. Surely there can be no woman so self-sufficient that she does not in silent moments yearn for a spoken word with ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... yet an art like other arts. Of these we may distinguish two great classes: those arts, like sculpture, painting, acting, which are representative, or, as used to be said very clumsily, imitative; and those, like architecture, music, and the dance, which are self-sufficient, and merely presentative. Each class, in right of this distinction, obeys principles apart; yet both may claim a common ground of existence, and it may be said with sufficient justice that the motive and end of any art whatever is to make a pattern; a pattern, it may be, ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... nothing is pure or disinterested. You can't even imagine to yourself a friendship between a man and a woman. Such a thing isn't known here—in your nation of artists. Your men are too inflammatory, and too self-sufficient, to want their calves fatted for any but the one sacrifice. Girls have their very kitchen-aprons tied on them with an undermeaning. And poor souls, who can blame them for submitting! What a fate is theirs, ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... on. Watch Cathy, and help her all you can. She's got it; her weather forecast proved that much. You've got to drum that into her; never let her forget it. Maybe I'll be back—I hope so. But first, I have to find others. I need them, and they might need me. We're still not completely self-sufficient. ...
— Stopover • William Gerken
... "... we are obliged to admit the existence in the cell of an independent life, which makes its development self-sufficient.... Each cell consequently represents a little independent organism, which assimilates foreign substances, builds them up, and rejects those that are useless; from this point of view the embryo can be compared ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... accounts for 5% of GDP; expanding output of cotton, fruits, vegetables, and livestock; other crops - bananas, coconuts, cucumbers, mangoes, sugarcane; not self-sufficient in food ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... promptly replied Howe, with his bullying, self-sufficient air. "We are to tell you what our plan is, and let you adopt it or not, as you ...
— Down the Rhine - Young America in Germany • Oliver Optic
... independence and of 'content' is scarcely Paul's whole idea here, though that, no doubt, is included. We have no word which exactly expresses the meaning. 'Self-sufficient' is a translation, but then it has acquired a bad meaning as connoting a false estimate of one's own worth and wisdom. What Paul means is that whatever be his condition he has in himself enough to meet it. He does not ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the inbred spirit of mankind. Everywhere this proud, self-assertive, self-sufficient, self-confident, self-aggressive spirit is found, in varying degree. It is coupled sometimes with laughable ignorance; sometimes with real learning and wisdom and culture. It is emphasized sometimes the more by school training, and other such advantages. But through all these ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... task it seemed. But Nature reckoned without Louis Napoleon. The road is here, serene and self-sufficient. It literally carved its way down to the valley. Slopes often greater than forty-five degrees have been cut into intrepidly; arches and viaducts thrown over gaping clefts, bridges over unbridgeable chasms. ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... mouth will be stopped, and the whole world and Satan will know their own failure and sin before God. They will stand self-condemned; and nothing could accomplish this but the testing, by actual trial, of all the self-sufficient claims of Satan and man. The sin of man has brought him under sentence too; and grace alone withholds his immediate execution (Jno. 3:18; Rom. 5:18, 19). Though the day of execution is, in the purpose of God delayed; it is, nevertheless, ...
— Satan • Lewis Sperry Chafer |
