"Self-sufficient" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... an excellent cook, being a child of Italy, that land of gluttons. And finally, you have myself, who as the father of the company very properly play as Pantaloon the roles of father. Sometimes, it is true, I am a deluded husband, and sometimes an ignorant, self-sufficient doctor. But it is rarely that I find it necessary to call myself other than Pantaloon. For the rest, I am the only one who has a name—a real name. It ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... only did I lead you by the hand, But I showed the difference between them by appealing to instances. Not (only) did I charge you face to face, But I held you by the ear [4]. And still perhaps you do not know, Although you have held a son in your arms. If people be not self-sufficient, Who comes to a late maturity ...
— The Shih King • James Legge
... have that fine bareness used as illustration; it was too good a thing in itself. Rodney the symbolist saw the vision of life in it, Peter the joy of self-sufficient beauty. ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... and do thou likewise." Through the self-sufficient Jewish theologian the command is addressed to us. The direct form of the injunction intimates, what might be gathered from the nature of the case, that this parable is more strictly an example than a symbol. It does not convey spiritual ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... Slav struggles and convulsions for Christ. It is a very large record, a very large Bible indeed, a wonderful drama, quite new, fresh, original, although in old forms and words, and signs. Still Slav Orthodoxy is not self-sufficient. She would become by human inertia self-sufficient, unless Providence sent her punishment from time to time. Tolstoi was for Orthodoxy a punishment. He was like a whirlwind which pulls down many things but at the same time purifies the unhealthy air. He was not at all ...
— The Religious Spirit of the Slavs (1916) - Sermons On Subjects Suggested By The War, Third Series • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... decaying times: but it was a question of ethics, not of philosophy, in the sense which the old Greek sages put on that latter word. Their object was, not to get at the laws of all things, but to fortify themselves against all things, each according to his scheme, and so to be self-sufficient and alone. Even in the Stoics, who boldly and righteously asserted an immutable morality, this was the leading conception. As has been ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... disability and need of physical protection, by feeding and inflaming the already large vanity of man, have caused him to attach a concept of attractiveness to feminine weakness, so that he has come to esteem his woman, not in proportion as she is self-sufficient as a social animal but in proportion as she is dependent. In this vicious circle of influences women have been caught, and as a result their chief physical character today is their fragility. A woman cannot lift as much as ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... your eager worship of the refinements of the senses, your ardent aspirations for a better state of things, your courageous contempt of many degrading and servile customs, to which woman is condemned; yes, now I understand the noble pride with which you contemplate the mob of vain, self-sufficient, ridiculous men, who look upon woman as a creature destined for their service, according to the laws made after their own not very handsome image. In the eyes of these hedge-tyrants, woman, a kind of inferior being to whom a council of cardinals deigned to grant ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... when the two girls went up-stairs, and sat watching her friend's quick movements as she completed some last arrangements for the journey. It was strangely unlike Phebe not to offer to help her, but somehow Gerald looked so strong and able and self-sufficient, and she herself felt so tired and ...
— Only an Incident • Grace Denio Litchfield
... in 1881, Mr. a Beckett was enabled to revive the humours of his father's "Mr. Briefless," by the filial creation of the happily-named "A. BRIEFLESS, Junior." The "Papers from Pump Handle Court" from this self-sufficient, inflated, and utterly hopeless Junior, have been a feature in Punch for years past, and by them the author has—so says an expert—"charmingly illuminated the legal profession by his queer fancy." One of the best papers ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... taken you in on this thing sooner," he said on one occasion, and remembered those first weeks when he had felt self-sufficient, and had made false moves at the State House, and had also let himself be inveigled into buying "a few margins." That was the bitterest drop in his cup. Wheat had dropped steadily from the very day he had begun buying. A steady decline in prices was unthinkable, and it was not till their land ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... O'Shaunnessy entered at the rear door and took his seat in one of the chairs behind the bench; a gentleman in black broadcloth, with sandy hair, inclined to curl, a round; reddish and rather jovial face, sharp rather than intellectual, and with a self-sufficient air. His career had nothing remarkable in it. He was descended from a long line of Irish Kings, and he was the first one of them who had ever come into his kingdom—the kingdom of such being the city of New York. He had, in ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 6. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... anybody, unless it were to a very ignorant child indeed. There were no safe highroads, nor quiet lanes, in those days, where a maiden might wander without fear of molestation. Old ballads are full of accounts of the perils incurred by rash and self-sufficient girls who ventured alone out of doors in their innocent ignorance or imprudent bravado. The roadless wastes gave harbour to abundance of fierce small animals and deadly vipers, and to men worse than ...
— Earl Hubert's Daughter - The Polishing of the Pearl - A Tale of the 13th Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... be too well-bred to tell you so. And now I remember a story about Selden that always amused me much. When he was appointed among the lay members to sit in the Assembly of Divines at Westminster, one of the ministers, with all the outward show of self-sufficient ignorance, declared that the sea could not be at any very great distance from Jerusalem; that as fish was frequently carried from the first to the last place, the interval did not probably exceed thirty miles! and having concocted this opinion, ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... resembled you. Personally, I like it better now." Jasper Penny surveyed with approbation Stephen's full, handsome presence. Jannan was a successful, a big, man. Well, so was he too. But he thought with keen longing of the time when he was twenty-one, and free, free to roam self-sufficient. He thought of that Howat Penny of which they had spoken, black as he was black in the family tradition; he had seen Hesselius's portrait of the other; and, but for the tied hair and continental buff, it might have been a replica of himself. It was curious—that dark strain of Welsh blood, cropping ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... lion and his lioness, whose very love was fierce and perilous. No power from without could separate these two nor make them quail. Alone and united Dundee and his wife could stand undismayed and self-sufficient, with all Scotland against them. Nothing could ever break their bond except dishonor. But if one should charge the other with that foulest crime, then the end had come, beside which death would be welcome. Where life is a comedy one writes with gayety not untouched by contempt; where life is a ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... on the fatal thirtieth of August, Pope, self-deluded and self-sufficient as before, dismayed his best officers by ordering his sixty-five thousand men to be "immediately thrown forward in pursuit of the enemy," whose own fifty thousand were now far readier than on the ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... the Bishop; so neither of them spoke at all. Mrs. Montagu cared not a fig, as long as she spoke herself, and so she harangued away. Meanwhile Mr. Melmoth, the Pliny Melmoth, as he is called, was of the party, and seemed to think nobody half so great as himself. He seems intolerably self-sufficient—appears to look upon himself as the first man in Bath, and has a proud conceit in look and manner, mighty forbidding.' Mme. D'Arblay's ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... gift to him. No one else understood—for that matter, no one else had had to listen. He knew that Christine was too tired, and poor overburdened Cosgrave would only have gazed helplessly at him, wondering why this strong, self-sufficient friend should pour out such unintelligible stuff over his own aching head. So he had learnt to be silent. Even now it was difficult to begin. He stammered and was shy and distrustful and eager, sometimes crudely self-confident, like a child who ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... comprehensive and satisfying view of the Deity and of man's relation to Him. He there finds that what he has to believe concerning God is, that He is Jehovah—the Being infinitely and eternally perfect, self-existent, and self-sufficient; the only living and true God, there being none beside Him. The heathen believed in and worshipped many gods. The untutored savage peopled the groves with them, and the pagan philosopher built innumerable temples in their honour. The Pantheons of Greece and Rome were crowded with the statues of favourite ...
— Exposition of the Apostles Creed • James Dodds
... the Arestino palace, the Marquis of Orsini suddenly lost that bold, insolent, self-sufficient air with which he had endeavored to deceive the venerable count, whose wife ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... than ours, (7) you would find that Nature's work is as complete in them as in ourselves. But not daring to take the pleasure they desire, they have exchanged that vice for a greater, which they deem more honourable, I mean a self-sufficient cruelty, whereby they look ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. III. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... realize completely the drama which you conceive, and of which you give us such magnificent examples in "Tannhauser" and "Lohengrin," it is absolutely necessary to make a breach in the old routine of criticism, the long ears and short sight of "Philistia," as well as the stupid arrogance of that self-sufficient fraction of the public which believes itself the destined judge of works of art by ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... European city; nor did it ever attain the rank in Gallic times, that the events which have been woven around it would seem to augur. To-day it is a truly characteristic, large, provincial town of little or no importance to the outside world. Self-sufficient as to its own importance, and the events around which its local life circles, it gives little indication of ever becoming more of a metropolis than it now is; indeed the census figures would indicate that the department, of which it is the capital, has remained stationary as to the numbers of ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... soul like Dr. Jekyll's and an utterly singleminded Brand, Parsifal, or Don Quixote. If the selves are too unrelated, we distrust the man; if they are too inflexibly on one track we find him arid, stubborn, or eccentric. In the repertory of characters, meager for the isolated and the self-sufficient, highly varied for the adaptable, there is a whole range of selves, from that one at the top which we should wish God to see, to those at the bottom that we ourselves do not dare to see. There may be octaves for the family,—father, ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... two nationalities with their unlike national habits and traditions are planted in the new world. Assume the one as living in a warm temperate clime, and the other under equatorial conditions. Assume that the first nationality is self-sufficient to establish a colony, and opposed to intermarriage with other races; and then imagine the second case, where there exist a few colonists in womanless settlements with consequent marriages between the native ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... used to filtrate the liquids, more or less loaded with fibrous matter. The greatest order and neatness prevailed in this hut, which was transformed into a chemical laboratory. The old Indian was known throughout the mission by the name of the poison-master (amo del curare). He had that self-sufficient air and tone of pedantry of which the pharmacopolists of Europe were formerly accused. "I know," said he, "that the whites have the secret of making soap, and manufacturing that black powder which has the defect of making a noise when used in killing animals. The curare, which we prepare ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... developments, shall have passed by, every mouth will be stopped, and the whole world and Satan will know their own failure and sin before God. They will stand self-condemned; and nothing could accomplish this but the testing, by actual trial, of all the self-sufficient claims of Satan and man. The sin of man has brought him under sentence too; and grace alone withholds his immediate execution (Jno. 3:18; Rom. 5:18, 19). Though the day of execution is, in the purpose of God delayed; it is, nevertheless, ...
— Satan • Lewis Sperry Chafer
... Mrs. Macgregor suffered with calm surprise, it became difficult to go on with the programme of tearful consolation which had been prepared. There seemed hardly a place for sympathy, much less for tearful consolation, in this well-ordered home, and with these self-sufficient folk. ...
— The Prospector - A Tale of the Crow's Nest Pass • Ralph Connor
... things I was allowed to show you did not make you humble. You took them as a compliment to your powers. And so when you had your chance to go back to help Cynthia, you thought out no plan, you asked no advice. You went down in a very self-sufficient mood, expecting that everything would ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... feel murderous. I like her, a sensible, sonsy woman, and I like him too, although his solemn, priggish airs make me tired, but I cannot bear the crowd they get round them: all the cranks and oddities and smug, self-sufficient, interfering people seem to get into their house, and they're all reforming something or uplifting something else or generally bleating against this country. Things done in England are always inferior to things done elsewhere. English cooking is inferior to French ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... finally; they have set themselves to legislate and construct on that assumption, and, experiencing the perplexing obduracy and evasions of reality, they have taken to dogma, persecution, training, pruning, secretive education; and all the stupidities of self-sufficient energy. In the passion of their good intentions they have not hesitated to conceal facts, suppress thought, crush disturbing initiatives and apparently detrimental desires. And so it is blunderingly and wastefully, destroying with the making, that any extension ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... the inbred spirit of mankind. Everywhere this proud, self-assertive, self-sufficient, self-confident, self-aggressive spirit is found, in varying degree. It is coupled sometimes with laughable ignorance; sometimes with real learning and wisdom and culture. It is emphasized sometimes the more by school training, and other such advantages. But through all these ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... proved that much. You've got to drum that into her; never let her forget it. Maybe I'll be back—I hope so. But first, I have to find others. I need them, and they might need me. We're still not completely self-sufficient. ...
— Stopover • William Gerken
... say with the greatest of the popes, "I have loved justice, and hated iniquity: therefore I die in exile"; therefore, in other words, I am cast aside and left behind by readers who are too lazy, too soft and slow of spirit, too sleepily sensual and self-sufficient, to endure the fiery and purgatorial atmosphere of my work. But there are breaths from heaven as surely as there are blasts from hell in the tumultuous and electric air of it. The cynicism and egotism which the editor already mentioned has the confidence to ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... was a knock on the door of his room and Blair entered. Blair, as always, bright of eye, smiling of lip, erect, proud, self-sufficient, inscrutable and sure. Lane's black demon stole away. Lane saw that Blair was whiter, thinner, frailer, a little farther on that road from which ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... the course of the next half or three-quarters of an hour she demonstrated herself conclusively a person of amazing resource, developing with admirable ingenuity a campaign planned on the spur of a chance observation. The gentle mannered and self-sufficient crook was taken captive before he realized it, however willing he may have been. Enmeshed in a hundred uncomprehended subtleties, he basked, purring, the while she insinuated herself beneath his guard and stripped him of his entire armament of cunning, vigilance, invention, suspicion, ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... 249) vicious abstractionism. The abstract world of mathematics and pure logic is so native to Mr. Russell that he thinks that we describers of the functions of concrete fact must also mean fixed mathematical terms and functions. A mathematical term, as a, b, c, x, y, sin., log., is self-sufficient, and terms of this sort, once equated, can be substituted for one another in endless series without error. Mr. Russell, and also Mr. Hawtrey, of whom I shall speak presently, seem to think that in our mouth also such terms as 'meaning,' 'truth,' ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... faded, in a cap and a short gown and red quilted petticoat, giving some instruction, touching an intricate weave, to a negro woman, neatly arrayed in homespun, with a gayly turbaned head, evidently an expert herself, from the bland and smiling manner and many self-sufficient and capable nods with which she perceived and appropriated the ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... and be off with you!" said Susan, over the hour-old baby, to Billy, who had come flying home in mid-morning. "Now I feel like David Copperfield's landlady, 'at last I have summat I can love!' Oh, the mistakes that you WON'T make, Jo!" she apostrophized the baby. "The smart, capable, self-sufficient way ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... find how poor and lonely I am. Alford cannot stay with me—I could not expect it—neither can Grace; and so I must go on alone to the end. I'm punished, punished that years ago I did not make some one love me; but I was self-sufficient then." ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... great deal to me then, and is so still. Though his words do not abide in memory, his presence does: serene, courtly, of darting hazel eye, a self-sufficient grace, and an appreciation of the world of stern realities, sometimes pathetic, never tragic. He is the natural man of the world; he is what he ought to be, and his darts never fail of their aim. There is a perfume and raciness, too, which makes life a banquet, where the wit sparkles ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... that was a favor difficult for Belllounds to ask. The old rancher, dominant and forceful and self-sufficient all his days, had begun to feel an encroachment of opposition beyond his control. If he but realized it, the favor he asked of ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... to his name, with nothing in the shape of resources save a self-sufficient nerve and an infinite eastern contempt for these struggling westerners, he ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... had furnished us With more occasions to be useful to him. God knows how readily we should have seized them. But then he would have nothing—wanted nothing - Was in himself wrapped up, and self-sufficient, As ...
— Nathan the Wise • Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
... deal of natural wit and penetration. On that day Woodward exerted himself to the utmost, with a hope of making a favorable impression upon her. He calculated a good deal upon her isolated position and necessary ignorance of life and the world, and in doing so, he calculated, as thousands of self-sufficient libertines, in their estimate of women, have done both before and since. He did not know that there is an intuitive spirit in the female heart which often enables it to discover the true character of the opposite sex; and to discriminate between ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... working-men naturally have nothing to do with these institutes, and betake themselves to the proletarian reading-rooms and to the discussion of matters which directly concern their own interests, whereupon the self-sufficient bourgeoisie says its Dixi et Salvavi, and turns with contempt from a class which "prefers the angry ranting of ill- meaning demagogues to the advantages of solid education." That, however, the working-men appreciate solid education when they can get it unmixed with ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... summer woods, that sinks into the wintry sea, yet are they brothers. The severe loneliness that has sun and moon in its bosom invites us as the vigorous health of the soul. The beautiful isolation of the rose in its own fragrance is self-sufficient. ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... some really heroic idea of setting to work to show them what he could do. "The beggar! He squats down on the inheritance, shoves me out, and then takes on a lot of 'side' as to his superiority over me! He always was a self-sufficient ass. I'd like to punch ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... service so narrow that if the emigration of the nobles had not raised the value of even the most rascally lieutenant to the famine price of a general he would have been swept contemptuously from the army: these trials have ground the conceit out of him, and forced him to be self-sufficient and to understand that to such men as he is the world will give nothing that he cannot take from it by force. In this the world is not free from cowardice and folly; for Napoleon, as a merciless cannonader of political ...
— The Man of Destiny • George Bernard Shaw
... a faithless, unworthy servant, who becomes proud and self-sufficient with property which belongs to me, and which he has stolen. And, therefore, am I about to change this impudent minister's fete into a sorrow and mourning, of which the nymph of Vaux, as the poets say, shall not soon lose ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... give me your attention, I will tell you what I am: I'm a genuine philanthropist—all other kinds are sham. Each little fault of temper and each social defect In my erring fellow creatures, I endeavor to correct. To all their little weaknesses I open people's eyes And little plans to snub the self-sufficient I devise; I love my fellow creatures—I do all the good I can— Yet everybody say I'm such a disagreeable man! ...
— Bab Ballads and Savoy Songs • W. S. Gilbert
... danger; for as he was the foremost to promise, so he was the slackest to perform. And, to speak the truth, though he was a civil-spoken fellow, his master was more afraid of him, with all his professions, than he was of the rest, who protested less. He knew that Parley was vain, credulous, and self-sufficient; and he always apprehended more danger from Parley's impertinence, curiosity, and love of novelty, than even from the stronger vices of some of the other servants. The rest, indeed, seldom ...
— Stories for the Young - Or, Cheap Repository Tracts: Entertaining, Moral, and Religious. Vol. VI. • Hannah More
... hard case to make slaves of those whom God and Nature made free," should be ungratefully pelted by the scoundrels his crazy philanthropy had let loose on society; but to others of a more judicial cast it will be a matter of regret that reckless self-sufficient enthusiasm is not oftener requited in some such way for all the mischief ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... tenderly in ancient sweaters when they were disabled, and watching every move of the game with a practised eye and an immobile countenance. But though to the eyes of the small fry on the grass at his feet he was as self-sufficient as ever, somehow he kept having strange qualms, and his mind kept reverting to the swart fat face of Pat at the Junction, as it ducked behind the cypress and talked into the crude telephone on the mountain. Somehow he couldn't forget the ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... on his fingers: 'the first is that you took the woman that I wanted. To a man of my temperament that is an unpardonable crime. I have never wanted women either as friends or as amusement. I am one of the few people in the world who are self-sufficient. It happened that I wanted your wife and she rejected me ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace
... before, instead of being preposterously and prejudicially placed behind, it had been evidently better; forasmuch as the human shin-bone could not then have been so easily broken,—Dr. Moreton's Beauty of the Human Structure, page 62.—What a pity it is that these two learned and self-sufficient authors, were not consulted in the formation of their own persons: doubtless they could have suggested many improvements, and would have felt all the advantages with due effect—probably they might have liked their heads to screw on ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 363, Saturday, March 28, 1829 • Various
... noted for their skill in living handsomely upon their own brains, and the personals of other people. To say truth, Paul, who at that time was an honest lad, was less charmed than he had anticipated by the conversation of these chevaliers of industry. He was more pleased with the clever though self-sufficient remarks of a gentleman with a remarkably fine head of hair, and whom we would more impressively than the rest introduce to our reader under the appellation of Mr. Edward Pepper, generally termed Long Ned. As this worthy was destined afterwards ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... decentralize decisionmaking. In an effort to expand international ties, Tirane has reestablished diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union and the US. The Albanians have also passed legislation allowing foreign investment. Albania possesses considerable mineral resources and, until 1990, was largely self-sufficient in food; several years of drought have hindered agricultural development. Numerical estimates of Albanian economic activity are subject to an especially wide margin of error because the government until recently did not release ...
— The 1991 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... necessary sequence of this preparation for war will be the desire of each nation to be self-sufficient—to produce within itself those materials indispensable for the waging of war. Capital will be wasted because each nation will store up quantities of these materials necessary to war which it is compelled to import ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... so-called Negro problem in America, he felt, is to be found along these lines: As his people have more and more opportunity for training and become better and better trained they become more and more self-sufficient. They are developing their own carpenters, masons, blacksmiths, farmers, merchants, and bankers as well as lawyers, teachers, preachers, and physicians. These trained people naturally, for the most part, serve their own race, and ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... propitiate Mrs. Bigglethorpe. The tea party, spite of Miss Du Plessis' marvellous story of Tillycot, was very slow. The newly engaged couple were full of each other. Mrs. Du Plessis, her daughter and the colonel had Wilkinson on the brain, Mrs. Carmichael and the minister were self-sufficient, and Mr. Terry was discoorsin' to his daughter, Honoria. The only free person for Miss Carmichael was the Squire, and happily she sat ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... feel that the woman whom they have married is dependent upon them for all she has in a material way, forgetting often that their mental and spiritual contacts count also in any relationship. Then again there are men who, if their wives are self-sufficient and capable, will do exactly what so many women are accused of doing—become parasites and willingly allow themselves to be taken care of in every way, even ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... is "the most self-sufficient of all goods," as the Philosopher declares (Ethic. i, 7). But that which needs something else is not self-sufficient. Since then the essence of happiness consists in seeing God, as stated above (Q. 3, A. 8); it seems that delight is not ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... take herself back. So whether she would condescend to do private teaching, particularly here, in Beldover, I don't know. But it would be just the thing. Winifred has got a special nature. And if you can put into her way the means of being self-sufficient, that is the best thing possible. She'll never get on with the ordinary life. You find it difficult enough yourself, and she is several skins thinner than you are. It is awful to think what her life ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... eyes, Their brain sweet incense with fine breath accloys, That on God's sweating altar burning lies; Their hungry ears feed on the heavenly noise That angels sing, to tell their untold joys; Their understanding naked truth, their wills The all, and self-sufficient goodness fills, That nothing here is wanting, but the ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... activity, high unemployment, and a heavy dependence on foreign grants and technical assistance. Agriculture, including fishing, hunting, and forestry, contributes 40% to GDP, employs 80% of the labor force, and provides most of the exports. The country is not self-sufficient in food production; rice, the main staple, accounts for the bulk of imports. The government - which is hampered by internal political disputes - is struggling to upgrade education and technical training, to privatize commercial and industrial enterprises, to improve health services, to diversify ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... Thoughtless, self-sufficient men say, they can control this desire, can govern their appetite, can enjoy the exhilaration of strong drink, and yet be temperate. Let them look at the poor inebriate wallowing in his pollution. He once stood just where they stand; ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... twilight dress! Ever since Mary had made the acquaintance of her brother, she seemed to have changed toward her. Perhaps she was jealous; perhaps she believed Mary was confirming him in his bad ways. Just where they were all three of one mind—just there her rudimentary therefore self-sufficient religion shut them out from ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... women might take example from these little creatures," said Temperley, who, in common with many self-sufficient persons, was fond of recommending humility to others. "They never attempt to shirk their lowly tasks on the plea of higher vocations. Not one turns from the path marked out by our great Mother, who also teaches her human children the same lesson of patient ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... whole; consequently, only by means of their connection in a system. Pure understanding distinguishes itself not merely from everything empirical, but also completely from all sensibility. It is a unity self-subsistent, self-sufficient, and not to be enlarged by any additions from without. Hence the sum of its cognition constitutes a system to be determined by and comprised under an idea; and the completeness and articulation of this system can at the same time serve as a test of the correctness and genuineness of all the ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... curious and authentic intelligence of Murtadi (p. 284-289) has not been discovered either by Mr. Ockley, or by the self-sufficient compilers of the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... hob and his long white pipe in his fingers, conscious of her there opposite him, as she worked at her embroidery, or as she talked to him, and he was safe with her now, till morning. She was curiously self-sufficient and did not say very much. Occasionally she lifted her head, her grey eyes shining with a strange light, that had nothing to do with him or with this place, and would tell him about herself. She seemed to be back again in the past, chiefly in her childhood or her girlhood, with ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... Christian; none of which names can be truly applied to Milton. And if we wish to find Love enjoying his just supremacy in poetry, we cannot do better than seek him among the lyrists of the Court of Charles II. Milton, self-sufficient and censorious, denies the name of love to these songs of the sons of Belial. Love, he says, reigns and revels ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... and cargo liners; every sort of machine. I'd like to try getting at some of that water frozen in the Saturnian System. Altogether, I see no end to the jobs. It's no good our depending on Earth for anything. Too expensive, too chancy. The Belt has to be made completely self-sufficient." ...
— Industrial Revolution • Poul William Anderson
... heterogeneous, was sufficiently well-dressed and well-mannered to impart to a beautiful lady and her squire a pleasant consciousness of being left very much to themselves in an amusing expression of a civilisation cynical and self-sufficient. ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... self-sufficient fool, Randall," I said, "as to think I don't understand. In the present position there are no subtleties ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... Ten to one I couldn't keep a capable working crew three weeks on end. On the other hand, take a bunch of loggers on a pay roll working for a man that meets them on an equal footing—why, they'll go to hell and back again for him. They're as loyal as soldiers to the flag. They're a mighty self-sufficient, independent lot, these lumberjacks, and that goes for most everybody knocking about in this country,—loggers, prospectors, miners, settlers, and all. If you're what they term 'all right,' you can ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... to the little creature seemed increased if possible after the letter from the count. Her pride, wounded to the quick by the cold, self-sufficient, insulting diplomacy conveyed to her mind by the words of her old love, she vented her rage upon the daughter. Besides, the idea of Luis being distressed at hearing of the tortures was an additional inducement to ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... for proclaiming the omnipotence of the State in polished sentences. "The unity of public power and its universality," says Portalis,[5146] "are a necessary consequence of its independence." "Public power must be self-sufficient; it is nothing if not all..." Public power cannot tolerate rivals; it cannot allow other powers to establish themselves alongside of it without its consent, perhaps to sap and weaken it. "The authority of a State might become precarious if ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... contemplation's sake. This act has all the marks of happiness. It is the highest act of man's highest power. It is the most capable of continuance. It is fraught with pleasure, purest and highest in quality. It is of all acts the most self-sufficient and independent of environment, provided the object be to the mind's eye visible. It is welcome for its own sake, not as leading to any further good. It is a life of ease and leisure: man is busy that he may come ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... absorbed in thought and tender memory. How beautiful the world and life were! She took from her bosom the tiny whistle, which had been for five long, delicious weeks her power of summoning unlimited joy to herself. What a new element had entered into her existence! How powerful and self-sufficient she felt as she recalled her part in those wonderful pictures that were growing day by day in the shanty on ...
— Janet of the Dunes • Harriet T. Comstock
... is the Division composed of all arms and self-sufficient. Several divisions may be grouped into a field army, to which are attached field army troops. These are organized into a brigade for purpose of supply and ...
— Military Instructors Manual • James P. Cole and Oliver Schoonmaker
... substance endowed with intellect and will and freedom, God is a PERSON; and a LIVING person also, for He is both object and subject of his own activity, and to be this distinguishes the living from the lifeless. He is thus absolutely SELF-SUFFICIENT: his SELF-KNOWLEDGE and SELF-LOVE are both of them infinite and adequate, and need no extraneous conditions ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... Schools stood with a cold, supercilious grin on his face, a stern, self-sufficient man, not one likely to echo the spirit of ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... a long-married couple discuss their acquaintances; for, while their intellectual intimacy was perfect, their air expressed a constant mutual deference and solicitude of approbation not to be confounded with the terrible familiarity of matrimony; and at the same time they constituted a self-sufficient circle, apart from the society around them, as man and wife cannot. Man and wife are so far merged as to feel themselves a unit over against society. They are too much identified to find in each other that sense of support and countenance which ...
— A Summer Evening's Dream - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... with his coat was led back to his corner—where, but for having no egotism in his pleasant nature, he would have answered well enough for that radiant though self-sufficient boy, Jack Horner—Bella with her own hands laid a cloth for him, and brought him his supper on a tray. 'Stop a moment,' said she, 'we must keep his little clothes clean;' and tied a napkin under his chin, in ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... really philosophizes at all even to this extent. The pressure of life renders it morally impossible. But they like to think that they do so. The whole temper of mind, begotten and matured by the rationalistic school, is self-sufficient: every man his own prophet, priest, and king; every man his own philosopher. Hence, he who poses as a teacher of the people will not be tolerated. The theorist must come forward with an affectation of modesty, as into the presence ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... things to act upon them in the life which we, His followers, have in Him; that life whose exercise and outcome means our whole walk here as well as hereafter. I would regard them, as it is apparent that He regarded them, as being (in a sacred sense) self-sufficient; not, indeed, to the self-sufficient reader, but to the reader who prays in reverent simplicity that the Holy Spirit may dispel every moral mist, every hindrance of heart and will, from between him and the meaning of the written Word; and who intends in ...
— To My Younger Brethren - Chapters on Pastoral Life and Work • Handley C. G. Moule
... a national State, exclusive, self-sufficient, self-contained. Therefore, the national State is the supreme and final ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... present occasion for the steel companies, in a brief which he filed nearly forty years ago as Solicitor General, in defense of the action of the President in withdrawing certain lands from public entry although his doing so was at the time contrary to express statute. "Ours," the brief reads, "is a self-sufficient Government within its sphere. (Ex parte Siebold, 100 U.S. 371, 395; in re Debs, 158 U.S. 564, 578.) 'Its means are adequate to its ends' (McCulloch v. Maryland, 4 Wheat. 316, 424), and it is rational to assume that its active forces will be found equal in most things to the emergencies that confront ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... below the knee, Dr. Withers says—poor Joseph! He's been an ambitious boy. So anxious to get ahead, and so self-sufficient. I feel right guilty about Joseph." She ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... colony as distracted as it was important, did not arise from the noble lord's fitness, but from his political interest; and that Earl Grey, the whig colonial minister, had performed his official duties in a way crotchety, self-sufficient, and arrogant—in the spirit of the partizan rather than ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... is much more important than the navigators of lakes and oceans may suppose. In those almost currentless waters a steersman in any craft is usually self-sufficient, but among turbulent rapids, where rocks and shoals lie in all directions, and the deep-water track is tortuous, with, it may be, abrupt turnings here and there, a bowman is absolutely essential, and sometimes, indeed, may become the more important steersman ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... two neighbours are admirably characteristic, not confined to any age or place, but always accompany the young convert to godliness, as the shadow does the substance. Christian is firm, decided, bold, and sanguine. Obstinate is profane, scornful, self-sufficient, and contemns God's Word. Pliable is yielding, and easily induced to engage in things of which he understands neither the nature ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... same ungovernable terror that restrained him from marrying, or whether he was the friend of too many women to be the lover of one, or whether he really was self-contained and self-sufficient, all this time he had remained single. His singleness had many advantages; it kept him free; it made it easy for him to get about from place to place and obtain an uninterrupted view of the world; it left an open way for his abrupt ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... at his intelligent face and hoped he would come. Selfish, conceited, and self-sufficient as I may be, there is a strand of weakness made up in my composition that forces me to find the companionship of another intellect ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... interview with his guardian on his twenty-first birthday. Harvey flinched and grew hot in thinking of it. What an ungrateful cur! What a self-sufficient young idiot! The Doctor had borne so kindly with his follies and vices, had taken so much trouble for his good, was it not the man's right and duty to speak grave words of counsel on such an occasion as this? But to counsel Mr. Harvey Rolfe was to be guilty of gross impertinence. With ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... old gentleman, musing at the change in the attitude of the young man's mind—once so self-sufficient and assertive, now so dependent and inexperienced. "Very few lives are bare and empty enough not to teach one something worth knowing. I know the events of one man's life," he added, after a few moments of thoughtful consideration; "perhaps it might lead to some good, if I were ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... Sewall's companion. They were occupying the house in England. No doubt they were very happy together. Sometimes it would sweep over me with distressing reality that nobody really needed me—Breck, or Mrs. Sewall, or self-sufficient Bob in his beloved West. Bob was fast becoming nothing but a memory to me. If I thought of him at all it was as if my mind gazed at him through the wrong end of a pair of opera glasses. He seemed miles ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty
... himself in the taxi with his feet on the opposite seat, he reflected with philosophic indulgence how wide of the mark his sister had fired. He was self-satisfied, perhaps, as he had some reason to be; self-sufficient, assuredly, as he had set out to become. After all, he could have entered the Civil Service ten years before, as his father had wished; and there would have been ten years of material comfort, an unchallengeable social position, a wife, a home, spiritual paralysis and soul-destroying ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... luxury, you do not know what delight, what rapture it is when a young man or woman receives the reward of his honest labour for the first time; you know nothing of the proud consciousness of being self-sufficient, of being able to live without the compassion, without the assistance, of ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... humanist exalts man, which is good; but then he makes him self-sufficient for the struggle which such exaltation demands, which is bad. In that partial understanding he departs from truth. And what is it that makes the futility of so much present preaching? It is the acceptance of this doctrine of man's moral adequacy and consequently ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... The Rose-alley ambuscade became almost proverbial;[22] and even Mulgrave, the real author of the satire, and upon whose shoulders the blows ought in justice to have descended, mentions the circumstance in his "Art of Poetry;" with a cold and self-sufficient complacent sneer: ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... mistook the aim of my Query about Crabbe: I asked if he were read in America for the very reason that he is not read in England. And in the October Cornhill is an Article upon him (I hope not by Leslie Stephen), so ignorant and self-sufficient that I am more wroth than ever. The old Story of 'Pope in worsted stockings'—why I could cite whole Paragraphs of as fine texture as Moliere—incapable of Epigram, the Jackanapes says of 'our excellent Crabbe'—why I could find fifty of the very best ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... Janet was aware of the change in Ditmar, and knew the cause of it. Her feelings were complicated. He, the most important man in Hampton, the self-sufficient, the powerful, the hitherto distant and unattainable head of the vast organization known as the Chippering Mill, of which she was an insignificant unit, at times became for her just a man—a man for whom she had achieved a delicious contempt. And ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the atomic theory seized upon these observations of Gay-Lussac as lending strong support to their hypothesis—all of them, that is, but the curiously self-reliant and self-sufficient author of the atomic theory himself, who declined to accept the observations of the French chemist as valid. Yet the observations of Gay-Lussac were correct, as countless chemists since then have demonstrated anew, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... ship, how the seaman was once all in all—how he sailed and took storm and calm alike with undaunted heart, and gave chase to whosoever reechoed his cry, "We are of the sea!" and fought with brains and sinews, self-reliant, self-sufficient, instead of being thrust into the background by unintelligent machinery, as Jack is to-day. So it always is—"man only is ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... the times of the great Venetian painters and martial doges to that period of faith and stone-cutting. What was done then might be beautiful, but the life was monotonous; she insisted that it was Huguenot; harsh, nasal, sombre, insolent, self-sufficient. Her eyes lightened for the flashing colours and pageantries, and the threads of desperate adventure crossing the Rii to this and that palace-door and balcony, like faint blood-streaks; the times of Venice in full flower. She reasoned against the hard eloquent ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... found any one who confessed to that weakness. In the office his rather ostentatious efficiency annoyed those who took their own work more lightly, and, if they foretold his advancement, it was not altogether sympathetically. Indeed, he appeared to be rather a hard and self-sufficient young man, with a queer temper, and manners that were uncompromisingly abrupt, who was consumed with a desire to get on in the world, which was natural, these critics thought, in a man of no means, ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... wholly within the competence of human resources, is displeasing in grave discussions: grave they are by necessity of their relations, howsoever momentarily disfigured by levity and the unseasonable grimaces of self-sufficient "philosophy." This temper of mind is already advertised from the first to the observing reader of Van Dale by the character of his engraved frontispiece. Men are there exhibited in the act of juggling, and still more odiously ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... she replied coldly. "On the few occasions I have seen her I have thought her so cool in her likings and sentiments, so self-sufficient, that I could not think her attractive to a nature so warm as Colonel Digby's. Nor do I think her mental attainments such as to render a real ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... people; but, though amongst them there are doubtless pockets of fierce prejudice, I have on the whole the impression of a wide and tolerant spirit. To that spirit one would appeal when it comes to passing judgment on the educated Briton. He may be self-sufficient, but he has grit; and at bottom grit is what Americans appreciate more than anything. If the motto of the old Oxford college, "Manners makyth man," were true, one would often be sorry for the Briton. But his manners do not make him; they mar him. His goods are all absent from the shop window; ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... what that is, the inspired Saint Paul teaches us, by placing it as the immediate antidote: Knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth. Perhaps, it is the vanity of human wisdom, unchastised by this correcting principle, which has made so many infidels. It may proceed from the arrogance of a self-sufficient pride, that some philosophers disdain to acknowledge their belief in a being, who has judged proper to conceal from them the infinite wisdom of his counsels; who, (to borrow the lofty language of the man of Uz) refused to consult ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... for there was nothing beside him. Of design he was created thus, his own waste providing his own food, and all that he did or suffered taking place in and by himself. For the Creator conceived that a being which was self-sufficient would be far more excellent than one which lacked anything; and, as he had no need to take anything or defend himself against any one, the Creator did not think it necessary to bestow upon him hands: nor had he any need of feet, nor of the whole apparatus of walking; ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... his wife's death Simeon Pratt had been but the business-man, large of appetite, pitiless, self-sufficient, and self-absorbed—the type of man often described by amiable critics as "a hard citizen, but good to his family, you know," as if the fact of his not beating his wife were adequate excuse ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... Ye self-sufficient sons of reasoning pride, Too wise to take Omniscience for your guide, Those rules from insects, birds, and brutes discern Which from the Maker you disdain to learn! The social friendship, and the firm ally, The filial sanctitude, and nuptial tie, Patience in want, ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... honest confession. This did not seem the gay, self-sufficient young man he had met on former occasions. "I cannot pretend to criticise another man's life, knowing my own," he answered humbly. "I am sure I wish you all success in ...
— Duncan Polite - The Watchman of Glenoro • Marian Keith
... at one another wearily when he had gone; then, without honouring this self-sufficient person with a word of comment, they fell to discussing Wuerben. This Bohemian nobleman was not an altogether unpleasing personality. Of middle height, he had a stoop which caused him to appear short; it was not the stoop of the scholar, but that bend which ill-health, caused by debauch, often ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... reader, was simply this: What the Eleusinia furnished to Greece, that Socrates furnished to himself. That man who could stand stock-still a whole day, lost in silent contemplation, what was the need to him of the Eleusinian veil? The most self-sufficient man in all Greece, who could find the way directly to himself and to the mystery and responsibility of his own will without the medium of external rites, to whom there were the ever-present intimations of his strange Divinity,—what need to him of the Eleusinian revealings or their sublime self-intuition ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... iron-gray eyebrows, a smooth-shaven face speckled on one side as by a powder scar. Beneath a thin-lipped mouth a stubborn chin protruded. He was dressed in a flannel shirt and corduroy trousers, fastened by a black belt. He had the self-sufficient air of the sailor or miner, which is developed by living a great deal apart from other men. It seemed to Wilson that the man was watching him, too, with considerable interest. Every now and then he removed the short clay pipe which he was smoking and covered a half ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... a blunt, hard-looking man, self-sufficient and formal. A woman said the undertaker brought him. Icier than the pitiless storm outside, yes, colder than ice were his words. He read a few verses from the Bible, and warned "the bereaved mother against rebellion at the divine decrees." He made ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... premature his thought of the presidency now appeared, how slight his claims to consideration! He learned now definitely that the bishop was the real president of the college, and that Doctor Renshaw was a fairly negligible element in the situation. He divined also the proud and self-sufficient spirit of the place, a pride entirely independent of worldly success, of numbers ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... him, as well I might be, for wanting the power to render myself intelligible. He as usual was amazed to hear he had not a right to do what he pleased with his own, and to be told it was not his own. Nor was he sparing in pettish reproof to the self-sufficient young lady, who thought proper to dispute the propriety and ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... ticket without a murmur? They must remember that telephones, whatever may be said to the contrary, are one of the modern aids to domesticity and preventives of gadding, while still keeping one not only in touch with a friend but within range of the voice. Surely there can be no woman so self-sufficient that she does not in silent moments yearn for a spoken word with ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... inexorable. She had suffered so much that she had no pity for his present sufferings. These seemed trivial to her. She showed a grand, strong, self-sufficient nature, which made her his superior, and put her above the reach of any influences that he might bring. He could remember the time when she was a fair and gentle young girl, with her will all subject to his; then a loving bride with no thought apart from him; but now years of suffering and self-discipline ...
— The Living Link • James De Mille
... home quietly placing the dishes on the supper-table, The mother with mild words, clean her cap and gown, a wholesome odor falling off her person and clothes as she walks by, The father, strong, self-sufficient, manly, mean, anger'd, unjust, The blow, the quick loud word, the tight bargain, the crafty lure, The family usages, the language, the company, the furniture, the yearning and swelling heart, Affection that will not ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... we passed Montelimar—"le pays du nougat et de M. l'ex-President Loubet," we were told by the octroi official who held us up at the barrier of this self-sufficient, dead-and-alive, pompous little town. We didn't know M. Loubet and we didn't like nougat, so we did not stop, but pushed on for Tournon. There, at the little Hotel de la Poste, beneath the donjon tower of the old chateau, we ate the most marvellously concocted dejeuner we had struck ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... industrialised a country is, the more dependent it must be upon supplies drawn from all parts of the world; not only supplies of food for the maintenance of its teeming population, but, even more, supplies of material for its industries. The days when Europe, or even America, was self-sufficient are gone for ever. And in order that these essential supplies may be available, it has become necessary that all the regions which produce them should be brought under efficient administration. The anarchy of primitive barbarism cannot be allowed ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
... Contemplation of Wisdom and Beauty: The latter is the peculiar Portion of that Sex which is therefore called Fair; but the happy Concurrence of both these Excellencies in the same Person, is a Character too celestial to be frequently met with. Beauty is an over-weaning self-sufficient thing, careless of providing it self any more substantial Ornaments; nay so little does it consult its own Interests, that it too often defeats it self by betraying that Innocence which renders it lovely and desirable. As therefore Virtue makes a beautiful Woman appear more ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... is a sufficient guide for your people? The fact is, you reverend gentlemen contradict in practice what you so vehemently advance in theory. Do not tell me that the Bible is all-sufficient; or, if you believe it is self-sufficient, cease your instructions. Stand not between the people and ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... which we have been engaged is necessary both for the knowledge and for the revision of the law. [37] However much we may codify the law into a series of seemingly self-sufficient propositions, those propositions will be but a phase in a continuous growth. To understand their scope fully, to know how they will be dealt with by judges trained in the past which the law embodies, we must ourselves know something of that past. The history of what ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... adj.; inspire with vanity &c n.; inflate, puff up, turn up, turn one's head. Adj. vain, vain as a peacock, proud as a peacock; conceited, overweening, pert, forward; vainglorious, high-flown; ostentatious &c 882; puffed up, inflated, flushed. self-satisfied, self-confident, self-sufficient, self-flattering, self-admiring, self-applauding, self-glorious, self-opinionated; entente &c (wrongheaded) 481; wise in one's own conceit, pragmatical^, overwise^, pretentious, priggish; egotistic, egotistical; soi-disant ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... reason, save our own self-sufficient arrogance, to believe that the discovery of these two forces exhausts the treasures of infinite wisdom. Humboldt thus well refutes the folly of such an imagination: "The imperfectibility of all empirical science, and the boundlessness of the sphere of observation, ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... nor of prestige. This indeed is the superiority of the German character over all others, that it is satisfied when it can acknowledge its own worth, and has no need of recognition, authority, or privilege. It is self-sufficient. This is the course I have steered, and in politics it is much easier to say what one should avoid than to say what one should do. Certain principles of honesty and courage forbid one to do certain things, just as the access to certain fields is interdicted ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... labor, yet remains amiably self-satisfied, and unconscious of his unfitness, may do more harm in his serene ignorance than he might have done good if he had chosen his proper sphere. Such a man as the last was the Reverend Harold. A good-natured, broad-shouldered, tactless, self-sufficient person, he had taken up his work with a complacent feeling that no field of labor could fail to be benefited by his patronage; he was content now as always. He had been content with himself and his intellectual progress at Oxford; he had been content with his first ...
— That Lass O' Lowrie's - 1877 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... must look to its bourgeoise for its Joans of Arc. But then your men are ungallantly self-sufficient. In Russia," the Prince shrugged his shoulders, "we send women to Siberia—or decorate them with the Order of ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... almost universal solvent. It is its residual affinity which enables it to enter into weak chemical combination with a large number of other substances, and thus to dissolve those substances. The dissolving power usually increases when the temperature is raised, possibly because the self-contained or self-sufficient groupings of the water molecules are then to some extent broken up and the fragments enabled to cling on to the foreign or introduced matter instead of only to each other. The foreign substance is apt to be extruded again when the ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge
... company on board our barque, the Mayor of Bruges and his lady; her friend, a woman of good family; and an old Baron Triste, of a sixteen-quartering family. At the name of Mayor of Bruges, you probably represent to yourself a fat, heavy, formal, self-sufficient mortal—tout au contraire: our Mayor was a thin gentleman, of easy manners, literature, and amusing conversation: Madame, a beautiful Provinciale. M. Lerret, the Mayor, found us out to be the Edgeworths described ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... as the type of self-sufficient stupidity and conceit—a custom, perhaps, like some few other customs, more conventional than fair—then the purest jackass in Cloisterham is Mr. Thomas ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... been lacking in many parts of Spain; and the Basques have shown great adaptability in suiting their agriculture to new conditions, helped by the presence of the courts at San Sebastian and Biarritz. When the old self-sufficient village industries declined, in consequence of the invention of machinery and manufacture elsewhere, the Basques entered at once upon emigration to the agricultural parts of the Americas, and the result has been that the Basque Provinces and the Pays Basque probably have never been more prosperous ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... men have nothing to do except to keep them in their place. And it is in the latter attitude that he is most really himself. His is, of course, an aristocracy of mind and character, not of birth and wealth; but the self-sufficient scorn which was almost a virtue in Aristotle's eyes, and is in ours the besetting sin of even the noblest of aristocrats, is too frequent a note in all his prose, and even in his poetry; and it is sometimes ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... account: I don't know who has told you that I liked her, but you may believe me, I never did. For the Damers,(172)they have lived much in the same world that I do. He is moderately sensible, immoderately proud, self-sufficient, and whimsical. She is very sensible, has even humour, if the excessive reserve and silence that she draws from both father and mother -would let her, I may almost say, ever show it. You say, "What people do we send ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... and starch), oil, amino acids, and proteins that have been removed from the leaves and wood of the tree. These materials are stored for future use of the embryo in the nut to sustain respiration, to permit germination, and to maintain the seedling until it has produced enough leaf area to become self-sufficient. ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Incorporated 39th Annual Report - at Norris, Tenn. September 13-15 1948 • Various
... compassion that is so much a part of your makeup. How can we love our country and not love our countrymen, and loving them, reach out a hand when they fall, heal them when they are sick, and provide opportunities to make them self-sufficient so they will be equal in fact ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... faults, which, if not inherent, will naturally be acquired by those who are too early intrusted with power. He was self-sufficient, arbitrary, and passionate. His good qualities consisted in a generous disposition, a kindness of heart when not irritated, a manly courage, and a frank acknowledgment of his errors. Had he been allowed to serve a proper ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... little writing-book for me, and told me not to make a mark in it except when she was near to tell me what to do. In my self-sufficient impatience to get out of "pothooks and trammels" into real letters and words I disobeyed her injunction, and disfigured the pages with numerous tell-tale blots. Then I hid the book away under the garret eaves, and refused to bring it to light ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... good of his soul and other people's souls, a man must eat—to put it baldly. He should earn his keep. He must indeed calculate upon provision for two. Mr. Thompson had made the common mistake of believing himself self-sufficient, and Sophie Carr had unwittingly taught him that a male celibate was an anomaly in nature's reckoning. He had thought himself immune from the ordinary passions of humanity. The strangest part of it was a saddened gladness that he was not. Somehow, he did not ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... belongeth whatsoever is in heaven and on earth. We have already commanded those unto whom the scriptures were given before you, and we command you also, saying, Fear God; but if ye disbelieve, unto God belongeth whatsoever is in heaven and on earth; and God is self-sufficient, and to be praised; for unto God belongeth whatsoever is in heaven and on earth, and God is a sufficient protector. If he pleaseth he will take you away, O men, and will produce others in your stead; for God is able to do this. Whoso desireth the reward of this world, verily ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... most men are so self-sufficient that they think the other sex is blind to their faults, and will tolerate and cling ...
— The Kentucky Ranger • Edward T. Curnick
... only—and the time flew by as on wings of the wind. Reuben assumed an air of worldly wisdom, quite awe-inspiring to his wife. He had visited Boston as a boy, and so had a dim idea of what to expect; moreover, he had sold stock and produce in the large towns near his home, and on the whole felt quite self-sufficient. ...
— Across the Years • Eleanor H. Porter
... as officers, nay, the very generals, with one voice extolled the merit of young Scipio: so necessary is it for a man to deaden, if I may be allowed the expression, the splendour of his rising glory, by a sweet and modest carriage; and not to excite jealousy, by haughty and self-sufficient behaviour, as this naturally awakens pride in others, and makes even ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... first act was to look at the register where all persons who call inscribe their names, and I was surprised to notice the number of Americans present in Paris. It only proved what I long had heard, that Americans take more naturally to the French than to the sturdy, self-sufficient Englishman. As it is in the matter of fashions, so it is regarding almost everything else, save morals, and I doubt if the tone of fashionable society in New York is any better than ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... looked back to that Christmas as his worst and darkest time. His pride had grown morbid, and he swore to himself that he would never give in—that Horace should never know him otherwise than self-sufficient, should never think that but for Mrs. Middleton's or Godfrey Hammond's charity he might have had his cousin as a pensioner. Brooding on thoughts such as these, he sauntered moodily beneath the lamps when the new year was ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... glance, will bring the blood to a maiden's cheek, so may it sow the germ of moral death in the heart of youth. How helpless and ignorant the young are in their seeming strength and smartness: how self-sufficient in their unwisdom, how little amenable to reason, how slow to perceive true ideals. What patient, persevering effort is required to form character, and what a little thing will poison life in its source! How easy it is to see and understand what is coarse and evil, how difficult to appreciate ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... of sad suspense Aunt Catharine appeared an altered woman. No longer stern and stately, self-satisfied and self-sufficient, she and her sister seemed to have changed places. She it was who clung to Miss Alice for sympathy and support in the sore trouble that had befallen them. Miss Alice it was who kept brave and cheery—hoping against hope that things were not actually so black as ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... He bore a brave outside to all his men, and to any stranger whom in these days he met about the run—to his wife and sister also, and to the old woman at home. He forced upon them all an idea that he was not only autocratic, but self-sufficient also—that he wanted neither help nor sympathy. He never cried out in his pain, being heartily ashamed even of the appeal which he had made to Medlicot. He spoke aloud and laughed with the men, and never acknowledged that his trials ...
— Harry Heathcote of Gangoil • Anthony Trollope
... misunderstood? Ought we not to look very closely at it, before declaring that one of the most lucid minds that have ever appeared in the world left at the basis of his doctrine a fault of logic which any schoolboy can discover? Self-sufficient levity of spirit is not the best means of penetrating the thought of leading minds; and it very often happens to us to fail of understanding because we have ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... Self-sufficient and secluded from the outer world, the rural village went on treasuring its traditions, keeping its old customs, century after century. The country instinctively distrusted all novelties; it always preferred old ways to ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... were a kingdom apart and self-sufficient, what meant this thing which, crossed the head of the plantation—this double line, tenacious and continuous, which shone upon the one hand dark, and upon the other, where the sun touched it, a cold gray in color? What meant this squat little building at the side ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... to discover their interdependence. The coming of that discovery is one of the few really new things under the sun. Not so very long ago, when mankind was far less numerous, such interdependence of nations did not exist; they were self-sufficient, just as the patriarchal family was self-sufficient still ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... swaddling cloths before the infant. For the earth (as Plato says doth not imitate a woman, but a woman, and so likewise all other females, the earth.) Moreover, it is probable that the first production out of the earth, which was then vigorous and perfect, was self-sufficient and entire, nor stood in need of those secundines, membranes, and vessels, which now Nature forms to help the weakness and supply the ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... say a word of the numerous goddesses who play an important part in Tibetan Buddhism, as in Hindu Tantrism. They are usually represented as the female counterparts or better halves of male deities, but some are self-sufficient. The greatest of these goddesses is Tara.[1043] Though Lamaist theology describes her as the spouse of Avalokita she is not a single personality but a generic name applied to a whole class of female ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... touched Coursay, who had never expected that he, a weak and spineless back-slider, could possibly be of aid or comfort to his self-sufficient and celebrated cousin, ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... an apologetic shoulder. "Because, I fancy, I'm no longer self-sufficient. I was all of that, twenty-four hours ago; but now I'm as lonesome as a lost child in a dark forest. I haven't a friend in the world. I'm like a stray pup, grovelling for sympathy. And you are unfortunate ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... legally prohibited from changing his residence and even from travelling about the Empire, for fear that he might evade the tax-collector. If a rural landowner, he lived in a community which was economically self-sufficient, and consequently provincial to the last degree. The types of character which developed under such conditions were not wanting in amiable or admirable traits. The well-to-do provincial was often a scholar, a connoisseur in art and literature, ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... not be as promptly interrupted by the hostile submarine. I point these things out here only to carry home the fact that the ideas of sovereign isolation and detachment that were perfectly valid in 1900, the self-sufficient empire, Imperial Zollverein and all that stuff, and damn the foreigner! are now, because of the enormous changes in range of action and facility of locomotion that have been going on, almost as wild—or would be if we ...
— In The Fourth Year - Anticipations of a World Peace (1918) • H.G. Wells
... unconscious whisper. On the instant she felt so weak and shaken and lonely that she wanted to lean upon some one stronger than herself; as she used to lean against her father, while he sat with one arm round her studying his railway problems. She had been self-sufficient enough all her life,—"an independent little bird of freedom," as Crozier had called her; but she was like a boat tossed on mountainous ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker |
