"Self-sufficing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... for power, nor a device for getting done such elementary tasks as the maintenance of order and security without too great encroachments on individual liberty. The state is "a community of well-being in families and aggregations of families for the sake of a perfect and self-sufficing life." The legislator is a craftsman whose material is society and whose aim ...
— Politics - A Treatise on Government • Aristotle
... the first is: a social and industrial system based on small, self-contained, largely self-sufficing units, where supply follows demand, where production is primarily for use not profit, and where in all industrial operations some system will obtain which is more or less that of the guilds of the Middle Ages. I should like to go into this a little more in detail before trying to answer ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... Aunt Jane, in a cosy little cottage with a wonderful little garden, lived Thomas Kitchener, a large, grave, self-sufficing young man, who, by sheer application to work, had become already, though only twenty-five, second gardener at the Hall. Gardening absorbed him. When he was not working at the Hall he was working at home. On the ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... the chief features of this new life: Industrially, we have the decline of the old system of production in the countryside in which each manor or, at least, each district, was for the most part self-sufficing and self-supporting, where production was almost entirely for immediate use, and only the surplus was exchanged, and where such exchange as existed took place exclusively under the form of barter. ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... wise man." For those who commonly go by the name of the Seven Sages are not admitted into the category of the wise by fastidious critics. Your wisdom people believe to consist in this, that you look upon yourself as self-sufficing and regard the changes and chances of mortal life as powerless to affect your virtue. Accordingly they are always asking me, and doubtless also our Scaevola here, how you bear the death of Africanus. This ...
— Treatises on Friendship and Old Age • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... with lots of land and the tools of their trade. Defoe has left a charming description of the region about Halifax in Yorkshire, toward the year 1730, where he found the whole population busy, prosperous, healthy, and, in the main, self-sufficing. He did not see a beggar or an idle person in the whole country. So, favored by circumstances, the landed oligarchy met with no effective resistance after the death of Cromwell, and achieved what amounted to being autocratic power in 1688. Their great triumph was the conversion of the ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... (b) Nietzsche seeks rather to magnify life by striking the note of a proud and defiant optimism. He claims for the individual limitless rights; and, repudiating all moral ties, asserts the complete sovereignty of the self-sufficing ego. With a deep-rooted hatred of the prevailing tendencies of civilisation, he combines a vehement desire for a richer and unrestrained development of human power. He would not only revalue all moral values, but reverse all ideas of right and wrong. He would soar 'beyond good and evil,' ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... orbs that beautify the night, The sunrise, and the setting of the moon, Earthquakes and wars, and poisons and disease, And all their causes, to an abstract point, Converging, thou did'st bend, and called it God; The self-sufficing, the omnipotent, The merciful, and the ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... a man who liked to be surrounded by dependents, and Mrs. Porter stoutly declined to be a dependent. She moved about the world, blunt and self-sufficing, and he hated her as he hated no one else. The thought that she had now come to grips with him and that he could best her in open fight was pleasant to him. All his life, except in his conflicts with her, he had won. He meant to ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... was happy in her own way. Personally, perhaps, she longed less for her mother's presence and sympathy than Frances did, for she was by nature more self-sufficing. And when one scarcely knows till one is fifteen or sixteen what it is to have a mother and a real home of one's own, small wonder if the inestimable blessings of such possessions are barely realised. Then, too, Jacinth's frequent visits to Lady Myrtle, and the old lady's ever-increasing affection ...
