"Selfish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... definitely united in the common purpose to set up such a peace as will satisfy the longing of the whole world for disinterested justice, embodied in settlements which are based upon something much better and much more lasting than selfish competitive ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... you observe some odd bits of bird behavior which you think will be news to the many bird lovers the world over, why should you not report them to one of the bird magazines, so that others may share the pleasures of your discoveries? An admirer of feathered folk should not be selfish; indeed, I do not see ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... with idiots; some children are stillborn, others blind or deaf and dumb from birth. Extremely different races people the earth—on the one hand, unintelligent and cannibal negroes; on the other, the proud, handsome, and intelligent, though selfish and cruel white race. Again, from a moral standpoint, who can explain congenital tendencies to crime, the vicious by birth, the wicked by nature, the persons with uncontrollable passions? Wherefore are thrift and foresight ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... not at all as emotional as one might have inferred from the sensitive, quick-changing colour that at one moment flushed her cheeks and at another ebbed, leaving her pallid, as with passion. Not that she was hardhearted or selfish. Far from it. But her surroundings had moulded her as they do women. Her mother had been one of the belles of Baltimore, a Southerner, too, by temperament. May had a brother and a sister older than herself (both were now married), and a younger brother who had taken care that she should ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... he is selfish, self-seeking?" Arkwright demanded with a challenge in his voice. "I thought you were ...
— The Lion and the Unicorn and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... during the last few years, and thought how they must have felt as he felt now, and he had no conception of it. He had been secretly rather proud that he had not encumbered himself with a wife and children, but had given his best strength to less selfish loves. He remembered his scorn of the school-master and his adoring girls, and realized that his scorn had been due, as scorn largely is, to ignorance. Instead of contempt, a fierce pity seized him for all who had given way to this great need of love, and yet he felt strange indignation and ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... private interests for the public good is the duty of the subject. When men are selfish there must be ill-will; when ill-will comes, then with it must come iniquity, which will disturb the public welfare. Ill-will is sure to bring about the breaking of wholesome rules and the violation of the laws of the state. It is for this reason that the harmony between superior and inferior ...
— Japan • David Murray
... heartless, ill- conditioned dislike to seeing those whom fortune has placed below him, cheerful and happy—an intolerant confidence in his own high worthiness before God, and a lofty impression of the demerits of others—pride, selfish pride, as inconsistent with the spirit of Christianity itself, as opposed to the example of its ...
— Sunday Under Three Heads • Charles Dickens
... no question about the weight of David's. I'm not a bit selfish about him though; poor fellow, I only wish he'd ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... want to preach," said Vail; "but you know that this doctrine of mere selfish floating on the current of impulse which your traveler poet teaches is devilish laziness, and devilish laziness always tends to something worse. You may live such a life, and quote such poetry, but you don't believe that a man should flow on like a purposeless river. ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... cried, springing up from a midnight reverie in my hut. Every selfish argument for my own safety had passed in review before my mind, and something so akin to judicious caution, which we trappers in plain language called "cowardice," was insidiously assailing my better self, I cast logic's sophistries to the winds, and dared death or torture to drive ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... all been settled, but that the man was stubborn, and would not be changed. "Of course, he is a man," said Edith to herself, as she put the mutton down. "Of course he must have it all to please himself. Of course he will be selfish." ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope
... say in answer to your inquiry is that I have a sincere desire to serve, to be of some little assistance in improving the condition of the average man, to lift him up, and to make his life more tolerable, agreeable, and comfortable. In doing this I try hard to purge my heart of selfish motives. It will only be known when I am dead whether or ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... higher moral plane in the times of Metternich and Napoleon, than in those of Chanakya and Rakshasa. Nor are suppressions of important passages in despatches for the purposes of publication, or wars undertaken on unjustifiable and really selfish pretexts, calculated to convince one, that even in Europe in the nineteenth century, the transaction of political affairs has been purged of the taint of immorality, however different, and I may even add, ...
— Tales from the Hindu Dramatists • R. N. Dutta
... of her slight but exquisitely moulded figure. In her dark eyes there was a sympathy, a compassion, that was new to me. It thrilled me with an emotion different from anything that my frankly happy, but hitherto wholly selfish life had known. There was only one note in her conversation which jarred upon me. She was apt to drift into the extraordinary views of life and death which were interesting when formulated by her eccentric brother, but pained me ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... and Christian Europe together for an enterprise that was to the advantage of all, and the neglect of which was a lasting disgrace. But their efforts were long defeated by the mutual quarrels and jealousies and the selfish policy of the European powers. Venice and Genoa long preferred to maintain peace with the Sultans, in order to have the undisturbed monopoly of the Eastern trade. France was too often the ally of the Turk, ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale
... the closeness of the reasoning. To do him justice, it was not a selfish triumph that he desired; he would personally lose nothing by defeat, or at least what he might lose did not actuate him; but neither was it love of justice which made him so anxious, nor even mainly solicitude for ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope
... see that selfish motives enter into this affair at all," I remarked. "Whatever you tell me, Ethelwynn, is, I know, for my own benefit. Therefore you should at ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... thwarts all the efforts of the active people. According to his philosophy, the self-contained, thoroughly egotistical natures, who are wedded solely to the cult of success, generally pass through this earthly life without any notable disasters; they attend strictly to their own selfish ends, and do not attempt to sway the destinies of others from motives of humanity, patriotism, or anything else in the lofty, self-sacrificing line. On the contrary, the fate of the people who are endowed with tender instincts, who have not allowed self-love to smother ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... criticism, Charles Lamb has cited a passage from Green's Tu Quoque—a comedy miserably misreprinted in Dodsley's Old Plays—on which he observes that "this is so like Shakespeare, that we seem to remember it," being as it is a girl's gentle lamentation over the selfish, exacting, suspicious and trustless love of man, as contrasted with the swift simple surrender of a woman's love at the first heartfelt appeal to her pity—"we seem to remember it," says Lamb, as a speech of Desdemona uttered on a first perception ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... she's going home just as she had planned. I can't go, of course, but as soon as Street comes back I'll either go to her or she'll come to me. She hasn't given up her music and I don't want her to. It's all rather hazy, Scott. I only know that I let her get away from me once, and, selfish brute that I am, I'm going to tie her to me now ...
— Across the Mesa • Jarvis Hall
... of compassion, and came and sat near him. "Bibbs," she said. "I can be glad of one thing, though it's selfish. I can be glad you came straight to me. It's more to me than even if you'd come because you were happy." She did not speak again for a little while; then she said: "Bibbs—dear—could you tell me about it? Do ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... Ledscha to go there, not from love, but merely to model her limbs so far as he considered them useful for his work. He was in haste to do so because he intended to return to the capital immediately. Whether he meant to leave her in the lurch after using her for his selfish purposes, she also desired to learn from the sorceress. But she would ask him that question herself to-morrow. Woe betide him if the spirits recognised in him the deceiver she now ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... selfish hopes. He had a feeling that Jane liked O-liver. He loved them both. If he could not have Jane he wanted O-liver to have her. He kept a wary eye therefore on Henry ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey
... up, saw the grief and perplexity in his face, and her heart smote her for her own selfish thoughts. She did not understand how he suffered, but she felt she ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... the youth, draining his cup with a sigh of satisfaction. "Some time before I had bought up the mortgage on the farm without saying a word to father or mother. I was selfish, I guess, but I wanted the pleasure of their surprise." His eyes sparkled moistly. "My! it was great. It was worth every cent, although it took nearly every dollar of my little pile. You had ought to have been up there to see them the morning the mortgage fell due. Their ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... indeed of the patriotism, the honesty, the moral courage he exhibited, was really no other than the refined ambition of attaining the respect of his contemporaries and bequeathing a name to posterity. He might not act from a sense of duty, like Cato, but his motives, personal and selfish as they in some sense were, coincided with what a more enlightened conscience would have felt to be duty. Thus his proconsulate is perhaps the purest and most honorable passage in his life. His strict and rare probity amidst the temptations of office arrests our ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... Tales have been to you in childhood, that and much more it is my wish that the true Plays of Shakespear may prove to you in older years—enrichers of the fancy, strengtheners of virtue, a withdrawing from all selfish and mercenary thoughts, a lesson of all sweet and honourable thoughts and actions, to teach you courtesy, benignity, generosity, humanity: for of examples, teaching these virtues, his pages ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... outrage of those fiendish legions, thank God.—It lays a finger on the spring of our only strength. What will he offer us? I will tell you.—A chance to live, or to die,—men,—ay, to leave a sample of manhood on the earth, that shall wring tears from the selfish of unborn ages, as they feel for once the depths of the slumbering and godlike nature within them. And Burgoyne,—oh! a coat and a pair of shoes, he offers, ...
— The Bride of Fort Edward • Delia Bacon
... folly! Fredersdorf would learn to make gold through the sacrifice of a black ram; in order to do this, he joins himself to my adversaries, to the hypocrites and pietists; he goes to the so- called prayer-meetings of the godless, who call themselves, forsooth, the children of God! Ah! Jordan, how selfish, how pitiful is this small race of man! how little do they merit! I took Fredersdorf from obscurity and poverty. I not only took him into my service, I made him my confidant and my friend—I loved him sincerely. ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... as accompanied this report of Pilate's cruelty that Jesus spoke the parable of the Unjust Judge (Luke xviii. 1-8), teaching that God's love may be trusted to be no less regardful of his people's cry than a selfish man's love of ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees
... to the others—he merely kept his eyes shaded; but he regarded me with a keen look of inquiry that was suggestive of shrewdness and cunning. I confess it was with a feeling of relief that I made this discovery; for I longed to find someone among this singular people who was selfish, who feared death, who loved life, who loved riches, and had something in common with me. This I thought I perceived in the shrewd, cunning face of the Kohen Gadol, and I was glad; for I saw that while he could not possibly be more dangerous to me than ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille
... an unselfish life. We are not to seek selfish glory in anything, but seek the glory of God first—above everything else. It has been remarked concerning certain ones who were struggling for an earthly existence, that if they would only get saved "all these things" (all earthly necessities) would ...
— Food for the Lambs; or, Helps for Young Christians • Charles Ebert Orr
... death, at the time the story first reached my ears, I was married, and my eldest child was born. A poor man had made me, a poor girl his wife, and, Miss Harman, let me tell you, that wives and mothers do long for money. The longing with them is scarcely selfish, it is for the beings dearer than themselves. There is a pain beyond words in denying your little child what you know is for that child's good, but yet which you cannot give because of your empty purse; there is a pain in seeing your ...
— How It All Came Round • L. T. Meade
... since I took you in my arms nineteen years ago, and said you should be mine. My little Sylvia, I've been neglectful of so many things, and now I see them all; I've fretted you with my ways, and haven't been patient enough with yours; I've been selfish even about your wedding, and it won't be as you like it; you'll reproach me in your heart, and I shall hate myself for it when you are gone never to be my care and comfort any more. And—oh, my dear, my dear, what shall I do ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... any adequate reason for doing so. I have no right to fashion my girl's life by my prejudices. My life has been lived. Hers is to come. In this matter I should be cruel and unnatural were I to allow myself to be governed by any selfish inclination. Though I were to know that she would be lost to me for ever, I must give way,—if once brought to a conviction that by not giving way I should sacrifice her young happiness. In this matter, Arthur, I must not even think of you, though I love you well. I must consider ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... existence were brief, all that existence has most tender, most sacred, was crowded into that space! Nothing dark, then, or bitter, rests with our remembrance of the lost: we are the mourners, but pity is not for the mourned,—our grief is purely selfish; when we turn to its object, the hues of happiness are round it, and that very love which is the parent of our woe was the consolation, the triumph, of ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... indomitable obstinacy, enabled him to hold the reins of government which were his by hereditary right. Besides being a fearless man, Grabantak was respected as a good leader in war. But Koyatuk had neither the energy of his father, nor his determination. He was vacillating and lazy, as well as selfish. Hence he was not a favourite, and when, after landing at Flatland, he endeavoured to renew his claim to Oblooria, neither his father nor the people encouraged him. The timid one was therefore left with Leo and Anders, who immediately fitted up for her ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... selfish beast, guzzling here when those poor devils think they're smothering down below. Well, O'Ruddy, will you ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... For the most part they work for future generations of their colony, and not for themselves, and yet they are as careful and diligent as if they were guided by the highest intelligence and the most selfish motives [tr. note: sic no punctuation]. Fairhurst, whom we are quoting, adds: "There is nothing more wonderful and mysterious in nature than the instincts of bees. What can be more remarkable than that instinct of the workers which causes them to prevent ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... withered. The natural thing is to avoid such, stand aloof, be quite scornfully indifferent. The miracle would happen if you went to them, lifted them up, restored them to society. I have said avoid useless people, I mean selfish, lazy, purposeless, aimless people. Sir Humphrey Davy worked a miracle when he took the boy Farrady out of a stable loft and gave him a chance to cultivate his genius. The Sistine Chapel is Angelo's ...
— Supreme Personality • Delmer Eugene Croft
... Tank. I suppose his real name is Thaddeus, or Tantalus, or something like it; I never knew, and I never liked him well enough to ask. Tank was a black-eyed little runt whom none of the boys liked, a grasping cuss, younger than Jim, and as selfish as Jim is kind. ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... others, Mr. Reginald Eversleigh? When did you consider others, if they stood in the way of your base pleasures, your selfish gratifications? Never! Nor will I spare you. As Jane's engaged lover, you were invited to Stukely Park. There you saw Mary Goodwin. Accident threw you across this girl's pathway very often in the course of your visit; but the time came when ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... even undervalue it—he rather upholds and magnifies its importance, as the agent or means by which his greatest and best discoveries can be made to subserve their greatest and most beneficent end. In him this may possibly arise from no unusual liberality of mind; it may spring from a selfish desire to see the principles he has established or made his own carried out to their legitimate extent, and their value established and acknowledged—for it is the application of a principle that imparts to it ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... laughed. "But until dinner let me keep you from wickedness. Come to tea jus' wiz me, not at the hotel, but at the little apartment I have taken, where it is quiet. The music is finish', an' all those pretty girl' are goin' away, you see. I am not selfish if I take you from the Pincio ...
— His Own People • Booth Tarkington
... took herself to task. "I am but a selfish woman," said she, "to talk or think of anything but that I came here for." She then proceeded to show Mrs. Gaunt by what means she proposed to secure her acquittal, without getting ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... secret but carefully concealed consternation of Rex and Lance, the prime movers in the matter, Mr Dale seemed more than half disposed to yield to Brook's jesting entreaties that he would make one of the party. It almost seemed as though this intensely selfish and egotistical individual were at last becoming ashamed of his own behaviour and had resolved upon an ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... one of the name becoming distinguished by his exploits or his crimes. These are useful citizens, for they bless a country with useful works, and add to its riches. But still, though industry, prudence, and economy are useful habits, they are selfish after all, and can hardly aspire to the dignity of virtues, except as they are preservatives against ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... Punishment and prohibition enter in by eye and ear and other senses besides. Then the thing is offensive to those we love and revere. Then it is bad for us. Then it is shameful, shabby, unfair, unkind, selfish, hateful to God. All these points of the idea of wrong are grasped by the intellect, beginning with sensory presentations of what is seen and felt and heard said. Again with the idea of ought. This idea is ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... a surrender after years of siege, not because her courage had failed, but because she had waited in vain for the reinforcement of his loyalty. This was what he had done with his life and hers. For him there was an empty future: for her marriage with a coldly selfish sensualist who called his greed piety. Stuart Farquaharson sat in a chilled inertia of despair while the ship's bells recorded the passing of hours. From the decks above drifted little fragments of human talk and human laughter, ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... develop his capacities, seek and to some extent attain satisfaction—in a manner, realise himself—not only in devotion to a scientific or artistic ideal or in labours for the common good, but also in selfish pursuit of power or even in sensual enjoyment. So far as the word 'self-realisation' can be made to cover such different activities, it is void of moral content and cannot express the nature of the moral ...
— Recent Tendencies in Ethics • William Ritchie Sorley
... vices were to the planter delightful fancies! Did she lie? The excellent man exclaimed: What an imagination she has! Was she jealous? He would sigh, pressing to his broad breast the tiny form: How sensitive she is!.... The result of that selfish blindness—for to love children thus is to love them for one's self and not for them—was that the girl, at the time of her entrance at Roehampton, was spoiled in the essential traits of her character. But she was so pretty, she owed to the ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... which had threatened to part them, but had stirred instead the mother depths of her soul, which had become clouded by years of luxury and artificial life and the knowledge of the ceaseless ambitions and selfish scheming which her husband—for the intellectual stimulus she gave him—had been accustomed to confide to her. And now Marco was not less to her, but more, as he had promised; and if the uncertain hope of that dim, distant, ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... they were under my own tuition,[73] though with the denial of the way of God. This was a smarting consideration, and was as spurs unto my flesh. That scripture also greatly helped it to fasten the more upon me, where Christ prays against Judas, that God would disappoint him in all his selfish thoughts, which moved him to sell his master: pray ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... very sad, for the bright green grass was broken, and the sweet wild flowers were trampled down, that a grave might be made in the dark, moist earth for her father, who had died in early manhood, leaving his wife and only child to battle with the selfish world as best they could. Since that time, life had been long and dreary to the poor widow, whose hours were well-nigh ended, for ere to-morrow's sun was risen, she would have a better home than that dreary, cheerless room, while Dora, ...
— Dora Deane • Mary J. Holmes
... same train of thought, can you not imagine what will happen when all this is turned around, and altered by an anti-semite? Are you in doubt what he will substitute for "aristocracy," and do you not know that he will repeat every twist and turn of speech with which Mr. Bamberger's sheet imputes selfish injustice ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... down all that I say about Simon to personal prejudice because you have heard enough about him from others to realize how mean and selfish and—and psychically cruel he could be. He never beat Lucy, but that was simply because he specialized in a more refined type of cruelty—and if you want to know which of the two hurts a woman most, there are plenty of unfortunate wives who can ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... business, and ought to be put a stop to in some way or other—" answered Hurry, confounding the distinctions between right and wrong, as is usual with selfish and vulgar men. "I heartily wish old Hutter and I had scalped every creatur' in their camp, the night we first landed with that capital object! Had you not held back, Deerslayer, it might have been done, and then you wouldn't have found yourself, at the last ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... swept these Northern men out of political existence, and they were again taught the lesson that is ever forgotten, namely, that it is an easy task to inflame the passions of the multitude, an impossible one to arrest them. From selfish ambition, from thoughtless zeal, from reckless partisanship, from the low motives governing demagogues in a country of universal suffrage, men are ever sowing the wind, thinking they can control the whirlwind; and the story of the Gironde and the Mountain ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... well-preserved man was Sir Charles Darryll, with a boyish smile and an air of perennial youth unspotted by the world, a man who was totally unfitted to cope with the hard grip and sordid side of life. There were some who said that he was a grasping, greedy, selfish old rascal, who under the guise of youthful integrity concealed a nature that was harsh ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White
... Letitia. It may be that you still love me, but you have given me few signs of it. You have been... you are.. . a selfish woman. ...
— The Naturewoman • Upton Sinclair
... gone; and Cynthia Farrow knew, as she stood there in the disordered room, that by sending him away she had made the greatest mistake of her selfish life. ...
— The Second Honeymoon • Ruby M. Ayres
... longings of masses of men, find utterance in the great popular spiritual demands all the more effectively because such demands override and nullify the insistence of an individualistic point of view which might easily become selfish. We have said that this democratic interpretation is final so long as it keeps itself in line with the biblical purpose. There are some dangers, however, against which we must be on our guard. First is the danger of identifying the church with those who ...
— Understanding the Scriptures • Francis McConnell
... "I'm just darin' ye to send John Gilman in the sound of my voice. If ye do, I'll tell him every mean and selfish thing ye've done to me poor lambie since the day of the Black Shadow. Send him to me? Holy Mither, I wish ye would! If ever I get my chance at him, don't ye think I won't be tellin' him what he has lost, and what he has got? And as for taking orders from him, I am taking my orders from the ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... Owen taught me that there were folks outside palaces, and that the greatness of a station, even as of a man, stood not in the multitude of the things that it possessed? The summary is cold and colourless; it smacks of duty, of obligations unwillingly remembered, of selfish pleasures reluctantly foregone. As I became old enough to do more than listen entranced to his stories, it seemed to me that to be such a man as he was, and not knowing that he himself was admired, could be no duty, but only a happy dream. There has been in ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... churlishly away from contemplating the felicity of his fellow-beings, and sit down darkling and repining in his loneliness when all around is joyful, may have his moments of strong excitement and selfish gratification, but he wants the genial and social sympathies which constitute the ...
— Old Christmas From the Sketch Book of Washington Irving • Washington Irving
... one of the most fascinating writers for youth, and withal one of the best to be found in this or any past age. Troops of young people hang over his vivid pages; and not one of them ever learned to be mean, ignoble, cowardly, selfish, or to yield to any vice from anything they ever read ...
— An Undivided Union • Oliver Optic
... officials, lawyers, and skilled artisans, who lived in the cities and who, ambitious and discontented, did much to stimulate the increasing unrest and demand for reform which in time pervaded the whole nation. A king, constantly in need of increasing sums of money; an idle, selfish, corrupt, and discredited nobility and upper clergy, incapable of aiding the king, many of whom, too, had been influenced by the new philosophic and scientific thinking and were willing to help destroy their own orders; an aggressive, discontented, and patriotic ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... restlessly from one to the other. The strange boy had again bent over the coals with an expression of momentary comfort which bordered on simple-mindedness, while Frederick's features showed the alternating play of a sympathy evidently more selfish than good-humored, and his eyes, in almost glassy clearness, for the first time distinctly showed the expression of that unrestrained ambition and tendency to swagger which afterwards revealed itself as so strong a motive in ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... you would accept my word of honor as a gentleman that I know as little of this treacherous bullet as you; that for all I am bound to secrecy, my sincerest desire is to protect Miss Westfall from the peculiar consequences of this damnable muddle, to clear up the mystery of the bullet, and for more selfish reasons to protect her from the romantic folly of the ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... and satiating with plunder. Young aristocrats, who sneered at the freedman's son, were not likely to found any system of liberty worthy of the name, or to use success for nobler purposes than those of selfish ambition. Fighting was not Horace's vocation, and with the death of Brutus and those nobler spirits, who fell at Philippi rather than survive their hopes of freedom, his motive for fighting was at an end. To prolong a contest which its leaders ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... promising enterprise truly, when every landholder in Ceylon, on referring to his title-deeds, observes the reservation of all precious metals to the crown. This is a fair sample of the narrow-minded, selfish policy of a government which, in endeavoring to save a little, loses all; a miserable tampering with the public in attempting to make a cat's paw of ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... a way some mony, and be at a very considerable expence. I dow not pretend to make a particular demand yet I assure you 200l. St. is necessary, and I intirely reffer to yourself to diminish or augment, only I beg you be convinced that no selfish interesting view occasions my making this demand, but only that I would be vext want of cash would disapoint either of us in our expectations, since I dow assure you that I dont look upon anything ...
— Pickle the Spy • Andrew Lang
... tenderfeet—lacking in grit, will power, self-assertion, and the ability to deal with men. We were easily crowded to the wall, easily cheated, always ready to take a back seat, timid, complying, undecided, obstinate but not combative, selfish but not self-asserting, always the easy victims of pushing, coarse-grained, designing men. As with Father, the word came easy but the blow was slow to follow. Only a year or two ago a lightning-rod man made my brother Curtis and his son John have his rods put upon ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... dishonorable Government produced this terrible world war by the most contemptible means, and solely in selfish greed of gain, has always been able to enjoy the fruits of its unscrupulousness because it was reckoned as unassailable. But everything is subject to change, and that applies today to the security ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... cautious, conservative, and responsible statesmen walk off with the portfolios of place and privilege and pay under their honest arms. But these are the unprincipled papists and infidels of a mushroom republic; and, thank God, such spurious patriotism, and such sham and selfish statesmanship, have not yet shown their miserable heads among faithful, fearless, straightforward, and uncalculating Englishmen. At the same time, if ever that continental vice should attack our national ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... of the fellah of old was, as we have seen, as hard as that of the fellah of to-day. He himself felt the bitterness of it, and complained at times, or rather the scribes complained for him, when with selfish complacency they contrasted their calling with his. He had to toil the whole year round,—digging, sowing, working the shadouf from morning to night for weeks, hastening at the first requisition to the corvee, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... unambitious men are cowards when they have no religion. They are dominated and exploited not only by greedy and often half-witted and half-alive weaklings who will do anything for cigars, champagne, motor cars, and the more childish and selfish uses of money, but by able and sound administrators who can do nothing else with them than dominate and exploit them. Government and exploitation become synonymous under such circumstances; and the world is finally ruled by the childish, the brigands, and the blackguards. Those ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... felt that it had done for him. It had made him conscious how unjust, how cruel, he had been to Sibyl Vane. It was not too late to make reparation for that. She could still be his wife. His unreal and selfish love would yield to some higher influence, would be transformed into some nobler passion, and the portrait that Basil Hallward had painted of him would be a guide to him through life, would be to him what holiness is to some, and conscience to others, and the fear of God to us all. There were ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... his way in other lives, such as those of Wilson and Gainsborough, to attack Sir Joshua by surmises and insinuations of meanness, blurring the fair character of his best acts. The generous doings of the President were too notorious not to be admitted, but generally a sinister or selfish motive is insinuated. His courtesy was unpleasing, while extreme coarseness met with a ready apologist. In the several Lives of Sir Joshua Reynolds, there does not appear the slightest ground upon which to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... and that she was at that moment protecting him against all the world! He was the unexpected, spontaneous gift to her, the companion her childhood had never known, the lover she had never dreamed of, even the child of her unsatisfied maternal yearnings. If she could not comprehend all his selfish incoherences, she felt it was her own fault; if she could not follow his ignorant assumptions, she knew it was SHE who was deficient; if she could not translate his coarse speech, it was because it was the language of a larger world from which she ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... foretell it would end in a tragedy. We made ourselves very comfortable, made many pleasant excursions into the interior, had a large correspondence, and escaped the mortification of being slighted by men in Washington who were using their temporary power for selfish ends. ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... provisions which they brought in, as well as for the commodities which they exported; of consequence, the former was valued at as high a price as their avarice could exact, and the latter sunk as low in value as their own selfish hearts could conceive: that the colony for two months had been destitute of all kinds of provision; the commodities of the planters lay upon their hands, and their negroes were in danger of perishing through hunger; a circumstance that excited the apprehension ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... her eyes to his ill-disguised defects, striving to clothe him with the graces which she had at first supposed him to possess, and, insensibly to himself, refining and purifying by slight degrees his selfish nature. ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... religion. Any organization, therefore, claiming to be a branch of the Republican party, but which had repudiated and denounced the fundamental and sacred creed of that organization, would be looked upon by the public as a close, selfish and local machine that was brought into existence to serve the ends, and satisfy the selfish ambition of the promoters and organizers of the corporation. Yet there were a few well-meaning and honest white men in some of ...
— The Facts of Reconstruction • John R. Lynch
... never beat in man a kindlier or more philanthropic heart. While he was a stranger to selfish and sordid impressions he was alike above mean actions; and he lived and toiled for others, amid hardships and sufferings that would have crushed ...
— Scouting with Daniel Boone • Everett T. Tomlinson
... Glenn's comrade and of her own friends. "I'll never—never write him again," she averred with stiff lips, and next moment could have laughed in mockery at the bitter truth. If she had ever had any courage, Glenn's letter had destroyed it. But had it not been a kind of selfish, false courage, roused to hide her hurt, to save her own future? Courage should have a thought of others. Yet shamed one moment at the consciousness she would write Glenn again and again, and exultant the next ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... known anything else. I remember well the one thing I didn't like when it first came along; and that was the new sort of Christmas celebration Dad and the others planned when I was ten or eleven. You know what Christmas means to such kids, and I guess we were all selfish together, because we didn't use our heads. Well, the Sunday school proposed that instead of us all getting something we should all give something. It looked pretty cheap to us little fellows at first, and our teacher had all he could do to hold us in line. But let me tell you, every ...
— John Wesley, Jr. - The Story of an Experiment • Dan B. Brummitt
... I do not think so. I think a woman must be very selfish, if all she cares for her husband is, to have a good provider. I think her husband's honor and welfare should be as dear to her as her own; and no true woman and wife can be indifferent to the moral welfare of her husband. Neither man nor woman ...
— Sowing and Reaping • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... Andrew, left to himself and his purely selfish interests, could have struck with the foremost. He would never have considered himself when it came to a question of a conscientious struggle against injustice, though he was so prone to look upon both sides of an argument that his decision would ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... been victorious in the second Punic War. It was because his countrymen were not animated with his heroic spirit, nor inspired with his prophetic foresight, that they failed. They were looking after gain, or actuated by selfish ambition, while he was straining every nerve to avert danger. When he swore hatred to the Roman on the altar at nine years of age, he imbibed a principle which the judgment of his maturer years told him was the only means of saving his country. To the prosecution of this object ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... ornamental there as a cue, if not more so. In short, there was nothing rare, or choice of its kind and within the bestowal of the Hunter's Paradise, which did not, sooner or later, find its way to the hands or feet, to the head or back, or to the selfish little belly of master Sprigg. But these were trifling indulgences compared with others, and would, in all likelihood, have left upon his disposition no other lasting evil effect than to render him overwatchful of his own ease and comfort. What was far worse, he was allowed ...
— The Red Moccasins - A Story • Morrison Heady
... Warristoun. This man, who was the inveterate enemy of Montrose, and who carried the most selfish spirit into every intrigue of his party, received the punishment of his treasons about eleven years afterwards. It may be instructive to learn how he met his doom. The following extract is from the MSS. of Sir George Mackenzie:—"The Chancellor and others ...
— Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers and Other Poems • W.E. Aytoun
... his favour. Several princes gave him hopes of his proposals being accepted on the first favourable opportunity; but the Saxon Elector, full of jealousy and distrust towards the King of Sweden, and true to the selfish policy he had pursued, could not be prevailed upon to ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... as the future husband of the Queen that Anjou again appeared in 1582 in the Netherlands and received the formal submission of the revolted States, save Holland and Zealand. But the subtle schemes which centred in him broke down before the selfish perfidy of the Duke. Resolved to be ruler in more than name, he planned the seizure of the greater cities of the Netherlands, and at the opening of 1583 made a fruitless effort to take Antwerp by surprise. It was in vain that Orange strove by patient negotiation ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... chamber, where already my drawers were cleared out and my share of the bookcase was empty—and where, hereafter, she would have to sleep alone, in dreary solitude, as she expressed it—my heart sank more than ever: I felt as if I had been selfish and wrong to persist in leaving her; and when I knelt once more beside our little bed, I prayed for a blessing on her and on my parents more fervently than ever I had done before. To conceal my emotion, I buried my face ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... the life of the Camp pursued its even and delightful way, blessed by perfect summer weather, a good harvest of fish, fine winds for sailing, and calm, starry nights. Maloney's selfish prayer had been favourably received. Nothing came to disturb or perplex. There was not even the prowling of night animals to vex the rest of Mrs. Maloney; for in previous camps it had often been her peculiar ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... one," she thought, "and I'll try to make the boys agree to having Hester for Queen. But I don't believe Tom will. I know it's selfish for me to be Queen all the time, and I ...
— Marjorie at Seacote • Carolyn Wells
... roads, I had intended asking them for a new pair, as they had abundance of everything of the kind sent to them from England, to distribute to the needy (and I fully came under that description of character); but finding them so selfish and cold-hearted, and meeting with one refusal, I refrained, and set ...
— A Narrative of a Nine Months' Residence in New Zealand in 1827 • Augustus Earle
... The moral anachronisms of Pope in this case are absolutely frightful—and the physical anachronisms of Pope also; for the simple want of roads, by intercepting all peaceful and pleasurable intercourse, must have intercepted all growth of nationality, unless when a rare community of selfish interest happened to arise, as when the whole was threatened with conquest or with famine through foreign aggression upon ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... there. Ellen's conscience immediately brought up Alice's words "Can't you do something to pass away a tedious hour now and then?" The first feeling was of vexed regret that they should have come into her head at that moment; then conscience said that was very selfish. There was a struggle. Ellen stood with the door in her hand, unable to go out or come in. But not long. As the words came back upon her memory "A charge to keep I have" her mind was made up; after one moment's prayer for help and forgiveness, she shut the door, came back to ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell |
