"Self-culture" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... leading must result badly. Why can you not devise some pursuit to fill your idle hours? Far be it from me to interfere with your liberty; but I confess that it grieves me to see youth, and no doubt some measure of ability, so wasted. Why do you not strive to continue your education? Self-culture is the highest form of improvement. My books ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... English, and Fred's own man, a jewel in his way, is taciturn to a fault. If Fred would be honest with himself, he would acknowledge that the third-hand chatter of anybody's kitchen would often be a delightful relief to his solitude. But then how could he follow up his system of self-culture? That and society are quite incompatible things. However, he ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... of a quarrier at Kirkconnel, Dumfriesshire, became a surfaceman on the railway. Spending all his leisure in self-culture, he mastered German, French, and Spanish sufficiently to read the chief masterpieces in these languages. His poetic vein, which was true if somewhat limited in range, soon manifested itself, and his first book, Songs of Labour, appeared in ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... discourage you. If you have no books, borrow them; if you have no teachers, teach yourself; if your early education has been neglected, by the greater diligence repair the defect. Let not a craven heart or a love of ease rob you of the inestimable benefit of self-culture. ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... alone gave it a living interest. Any extemporized raft would have floated the boy down to immortality. But Wordsworth never quite learned the distinction between Fact, which suffocates the Muse, and Truth, which is the very breath of her nostrils. Study and self-culture did much for him, but they never quite satisfied him that he was capable of making a mistake. He yielded silently to friendly remonstrance on certain points, and gave up, for ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... or unrest, is all owing to lack of self-culture," cry some. Perhaps it is—some of it. No doubt the cocoon stage of rest and self-development is higher, and nearer to the ultimate perfection—the winged creature which soars above where others crawl—but until we are fit to ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... found a brotherhood which was to combine art with religion and to train craftsmen for the service of the Church; but he was more fitted to work in the world than in the cloister, and the social aspect of this foundation prevailed over the religious. Nor was it mere self-culture to which he aspired. The arts as he understood them were one field, and a wide field, for enlarging the powers of men and increasing their happiness, for continuing all that was most precious in the heritage of the past and passing on the torch to the ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... can assert that poverty is no evil, I cannot imagine!" she exclaims in the "Wrongs of Woman." She cared nothing for the luxuries and the ease and idleness which wealth gives, but she prized above everything the time and opportunity for self-culture of which the poor, in their struggle for existence, are deprived. The Wollstonecraft fortunes were at low ebb. Her share in them, should she remain at home, would be drudgery and slavery, which would grow greater with every year. Her one hope for the future depended upon ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... for the defence of slavery in the name of freedom. The book is dedicated, in a very graceful and cordial sonnet, to Mr. E.P. Whipple; and it is seldom that South Carolina sends so pleasant a message to Massachusetts. Mr. Hayne need only persevere in self-culture to be able to produce poems that shall win for him a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... at anything better. I have enough to eat and to wear at home, but the soul has some claims too, and I long for the contact of higher natures than those by whom I am now surrounded. I want opportunities for self-culture, for intercourse with kindred spirits, for the ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... that Pauline Garcia was self-educated as a vocalist. Her mother's removal to Brussels, her brother's absence in Italy, and the wandering life of Mme. Malibran practically threw her on her own resources. She was admirably fitted for self-culture. Ardent, resolute, industrious, thoroughly grounded in the soundest of art methods, and marvelously gifted in musical intelligence, she applied herself to her vocal studies with abounding enthusiasm, without instruction other than the judicious counsels of her mother. She had her eyes fixed on ...
— Great Singers, Second Series - Malibran To Titiens • George T. Ferris
... sensation of a reflex sorrow, he would wring a heart. All that saves his egoism from being hateful is, that, with its immense reaches, it cheats the sense into a feeling of something like sublimity. A patch of sand is unpleasing; a desert has all the awe of ocean. Lessing also felt the duty of self-culture; but it was not so much for the sake of feeding fat this or that faculty as of strengthening character,—the only soil in which real mental power can root itself and find sustenance. His advice to his brother Karl, who was beginning to write for the stage, is two parts moral ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... passages in the 'Cortegiano' it is clear that Castiglione is painting the character of an independent gentleman, to whom self-culture in all humane excellence is of far more importance than the acquisition of the art of pleasing. Circumstances made the life of courts the best obtainable; but there is no trace ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... and softened to receive it. It waits for preparedness of nature, for the obedient will, the awakened mind, the receptive heart;—and all these forms of self-discipline are comprehended in any genuine self-culture. ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... influence is a recollection of the large canvases of Jan and Hubert Van Eyck and Hubert Van der Goes which Duerer had admired in the Netherlands; these had strengthened and directed the bias of his self-culture towards simple masses on a large scale.[74] He may very well have sought to combine what he learnt from them with hints he found in the engravings after Raphael which he obtained in Antwerp. His increasing sickness may probably account for ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... our own plot of ground, be it larger or smaller. For indeed the only estate of man that savors of the realty is in his mind. Mr. James seems to have arrived early at an understanding of this, and to have profited by the best modern appliances of self-culture. In conception and expression is he essentially an artist and not an irresponsible trouvere. If he allow himself an occasional carelessness, it is not from incaution, but because he knows perfectly well what he is about. He is ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... directions for self-culture. A sensible and instructive work, that ought to be in the hands of every one who wishes to be either an agreeable talker or listener. ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... culture considered in its broadest sense. The title is justified not so much from the point of view of giving many details for self-culture, as of ...
— Little Lucy's Wonderful Globe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... must not be forgotten that China has already four great religions flourishing in her midst. There is Confucianism, which, strictly speaking, is not a religion, but a system of self-culture with a view to the proper government of (1) one's own family and of (2) the State. It teaches man to be good, and to love virtue for its own sake, with no fear of punishment for failure, no hope of reward for success. Is it below ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... before, during, and after dinner, as if it was an accustomed social function with them. The half dozen who made speeches showed a grasp of the political questions of the hour and an ability to put their views before an audience which was an exhibition of a high order of intelligence and self-culture. ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... Pocket Manual of Republican Etiquette, and Guide to Correct Personal Habits; embracing an Exposition of the Principles of Good Manners, Useful Hints on the Care of the Person, Eating, Drinking, Exercise, Habits, Dress, Self-Culture, and Behavior at Home; the Etiquette of Salutations, Introductions, Receptions, Visits, Dinners, Evening Parties, Conversation, Letters, Presents, Weddings, Funerals, the Street, the Church, Places of Amusement, Traveling, &c; with Illustrative Anecdotes, a Chapter on Love and Courtship, and ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... would be of {to euaggelion Xristou}. The Fa or Law is the equivalent of dharma comprehending all in the first Basket of the Buddhist teaching,—as Dr. Davids says (Hibbert Lectures, p. 44), "its ethics and philosophy, and its system of self-culture;" with the theory of karma, it seems to me, especially underlying it. It has been pointed out (Cunningham's "Bhilsa Topes," p. 102) that dharma is the keystone of all king Priyadarsi or Asoka's edicts. The whole of them are dedicated to the attainment of one ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien
... presence so securely felt, And so related to her every act,— Their love was still so vigilant, so real, That to do what, and only what, she knew They would approve, was duty paramount; And their approval was the smile of God! Self-culture, work, and needful exercise,— This was her simple summing-up of duties Immediately before her, and to be Fulfilled without more parleying or delay. She found that by the labor of a month In painting flowers from nature, she could earn Easily sixty dollars. This she did For two years ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent
... intellect of the Greeks produced the first systematic guides to high culture; the Rhetorical art for Oratory and Poetry, the Logical art for Reasoning, and the Eristic art for Disputation. There was nothing precisely corresponding to an Art of Study, but there were examples of the self-culture of celebrated men. The most notorious of these is Demosthenes; of whom we know that, while he took special lessons in the art of oratory, he also bestowed extraordinary pains upon the general cultivation ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... perhaps influenced by the example of Nat, devoted his spare moments to self-culture, and made commendable progress before he resolved to quit his trade, and educate himself for the legal profession. Without means of his own, or wealthy friends to aid, he succeeded in his laudable efforts, and, without being able to command a collegiate ...
— The Bobbin Boy - or, How Nat Got His learning • William M. Thayer
... The art of self-culture—one learns just that when youth's outward-looking curiosity and passion begin to ebb—is the art of freeing oneself from the influence of books so that one may enjoy what one is destined to enjoy without pedantry or scruple. And yet, by the profound law ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... last great waste tracts of the country, were the people free to reach out after things immaterial and aesthetic; and only with the accession of wealth, which again these same causes produced, came the possibility of gratifying the craving for those things. And in the longing for self-improvement and self-culture, thus newly inspired and for the first time truly national, one of the things to which the people turned with characteristic earnestness was the improvement of the common speech. The nation has set itself purposefully and with determination ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... elsewhere, had far more serious aims and enthusiasms in the direction of science, refined self-culture, discoveries, analysis of man and nature, than have always been ascribed to it. The men of that epoch did more hard work for the world, conferred more sterling benefits on their posterity, than those who study it chiefly from the ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... virtue and self-culture. With deep meaning he says, "Become that which thou art;" that is, be that which ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... always diminishing: if I made steps towards some of his opinions, he, during his short life, was constantly approximating more and more to several of mine: and if he had lived, and had health and vigour to prosecute his ever assiduous self-culture, there is no knowing how much further this ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... finds it outside of the soul, in the results of good and evil action, therefore in the nature of things. The method of salvation, therefore, according to Zoroaster, is that of an eternal battle for good against evil; but according to the Buddha, it is that of self-culture ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... was true. Allie Briskow was indeed in training, both physical and mental, and the application, the energy she displayed had surprised not only her parents, who could but dimly understand the necessity of self-culture, but also Mrs. Ring, the instructress. Mrs. Ring, a handsome, middle-aged woman whose specialty was the finishing of wealthy young "ladies," had been induced to accept this position partly by reason of the attractive salary mentioned ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... full maturity, when he gave them literary form. Most lack power to fully utilize their own experience even for practical self-knowledge and guidance, but with Goethe nothing was wasted from which self-culture could be extracted. ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... left alone with the child oftener than she used to be, but in truth this was a relief rather than otherwise. She was accustomed to solitude, and the work of self-culture she had begun filled her spare hours ...
— That Lass O' Lowrie's - 1877 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... not enough," Paul broke in, "this self-culture in one's own study does no one any good. For that reason I do not mind if I appear unphilosophical. One has duties toward one's fellowmen. One must be useful to the State, as a good citizen. One must make money, to ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... and self-culture irreconcilable to each other? In the first place, we have seen that a man, in the midst of labour, may and ought to give himself to the most important improvements, that he may cultivate his sense of justice, his benevolence, and the desire of perfection. ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... close examination of our own nature and its workings, perhaps, that we are most likely to solve the enigma of our being. The word spiritual surely has a meaning; it suggests self-culture not only for the present ...
— No Refuge but in Truth • Goldwin Smith
... never to lose an opportunity for self-culture or self-advancement. Few men knew so well the value of spare moments. He seized them as though they were gold and would not let one pass until he had wrung from it every possibility. He managed to read a thousand good books before he was twenty-one—what a lesson for boys ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... my theories about self-culture, etc., would ever have been modified so much, whether I should ever have seen what a necessary failure they lead to, had it not been for this war. Now I feel every day, more and more, that a man has no right to himself at all; that, indeed, he can do nothing useful unless he recognizes this clearly. ...
— Hero Tales From American History • Henry Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt
... time for enjoyment than any other farmer in the world. His hard work ceases with autumn. He has the long winters in which to become acquainted with his family—with his neighbors—in which to read and keep abreast with the advanced thought of his day. He has the time and means for self-culture. He has more time than the mechanic, the merchant or the professional man. If the farmer is not well informed it is his own fault. Books are cheap, and every farmer can have enough to give him the outline of every science, and an idea ...
— The Ghosts - And Other Lectures • Robert G. Ingersoll
... needs and may have warm hearts. At the same time I will not deny that I prefer the northern variety of Buddhism, because I seem to myself to detect in the southern Buddhism a touch of a highly-refined egoism. Self-culture may or may not be combined with self-sacrifice. In the case of the Buddha it was no doubt so combined, as the following passage, indited ...
— The Reconciliation of Races and Religions • Thomas Kelly Cheyne
... being thwarted in an, object on which she has so set her heart, as she has on this? Thee has trained her thyself at home, in her enfeebled childhood, and thee knows how strong her will is, and what she has been able to accomplish in self-culture by the simple force of her determination. She never will be satisfied until she has tried her ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 2. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... woman, especially the one who may subsequently marry, education in the broad sense of self-culture and development is of primary importance. The question of being should take precedence over doing, although not to the exclusion of the latter, for character is best formed by action. But all her studies, occupations, even her pastimes, should be pursued with the main purpose of making herself ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... unum est necessarium"; and here he pursues his controversy with modern Puritanism, which imagines that it has, in its special conception of God and religion, the unum necessarium, which can dispense with Sweetness and Light, self-culture and self-discipline. "The Puritan's great danger is that he imagines himself in possession of a rule telling him the unum necessarium, or one thing needful, and that he then remains satisfied with a very crude conception of what this ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... with the tears running down its face, and pretty well draggled and seedy; but when we started out with the sun shining against our cheeks and the hills looking so warm and lazy and the hollows kind of smiling to themselves over something, and the prairie-dogs gossiping worse than a ladies' self-culture meeting, I tell you, it all looked good to me, and ...
— The Range Dwellers • B. M. Bower
... the greatest writer of the period. His Autobiography has a value possessed by no other work of the kind. This and his Poor Richard's Almanac have taught generations of Americans the duty of self-culture, self-reliance, thrift, and the value of practical common sense. He was the first of our writers to show a balanced sense of humor and to use it as an agent in impressing truth on unwilling listeners. ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... a stronger sense of the importance of what human beings can do as to shape the characters of one another; but the free-will doctrine has, I believe, fostered in its supporters a much stronger spirit of self-culture.[16] ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... but it had the suppleness which makes the graceful dancer, and was an elegant scaffolding on which to hang the picturesque costume of the day. For the rest, all that he was he had made himself, during those eighteen years of intelligent self-culture, which had been his engrossing occupation since his fifteenth birthday, when he determined to be one of the finest ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... lot had been the lot of an orphan. No academy had welcomed him to its shade, no college crowned him with its honors; to read, to write, to cipher, these had been his degrees in knowledge. Shakespeare learned little more than reading and writing at school, but by self-culture he made himself the great master among literary men. Burns, too, enjoyed few advantages of education, and his youth was passed ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... sacred duties of home, the personal attention and effort which the majority of American women have to give to their household affairs, produce that lack of time that is offered as an excuse for the neglect of the duty of self-culture. This it is which fritters away thought and the taste for higher things, leaving the mind blank and nerveless except ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... that Chuang Tzu is a very dangerous writer, and the publication of his book in English, two thousand years after his death, is obviously premature, and may cause a great deal of pain to many thoroughly respectable and industrious persons. It may be true that the ideal of self-culture and self-development, which is the aim of his scheme of life, and the basis of his scheme of philosophy, is an ideal somewhat needed by an age like ours, in which most people are so anxious to educate their neighbours that they have actually no time ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... prevailing tendency to discontinue it when free from the coercion of parents and masters. And when the acquisition of knowledge has been rendered habitually gratifying, then there will be as prevailing a tendency to continue, without superintendence, that self-culture previously carried ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... order to go out and fight, unless the danger was very urgent, or the interests at stake of vital importance; particularly now that the length of campaigns had become greater and the seasons exempted from military operations shorter. In many minds the spread of culture, and of the ideal of self-culture, had produced a type of individualism indifferent to public concerns, and contemptuous of political and military ambitions. Moreover, the methods of warfare had undergone great improvement; in most branches of the army the trained skill of the professional soldier was really necessary; and it was ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 1 • Demosthenes
... produced many volumes of sermons that have in an unusual degree the merit of directness, literary grace, suggestiveness, and spiritual warmth and insight. His theological writings have been widely read by Unitarians and those not of that fellowship. His Self-culture has been largely circulated as a manual of practical ethics. His Ten Great Religions and its companion volume opened the way in this country for the recognition of the comparative study of religious developments. Not content with so wide a range ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... It is one of the finest biographies in the language, and also one of the most stimulating. The reader who follows Charlotte's stormy youth is made ashamed of his own lack of application when he reads of the girl's tireless work in self-culture in the face of much bodily weakness ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... mind by philosophy; from habitual conversance with public affairs; from that perfect balance, in a word, of the physical, intellectual, and moral powers, which was only to be attained by a process of self-culture, incompatible with the pursuance of a trade for bread. Such, at any rate, was the opinion of the Greeks. We shall have occasion to return to it later. Meantime, let us sum up the course of our investigation up ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... to what I believe to be a fact, namely, that the foundations of all existing education systems are absolutely false in principle; and that teaching itself, as opposed to natural development and self-culture, is the greatest obstacle to human progress that social evolution has ever ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... pleasures of the eye and ear never lack eulogists; on the contrary, they need rather to be put in the background than in the foreground by speakers: but to obtain volunteers who will undertake the fatigue and hard work of self-culture, we have not only to offer rewards but to encourage them with the choicest addresses. For if doctors have to coax their patients into adopting an insipid but yet wholesome diet, how much the more ought the man who is giving his fellows good advice to use all the allurements of oratory ...
— The Letters of the Younger Pliny - Title: The Letters of Pliny the Younger - - Series 1, Volume 1 • Pliny the Younger
... to resist when many invite to utterance; and with us whoever has ability is urged to put himself forward, and consequently to dissipate in crude performances energies which if employed in self-culture might make of him a philosopher, a poet, or a man of science. As it is easier to act than to think, the multitude of course will be only talkers, writers, and performers; but a great and civilized people must have at least a few men who take rank with the profound thinkers and ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... and subtle imagination of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats when they were at their best. But he had greater body and motive force than any of them. He is the strongest personality among English poets since Milton, though his strength was wasted by want of restraint and self-culture. In Milton the passion was there, but it was held in check by the will and the artistic conscience, made subordinate to good ends, ripened by long reflection, and finally uttered in forms of perfect and harmonious ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... must be done, and after that she has no time left. The "mother of a young and increasing family," with her "pale, thin face and feeble step," and her "multiplied and wearying cares," is "completely worn down with so many children." She has neither time nor spirit for self-culture, beyond what she may obtain in the nursery. What satisfaction is there in proving that she is far below where she ought to be, if inexorable circumstance prevent her from climbing higher? What use is there in telling ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... a view to the greater satisfaction of all the clans and classes," he again added. "Self-culture for the sake of all—a result that, that would almost put Yau and Shun into ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... received was meagre, but he could hardly have put what knowledge he had to better advantage. After he had been relieved from the arduous life of the camp, he began to satisfy again his desires for self-culture. His correspondence towards the close of his life shows a marked improvement in style over that of his earlier years. There is no lack of convincing evidence that Brant had a penetrating and well-balanced intellect; but his chief glory is the constant efforts ...
— The War Chief of the Six Nations - A Chronicle of Joseph Brant - Volume 16 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • Louis Aubrey Wood
... up wrong pleasure is not; neither is it self-sacrifice, but self-culture. But giving up right pleasure is. If you surrender the pleasure of walking, your foot will wither; you may as well cut it off: if you surrender the pleasure of seeing, your eyes will soon be unable to bear the light; you may as well pluck them out. And to maim yourself is partly to kill yourself. ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... panegyric delivered by the Buddha just before his death (Book of the Great Decease, v. 38); but it is the panegyric of an unselfish man, kindly, thoughtful for others and popular; not of the intellectual man, versed in the theory and practice of the Buddhist system of self-culture. So in the long list of the disciples given in the Anguttara (i. xiv.) where each of them is declared to be the chief in some gift, Ananda is mentioned five times (which is more often than any other), but it is as chief in conduct and ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... after that she has no time left. The "mother of a young and increasing family," with her "pale, thin face and feeble step," and her "multiplied and wearying cares," is "completely worn down with so many children." She has neither time nor for self-culture, beyond what she may obtain in the nursery. What satisfaction is there in proving that she is far below where she ought to be, if inexorable circumstance prevent her from climbing higher? What use is there in telling her that she will alienate her husband and injure her children by ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... and Christian tenderness; his hatred of wrong and oppression, with love and pity for the wrong-doer; his noble pleas for self-culture, temperance, peace, and purity; and above all, his precept and example of unquestioning obedience to duty and the voice of God in his soul, can never become obsolete. It is very fitting that his memory should be especially cherished with that ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... of self-culture one friend can help another by advice and example; but he cannot educate, for education presupposes inequality.—The necessities of human nature produce societies in which equals seek to influence each other in a pedagogical way, since they establish ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... we are naturally all desirous to widen our outlook, and to broaden our views of life; and, believing that the best method of self-culture and of self-development lies in a systematic course of reading and an interchange of opinions regarding the books read, we have decided to start ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... means delicately formed; but her face is marked, and the eyes are brilliant, dark, and full of character. She has far more ability than she ever can display on the stage; but I have no doubt that, by practice and self-culture, she will be a far finer actress at least than any one since Mrs. Siddons. I was at Charles Kemble's a few evenings ago, when a drawing of Miss Kemble, by Sir Thomas Lawrence, was brought in; and I have no doubt that you will shortly see, even in Dublin, ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... "earned money merely," but money, health, delight, and moral profit, all in one. "We must heap up a great pile of doing for a small diameter of being," he says in another place; and then exclaims, "How admirably the artist is made to accomplish his self-culture by devotion to his art!" We may escape uncongenial toil, only to devote ourselves to that which is congenial. It is only to transact some higher business that even Apollo dare play the truant from Admetus. We ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... effective way—by tracing the continuous effects of ill-done work. Some of them seem to be still hopeful that it will follow as a necessary consequence from week-day services, ecclesiastical decoration, and improved hymn-books; others apparently trust to descanting on self-culture in general, or to raising a general sense of faulty circumstances; and meanwhile lax, make-shift work, from the high conspicuous kind to the average and obscure, is allowed to pass unstamped with the disgrace ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... contumely, being so starved that he was fain sometimes to devour raw roots to stay his hunger. His constitution must have been of iron to carry him through all that he endured. In the meantime his indomitable mind was engaged in attempts at self-culture; he studied a Euclid which he had brought with him, drawing his diagrams on the sand, and he afterwards managed to teach himself Latin by means of a Horace and a Latin Bible, aided by some slight vestiges ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... speak well is, like forming character, a matter of self-discipline and self-culture. A good voice is a good habit; distinct articulation is a good habit; graceful and effective gestures are a good habit. Like all good habits, these are formed by a constant exercise of the will. The teacher's part is to get the students to hear his own voice, to observe ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... hence take occasion, secondly, to mark (what is not so obvious), that through life the same law binds us: the law, that our intellectual life depends more on the state of society in which we exist, than on our direct efforts at self-culture. Individual effort may give one great preeminence before his associates in any of the acknowledged sciences, though even in such their success facilitates his; and if he prizes the knowledge—the ...
— The Growth of Thought - As Affecting the Progress of Society • William Withington
... The self-culture that there is in the mere habit of faithfulness is in itself a rich reward for all our striving. It is a great thing to train ourselves to do always our best, to do as nearly perfect work as possible. Said ...
— Making the Most of Life • J. R. Miller
... that which has a principle of life capable of being expanded. He, therefore, who does what he can to unfold all his powers and capacities, especially his nobler ones, so as to become a well-proportioned, vigorous, excellent, happy being, practices self-culture, and ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... said that the domestic circle is the peculiar province of woman; that "men are what mothers make them." But how can that woman who does not live for self-culture and self-development, who has herself no exalted objects in life, imbue her children with lofty aspirations, or train her sons to a free and glorious manhood? She best can fulfill the duties of wife and mother, who is fitted for other and ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... betterment of man's condition. The disease lies so deep, and so great are the destruction and loss partly experienced, and still more awfully impending over every soul of us, that something else than tinkering at the outsides, or dealing, as self-culture does, with man's understanding or, as social gospels do, with man's economical and civic condition, should be brought to bear. Dear brethren, especially you Christian ministers, preach a social Christianity by all ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... same general subject is discussed in these lectures as in the "Lecture on Self-Culture," published last winter, there will, of course, be found in them that coincidence of thoughts which always takes place in the writings of a man who has the inculcation of certain great principles much at heart. Still, the point of view, the mode of discussion, ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... out of his social, mental, and political dilemma by the straps of his boots. Colored men turned their attention to the education of themselves and their children. Schools were begun, churches organized, and work of general improvement and self-culture entered into with alacrity and enthusiasm. Boston had among its teachers the scholarly Thomas Paul; among its clergymen Leonard A. Grimes and John T. Raymond; among its lawyers Robert Morris and E. G. Walker; among its business men J. B. Smith and Coffin Pitts; among its physicians ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... in the words of a favorite author of the day. He says, 'It is for want of self-culture that the superstition of traveling, whose idols are Italy, England, Egypt, retains its fascination for all educated Americans. He who travels to be amused, or to get somewhat which he does not carry, travels away from himself, and grows old, even ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... much to tell. She's common, and stupid. One of those who go in for self-culture; and then when the test comes they break down. [With sinister enjoyment] She'll be the ...
— What Every Woman Knows • James M. Barrie
... thus becomes to the attentive reader an insensible training in language, as well as an elevation of mind and spirit. Superiority of spirit and of form, then, offers good reasons why the intelligent—whether for stimulation, consolation, self-culture, or mere amusement in idle hours—should avail of a due proportion of this finest expression of the sweetest, the highest, and the deepest emotional experiences of life, in the realms of nature, of ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... that this prize of eternity falls only to those who devote themselves wholly to self-culture, to the salvation of their own souls. The best lives have thought little of themselves, but they have lived for the ends of the soul, to help men to better living, to save them from the things that blight and damn the soul. Like the Leader of men ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... of others. We have, first and last, to be captains of our own souls. There is an element of absurdity in the thought that the aim and purpose of human life is for each soul to hunt for the sins and imperfections in others. The enjoinment of self-criticism and self-culture seems a simpler and less circumstantial rule of life. Asceticism, abnegation, prayer, remoteness from the passions that rend the worldly, bring peace and content. But they limit experience and give a false simplicity to the problems of life. Early Christian ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... England at the point where work was initiated, were, as compared with those of England, almost idyllic. The Lowell workers came from New England farms, many of them for the sake of being near libraries and schools, and thus securing larger opportunities for self-culture. ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... power of forming mental images can be cultivated so as to improve one's fitness for different kinds of employment. Such self-culture rests upon improvement in the vividness of your sense-perceptions. It suffices for your present purpose to know that to cultivate your power of sense-imagery in any respect you must (1) Keep the appropriate ...
— Power of Mental Imagery • Warren Hilton
... rendering themselves liable to the dungeon, but who would become filled with angry, revengeful emotions at what they were forced to endure. I would labor to induce these to use what they experienced as a means of self-culture, to leave the acts of others in the hands of God, submit calmly to what they could not avoid, do their own duties faithfully, and in all things keep themselves strictly in the right. Thus I was almost constantly called to speak a word here ...
— The Prison Chaplaincy, And Its Experiences • Hosea Quinby
... so hard as other callings? In 1880 there were 8,562 women engaged in teaching in Massachusetts. Of these, a fourth would probably have done a better work in some other way. Teaching is a noble profession: it has great chances for self-culture and for helpfulness to others. In no profession can one do more good, if one tries with all one's heart. It is one of the highest callings even for this reason: a teacher utterly unable to see any results of her labor, in black and white, at the end of her pupil's course, ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... the highest distinction in art, it is equally true that, without the inborn genius, no amount of mere industry, however well applied, will make an artist. The gift comes by nature, but is perfected by self-culture, which is of more avail that all the imparted learning of the schools. But even genius without good judgment may be an unbroken steed without ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... another disadvantage in self-culture. The self-educated man is often only acquainted with the elements of a great many different sciences, but it is seldom that he is thoroughly versed in any single one. There are exceptions to this rule. One is when the student has a decided talent for something, and energy ...
— The Silver Lining - A Guernsey Story • John Roussel
... elementary work like the present. It is believed that the notes will prove a help to teacher and pupil in special investigations, and to the reader who may wish to make selections from excellent sources for purposes of self-culture. It is hardly necessary to add that it is sometimes worth much to the student to know where valuable information may be obtained, even when it is not practicable to make ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... all the little education that had been bestowed on him. That education was most capriciously imparted, and in its extent only went the length of teaching him to read partially; for whatever further advances he had made he was indebted to his own self-culture. At times his mother would make some efforts to impress on him the advantages of education: she would talk of poetry, and repeat specimens of the poets which her memory had retained from the period of her girlhood in her father's house; but oftenest the language ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... She showed no inclination for the frivolous amusements of a frivolous society. Her view of life and its responsibilities was a serious one, and she addressed all her energies to the work of self-improvement and self-culture. She read and re-read the literary masterpieces of England, France and Germany. As a ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... religious emotions, reverence, awe, and aspiration, if for no better reason than as a means of self-culture. Educate, train every side of your mental and emotional nature. Read poetry and learn the secret of tears and ecstacy. Go to Catholic and Episcopal churches and surrender yourself to the inspiration of soul-inspiring ...
— Memories of Jane Cunningham Croly, "Jenny June" • Various
... Where the verses deal with those ideas that are common to Christians and Buddhists, the versions are easily intelligible, and some of the stanzas appeal very strongly to the Western sense of religious beauty. Where the stanzas are full of the technical terms of the Buddhist system of self-culture and self-control, it is often impossible, without expansions that spoil the poetry, or learned notes that distract the attention, to convey the full sense of the original. In all these distinctively Buddhist verses the existing ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... be charged on this sex that they often yield, without an attempt at self-control, to their supposed natural volatility? If man be constitutionally grave, and life be with him all a serious affair, then should woman supply this want by careful self-culture. I would not frown on the innocent gratifications of the tongue; but I would entreat this sex, instead of seeking their pleasure in discussing the concerns of their neighbors, to pause, consider, and resolve that they will set their feet in a new ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... emotion." Thoreau, however, is no cynic, either in character or thought, though in a side glance at himself, he may have held out to be one; a "cynic in independence," possibly because of his rule laid down that "self-culture admits ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... and home were as dear to us as they were to Him, we should be at once relieved of more than half the difficulties and the diseased and painful affections of our lives. Simple obedience to rectitude, instead of self-interest; simple self-culture and self-improvement, instead of constant cultivation of the good opinion of others; single-hearted aims and purposes, instead of improper objects, sought and approached by devious and crooked ways, would free our meditations of many disturbing and ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... undoubtedly a clever, cultured young woman; the great work of her life had been self-culture. To know and understand, she had spared neither herself nor any one else. To know, and to use her acquired knowledge intellectually as teacher and, perhaps, too, as writer, had been the great aim of her life. Everything that furthered this aim won her instant attention. ...
— Ships That Pass In The Night • Beatrice Harraden
... lacking the power of self-control even among strangers. These traits explain, though they do not excuse, his bad temper to the unclean and disagreeable patients of the hospital, and they mitigate the fact that his industry was paralyzed by material prosperity, and his self-culture interfered with by conceit. His early and sweeping success injured him as many a greater man ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... by explaining the rationality of self-sacrifice, explained away the whole matter and practically identified it with self-culture? There is plausibility in this view—and it has often been maintained—but not complete truth. For evidently the emotions excited by culture and sacrifice are directly antagonistic. Toward a man pursuing the aim of culture we experience ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... road; I never raised my finger in the matter. I might have helped to make life a happier, sweeter thing to the nearly one thousand souls in this building; but I went my selfish way, content with my own luxurious home and the ambition for self-culture and the pride of self-accomplishments. Yet there is not a man here to-day who isn't happier than ...
— Robert Hardy's Seven Days - A Dream and Its Consequences • Charles Monroe Sheldon
... work and constant effort at self-culture followed. He was now fifteen. His ambition was growing. He must seek a wider field. Another year passed, and then came the longed-for opening. Joyfully the youth set out for his brother's store, in Newburyport, Massachusetts. Here he felt he would have a ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... so greatly that neither man nor woman could come between them. They were in no sense refined, nor to be admitted to the outer- door mats of decent folk, because they happened to be private soldiers in Her Majesty's Army; and private soldiers of our service have small time for self-culture. Their duty is to keep themselves and their accoutrements specklessly clean, to refrain from getting drunk more often than is necessary, to obey their superiors, and to pray for a war. All these things my friends accomplished; ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... test its truth in nature by examining character, correcting the errors of phrenology, demonstrating the science by his own experiments, and applying its principles in the treatment of disease, in experimental investigation, in education, self-culture, and elocution. This may satisfy the urgent present demand, until time shall permit a satisfactory work, containing the illustrations and proofs, the important modern discoveries in cerebral anatomy and vivisecting experiments, as well as the vast and interesting ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, February 1887 - Volume 1, Number 1 • Various
... workshops, at the loom and the plough, in counting- houses and manufactories, and in the busy haunts of men. This is that finishing instruction as members of society, which Schiller designated "the education of the human race," consisting in action, conduct, self-culture, self-control,—all that tends to discipline a man truly, and fit him for the proper performance of the duties and business of life,—a kind of education not to be learnt from books, or acquired by any amount of mere literary training. With his usual weight of words Bacon observes, ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... strength of mind, gifted with the will to do and dare, the beings of action and genius, act directly, and are like athletes who lift a tree by the simple exertion of the muscles. He who achieves his aim by self-culture, training, or suggestion, is like one who raises the weight by means of a lever, and if he practice it often enough he may in the end become ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... educated in relation to her needs as her brothers, and that in so training her we shall not forget that my ideal young person is to marry or not, and, at all events, is to have a good deal of her life in her home with others, and should have some resources for minor or self-culture and occupation besides the larger ones which come of ...
— Doctor and Patient • S. Weir Mitchell
... get my meaning. I may fail," said Clay, proudly; "I may never even try to succeed, in your sense of the word. I decline all mean competitions and all low views of success. The noblest ideal of life—at least, the noblest to me—is self-culture in the high meaning of the word; the harmonious development of one's whole nature. Armstrong has drawn a picture of his future in the likeness of old Tulkinghorn. I suppose we are all accustomed to put our anticipations ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... as an axiom that the ultimate verdict in matters of taste is 'what the man of enlightened intelligence would decide.' The critic becomes a man of enlightened intelligence, a [Greek: phronimos], by following the line of Goethe's precepts. In working out self-culture, he will derive assistance by the way from the commanding philosophical conception of our century. All things with which we are acquainted are in evolutionary process. Everything belonging to human nature is in a state of organic transition—passing ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... this, our messenger, is to be accomplished by the faithful preaching of such things as the Master has left on record for the learning of His followers, and by calling them to make proof of truth in the exercise of Christian activity, self-denial, sacrifice and self-culture. We believe, notwithstanding all that may be said to the contrary, that the Church and her children long to hear this message and that they will respond to it. Once more we admit that to the preacher, it may not be the easiest kind of preaching ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... the poor have not time for self-culture? This is one of the greatest mistakes of life. It is not time that we want; it is inclination. Generally, those who have most time profit by it least. An earnest purpose will either find time or make time. Nor is it necessary ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... man should determine to devote himself to the service of humanity—including intellectual and moral self-culture under that name; that this should be, in the proper sense of the word, his religion—is not only an intelligible, but, I think, a laudable resolution. And I am greatly disposed to believe that it is the only religion which will prove itself ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... Author of a "Precis of English History," a "Continuation of Grecian History," etc., and for many years Editor of Self-Culture Magazine.—The Publishers. ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... considered, could I, under any circumstances, have more opportunities for self-culture and for doing good than I have ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... charge that I should cultivate my judgment in preference to my imagination, I can only answer, "I am ready and willing to do so;" but it is nevertheless not altogether easy for me to do it. My life in London leaves me neither time nor opportunity for any self-culture, and it seems to me as if my best faculties were lying fallow, while a comparatively unimportant talent, and my physical powers, were being taxed to the uttermost. The profession I have embraced is supposed to stimulate ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... it. The faculties of the mind are like the muscles of the body. They shrink to nothing if not exercised; they can be exercised symmetrically; or some can be exercised at the expense of the rest. What we want is a school culture, and a self-culture, which shall bring out all our best powers, not one only of them or some few of them. At present our system is all for knowledge. We seek for understanding of facts, but we do not seek for a systematic view of life, for clear principles of art, or ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... inheritance of acres may be bequeathed, an inheritance of knowledge and wisdom cannot. The wealthy man may pay others for doing his work for him, but it is impossible to get his thinking done for him by another, or to purchase any kind of self-culture.—Samuel Smiles. ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... Goethe's Youth, Self-Culture, Titanism, Maerchen, Elective Affinities, Women, Faust, Portrayal of Child-Life, Schiller, Relations to ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... and more helpful than that of any other system of psychology. While it places the intellectual, moral and spiritual faculties at the top as supreme, it is just as vitally interested in the care of the body, education, discipline, self-culture, choice of occupation, matrimonial adaptation, heredity and all the practical affairs of life. How could a person be more healthy, happy and successful than by normally and harmoniously developing all his faculties as phrenology ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... who live in these times to realise the fervour with which the few books then brought within the reach of the people were received by those who were hungry for self-culture. The Queen was an accomplished scholar, and did her best to encourage the spread of literature in the country. But though the tide had set in with an ever-increasing flow, the flood had not as yet reached the women in Mary Forrester's position. Thus, when she married ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall
... feelings, and his temper, as well as the society to which he has been accustomed. There is a conventional manner, which is of comparatively little importance; but the natural manner, the outcome of natural gifts, improved by careful self-culture, ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... thinker, a theologian, and a statesman, because he was always a scholar. One duty he never neglected—the duty of self-culture through reading. Certain companions were ever with him—his favorite authors. Imprisoned in Rome, the burden of his letters to his young friend in Ephesus was books and the duty of reading. Himself a Hebrew, by much study he became a cosmopolitan and a citizen of the wide-lying ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... conversation took place. Jasmin was asked how it was that he first began to write poetry; for every one likes to know the beginnings of self-culture. He thereupon entered into a brief history of his life; how he had been born poor; how his grandfather had died at the hospital; and how he had been brought up by charity. He described his limited education and his admission to the barber's ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... should refuse to turn our eyes away from the vision of that other Ireland, free to control her own destiny in all that properly concerns herself, free to devote the native genius of her people to the purposes of her own self-culture—the vision of that other Ireland which Mr. Gladstone had reserved as the culminating achievement of his long and glorious career? Is it wonderful that we should refuse to turn our eyes away from that? No; I say that the desire and the aim of making a national settlement with Ireland ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... striking figure in the intellectual life of America. His discourses were above all things inspiring. Through them many were induced to strive for a higher self-culture. His influence can be discerned in all the literary movements of the time. He was the central figure of the so-called transcendental school which was so prominent fifty years ago, although he always rather held aloof from any enthusiastic ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... track, elevating the human being, in the most imperfect states of society, by continual efforts at self-culture, takes as good care of women as of men. His mother, the bold, gay Frau Aja, with such playful freedom of nature; the wise and gentle maiden, known in his youth, over whose sickly solitude "the Holy Ghost brooded as a dove;" his ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... reaction from so much ideal effort, and a plunge into cynicism and malice, scoundrelism and the flesh-pots. In their early life they resembled the Abolitionists in their devotion to an idea; but with the Transcendentalists self-culture and the aesthetic and sentimental education took the place of more public aims. They seem also to have been persons of greater social ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... as this that most of the more highly intelligent men and women whose histories I have already briefly recorded have at last slowly and instinctively reached a condition of relative health and peace, both physical and moral. The method of self-restraint and self-culture, without self-repression, seems to be the most rational method of dealing with sexual inversion when that condition is really organic and deeply rooted. It is better that a man should be enabled to make the best of his own strong natural instincts, with ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... the worldly tone of his tales grew out of the calculations of self-culture. It was the infirmity of an admirable scholar, who loved the world out of gratitude; who knew where libraries, galleries, architecture, laboratories, savants, and leisure, were to be had, and who did not quite trust the ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... but I still have the more time for reading and reflection. At every change in my outward situation I find myself forming new purposes and plans for the future.... I will trust that, by the grace of God, the ensuing winter shall be a period of more vigorous effort and more persevering self-culture than any previous season of my life. Above all, let me remember that intellectual culture is worthless when dissociated from moral progress; that true spiritual growth embraces both; and the latter as the basis and mould of the former. Let me remember, too, that in the ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... I am given to understand, enjoyed the personal friendship of the late Mr. Constant, and has cooperated with him in various schemes for the organisation of skilled and unskilled classes of labour, as well as for the diffusion of better ideals—ideals of self-culture and self-restraint—among the working men of Bow, who have been fortunate, so far as I can perceive, in the possession (if in one case unhappily only temporary possession) of two such men of undoubted ability and honesty to direct their ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... of self-culture, to kill you, I should be taking a long step towards rising in your ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... turned his attention to the education of himself and his children; schools were commenced, churches organized, and a new era of self-culture and general improvement began. ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... practical ability and presence of mind) capable of a depth of contemplative abstraction, equalling that of a Soofi who has passed the fourth step of initiation. It enables us in some sort to see how, from being the slave of his imaginative faculty, he rose by self-culture and force of will to that mastery of it which is art. We comprehend the Commedia better when we know that Dante could be an active, clear-headed politician and a mystic at the same time. Various dates have been assigned to the composition of the Vita Nuova. The earliest limit is fixed by ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... say that the period of Goethe's sojourn in Strassburg was the most memorable epoch of his life. During the eighteen months he spent there he received an intellectual stimulus from which we may date his dedication to the unique career before him, in which self-culture, the passion for knowledge, and the impulse to produce were all commensurate ends. Moreover, as has already been said, it was in Strassburg that his genius found its first adequate expression. And, what is worth noting in the case of one who was to range over so many fields, it was in lyric poetry ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... teacher. The manners of society at large are but the reflex of the manners of our collective homes, neither better nor worse. Yet, with all the disadvantages of ungenial homes, men may practice self-culture of manner as of intellect, and learn by good examples to cultivate a graceful and agreeable behavior towards others. Most men are like so many gems in the rough, which need polishing by contact with other and better natures, to bring out their full beauty and lustre. Some ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... promising some great reform; easy to inflame self-interest by picturing millennial conditions, especially when the pocket is touched. But quite different is it to arouse and sustain interest in a large popular organization whose object is education, whose watchword is self-culture. Of course, it would be but a half-truth to assert that the order places all its emphasis on the sober problems of education. Agitation has had its place; the hope of better things for the farmer, to be achieved through legislation and business co-operation, has been an inspiration ...
— Chapters in Rural Progress • Kenyon L. Butterfield
... fathers was their emphasis of the principle of self-care and self-culture. Finding that he who first made the most of himself was best fitted to make something of others, the teachers of yesterday unceasingly plied men with motives of personal responsibility. Influenced by the former generation, our age has organized ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... teaching of Chutsz as explained, modified, and carried into practice in Japan. The moral philosophy of the Chutsz school in Japan compared with that of the other two schools was moderate in tone, free from eccentricities, and practical in a rare degree. In the enormous importance it attached to self-culture and what is known in modern terminology as self-realization, the teaching of the Chutsz school of Japanese moralists differed in no material respects from the doctrines of the New Kantians ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... afforded him no remedy, and Hindu penances and mortifications proved unavailing after he had practised them for years. At last, by severe contemplation, he discovered the long coveted truth; a holy and calm life, and benevolence and love toward all living creatures seemed to him the essence of religion. Self-culture and universal love—this was his discovery—this ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... a woman, Alfieri, accepted as an intimate by the husband, who doubtless thought one hare-brained poet more easy to manage than two or three fashionable gallants—with such a woman as this, Alfieri might talk over plans of self-culture and work, his plays, his essays on liberty and literature, and all the things by which he intended to redeem Italy and make himself immortal, without any fear of his listener ever growing weary; from her he could receive ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... masculine methods of living and working as well as of studying. The notion is practically found everywhere, that boys and girls are one, and that the boys make the one. Girls, young ladies, to use the polite phrase, who are about leaving or have left school for society, dissipation, or self-culture, rarely permit any of Nature's periodical demands to interfere with their morning calls, or evening promenades, or midnight dancing, or sober study. Even the home draws the sacred mantle of modesty so closely over the reproductive ...
— Sex in Education - or, A Fair Chance for Girls • Edward H. Clarke |