— Robin Redbreast - A Story for Girls • Mary Louisa Molesworth
... been and always will be happy, because my father's nature turned out no waste product: he had none of that useless stuff in him that lies in heaps near factories. He took his own happiness with him, and was self-centred and self- sufficing: for a sociable being, the most self-sufficing I have ever known; I can think of no one of such vitality who was so independent of other people; he could golf alone, play billiards alone, walk alone, shoot alone, fish alone, do everything alone; and yet he was dependent on both my mother and my stepmother and on all occasions ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... living! Come with me, Now that, through vanishing veil, Shimmers the dew on lawn and lea, And milk foams in the pail; Now that June's sweltering sunlight bathes With sweat the striplings lithe, As fall the long straight scented swathes Over the crescent scythe; Now that the throstle never stops His self-sufficing strain, And woodbine-trails festoon the copse, And eglantine the lane; Now rustic labour seems as sweet As leisure, and blithe herds Wend homeward with unweary feet, Carolling like the birds; Now all, except the lover's vow, ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... the country, to the continent, to the world, but loves it for itself and in itself, so Reb Shemuel regarded and reverenced and loved these gigantic pages with their serried battalions of varied type. They were facts—absolute as the globe itself—regions of wisdom, perfect and self-sufficing. A little obscure here and there, perhaps, and in need of amplification or explication for inferior intellects—a half-finished manuscript commentary on one of the super-commentaries, to be called "The Garden of Lilies," was lying open on Reb ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... natures condemned to solitude, he tried to convince himself that he had no need of society, that he despised its attractions, and could be self-sufficing. So far was this from the truth that he often regarded with bitter envy those of his fellow-students who had the social air, who conversed freely among their equals, and showed that the pursuits of the College were only a part ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... care twopence one way or the other. If the professor were friendly, he was willing to talk to him by the hour on any subject, pleasant or unpleasant. If, on the other hand, he wished to have nothing more to do with us, it did not worry him. He was content to let him go. Ukridge was a self-sufficing person. ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... criticisms on the acting he had last seen, conducting himself in such manner as would have made lord Gartley quite grateful to him, had he not put it down to the imperial presence of his high-born aunt, cowering his inferior nature. But while indeed the major was naturally checked by a self-sufficing feminine presence, the cause that mainly operated to his suppression was of another kind and from an ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... become a rival to other Christian powers, against whom, in case of defeat in war, we can expect no effective intervention on the part of other nations, from that moment, Gentlemen, the establishment of Greece as a self-sufficing state, able to defend itself against its enemies, is for her a question of ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... letters on the subject of the quarrel with Diderot, in which each promised the other contemptuous oblivion.[287] Perpetuity of hate is as hard as perpetuity of love for our poor short-spanned characters, and at length the three who were once to have lived together in self-sufficing union, and then in their next mood to have forgotten one another instantly and for ever, held to neither of the extremes, but settled down into an easier middle path of indifferent good-will. The conduct of all three, said the most famous of them, may serve ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... on to notes on an imaginary sheet of paper. We think of a keyboard on which one plays, of the bow of a violin which comes and goes, of the musicians, each one of whom plays his part in conjunction with the others. Let us abstract these spatial images; there remains pure change, self-sufficing, in no way attached to a 'thing' which changes."[Footnote: Translated from La Perception du ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... tempered; thus was gradually produced A quiet independence of the heart; And to my Friend who knows me I may add, Fearless of blame, that hence for future days Ensued a diffidence and modesty, 75 And I was taught to feel, perhaps too much, The self-sufficing power of Solitude. ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... universe contains nothing that can be represented by that figure. Indeed if anywhere such a self-sufficing organism did exist, we could never know it. For, by the hypothesis, it would be altogether adequate to itself and without relations beyond its own bounds. And if it were thus cut off from connection with everything except itself, it could not even affect our knowledge. It would be a closed ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... rebelled; when in pride and self-will he tore himself—his person—away from that God in whom he lived and moved and had his being: the personality remained; he could still, like Medea, fall back, even when he knew that he had rebelled against his Creator, on his indomitable self, and reign a self-sufficing king, even in ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... and sculpture, music and the literature of the theatre are not self-sufficing arts. They require an interpreter. Before a dramatic work can exist completely, scenery, and actors to give it voice and gesture, are necessary; before music can be anything more than hieroglyphics, the signs must be transmuted into sound by singers or instrumentalists. Wagner embodied this truth ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... himself the right to govern another. By the law of nature all men have equal rights, are equals, and equals have no authority one over another. Nor has an individual the sovereign right even to himself, or the right to dispose of himself as he pleases. Man is not God, independent, self-existing and self-sufficing. He is dependent, and dependent not only on his Maker, but on his fellow-men, on society, and even on nature, or the material world. That on which he depends in the measure in which be depends on it, contributes to his existence, to his life, ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... of one self-sufficing work is the Bible. Being the sole and ultimate authority of Christian doctrine, it holds a position entirely apart; and, among Protestants at least, there is a becoming jealousy of allowing any extraneous writing to overbear its contents. Yet we are not to infer, as many have done practically, ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... conveniences of life. Each nation, as regards the more important constituents of its consumption, its staple foods, articles of clothing, household furniture, and the chief implements of industry, was almost self-sufficing, producing little that it did not consume, consuming little it did ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... smooth-rubb'd soul can cling Nor form nor feeling, great nor small; A reasoning, self-sufficing thing, An ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... interfered with by human prejudice and human institutions, the happiness alike of children and of men consists in the enjoyment of their liberty. But the child's liberty is restricted by his lack of strength. He who does as he likes is happy provided he is self-sufficing; it is so with the man who is living in a state of nature. He who does what he likes is not happy if his desires exceed his strength; it is so with a child in like conditions. Even in a state of nature children only enjoy an imperfect liberty, ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau |
