"Self-sufficiency" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... spare man, a seigneur of the old school, and had been a Commander of the Order of Malta. His neck had always been so tightly compressed by a strangulation stock, that his cheeks pouched over it a little, and he held his head high; to many people this would have given an air of self-sufficiency, but in the Vidame it was justified by a Voltairean wit. His wide prominent eyes seemed to see everything, and as a matter of fact there was not much that they had not seen. Altogether, his person was a perfect model of aristocratic outline, ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... is hoped, will suppose that by what is here said I countenance the notion which is held by some authors—a notion implying either arrogant self-sufficiency or mercenary servility—that to succeed, a man should write down to the public. Quite the reverse. To succeed, a man should write up to his ideal. He should do his very best; certain that the very best will still fall short of what the public can appreciate. He will only degrade his ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... have essayed to do in this book what should have been done by one of the masters of the science of folklore—Mr. Frazer, Mr. Lang, Mr. Hartland, Mr. Clodd, Sir John Rhys, and others—I hope it will not be put down to any feelings of self-sufficiency on my part. I have greatly dared because no one of them has accomplished, and I have so acted because I feel the necessity of some guidance in these matters, and more particularly at the present stage of inquiry into the early ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... Harry's self-sufficiency had left so little room for anything that did not directly concern his own comfort, that he could not understand the deadly earnestness of the men he saw file out of camp, or that there was any urgent call for him to join them ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... hard at me. 'The best of it is Albertus asks for nothing. You can neither bribe nor buy him; your flattery will not move him; your approbation or blame alike are vain ... he has the self-sufficiency of ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... Supreme; that, with his magic art, he transformed all there into children, and charged them, on their fealty to act only as such. "I absolve them all from wisdom," he said; "I bid them be just wise enough to make fools of themselves, and do decree that none shall sit apart in pride and eke in self-sufficiency to laugh at others"; and ...
— Historic Girls • E. S. Brooks
... the arguments he would adduce! Henceforward and for ever there would be a gulf between them! The poor religion he had would never serve to keep him straight! What was it but a compromise with pride and self-sufficiency! It could bear no such strain! He acknowledged God, but not God reconciled in Christ, only God such as unregenerate man would have him! And when Ian came home, he would be ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... the translation of Juvenal, where he is mentioned as a man of quality, whose ashes our author was unwilling to disturb, and who had paid Dorset, to whom that piece is inscribed, the highest compliment which his self-sufficiency could afford to any one. Perhaps Dryden remembered Rochester among others, when, in the same piece, he takes credit for resisting opportunities and temptation to take revenge, even upon those by whom he had ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... Self-sufficiency was both a characteristic and a necessity among these Scotch-Irish, English, and German settlers of central Pennsylvania. Bringing their agrarian traditions with them from the "old country," where they had operated small farms, they were bound to ...
— The Fair Play Settlers of the West Branch Valley, 1769-1784 - A Study of Frontier Ethnography • George D. Wolf
... sold into slavery, and except in war or in street robberies we are not insulted by brute physical force. Nevertheless we are cheated by scoundrels, oppressed by financial tyranny, wounded by injustice, suppressed by self-sufficiency, rasped by harsh tempers, annoyed by snobbery, and often ruined by unconscious selfishness. We long to strike back at the human traits which have wronged us, and the satiric depiction of hateful characters whose ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... of steam-power, and we think and speak of a locomotive or a steamboat as we once thought and spoke of a horse or a man; and no little feeling of self-sufficiency is engendered by the conclusion that this new source of power has been brought under control and put ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... blasphemy; they were such as I had never heard before, and his congregation, which was numerous, were turning up their ears and drinking in his doctrines with the utmost delight; for Oh they suited their carnal natures and self-sufficiency to a hair! He was actually holding it forth, as a fact, that "it was every man's own blame if he was not saved!" What horrible misconstruction! And then he was alleging, and trying to prove from nature and reason, that ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... sports he had improved, and was the acknowledged leader and champion in matters requiring boldness and courage; his popularity made him giddy; favour of man led to forgetfulness of God; and even a glance at his countenance showed a self-sufficiency and arrogance which ill became the refinement of his features, and ill replaced the ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... kWh produced, 270 kWh per capita (1991) Industries: crude oil products, food processing, light consumer goods, textiles, sawmills Agriculture: the agriculture and forestry sectors provide employment for the majority of the population, contributing nearly 25% to GDP and providing a high degree of self-sufficiency in staple foods; commercial and food crops include coffee, cocoa, timber, cotton, rubber, bananas, oilseed, grains, livestock, root starches Economic aid: US commitments, including Ex-Im (FY70-89), $440 million; Western ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... the false and arrogant notion that it is duty to force the opinion upon the acceptance of others. But it is because such men themselves hold with so poor a grasp the truth underlying their forms that they are, in their self-sufficiency, so ambitious of propagating the forms, making of themselves the worst enemies of the truth of which they fancy themselves the champions. How truly, in the case of all genuine teachers of men, shall a man's foes be they of his own household! ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... one little fault which she would have gladly seen mended. Certain roughnesses of manner which contrasted unfavorably with the polish (merely external though it was) of the Flemish and Norman knights; a boastful self-sufficiency, too, which bordered on the ludicrous at whiles even in her partial eyes; which would be a matter of open laughter to the knights of the Court. Besides, if they laughed at him, they would laugh at her ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... needful accompaniment of pious caution. It was true, but it was truth without the needful amount of humility, of meekness, of gentleness, and of self-distrust. It was truth, but it was truth put in such a form as to do the work of falsehood. It was an appeal to pride, to self-conceit, to self-sufficiency. It was truth presented in such a shape, as to abate the sense of my dependence on God; as to make me forgetful of my own imperfections; as to exclude from my mind all thoughts of danger, and so prepare me for mistakes, mishaps, and ultimately ruin. It is ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... circumstance, to set it off; "the marshal's truncheon, nor the judge's robe;" neither tradition, reverence, nor ceremony, "that to great ones 'longs": it breaks in pieces the golden images of poetry, and defaces its armorial bearings, to melt them down in the mould of common humanity or of its own upstart self-sufficiency. They took the same method in their new-fangled "metre ballad-mongering" scheme, which Rousseau did in his prose paradoxes— of exciting attention by reversing the established standards of opinion and estimation in the world. They were for ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... intellectual passion. Sitting behind her, he watched her with perplexed admiration, shading his eyes with his hand. In her dinner dress she looked even younger than in street clothes, and, for all her composure and self-sufficiency, she seemed to him strangely alert and vibrating, as if in her, too, there were something never altogether at rest. He felt that he knew pretty much what she demanded in people and what she demanded from life, ...
— Alexander's Bridge and The Barrel Organ • Willa Cather and Alfred Noyes
... the Earl of Elgin went to Constantinople as ambassador, Spencer Smith dropping to secretary of embassy, and his brother remaining on the Egyptian coast. Elgin was far from being in accord with Smith's general line of conduct, which was marked with presumption and self-sufficiency, and in the end he greatly deplored the terms "granted to the French, so far beyond our expectation;" but he shared the belief that to rid Egypt of the French was an end for which considerable sacrifices should ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... prescription observed that few coxcombs, dandies, and heads filled with bitter conceits, would like to be anointed with this cure of self-sufficiency. The wax might make the plaster stick, but it might be feared that the honey and the incense would neutralize the good effects to be expected from the wormwood and salt. If, however, the phrase "vanityes ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... reproach than anger. Louis felt struck to the heart with shame and anger; but so much had he lately been nursed in conceit and self-sufficiency, that he drove away the better impulse; and, instead of at once acknowledging himself in the wrong and begging pardon, he stood still, endeavoring to look unconcerned, repeating, "I ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... business, like a nation, may cherish visions of self-sufficiency, may stretch its tentacles forward to the consumer and backwards to its supplies of raw material; but each fresh extension of its activities serves only to multiply its points of contact with the outside ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson
... gold, reflecting all that is strong and brave, all that is courageous and magnanimous, all that is patriotic and generous, while from the other shore its appearance is as brass engraven by vanity and vulgarity, by self-sufficiency ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... had been anxious about it at first, and had tried to cure him of his apparent hypochondria, and to persuade him to employ himself with something, but as he was obstinate, avoided them, rejected their friendly offers with arrogance and self-sufficiency, even his brothers had abandoned him, and almost renounced him. All their affection had been transferred to the poor child who shared his solitude, and who endured all that wretchedness with the resignation of a saint. Thanks to them, she had ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... the object, a strange, sudden flush of confident vanity and self-sufficiency seemed to pass through him, but it was so momentary that he could ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... Etonian. If I am asked to say what that is, I should say that it is the imbibing instinctively of what is eminently a fine, manly, and graceful convention. Its good side is a certain chivalrous code of courage, honour, efficiency, courtesy, and duty. Its fault is a sense of perfect rightness and self-sufficiency, an overvaluing of sport and games, an undervaluing of intellectual interests, enthusiasm, ideas. It is not that the sense of effortless superiority is to be emphasized or insisted upon—modesty entirely forbids that—but it is the sort of feeling described ironically ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... affectively, expressed the self-confidence of the aristocrat. His smooth face was insolent with happiness and prosperity, with that spirit called the pride of life. But for what he knew of this man, he could have laughed at his self-sufficiency. The mirror gave back a shrunken, sickly figure, somewhat concealed by new garments, and the eyes betrayed a poor soul, cracked and seamed by grief and wrong; no longer Horace Endicott, broken by sickness of mind and heart, ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... tradition, imitation, interest, by in fact any influence rather than that of pure reason. Taught they are, and taught they must be, however they repudiate it. But the most successful teachers and leaders are those who contrive to wound their sense of intellectual self-sufficiency least, and to offer them the strong food of dogmatic assertion sugared over and sparkling with the show of wit ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... deals chiefly with the shortcomings of the orthodox religious world. Its faults of temper, its repulsive manners, its custom of making home unlovely, its distaste of innocent amusement, its habits of censure, its self-sufficiency and pharisaical character, are touched with a caustic but healing power. Only the hand of a friend could have done this thing. No point of doctrine is questioned, no principle of faith invaded, no charity wounded. She probes in love—her object is cure. This book is fresh and vigorous, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... cannon, right in their very faces, added the horror of surprise to the disorder of attack, and the thick blue lines broke in irrestrainable confusion. The terror of the unknown seized officers and men alike. In five minutes the crest was cleared, and the ignoble vanity, ignorance, and self-sufficiency of one man had undone in an hour the splendid work of the commander-in-chief. A melee of miserable, disgraceful disorder ensued. The rebel sharpshooters, hurrying to the flank, poured in hurtling, murderous volleys, filling the minds of the ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... do it. With the gushing self-sufficiency of youth I was feverish to plunge in headlong and achieve a great reform here—until I saw the Mormon women. Then I was touched. My heart was wiser than my head. It warmed toward these poor, ungainly and pathetically "homely" creatures, and as I turned to hide the generous moisture ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... termed a remarkably clean-looking boy, from the peculiarity of my skin and complexion; my teeth were small, but were transparent, and I had a very deep dimple in my chin. Like all embryo apothecaries, I carried in my appearance, if not the look of wisdom, most certainly that of self-sufficiency, which does equally well with the world in general. My forehead was smooth, and very white, and my dark locks were combed back systematically, and with a regularity that said, as plainly as hair could do, "The owner of this does everything ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... he had been the tutor, whose armies he had led to victory, and whose dominions he was administering. The exercise of power without a check had made the exercise of such power necessary to him, and he continued to wield it with all the self-sufficiency ...
— Rulers of India: Akbar • George Bruce Malleson
... opportunity of securing material prosperity, and the love of liberty was apt to become, what indeed it too often is everywhere, a purely self-regarding emotion. The distance of the republic from Europe and its controversies, its economic self-sufficiency, its apparent security against all attack, fostered and strengthened this feeling. While the peoples of the Old World strove with agony and travail towards freedom and justice, or wrestled with the task of sharing their own civilisation ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
... of Genji Gartner's death, the economics of interstellar trade overtook the Trisystem and the mines and factories closed down. It was no longer possible to ship the output to a profitable market, in the face of the growing self-sufficiency of the colonial planets and the irreducibly ...
— Graveyard of Dreams • Henry Beam Piper
... opening when I clattered in by the West Bow, and drew up a smoking horse at my Lord Advocate's door. I had a written word for Doig, my lord's private hand that was thought to be in all his secrets—a worthy, little plain man, all fat and snuff and self-sufficiency. Him I found already at his desk, and already bedabbled with maccabaw, in the same anteroom where I rencountered with James More. He read the note scrupulously through like a ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... or unbelief by the wretched delusion, that these creatures, wickedly caricaturing Christianity, are fairly representing it. I have beheld more deliberate malice, more lying and cheating, more backbiting and slandering, denser stupidity, and greater self-sufficiency, among bad-hearted and wrong-headed religionists, than among any other order of human beings. I have known more malignity and slander conveyed in the form of a prayer than should have consigned any ordinary libeller to the pillory. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... his bearing; his form was erect and military; there was no self-sufficiency or pride in his expression; but a calm, steady purpose of soul alone was revealed by the countenance that a hundred curious eyes now gazed upon. More than one heart beat quicker among the lovely throng of ladies, as they gazed upon the young hero. More than one ...
— The Heart's Secret - The Fortunes of a Soldier, A Story of Love and the Low Latitudes • Maturin Murray
... Saviour, and for the simple reliance on His atoning blood and divine mercy, is not gross, long profligacy, and outward, vehement transgression; but it is self-complacency, clean, fatal self-righteousness and self-sufficiency. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... I'm afraid I didn't." Miss Loder, who at Cambridge had been known as an excellent debater, closed the subject by her tone; and Barry smiled quietly at her self-sufficiency. ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... was strengthened by the World War is the military or self-sufficiency argument. It has long been the claim of the protectionist that high tariff duties encourage the development in this country of all industries producing the necessities of life, as well as all supplies which are vital in war time. High protection was ...
— Problems in American Democracy • Thames Ross Williamson
... suspected Tom of such a feeling, I fear he would have cared little, save how to restore the balance by making a fool of the man who fancied him a fool: but no male self-sufficiency or pride is proof against the contempt of woman; and Tom slunk along by the schoolmistress's side, as if he had been one of her naughtiest school-children. He tried, of course, to brazen it out to his own conscience. He had done no ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... Assembly against the length and labour of the curriculum. Was there ever a class that was as full and attentive at the end of the session as it was at the beginning? Never since our poor human nature was so stricken with laziness and shallowness and self-sufficiency. But what is the chaff to the wheat? It is the wheat that deserves and repays the husbandman's love and labour. When Plato looked up from his desk in the Academy, after reading and expounding one of his greatest Dialogues, he found ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... the things spoken of and are used substantively (suppositio materialis), they are categorematic. In the proposition, 'Of' was used more indefinitely three hundred years ago than it is now, 'of' is categorematic. On the other hand, all substantives may be used categorematically; and the same self-sufficiency is usually recognised in adjectives and participles. Some, however, hold that the categorematic use of adjectives and participles is due to an ellipsis which the logician should fill up; that instead of Gold is heavy, he should say Gold is a heavy metal; instead of The sun is shining, The ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... of some Utopian philosophy and too much insistence on the self-sufficiency of the individual, Walden has proved a regenerative force in the lives of many readers who have not passed the plastic stage. The book develops a love for even commonplace natural objects, and, like poetry, discloses a new world of enjoyment. Walden is Thoreau's most vital combination ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... could be made, it was done. Not until the long-desired documents, vouching for the equitable settlement of the estate, were in Jasper's hands, did he breathe freely. Oh! through what an ordeal he had passed. How his own pride, self-consequence, and self-sufficiency had been crushed out of him! And not only in spirit was he humbled and broken. In his anxiety to settle up the estate of Mr. Elder, and thus get the sword that seemed suspended over his head by a single hair, removed, ...
— True Riches - Or, Wealth Without Wings • T.S. Arthur
... resentment was almost a stranger to his nature. We all shed tears, the girls sobbing aloud; and we were both solemnly blessed. Nor am I ashamed to say I knelt to receive that blessing, in an age when the cant of a pretending irreligion—there is as much cant in self-sufficiency as in hypocrisy, and they very often go together—is disposed to turn into ridicule the humbling of the person, while asking for the blessing of the Almighty through the ministers of his altars; for kneel I did, and weep I did, and, I trust, ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... from whatever angle one views them. They have a patriarchal, self-satisfied, suburban manner of complete importance. The old gentleman bosses his harem outrageously, and each and every member of the tribe walks about with short steps and a stuffy parvenu small-town self-sufficiency. One is quite certain that it is only by accident that they have long tusks and live in Africa, instead of rubber-plants and self-made business and a pug-dog within commuters' distance of New York. But at the slightest alarm this swollen and ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... up within me. "At last," said my heart, "what I write is my own!" Let no one mistake this for an accession of pride. Rather did I feel a pride in my former productions, as being all the tribute I had to pay them. But I refuse to call the realisation of self, self-sufficiency. The joy of parents in their first-born is not due to any pride in its appearance, but because it is their very own. If it happens to be an extraordinary child they may also glory in that—but that ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... appeared to them, and eager as they were to profit by this superiority, yet, contradictory as it may seem, they certainly looked upon us in many respects with profound contempt; maintaining that idea of self-sufficiency which has induced them, in common with the rest of their nation, to call themselves, by way of distinction, Innue, or mankind. One day, for instance, in securing some of the gear of a sledge, Okotook broke a part of it, composed ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... pose of self-sufficiency—so ingrained as to deceive himself—Ishmael's heart beat fast as he followed the Parson through the arched doorway of grey granite that was to open so often for him in the years to follow. He was ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... it is undoubtedly true that Perry Tomson and I used to consider George's friends as models in the manner of smoking a pipe, or ordering whiskey-and-soda at Bertrand's to give us an appetite for our mutton-chops or our bifteck aux pommes, and in the delightful self-sufficiency with which in the pleasant spring days they would cut recitations and loll on the grass smoking cigarettes right under the nose, almost, of the professor. But they are both married now, and settled down to respectable conventional ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... per capita among lowest in Europe; one-half of work force engaged in farming; produces wide range of temperate-zone crops and livestock; claims self-sufficiency ...
— The 1990 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... the ladies of the family and their endearing adjectives, Mr. Harness is very outspoken on the subject of the handsome Doctor! He disliked his manners, his morals, his self-sufficiency, his loud talk. 'The old brute never informed his friends of anything; all they knew of him or his affairs, or whatever false or true he intended them to believe, came out carelessly ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... girl's most withering contempt; and he saw how she contrasted him with her father and Mr. Lane,—yes, even with little Strahan. In her bitter words he heard the verdict of the young men with whom he had associated, and of the community. Throughout the summer he had dwelt apart, wrapped in his own self-sufficiency and fancied superiority. His views had been of gradual growth, and he had come to regard them as infallible, especially when stamped with the approval of his father's old friend; but the scathing words, yet ringing in his ears, showed him that ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... beauty and her tears to arrest the fugitive; but his feet were too strong, even for love: she did not reach him till he had arrived on the sea-shore. Where was her pride now? where the scorn she had exhibited to so many suitors? where her coquetry and her self-sufficiency—her love of being loved, with the power to hate the lover? The enchantress was now taught what the passion was, in all its despair as well as delight. She cried aloud. She cared not for the presence of the messengers. "Oh, go not, Rinaldo," she ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... weeks the work was really given him to do, and then began one of the finest exhibitions of Irish domination and self-sufficiency that I have ever witnessed. We moved to Mott Haven Yard, a great network of tracks and buildings, in the center of which this new building was to be erected. Rourke was given a large force of men, whom he fairly gloried in bossing. He had as many as forty Italians, ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... In her youth and self-sufficiency Lily stood ready to give, rather than to receive. She felt now that he needed her more than she needed him. There was something unconsciously patronizing those days in her attitude toward him, and if he recognized it he did ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... cruelties for some of which several hussars had been executed: carried to its extent the vengeance threatened in the Duke of Brunswick's Declaration, in burning whole villages where a shot was fired on them: and on the other hand by their self-sufficiency, want of subordination and personal disrespect, have drawn upon themselves the contempt of the combined armies." Oct. 6. So late as 1796, the exile Louis XVIII. declared his intention to restore the "property and rights" (i.e. tithes, feudal dues, etc.) of the nobles and clergy, and to ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... made her shun other women and their company, the fear that her husband was unfaithful (which fear was probably justified), and the lack of any fixed or definite purpose, the lack of a great pride or self-sufficiency, brought on symptoms that necessitated her removal to ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... duty of the State to see that the means for the higher education of the youth of the country are adequate in quantity and efficient in quality. The better technical training of our workmen is necessary if we are to secure their economic self-sufficiency and fit them to become socially useful as members of a community. One aim therefore underlying any future organisation of education must be to secure the industrial efficiency of the worker and to ensure that the results of science shall be utilised in the furtherance of the arts ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... to-day," he said. "I made a most determined cast-iron resolution not to open my lips unless I was interrogated, but I could not stand that perkiness and self-sufficiency of Duff, especially when it developed ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... any country can afford to stand alone in full economic self-sufficiency, that country is America. It is feasible for America to contract within very narrow limits her commercial and political relations with the rest of the world, or, if she chooses, to confine her commercial and financial relations to this continent, ...
— Morals of Economic Internationalism • John A. Hobson
... truth he did not look it. Cornelia's glance took in the magnificent proportions of the man, the indefinable air of birth and breeding, the faultless toilette; the strong, dark features. To one and all she paid a tribute of admiration, but the expression on the face was of concentrated self-sufficiency. At this point admiration stopped dead, to be replaced by an uneasy dread. Was Geoffrey Greville, even as his friend, frankly indifferent to everything but his own amusement, and if so, what of poor Elma and her dream? It was an awful ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... Yet these are mysteries, and they cannot be reasoned out or argued over. We cannot speak truly of them from report, or description, or from what another has written. A relation to the thing in itself alone is our warrant, and this means we must set aside our intellectual self-sufficiency and await guidance. It will surely come to those who wait in trust, a glow, a heat in the heart announcing the awakening of the Fire. And, as it blows with its mystic breath into the brain, there is a hurtling of visions, a brilliance of lights, a sound ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... Virginia was determined, not so much by design, as by force of circumstances. Available land and tobacco were determining factors in developing large plantations along the main waterways and small plantations in the hinterlands. Self-sufficiency was concomitant with their way ...
— Domestic Life in Virginia in the Seventeenth Century - Jamestown 350th Anniversary Historical Booklet Number 17 • Annie Lash Jester
... is observed, that any do minister more from gifts and parts, than life and power, though they have an enlightened and doctrinal understanding, let them in time be advised and admonished for their preservation, because insensibly such will come to depend upon a self-sufficiency; to forsake Christ the living Fountain, and hew out unto themselves cisterns, that will hold no living waters: and, by degrees, such will come to draw others from waiting upon the gift of God in themselves, and to feel it in others, in order to their strength and refreshment, to wait upon them, ...
— A Brief Account of the Rise and Progress of the People Called Quakers • William Penn
... in the army, a Russian officer remarked, with much self-sufficiency, "That his country fought for glory and the French for gain."—"You are perfectly right," answered Napoleon; "every one fights for that which he ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 343, November 29, 1828 • Various
... or two, puff'd the smoke from his mouth very leisurely in silence. His manner had an air of vacant self-sufficiency, rather strange in one of ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... improvement are Mrs. Agnes R. Arnold and Mr. George M. Whiteside. Mr. Whiteside has indications of qualities not far remote from genius, and would be well repaid by a rigorous course of study. Messrs. John Hartman Oswald and James Laurence Crowley are both gifted with a fluency and self-sufficiency which might prove valuable assets in a study of poesy. W. F. Booker of North Carolina possesses phenomenal grace, which greater technical care would develop into unusual power. Rev. Robert L. Selle, D. D., of Little Rock, Arkansas, ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... life, and unity with her divine original gives herself to such a one as lord Gartley, I cannot help thinking she must have seriously mistaken some things both in him and in herself, the consequence, probably, of some self-sufficiency, ambition, or other fault in her, which ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... prosperity and culture it would be almost, if not quite, as impossible for a white man to be received into the best Negro society as it would for a Negro to be received into the best white society. This growing independence and self-sufficiency in the trades, the professions, and social intercourse leads inevitably, as he pointed out, to a form of natural segregation based upon economic needs and social preferences, and in conformity to the laws of nature, ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... were shown the folly and uselessness of such a proceeding by arriving on the scene and being utterly unable to extricate him from his position. If children would realize their weakness and foolishness more in these days, they would develop into better men and women, but self-sufficiency and self-conceit ...
— His Big Opportunity • Amy Le Feuvre
... there followed for M. de Cussy an extremely bad quarter of an hour. M. de Cussy, in fact, deserves your sympathy. His self-sufficiency was blown from him by the haughty M. de Rivarol, as down from a thistle by the winds of autumn. The General of the King's Armies abused him—this man who was Governor of Hispaniola—as if he were a lackey. M. de Cussy defended himself by urging the thing that Captain Blood had so admirably urged ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... now the effects of public favor, lest it should kindle that pride of heart and self-sufficiency which dwells in my own as well as in others' breasts, and which, alas! is so ready to be inflamed by the slightest spark of praise. I do indeed feel gratified, and it is right I should rejoice, but I rejoice ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... the post would have been short. The most delicate repetitions of mispronounced words, the subtlest substitution of society phrases for factory idioms, fell blunted against an impenetrable ignorance and self-sufficiency. Short of dropping the pose of companion and boldly rapping a pupil on the knuckles, there seemed to her no way of modifying her mistress. "Who can refine what Fortune has gilded?" she asked herself in humorous despair. The appearance of Mr. Maper at dinner ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... and show that their minds have been enlarged, and not narrowed, by their special studies—a defect which was too apt to mar the qualities of the seekers into natural facts in what must now, I would hope, be called the just-passed epoch of intelligence dominated by Whig politics, and the self-sufficiency of ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele
... good instance of Shakespeare's method—noticed by Maurice Morgann—of making a character act and speak from those parts of the composition which are inferred only and not distinctly shown; but to the initiated, including Southampton and his friends, who knew the bumptious self-sufficiency of Shakespeare's living model, and who followed the developing characterisation from play to play, the effect of such bold dramatic strokes ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... LIBERALITY, THEOLOGY AND RELIGION.—Upon these subjects it is customary to find a mingling of contradictions. Leading New England literati, who inherit all the narrowness and self-sufficiency of British conservatism, are frequently impelled to utter expressions which would lead the reader to think them persons of liberal and progressive minds. Such expressions we find in the writings of Dr. Holmes, a thorough medical bigot and sceptic; R. W. Emerson, who closed his eyes ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, June 1887 - Volume 1, Number 5 • Various
... was I urged to do this, that I had actually set out to find the first lieutenant when reflection and common sense came to my aid and asked me what was this thing that I was about to do. The answer to this question was, that with the self-sufficiency and stupendous conceit which my father had especially cautioned me to guard against, I was arrogating to myself the possession of superhuman sagacity, and (upon the flimsy foundation of a wild and extravagant fancy, backed by a mere ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... plain things. There have been people in the Christian Church who have said, 'We have all the Spirit, and therefore we do not need one another.' There may be isolation, and self-sufficiency, and a host of other evils coming in, if we only grasp the thought, 'The manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man,' but they are all corrected if we go on and say, 'to profit withal.' For every one of us has something, and no one of us has ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... 'separate'; the principle of kindness and of love is not abiding, 'tis better then to reject this pitiful and doting heart. All things around us bear the stamp of instant change; born, they perish; no self-sufficiency; those who would wish to keep them long, find in the end no room for doing so. If things around us could be kept for aye, and were not liable to change or separation, then this would be salvation! where then can this be sought? You, and all that ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... road disturbed the pleasing reveries of revenge, to awaken him to the more probable and less agreeable consequences likely to occur to himself for the blunder he had made; for, with all the puppy's self-sufficiency and conceit, he could not by any process of mental delusion conceal from himself the fact that he had been most tremendously done, and how his party would take it was a serious consideration. O'Grady, another horrid Irish squire—how should he face ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... with her. They knew she would not let them down. She would not intrigue into marriage, or try and make use of them in any way. She didn't care about them. And so, because of her isolate self-sufficiency in the fray, her wild, overweening backbone, they were ready to attend on her and serve her. Headley in particular hoped he might overcome her. He was a well-built fellow with sandy hair and a pugnacious face. The battle-spirit ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... one will repose in the belief that you consider him or her a Christian, and you will thus increase the number, already unfortunately too large, of those who maintain the form and pretenses of piety without its power; whose hearts are filled with self-sufficiency and spiritual pride, and perhaps zeal for the truths and external duties of religion, while the real spirit of piety has no place there. They trust to some imaginary change, long since passed by, and which has proved to be spurious by its failing of its fruits. The best way—in ...
— The Teacher • Jacob Abbott
... philosophy and bad. The idea of Leibnitz is speculative and far outruns the evidence, but it is speculative in a well-advised, penetrating, humble, and noble fashion; while the idea of Spencer is foolishly dogmatic, it is a piece of ignorant self-sufficiency, like that insular empiricism that would deny that Chinamen were real until it had actually seen them. Nature is richer than experience and wider than divination; and it is far rasher and more arrogant to declare that any part of nature is simple than to suggest ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... Englishman is too much worried to plan the oppression of anybody. "Did you ever," asked Lord Salisbury on a remembered occasion, "have a boil on your neck?" To the Englishman of 1911—that troubled man whose old self-sufficiency has in our own time been shattered beyond repair by Boer rifles, German shipyards, French aeroplanes—Ireland is the boil on the neck of his political system. It is the one peche de jeunesse of his nation that will not sleep in the grave of the past. Like the ghost ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... earnest, headstrong man, the like of whom does not appear a half-dozen times in a century. Being self-educated, he was possessed, like nearly all self-educated men, of a complacency and a self-sufficiency which stood always in his way. Affecting to teach grammar, he was ignorant of all the etymology of the language; knowing no word of botany, he classified plants by the "fearings" of his turnip-field. He was vain to the last degree; he thought ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... order—it is rather the sign of a small nature. To take the commonest instances, when you are told to go to bed, or to mend your dress, or to put on a wrap, or to tidy your room, are you in any way a finer nature if you dawdle and argue and resent the order? Nothing is so small as self-sufficiency and self-centredness, whereas humility and obedience are of the Nature of our Lord Himself, and every humble and obedient soul is in communion with His Greatness. Dante's hierarchy of heaven, "in order serviceable," ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... slander. I'm a celebrated mineralogist and assayer. Tell you how the deep leads run; analyze you anything. For example, we'll proceed to put this hotel-keeper in the crucible, and see what we get. It's thirty parts hoggish self-sufficiency, and ten parts ignorance. Forty more rank dishonesty, and ten of insatiable avarice. Ten more of go-back-when-you-get-up-and-face-him. Can't even bluff a drunken man. I've no use ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... advantage from outside their own special field so long as they are allowed access to these outlying sources of supply; and any arbitrary limitation on this freedom of traffic makes the conditions of life that much harder, and lowers the aggregate efficiency of the community by that much. National self-sufficiency is to be achieved only by a degree of economic isolation; and such a policy of economic isolation involves a degree of impoverishment and lowered efficiency, but it will also leave the nation readier for warlike enterprise on such a scale as ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... all shared one common experience during the last two years; they have had an enormous loss of self-sufficiency. This has been particularly the case with the United States of America. At the beginning of this war, the United States were still possessed by the glorious illusion that they were aloof from general international politics, that they needed no allies and need fear no enemies, that they constituted ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... distinctions of being and activity, substance and accident, potentiality and actuality, and the rest; his repudiation of inclusion in a genus; his actualized infinity; his "personality," apart from the moral qualities which it may comport; his relations to evil being permissive and not positive; his self-sufficiency, self-love, and absolute felicity in himself:—candidly speaking, how do such qualities as these make any definite connection with our life? And if they severally call for no distinctive adaptations of our conduct, what vital difference ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... individuals so inflated with self-sufficiency, and entertain such an overweaning opinion of their skill in all matters, that they must needs have a finger in ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... can find out the beginning of that which hath not a beginning to be found out,—and our most extended apprehensions fall infinitely short of the days of the Ancient of days. O how glorious, then, must his being be, and how boundless! His self-sufficiency and perfection doth herein appear, that from such an inconceivable space he was as perfect and blessed in himself as now. The creatures add nothing to his perfection or satisfaction. He was as well-pleased with his own all-comprehending being, and with ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... Browning's doctrine of love, though it inspired some of his most exalted lyrics, throws into naked relief the dearth of social consciousness in Browning's psychology. Yet it is easy to see that the absolute self-sufficiency into which he lifted the bare fact of love was one of the mainsprings of his indomitable optimism. In Love was concentrated all that emancipates man from the stubborn continuities of Nature. It started up in corrupt or sordid hearts, and swept all their blind ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... timber and several minerals, Finland depends on imports of raw materials, energy, and some components for manufactured goods. Because of the climate, agricultural development is limited to maintaining self-sufficiency in basic products. Forestry, an important export earner, provides a secondary occupation for the rural population. Rapidly increasing integration with Western Europe - Finland was one of the 11 countries joining the ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... with destruction; but God was entreated not to destroy them utterly, and Moses was assured that God would extend mercy as He should see fit. The quotation has a bearing upon the position of the Jews and Paul's argument. They were filled with self-sufficiency and pride, and in great danger. In the reply to Moses, God claimed the right of extending mercy as He pleased, and would not allow Moses to interfere with His prerogative. The Jews were reminded by the quotation that God had a right to say on what terms He would have mercy upon sinners. He does ...
— The Doctrines of Predestination, Reprobation, and Election • Robert Wallace
... a hurry to leave me, Helen?' he said, with a smile of the most provoking self-sufficiency. 'You don't ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... intent on its own game. Its aloofness, its self-sufficiency, are its great charm. The sea does not give and take, like the land and the sky. It has no traffic with the world. It spends its passion upon itself. Helena was something like the sea, self-sufficient and ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... insufficiency of any earthly thing, or of any power of our own to do what is essential for our salvation, and then, when we hang solely and entirely on the Lord Jesus, we shall be safe. Of this I feel no doubt or fear:—the fear is of having confidence in any thing besides, of spiritual pride, of self-sufficiency. Yes, I find self has many lives, and the very sorrows and humiliations of one day, if we do not beware, may become the idols of the next. "We have eaten and drunk in thy presence:" can such a language ever be used in vain-glory, while we remember "the wormwood and the gall," which ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... from the Mediterranean to India, from the Euxine and Caspian Seas to Arabia and the Persian Gulf—a monstrous empire, whose possession was calculated to inflame the monarchs who reigned at Susa and Babylon with more than mortal pride and self-sufficiency. It had been gradually won by successive conquerors, from Nimrod to Darius. It was the gradual absorption of all the kingdoms of the East in the successive Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian empires—for these three empires ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... ran to handsome photographs, some afforded fads in old furniture; but it was only a question of more or less. It looked utterly impersonal to-day; its very atmosphere was artificial, typical, a pretended self-sufficiency. ...
— A Reversion To Type • Josephine Daskam
... sake as an incentive, could take advantage of these circumstances to display his genius and to delight his hearers with a piece of genuine music. This he did and his operatic overtures are of such distinct import and self-sufficiency that they are often detached from the opera itself and played as concert numbers. The Magic Flute Overture is also noteworthy because of the polyphonic treatment of the first theme which is a definite fugal presentation in four voices. The second theme, beginning in measure 64, and soon ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... parleying with Berenice, he at last obtained speech of Lucien; and, arrogant publisher though he was, he came in with the radiant air of a courtier in the royal presence, mingled, however, with a certain self-sufficiency and ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... apologize. I now perceive and frankly admit that there was wrong on my side. I could not have approached you and spoken to you in the right spirit, for if I had, what followed could not have occurred. I fear there was a self-sufficiency in my words and mariner yesterday, which made you conscious of Dr. Marks only, and you had no scruples in dealing with Dr. Marks as you did. If my words and bearing had brought you face to face with my august yet merciful Master, you would have respected ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... change, but it was hard for her to get the old point of view now, to laugh at the old jokes, to listen to the old gossip. She had been cold and wretched only a year before, but she had had the confident self-sufficiency of a gypsy who walks bareheaded and irresponsible through a world whose treasure will never come her way. Now Rachael, tremulous and afraid, was the guardian of the great treasure, she knew now what love ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... to where the trail of smoke still hung, dissolving to a thread. The fleeing figure of Leff brought no comments to their lips. They did not think about him, his cowardice was as unimportant to them in their mutual engrossment as his body was to the indifferent self-sufficiency of the landscape. They knew he was hastening that he might be first in the camp to tell his own story and set himself right with the others before they came. They did not care. They did not even laugh at it. They would do that later when they had returned to the plane where life had ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... a hand on Jose's arm. "My young friend," he said earnestly, "I believe there are meanings in the life and words of Jesus of which the Church in its astounding self-sufficiency has never even dreamed. Did he walk on the water? Did he feed the multitude with a few loaves? Did he raise Lazarus? Did he himself issue from the tomb? No more momentous questions were ever asked than these. For, if so, ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... it clear, by these instances, what is meant by Christian self-denial. If we have good health, and are in easy circumstances, let us beware of high-mindedness, self-sufficiency, self-conceit, arrogance; of delicacy of living, indulgences, luxuries, comforts. Nothing is so likely to corrupt our hearts, and to seduce us from God, as to surround ourselves with comforts,—to have things our own way,—to be the centre of a sort ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... pernicious principles, which he published to the world, having a manifest tendency to subvert revealed religion, and expose the exercise of serious godliness, under the notion of enthusiasm; to advance self-love, as the leading, principle and motive in all human actions whatever, and to destroy the self-sufficiency of God, making him a debtor to his creatures: yet though these, with a number of God-dishonoring, creature-exalting, and soul-ruining errors, were notorious from his books, and were defended by him; the heretic, instead of being duly censured, was countenanced and carressed: whereby this ...
— Act, Declaration, & Testimony for the Whole of our Covenanted Reformation, as Attained to, and Established in Britain and Ireland; Particularly Betwixt the Years 1638 and 1649, Inclusive • The Reformed Presbytery
... himself from wild experimenting by clinging to the idyllic, and opposed the restless creative spirit that animates the artist, by means of a certain smug ease—the ease of self-conscious narrowness, tranquillity, and self-sufficiency. His tapering finger pointed, without any affectation of modesty, to all the hidden and intimate incidents of his life, to the many touching and ingenuous joys which sprang into existence in the wretched depths of his uncultivated existence, and which modestly blossomed forth on ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... laughed when I looked at Mr. Smith, who no sooner saw me addressed by Sir Clement, than, retreating aloof from the company, he seemed to lose at once all his happy self-sufficiency and conceit; looking now at the baronet, now at himself; surveying, with sorrowful eyes, his dress; struck with his air, his gestures, his easy gaiety, he gazed at him with envious admiration, and seemed himself, with conscious ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney
... to seize the opportunity for a visit to England, whither he was drawn by feelings which every educated and impressible American feels, in a degree scarcely conceivable by the English themselves. And being here (but he had already too much experience of English self-sufficiency to confess so much) he began to feel the deep yearning which a sensitive American—his mind full of English thoughts, his imagination of English poetry, his heart of English character and sentiment—cannot fail to be influenced by,—the yearning of the blood within his veins ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... petty slavery of a provincial newspaper to the foremost ranks of the journalists of the world and on into literature, into literature worth the writing. The man won his place in England much as his hero won his, by defiance, by strong shoulder blows, by his self-sufficiency and inexhaustible strength, and when he finished his book he did not know that his end would be so much less glorious than his hero's, that it would be his portion not to fall manfully in the thick of the combat and the press ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... somewhat jarred the poet's self-sufficiency and he subsided for the moment, but jealousy is a cunning adversary and the rival awaited his opportunity ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... ostentatious element than Ambition. Next to this come the regions of Adhesiveness, the gregarious social impulse, Aggressiveness, the intermediate between Adhesiveness and Combativeness, possessing much of the character of each, and Self-sufficiency, which relies upon our own knowledge and desires to lead others. These three organs are the antagonists of the intellectual, and yet by a wonderful law to be explained hereafter, they co-operate with them. The region between Aggressiveness, Repose, ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, November 1887 - Volume 1, Number 10 • Various
... McClellan's self-sufficiency, see vol. i.; on campaign of 1862; on extraordinary powers ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse
... as the south of France, and the junior portion of the Russian army at this period assumed an absurd braggadocio tone. On the very eve of the battle the Emperor Alexander sent one of his aides de camp, Prince Dolgorouki, as a flag of truce to Napoleon. The Prince could not repress his self-sufficiency even in the presence of the Emperor, and Rapp informed me that on dismissing him the Emperor said, "If you were on 'the heights of Montmartre,' I would answer such impertinence only by cannon-balls." This observation was very remarkable, inasmuch as subsequent events rendered ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... Maud was married. Between Mr Dolomore and Jasper existed no superfluous kindness, each resenting the other's self-sufficiency; but Jasper, when once satisfied of his proposed brother-in-law's straightforwardness, was careful not to give offence to a man who might some day serve him. Provided this marriage resulted in moderate happiness to Maud, it was undoubtedly a magnificent stroke of ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... impression of his life begat in his disciples the conviction that "he did no sin" (I. Pet. ii. 22; compare John viii. 46; II. Cor. v. 21), this silence of Jesus would offend the religious sense. Jesus, however, had no air of self-sufficiency, he came to make surrender and "to fulfil all-righteousness" (Matt. iii. 15). It was the positive aspect of John's baptism that drew him to the Jordan. John was preaching the coming of God's kingdom. The place held by the doctrine of that kingdom in the later teaching of Jesus makes it all but ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees
... on me the effect of a pedagogic exuberance. Even the occasional good views (on harmony, for example) that it contains are obscured by a self-sufficiency in the tone and manner of them, of which one may well complain as insupportable. What Raff wishes to appear spoils four-fifths (to quote the time which he adapts so ridiculously to "Lohengrin" of what he might be. He is perpetually getting on scientific ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... huts surround the salt lake, we found it shoemaker of Castilian descent. He received us with the air of gravity and self-sufficiency which in those countries characterize almost all persons who are conscious of possessing some peculiar talent. He was employed in stretching the string of his bow, and sharpening his arrows to shoot ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... In the assemblies of nobility he plays a rather important part, but on grounds of economy he declines the honourable dignity of marshal. 'Gentlemen,' he usually says to the noblemen who press that office upon him, and he speaks in a voice filled with condescension and self-sufficiency: 'much indebted for the honour; but I have made up my mind to consecrate my leisure to solitude.' And, as he utters these words, he turns his head several times to right and to left, and then, with a dignified air, adjusts his chin ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev
... as I always do, at this particular stage, with his compatriots; not so much, perhaps, for the compliment to myself and my poor country, as for the revelation (which is ever fresh to me) of Britannic self-sufficiency and taste. And he was so far softened by my gratitude as to add a word of praise on the American method of lacing sails. "You're ahead of us in lacing sails," he said; "you can say ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and ...
— Manifesto of the Communist Party • Karl Marx
... productions, but shut out from the present selection for reasons given further on. The final edition shows numerous and considerable variations from all its precursors; evidencing once again that Whitman is by no means the rough-and-ready writer, panoplied in rude art and egotistic self-sufficiency, that many people suppose him to be. Even since this issue, the book has been slightly revised by its author's own hand, with a special view to possible English circulation. The copy so revised has reached me (through the liberal and friendly ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... dignity and freedom of the human soul.'[6] But we cannot close our eyes to its defects. Divine providence, though frequently dwelt upon, signified little more for the Stoic than destiny or fate. Harmony with nature was simply a sense of proud self-sufficiency. Stoicism is the glorification of reason, even to the extent of suppressing all emotion. Sin is unreason, and salvation lies in an external control of the passions—in indifference and apathy begotten of the subordination of ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... of man's will as the foundation of government is distinctly materialistic; it is a self-sufficiency that shuts out God and the higher law.—["And, indeed, if the will of man is all-powerful, if states are to be distinguished from one another only by their boundaries, if everything may be changed like the scenery in a play by a flourish of the magic ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... drawn up a codicil to his will, the poor, decided Governor, who had adopted Mr. Ryland, was so ill. Nay, Mr. Ryland, for the love of this one honorable and just man, could have almost forgotten that he was surrounded by scoundrels, and would bury in oblivion the mean jealousies of a contemptible self-sufficiency, and the false professions of smiling deceit. But should it please Almighty God to remove the incomparable man, and should there be a chance that the civil government of the province should be again disunited from the military command, he did hope that the dear, dear Lord, would favor him ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... have influenced our national cause like the tiller-ropes of a ship, if the rough gripe of England had been capable of managing so sensitive a kind of machinery. It has required nothing less than the boorishness, the stolidity, the self-sufficiency, the contemptuous jealousy, the half-sagacity, invariably blind of one eye and often distorted of the other, that characterize this strange people, to compel us to be a great nation in our own right, instead of continuing virtually, ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... perpetual, where, from the floor-scrubber to the dramatist, from the academician to the simpleton who gets muddled over the evening newspaper, from the witty courtier down to his philosophic lackey, each one revises Montesquieu with the self-sufficiency of a child which, because it is learning to read, deems itself wise; where self-esteem, in disputation, caviling and sophistication, destroys all sensible conversation; where no one utters a word, but to teach, never imagining that to ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... mortification, in all probability, had spread half-way of the femur: and then, getting me between them, (three or four of the women joining us, and listening with their mouths open, and all the signs of ignorant wonder in their faces, as there appeared of self-sufficiency in those of the artists,) did they by turns fill my ears with an anatomical description of the leg and thigh; running over with terms of art, of the tarsus, the metatarsus, the tibia, the fibula, the patella, the os tali, the os tibae, ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... enlarged and fortified the coal situation in the Union. Practically all other interests are similarly affected. The outstanding factor in the prosperity of the Union has been the development of war-born self-sufficiency. I used to think during the conflict that shook the world, that this gospel of self-containment would be one of the compensations that Britain would gain for the years of blood and slaughter. So ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... amusement. Hudson made no serious rejoinder to Rowland's compliment on his statuette until he rose to go. Rowland wondered whether he had forgotten it, and supposed that the oversight was a sign of the natural self-sufficiency of genius. But Hudson stood a moment before he said good night, twirled his sombrero, and hesitated for the first time. He gave Rowland a clear, penetrating glance, and then, with a wonderfully frank, appealing smile: ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... referred, but the application of the metaphor goes far beyond the petty strife in Corinth and carries for us the wholesome lesson that one main cause which keeps men back from Christ is a too high estimate of themselves. Some of us are enclosed in the fortress of self-sufficiency: we will not humbly acknowledge our dependence on God, and have turned self-reliance into the law of our lives. There are many voices, some of them sweet and powerful, which to-day are preaching that gospel. It finds eager ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... good friends, it is not timidity—it is all pride. I would pardon his dulness, and even his ignorance; for one, as you say, might be the fault of his nature, and the other of his education: but his self-sufficiency is his own fault, and that I will not, and cannot pardon. Somebody says, that nature may make a fool, but a coxcomb is always of his own making. Now, my cousin—(as he is my cousin, I may say what I please of him)—my cousin ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... wasn't it? Ninety out of a hundred provincial middle- class women are boorish (pignouf lardes) to a high degree, even with pretty faces that ought to give evidence of delicate instincts. One is surprised to find a basis of gross self-sufficiency in these false ladies. Where is the woman now? She is becoming a ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... fellow you are, Dom, for supposing chances and difficulties, and fancying they cannot be overcome," returned Otto, with the pert self-sufficiency that characterised him. "For my part I rather enjoy difficulties, because of the fun of overcoming them. Don't you see, we three can make quite sure of never being separated by never going out on our raft except together, so ...
— The Island Queen • R.M. Ballantyne
... epitaph of the dead misanthrope shows the same lack of self-sufficiency which characterized the living Timon. He despises the opinion of men, but he must let them know that he despises it. Coriolanus would have laughed at them from Elysium and scorned to ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... crying over spilled milk. It was impossible at times for him not to feel intensely in moments of success or failure; but the proper thing to do was to bear up, not to show it, to talk little and go your way with an air not so much of resignation as of self-sufficiency, to whatever was awaiting you. That was his attitude on this morning, and that was what he expected from those around him—almost compelled, in fact, by his ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser |
