"Effacement" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... solicitude which envelops a young woman in the mating season. A solitude was tacitly created for her in the crowded existence of Bellomont, and her friends could not have shown a greater readiness for self-effacement had her wooing been adorned with all the attributes of romance. In Lily's set this conduct implied a sympathetic comprehension of her motives, and Mr. Gryce rose in her esteem as she saw ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... morning air. Had anything happened to Enriquez? I had always looked upon his extravagance as part of his playful humor. Could it be possible that under the sting of rejection he had made his grotesque threat of languishing effacement real? Surely Miss Mannersley would know or suspect something, ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... inclination to perform this noble act of self-effacement. On no account would {115} he have a dictator imposed upon him to shape the fortunes of Greece according to his caprice, unfettered by "military advisers of limited perceptions." If Greece was to have a dictator, the King had said long ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... to walk the sorrowful road of married life; she, too, had to learn from bitter experience that legal statutes signify dependence and self-effacement, especially for the woman. The marriage was no liberation from the Puritan dreariness of American life; indeed, it was rather aggravated by the loss of self-ownership. The characters of the young people ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... Christianity promises an immediate transfer to a life of unalloyed blessedness, and an endless growth of all our powers and capacities; but why should Hinduism urge the cultivation of that whose real destiny is "effacement?" Hinduism finds the explanation of life's mysteries and inscrutable trials in the theory of sins committed in a previous existence. Christianity, while recognizing the same trials, relieves them with the hope of solutions in a future life of compensating joy. The one turns ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... though secretly delighted at this evidence of something like conversion, eyed Jabe doubtfully. He was not sure of the latter's capacity for the tireless patience and long self-effacement necessary for ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... types of character Nietzsche would destroy. They are degenerative, forsooth! They make against life and the joy thereof. Ah, but the joy of life is not only the joy of self-assertion: there is the joy of self-effacement, which is only another form of self-expression, the assertion of a higher self. That was the secret of Jesus, of Buddha. Whereas the doctrine of Nietzsche—c'est le secret de Polichinelle. The man in the street needs no encouragement to enjoyment. It is only by the travail of ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... fresh proof that the work of translation, if it is to be done with effect, must be done by those who, possessing, like Mrs. Ward, original literary gifts, are willing to make a long act of self-denial or self-effacement [20] for the benefit of the public. In this case, indeed, the work is not wholly one of self-effacement, for the accomplished translator has prefaced Amiel's Journal by an able and interesting essay of seventy pages on Amiel's life and intellectual position. And certainly ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... by the arrangement of 1809 the people of this section must content themselves with remaining in the minority in the state legislature, and suppress whatever of opposition they felt toward the institution of slavery, the cause of their effacement. ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... active knees there was a look of feebleness. Seen from the front they could readily be differentiated, for the General's whiskers broadened down his cheeks till they reached his moustaches, and there was in his face and manner a sort of formal, though discontented, effacement, as of an individualist who has all his life been part of a system, from which he has issued at last, unconscious indeed of his loss, but with a vague sense of injury. He had never married, feeling it to be comparatively useless, owing to Horace having gained that year on ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... have his inferiors in rank assert themselves. That accounted, no doubt, for the meek self-effacement of the Turks who had come with him. Peter Measel did not appear to mind being rebuked. He crossed to the other side of the room, and proceeded to look the gipsies over with the air ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... capable. She was sober and industrious. The wine had never been better served; the dinner had rarely come to the table so hot. Had she been a butler of the first magnitude she could not so have discouraged the idea of acquaintance; her attraction, if anything, was a combination of her self-effacement and her ugliness. The latter might have been noticed as she entered the dining-room; it was soon forgotten in the unconsciously observed ease with which ...
— Paste Jewels • John Kendrick Bangs
... honored everywhere. I also tried to grow accustomed to the thought, which grew every day more certain to me, that I must live on so for the future—to plan my life, and shape out a certain kind of repentance for sins past. I decided that the only form my atonement could take was that of self-effacement—" ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... she suffered no hand but her own to do the last kind offices for her dear dead. And oh! how empty and lonely was now the little cottage, while the swift return to all the ordinary duties of life seemed such a cruel effacement. Uncle David watched her silently, but on the evening of the third day after the funeral ...
— Winter Evening Tales • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... society; and, in the eyes of those who loved her, one of the bravest, saddest, noblest of women. Of course Welby had shared in the immense effort of the family to comfort and console her. They had been so eager to accept his help; he had given it with such tact and self-effacement; and now, meanly, they must help Eugenie to dismiss him! For it was becoming too big a thing, this devotion of his, both in Eugenie's life and also in the eyes of the world. Lord Findon must needs suppose—he did not choose to know—that ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... pretty women, bent upon being seen, are as plentiful as the blackberries of Kentucky's July—in New York no one would have given her a second look, this quiet young woman screened in an atmosphere of self-effacement. ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... He decides to live a second and far better life through his son. Whenever a parent feels blue, or is not making good, he immediately declares that his hopes are in his little son anyhow. Then he has a sad, comfortable glow at his own self-effacement. Oh, these shirking fathers! They allow themselves to give way to weariness, or be halted by fears; but expect a son, when he comes to such moments, to find them quite jolly. He's to make up for the weakness of his father, and carry his own ...
— The Crow's Nest • Clarence Day, Jr.
... he has said that I imagine he intended the inference to be drawn,—if this is so, assimilation is nothing else than the communication of its own rhythms from the assimilating to the assimilated substance, to the effacement of the vibrations or rhythms heretofore existing in this last; and suitability for food will depend upon whether the rhythms of the substance eaten are such as to flow harmoniously into and chime in with those of the body which has eaten it, or whether they will refuse to act in ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... Secretary was again in the War Office. The early returns showed that the whole North was turning to him in enormous majorities. He showed no exultation. When the Assistant Secretary of the Navy spoke sharply of the complete effacement politically of Henry Winter Davis against whom he had a grudge, Lincoln said, "You have more of that feeling of personal resentment than I. Perhaps I have too little of it; but I never thought it paid. A man ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... that the dim object must have been a canoe, but its sudden effacement, and the loud cry for help, were mysteries too deep for immediate comprehension. He shouted with all the power of his voice full half a dozen times, but no answer ...
— Canoe Boys and Campfires - Adventures on Winding Waters • William Murray Graydon
... he was there—not a difficult matter, when he had in its perfection the secretarial manner of complete self-effacement. Said she reflectively, like one puzzling out ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... the hypothesis of a part of the good and evil works being left behind at the time of the soul's departure from the body, and another part later on, and the effacement of works thus taking place in a double way, that a sense can be found in the scriptural declaration of the soul proceeding on the path of the gods. For otherwise there would be a contradiction. For ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... taxi, and as Selwyn snapped the door he huddled in an opposite corner as if effacement were an obligation required by the situation in which he found himself. But he had never been in an automobile before, and his sense of awe soon yielded to eager anxiety to miss no thrill of the unexpected experience. His face was pressed ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... "Nature will have her way about this old world and its destiny. Self-development is the first law of life, not self-effacement." ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... upon English models and give it a complexion far removed, socially as well as politically, from Republican simplicity, coupled with a disposition to aggress upon and dictate to the individual states of the Union, to their nullification and practical effacement. ...
— Thomas Jefferson • Edward S. Ellis et. al.
... His firm and yet sensitive mouth and his thick, well-arched brows gave an air of authority and power to his face, while the more subdued expression which was habitual to his brother marked the man whose whole life had been spent in one long exercise of deference and self-effacement. The dauphin, on the other hand, with a more regular face than his father, had none of that quick play of feature when excited, or that kingly serenity when composed, which had made a shrewd observer say that Louis, if he were not the greatest monarch that ever lived, was at least the ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle
... and bit his lip. His dulled realization of what Yale had been to him was quickened by this tormenting comrade of the brave days of old, but he could not be shaken from his attitude of morbid self-effacement. ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... habits in thought or conduct there are good and real reasons in the nature of things. To leave such habits attached to false opinions is to lessen the weight of these natural or spontaneous reasons, and so to do more harm in the long run than effacement of them seems for a time to do good. Most excellences in human character have a spontaneous root in our nature. Moreover if they had not, and where they have not, there is always a valid and real external defence for them. The unreal defence must be weaker than the ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... sentiment than our frequent elections, but in 1854 conditions were peculiar. The repeal of the Missouri Compromise had outraged the North and indicated that a new party must be formed to resist the extension of slavery. In the disorganization of the Democratic party, and the effacement of the Whig, nowhere may the new movement so well be traced as in the news and editorial columns of the newspapers, and in the speeches of the Northern leaders, many of these indeed being printed nowhere else than ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... see this charming woman, this admirable friend, pass away from him. He had never so unreservedly qualified her as while confronted in thought with such a possibility; in spite of which there was small doubt for him that as an answer to his long riddle the mere effacement of even so fine a feature of his situation would be an abject anticlimax. It would represent, as connected with his past attitude, a drop of dignity under the shadow of which his existence could only become the most ...
— The Beast in the Jungle • Henry James
... dispersed Jews did the same lest they should be sent back to Palestine. Since then the world, bereft of its Jews and its Irish, has been a tame dull place. Is there no pathos for you in this story? Can you not understand now why I am come to visit the scene of this tragic effacement of a race ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... his painting (I apprehend this through his own persistently modest observations) at which he works out his purpose more excellently than Watteau; of whom he has trusted himself to speak at last, with a wonderful self-effacement, pointing out in each of his pictures, for the rest so just and true, how Antony would have managed this or that, and, with what an easy superiority, have done ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... be careful," Mrs. Frayling admonished him with some sharpness. The performance had been prolonged. Not without intention had she effaced herself. But, by both performance and effacement, she had been not a little bored, having a natural liking for the limelight. She, therefore, hit out—to regret her indiscretion ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... to get on alone. Immediately get off on other side. Nearly upset the pretty girl. Polite self-effacement impossible when one is at the mercy of a mere machine. After a time manage better. And at last get started and ride alone for short distances. Always tumble off ignominiously just as I meet the pretty girl. Instructor urges ...
— Mr. Punch Awheel - The Humours of Motoring and Cycling • J. A. Hammerton
... harvest of the sea. (2) Among the cleverer animals it looks as if the creature sometimes sought out a spot where it was most inconspicuous. A spider may place itself in the middle of a little patch of lichen, where its self-effacement is complete. Perhaps it is more comfortable as well as safer to rest in surroundings the general colour of which is like that of the animal's body. (3) The fishes that live among the coral-reefs are startling in their ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... between 1920 and 1995, with its incalculable waste of blood and treasure, its dreadful conflicts of armies and more dreadful massacres by passionate mobs, its kaleidoscopic changes of government and incessant effacement and redrawing of boundaries of states, its interminable tale of political assassinations and proscriptions—all the horrors incident to intestinal wars of a naturally lawless race—had so exhausted and dispirited the surviving protagonists ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... to excess. He judged it to be about two- or three-and-twenty. At his approach it drew as close as possible to the sideboard. It had the air of cultivating assiduously the art of self-effacement, for its face, when looked at, achieved ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... on to effacement of other wing of allied forces. ATKINSON wanted to put question to JOKIM about his Coinage Bill. Took some pains in framing it; handed it in at table; next day question appeared on paper shorn ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 1, 1891 • Various
... mild and inoffensive, and his watery pale eyes and receding chin gave one the idea that he was hardly to be trusted astride anything more spirited than a gold-headed cane. And yet, somehow, he aroused compassion rather than any sense of the ludicrous: he had that look of shrinking self-effacement which comes of a recent humiliation, and, in spite of all extravagances, he was obviously a gentleman; while something in his manner indicated that his natural tendency would, once at all events, have been to ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... another, that business is at an end for him. Perhaps poor Beatriz, seeing her son in such a high place at Court, has effaced herself for his sake; perhaps the appointment was given on condition of such effacement; we ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... child? Well, by the time that she grew up, if she lived to grow up, all the trouble and scandal would be forgotten, and the effacement of a discredited parent could be no great loss to her. Moreover, my life was insured for 3000 pounds in an office that took the risk ...
— Doctor Therne • H. Rider Haggard
... whether I should not abandon the struggle altogether— leave this sad world of ordinary life for which I am so ill fitted, abandon the name of Cummins for some professional pseudonym, complete my self-effacement, and—a thing of tricks and tatters, of posing and pretence—go upon the stage. It seems my only resort—"to hold the mirror up to Nature." For in the ordinary life, I will confess, no one now seems to regard me as both sane and sober. Only upon the stage, I feel convinced, will people ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... remained almost rigidly still, as if he would make amends for the slight noise of his entrance by subsequent self-effacement. The succession of pictures, even the surrender of Breda and the scene of the jolly drinkers, shared his attention with that part of the room in which he had seen the bishop rise, but he soon realised that no further discoveries were possible as yet in ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... teacher, which is noble, but to our love of finding and embracing truth for ourselves, which is still nobler. People who like their teacher to be as a king publishing decrees with herald and trumpet, perhaps find Mr. Mill colourless. Yet this habitual effacement of his own personality marked a delicate and very rare shade in his reverence for ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 3 (of 3) - Essay 2: The Death of Mr Mill - Essay 3: Mr Mill's Autobiography • John Morley
... greater birds, the Dinornis and Epiornis, as well as the interesting Dodo, have vanished from the southern isles which they inhabited. In the century to come we can foresee that this process of effacement of the ancient life will go on with ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... Road and gone to an expensive nursing home, to insist later upon his meeting the bill. For all her awakened instinct of self, the fact of her still deciding to remain at Mrs Gowler's was a yet further sacrifice on the altar of the loved one. Perhaps this further self-effacement where her lover was concerned urgently moved her to stand no trifling in respect of others. Consequently, when about half-past ten Mrs Gowler opened the door, accompanied by her idiot son, Oscar, who looked ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... have hoped to escape notice by a policy of judicious self-effacement, but unhappily his long, blank, uninterested face was held by his companions to bear an implied reproach; and being delicately sensitive on this point, they kicked his legs viciously, which made him extremely glad ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... self-effacement was perhaps the wisest thing under the circumstances, for the Board, as appointed, being unconnected with woman suffrage, proved an immense source of education to the conservative women of the whole world—an education not needed by the radical women of our own ranks. I think the ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... herself to a pained protest: "Oh surely not; not Bach; I do not come for my Bach to Okraska. She belongs too definitely to the romantics to grasp Bach. Beethoven, if you will; she may give us the Appassionata superbly; but not Bach; she lacks self-effacement." ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... took shape, and it was decided that France should participate in the Congress and send three representatives. It was the first time that France had asserted herself since the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, but it was time for her now to emerge from her self-imposed effacement, and take her place in the Congress of nations. There were many discussions, both public and private, before the plenipotentiaires were named, and a great unwillingness on the part of many very intelligent and patriotic Frenchmen to see the country launching itself upon dangerous ground and ...
— My First Years As A Frenchwoman, 1876-1879 • Mary King Waddington
... a father. If he hesitates a moment between his attention to his wife and the effacement of his happiness, what shall I ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... the false love that grasps everything; of the passionate, eloquent, suffering eyes, full of jealousy and yearning, fierce hate and fiercer desire, and behind all, yes, dominating all, the struggle for martyr-like self-effacement whose cry forever is, not for my sake, but for the sake of one that I love. Great waves of pity overwhelmed every other emotion in Helene's breast, as she leaned forward. "My poor child," she said, "how intensely ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... about a year at this period—not steadily, because now and then would come a day when with sadness and averted eyes he would say, "I think I'll be goin' now, for a little while," after which the effacement of William for perhaps a week, followed by his return some morning, pale, delapidated, as on the ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... saints are known by their achievements as men and cannot be selected among infant prodigies.[14] It was the general though not universal opinion that one who had entered on the career of a Bodhisattva could not fall so low as to be reborn in any state of punishment, but the spirit of humility and self-effacement which has always marked the Buddhist ideal tended to represent his triumph as incalculably distant. Meanwhile, although in the whirl of births he was on the upward grade, he yet had his ups and downs and there is no evidence that Indian or Far Eastern Buddhists arrogated ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... into one's work: whether anything at all of it: whether one can put there anything else:—is clearly a far-reaching and complex question. Serviceable as [36] the basis of a precautionary maxim towards the conduct of our work, self-effacement, or impersonality, in literary or artistic creation, is, perhaps, after all, as little possible as a strict realism. "It has always been my rule to put nothing of myself into my works," says another great master of French prose, Gustave Flaubert; but, luckily as we may think, ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... he was working out his destiny. "How can I best help?" she asked herself, which showed that the spirit aroused in her that afternoon had not in reality died. And her intellect relentlessly pointed out to her that her only aid would come from her self-effacement, her standing one side. When the great work ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... or after, how she reached this mystic climax of effacement; she was only conscious, through her anguish, of that lift of the heart which made one of the saints declare that joy was the inmost core of sorrow. For it was indeed a kind of joy she felt, if old names must serve for such new meanings; a surge of liberating ...
— Sanctuary • Edith Wharton
... in two, divided into opponents and adherents of monarchy. As if to insure the disasters of such an antagonism, the Assembly, which numbered among its members every man in France of ripe political experience, committed the incredible folly of self-effacement, voting that not one of its members should be eligible to the legislature about to ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... whom Pheidias moulds, Clothed in marmoreal calm divine, Veils all that strength 'neath beauty's line, All energy in repose enfolds;— So He, in self-effacement great, Magnanimous to endure ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... of sign.] Obliteration — N. obliteration; erasure, rasure^; cancel, cancellation; circumduction^; deletion, blot; tabula rasa [Lat.]; effacement, extinction. V. efface, obliterate, erase, raze^, rase^, expunge, cancel; blot out, take out, rub out, scratch out, strike out, wipe out, wash out, sponge out; wipe off, rub off; wipe away; deface, render illegible; draw the pen through, apply the sponge. be effaced &c; leave no trace &c 550; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... so refined that there was scarcely anything of her; her presence was barely perceptible. She had learnt the art of self-effacement to the point of showing no trace of being there at all. To add to the effect of not being noticeable, she wore a dress exactly the same colour as the sofa on which she sat—like those insects who, when hiding from their foes, become the colour of the leaves on which they live. ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... they never exceeded 5000 men. The magic of discipline and cohesion gone, Cromwell's Ironsides ceased to be an effective instrument of war. But, spread throughout the villages of England, they powerfully leavened the national character, and prevented the effacement of a type which the strain of Civil War and the white-heat of religious enthusiasm had served to create. The threatenings of a sullen temper on the part of the army, who found their occupation gone, ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... regulations were as the sands of the sea for number, and as they all tended in the same direction, namely, to the effacement of his lively and ubiquitous offspring, it is hardly surprising that such a large and healthy family found it difficult, not to say impossible, to attain to his ideal of the whole duty of children. And although a desire not to transgress his code regarding silence and decorum in such ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... Not Vote. She compared them to some wild ducks that were born in a farmyard and as they were stepping timidly about the farmer said: "Them ducks can fly, they can fly miles, but they don't know it." "One reason why women do not vote," she said, "is the entire self-effacement of many, and another is the kindness of many men. These are lovely traits but they may be misapplied. Women sometimes efface themselves to an extent that is bad for their men as well as themselves, and men out of mistaken kindness ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... and of later years to the vast amount of business that its extension involves. And it has been a labour of love. Zamenhof is an idealist. His action, in all that concerns Esperanto, has been characterized throughout by a generosity and self-effacement that well correspond to the humanitarian nature of the inspiration that produced it. He has renounced all personal rights in and control of the Esperanto language, and kept studiously in the background ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... him. Whatever her anxiety or affliction could have been, the importance of his visit had evidently banished it from her mind. She hovered over him as his mother may have done when he was in his cradle, while the cheerful self-effacement in which slavery had trained her lent a pathetic charm to ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... Rishis think that the distinctions between the lower, the middling, and the higher classes of society are eternal, and nothing can be a greater calamity than the effacement of those distinctions. Equality of men, in their eyes, is an ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... as all the men had gone who had listened to their country's call, and she, Crystal, could not convey to him even by a message, by a word, that she understood all that he had done for her, all that his actions had meant of devotion, of self-effacement, of pure ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... a headlong gallop was born in him. The poem was pencilled on the cover of Bartoli's "De' Simboli trasportati al Morale", a favourite book and constant companion of his; and, in spite of perfect effacement as far as the sense goes, the pencil dints are still visible. The little poem 'Home Thoughts from the Sea' was written at the same time, and in the ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... what, with their wealth, she and Franklin could do for Helen, seemed, really, her strongest hold on life. It was the brightest thing that she had to look forward to, and she looked forward to it with complete self-effacement. She saw the beautiful Italian villa where Helen should be the fitting centre, the English house where Helen, rather than she, should entertain. She felt that she asked nothing more for herself. She ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... sitting in a very high chair, he in a low one, so that her eyes were above his. The professor was blent with the shadows of some corner, in silent self-effacement, with a note-book ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... imperious demands of the entirely efficient and clear-minded, a tolerance of imperfection. Thus for these efficient and clear-minded members there is always, in the church as in the family, a perpetual opportunity of humility, self-effacement, gentle acceptance; of exerting that love which must be joined to power and a sound mind if the full life of the Spirit is to be lived. In the realm of the supernatural this is a solid gain; though not a gain which we are very quick to appreciate in our vigorous youth. Did we look upon the ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... soft, polished, hairless skin, an Egyptian woman, he stated, most desired to obtain embonpoint; men admired fat women and women sought to become fat. "The idea of a very fat woman," Sonnini adds, "is nearly always accompanied in Europe by that of softness of flesh, effacement of form, and defect of elasticity in the outlines. It would be a mistake thus to represent the women of Turkey in general, where all seek to become fat. It is certain that the women of the East, more favored by ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... defiance, almost of contempt, in her voice as she said the last words. The well-fed, much-too-well dressed Baroness stared angrily at the dowdy old woman who had come forth from her usual and seemly position of effacement to ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... the business or profession, the active work of life, which is relinquished, the position of the individual vis-a-vis the family being unaffected; in the other case, it is the position of head of the family which is relinquished, with the result of the complete effacement of the individual so far as the family is concerned. Moreover, although abdication usually implies the abandonment of the business, or profession, of the person who abdicates, this does not necessarily follow, ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... passages are as original as they are magnificent. The finest bars in the work are those in which Senta declares her faith in her "mission," and the Dutchman yields himself to unreasoning adoration. Other moods came to Wagner, but never again that mood of rapturous self-effacement. It is perhaps a young man's mood; certainly it is identical with the ecstasy with which one contemplates a perfect piece of art, or a life greatly lived; and here ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... in Desargues's time.* It is not necessary to suppose that this effacement of Desargues's work for two centuries was due to the savage attacks of his critics. All this was in accordance with the fashion of the time, and no man escaped bitter denunciation who attempted to improve on the methods of the ancients. Those ...
— An Elementary Course in Synthetic Projective Geometry • Lehmer, Derrick Norman
... morally no claim upon him had always led Tess to suspend her impulse to send these notes; and to the family at the Vicarage, therefore, as to her own parents since her marriage, she was virtually non-existent. This self-effacement in both directions had been quite in consonance with her independent character of desiring nothing by way of favour or pity to which she was not entitled on a fair consideration of her deserts. She had set herself to stand or fall by her qualities, and to waive such ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... I worshipped Aunt Emmy, who represented in my somewhat colourless orphaned existence the beautiful and romantic side of life. Aunt Emmy looked romantic, and the contrast between her refined, gentle self-effacement and the commonplace egotism of her two men was of the glaring nature which appeals to a young ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... as briefly as might be, of that morning's great experience; of Hugh's return, and noble self-effacement; of the clear light she had received, and the decision to which she had come; and of how she was now going forward, with a free heart, ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... to Ko-tan, "lest Jad-ben-Otho, mistaking their intention, strike them dead." The effect of his words was immediate upon the men in the front rank of those who faced him, each seeming suddenly to acquire a new modesty that compelled him to self-effacement behind those directly in his rear—a modesty ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... its brilliance, and the sense of a certain bigness in the man passed through him. He had been prepared for his quiet, well-bred dignity. All the priests he had known were thoroughbreds in their manner and bearing; their self-imposed restraint, self-effacement, absence of all unnecessary gesture, and modulated voices had made them so; but the warmth of this one's underlying nature was as unexpected as it ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith
... which had appeared in connection with this episode continued to show themselves in a desultory way until the end. A few individuals threw what impediments they could in the path of this Committee, and thereby furnished the only exception to the wonderful exhibition of loyalty and self effacement that manifested itself in ...
— The New York Stock Exchange in the Crisis of 1914 • Henry George Stebbins Noble
... Catholic interests; therefore, according as his temporal power diminishes his spiritual power expands, to such an extent that, in the end, after three-quarters of a century, just at the moment when the former is to fall to the ground the latter is to rise above the clouds; through the effacement of his human character his superhuman character becomes declared; the more the sovereign prince disappears, the more does the sovereign pontiff assert himself. The clergy, despoiled like him of its hereditary ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... not so much like a man in high spirits, but like one of an approved good-nature, habitually self-forgetful, accustomed to please and to follow others. I have remarked in old soldiers much the same smiling sadness and sociable self-effacement. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a wide interval between the grotesque effrontery that wears the Hellenic crown and the undeviatingly decorous self-effacement of the Dutch sovereign; and yet there is something of a common complexion runs through the whole range of establishments, all the way from the quasi-dynastic to the pseudo-dynastic. For reasons unavoidable ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... fastening her mind upon the most elevated and revered ideas conceivable. She saw the eternal Tao flowing like a great green river of souls, smooth and mighty and resistless; and she willed that she too might become a part of that desirable self-effacement, safe in surrender. Men striving to create a Tao for personal ends beat out their lives in vain. It was the figure of the river developing, like floating on a deliberate all-powerful tide or struggling ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... would thus twinkle on as before, but a wonderful change would come over the planets. Were the sun to be obscured, the planets would also disappear from view. The midnight sky would thus experience the effacement of the planets one by one, while the stars would remain unaltered. It may seem difficult to realise how the brilliancy of Venus or the lustre of Jupiter have their origin solely in the beams which fall upon these bodies from the distant ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... gas and electric light companies for all the money they will have lost. That will bring those 163 old gentlemen to life again and double their remaining term of years to make up for their temporary effacement. They are patriotic hostages to Time for the summer only. You must remember that time is only a philosophical abstraction, with no real or tangible existence, and we have a right to do whatever we want ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... achieved distinction in the spiritualistic world. (He was an extraordinarily favoured medium, only he had had to stop for reasons of which Mrs. Tarrant possessed her version.) Even in a society much occupied with the effacement of prejudice there had been certain dim presumptions against this versatile being, who naturally had not wanted arts to ingratiate himself with Miss Greenstreet, her eyes, like his own, being fixed exclusively on the future. The young couple (he was considerably her elder) ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... the hope that it would arouse philanthropic endeavour to ameliorate the condition of American seamen. Throughout the volume there is a vein of deep, yet unobtrusive piety, and the reader is struck with her self-effacement, her courage, her reverent admiration for her young sailor husband, and her pride in his gallant ship and sturdy crew of native-born American seamen. In the Antarctic the young couple sailed many seas, and visited ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke
... even for a short distance, and in such positions as the older woman was able to secure, it was always with the promise that the child should be no nuisance. And so the young person grew up in a habit of self-effacement, and of sitting quietly in corners where she could not be seen or heard, instead of playing with other children of her own age. Then came a great hope, which even as she lay in bed and thought ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... less than two minutes from the instant of their encounter, they stood outside Troyon's back door, facing a cramped, malodorous alley-way—a dark and noisome souvenir of that wild mediaeval Paris whose effacement is an enduring monument to the fame ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... self-mortification; not mere self-sacrifice, but self-extinction; not mere morality, but absolute holiness." And further on in his address, Mozoomdar claimed that this asceticism is practically the essential principle in Christianity and the meaning of the cross of Christ: "This great law of self-effacement, poverty, suffering, death, is symbolized in the mystic cross so dear to you and dear to me. Christians, will you ever repudiate Calvary? Oneness of will and character is the sublimest and most difficult unity with God." The chief value of these quotations from ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... effacement of things, seeing the lights of the farmhouses in the long plain start into existence, and then remain fixed, like gold beetles pinned on a blue curtain. The chill evening drew her to him, till they seemed one; and full of the intimate happiness of the senses which comes of a long day spent ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... Bok enjoyed this hugely; the real Edward Bok did not. The one was bottled up in the other. It was a case of absolute self-effacement. The man behind the editor knew that if he followed his own personal tastes and expressed them in his magazine, a limited audience would be his instead of the enormous clientele that he was now reaching. It was the ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... support of a stronger nature; Audrey loved to support others; any form of suffering, mental or physical, appealed to her irresistibly. Her sympathy was often misplaced and excessive, and her power of self-effacement, under some circumstances, was even more remarkable, the word 'self-effacement' being rightly used here, as 'self-sacrifice' presupposes some consciousness of action. It was this last trait that caused genuine anxiety to those who knew and loved Audrey best; for who can tell to ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... experiment, and they seldom live long enough to pass their folly on. Only the mighty can afford not to walk circumspectly, and they are very few, and, with man about, even they have learnt wisdom. That is why the wild is so guarded, and why self-effacement becomes almost ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... sacrifice he was undergoing would be out of proportion to the good attained by it, and the interests of others to which he was postponing his own interests would not be so distinctly greater as to warrant the act of self-effacement. But now let us suppose that, in attending to the interests of the trust, he is neglecting the interests of others who have a claim upon him, or impairing his own efficiency as a public servant or a professional ...
— Progressive Morality - An Essay in Ethics • Thomas Fowler
... was curiously regardless of fame. He gave ungrudgingly of his knowledge to all who claimed his help and direction, and he trained many other men to great public service. In Mr. Alfred Lyttelton's happy phrase, he possessed "rare self-effacement." There are many instances in his early career of this habit of self-effacement, and the habit increased with years. Remonstrance met with the reply: "What does it matter who gets the credit so long as the ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... he went by launch into Naples in the interests of his banking, and did not return for luncheon; and she had long uninterrupted hours for the enjoyment of her pleasant domain. Altogether, his demands upon her were reasonable to the point of self- effacement. He laughed a great deal; this annoyed her youthful gravity and she remonstrated sharply more than once, but he only leaned back and laughed harder. Then she would either grow coldly disdainful or leave ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... be full.'" But the quality Rashi possessed in the highest degree was simplicity, modesty, one may almost say, humility; and what contributed not a little to the even tenor of his existence was his capacity for self-effacement. ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber
... by some one or more individuals; practised, probably, in a consciously intelligent manner during many successive lives, until the habit has acquired the highest perfection which the circumstances admitted; and, finally, so deeply impressed upon the memory as to survive that effacement of minor impressions which generally takes place in every ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... for ordinary comprehension. But although men on both sides stood ready to die for the decisions of their councils which they did not understand, there was underlying the whole question the political jealousy existing between the two: Byzantium, embittered by the effacement of its political jurisdiction in the West, exasperated at the overweening pretensions of Roman bishops; Rome, watching for opportunity to cajole or compel the Eastern Church to submit to her ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele
... against it, and thus resemble the Indian who, however cruelly he may be tortured, considers himself revenged on his tormentor by the bitterness of his own tongue. Supposing we withdraw from pain into nonentity, into the deaf, dumb, and rigid sphere of self-surrender, self-forgetfulness, self-effacement: one is another person when one leaves these protracted and dangerous exercises in the art of self-mastery, one has one note of interrogation the more, and above all one has the will henceforward to ask more, ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... to the point of self-effacement, instantly hushed all discontent and, before it, even the newspaper editors ...
— On the Trail of Grant and Lee • Frederick Trevor Hill
... to what my wife had told me of this young lady's behavior when she was with her mother, her submissiveness, her entire self-effacement, up to a certain point, I did not know quite what to make of her present independence, not to say freedom. I thought she might perhaps have been kept so strictly in the background, with young men, that she was rather disposed to make the most of any chance at them which offered. ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... spear into a pruning hook. With this to leaven them, the rough habiliments were most becoming. In a word, they supplied the very setting which manhood should have; and since Anthony, sitting there at his meat, was the personification of virility, they served, as all true settings should, by self-effacement to magnify their treasure. The ex-officer might have ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... hardly the typical lazy, effeminate, creature whose only interests in life were holidays and the society of such ladies as would receive him. On the contrary he was conscientious, retiring to a point of absolute self-effacement, and able to forget himself only in his one great passion: music. He was a Pole of the Chopinesque type: and it was in spite of himself that he gave his pupil, besides the regular studies, a very thorough grounding in the classical masters, taught him something of the spirit of Schumann ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... small and sallow young man with a pointed nose and bright, bulbous brown eyes like a chipmunk's. Indeed, he reminded one of a chipmunk. As he whisked himself in and seized Ditmar's hand he gave a confused impression of polite self-effacement as well as of dignity and self-assertion; he had the air of one who expects opposition, and though by no means desiring it, is prepared to deal with it. Janet smiled. She had a sudden impulse to drop the heavy book that lay on the corner of the desk to ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... was as a scholar and a theologian that he acquired his chief reputation among his contemporaries. On his return from exile he found such engrossing occupation in the business of his see, that he took little part in politics for several years. His self-effacement strengthened the position ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... State to which his reason and his maturest thought direct him. He must lend himself to the development of aggregatory ideas that favour the civilising process, and he must do his best to promote the disintegration of aggregations and the effacement of aggregatory ideas, that keep men narrow and unreasonably prejudiced ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... no desire for vengeance, and in his brave black hands he bore nothing but gifts to the South—gifts of golden leisure, untold wealth, baronial pleasure and splendor, infinite service, and withal, a phenomenal effacement of himself. Economically weak, yet singularly favored by a fortuitous combination of circumstances, slave labor flourished and expanded until at length it came into rough contact and rivalry with modern industrialism as it leaped into life under the magical influence ...
— Modern Industrialism and the Negroes of the United States - The American Negro Academy, Occasional Papers No. 12 • Archibald H. Grimke
... accomplishment of the plan of happiness, sublime and disastrous, which he had formed for her. He had resolved to pass out of her life in order to save her from his old age and his poverty; he wished her to be rich and free, to enjoy her youth, far away from him; this indeed was utter self-effacement, complete absorption in the love of another. And she felt a profound gratitude, a sweet solace in the thought, mingled with a sort of angry bitterness against evil fortune. Then, suddenly, the happy years of her childhood and her long youth spent beside him who had ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... constantly—either by desire or the force of circumstances—unselfish. A faint flush swept into Brigit's face under the effect of an experience so novel. Their twofold consciousness had all the pathos of self-effacement, and all the thrill of satisfied egoism. Such instants cannot last, and they are shortest when one's habits of thought are antagonistic to such luxury. Brigit sighed deeply, and roused herself with a painful sense that the minute she wilfully cut short had ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... Now for the third time I am come, and I flatter myself that to-day again I shall obtain a reconciliation, and on grounds exceptionally just. My eyes bear witness that our hearts are in accord; you and we alike are pained at the effacement of Plataeae and Thespiae. Is it not then reasonable that out of agreement should spring concord rather than discord? It is never the part, I take it, of wise men to raise the standard of war for the sake of petty differences; but where there is nothing but unanimity ...
— Hellenica • Xenophon
... true to itself at any cost; it would be quite sexless and just before it would be womanly and merciful. At least he hoped it would. Ideals are much too precious to be shattered recklessly by mere personal considerations; and he told himself, in a fine glow of artistic self-effacement, that he should be sorry to purchase even so great a boon as his liberty at the price of ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... will—there is no way but practice. And the practice consists in two exercises: (a) that of concentration—in holding the thought steadily for a time on one subject, or point of a subject; and (b) that of effacement—in effacing any given thought from the mind, and determining NOT to entertain it for such and such a time. Both these exercises are difficult. Failure in practicing them is certain—and may even extend over years. But the power equally certainly grows WITH practice. And ultimately there ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... Mary was already a much changed girl. As Grace had threatened, she had been initiated into the Girl Scout secrets to the extent of taking the "good cheer and helpful" pledge, and that this had furnished the stray child with a practical motto, was very evident in the almost complete effacement of her former wistful, dejected and often gloomy moods. Altogether it was a delightful achievement, due principally to the subtle and gentle influence of the sincere little ...
— The Girl Scouts at Bellaire - Or Maid Mary's Awakening • Lilian C. McNamara Garis
... "was like a child seeking the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. He was always looking for romance, forgetting that the most wonderful romance is that of the hearthstone and of the quiet heart. If he had ever really loved he would have known the joy of self-sacrifice, of self-effacement—but he did ...
— Glory of Youth • Temple Bailey
... large mound of chamber-pots formed an astonishing background, and against all this white and grey effacement the men who stood on high ladders dusting the crockery came out like strange ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... similarity of their platforms and the geographical distribution of their candidates that the two labor parties were competing for the same vote. At a conference held in Chicago to effect a union, however, the Union Labor party insisted on the complete effacement of the other ticket and the single taxers refused to submit. In the election which followed, the Union Labor party received about 147,000 votes, largely from the South and West and evidently the old Greenback vote, while ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... the Puritan boot, they had no sympathy with their masters, nor their ways—vide the rebound, immediately after Oliver Cromwell's death, and the return to the old state of things, which has never altered since, except as a matter of fashion. Yet, even then, there were protests against this effacement of Christ-tide, and many have been handed down to us, differing naturally very much in style. One really amusing one has the merit of being short: and when the reader of this book has perused it, I believe he will thank me for having reproduced it. ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... that deserve this corrective especially are insubordination, sulkiness and sullenness; it is good to stir up the lazy; it is necessary to instil in the child's mind a saving sense of its own inferiority and to inculcate lessons of humility, self-effacement and self-denial. It should scourge dishonesty and lying. The bear licks its cub into shape; let the parent go to the bear, inquire of its ways and be wise. His children will then have a moral shape and a form of character that will stand them in good ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... subsequent career proves that this reason was not imperative. Saga, after a most useful reign of thirteen years, stepped down frankly in favour of his younger brother. There is no valid reason to endorse the view of some historians that these acts of self-effacement were inspired by an indolent distaste for the cares of kingship. Neither Heijo nor Saga shrank from duty in any form. During his brief tenure of power the former unflinchingly effected reforms of the most distasteful kind, as the dismissal of superfluous ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... taken up with the embarrassed adjustment of their new relation to Mr. Ramy and to each other. Ann Eliza's ardour carried her to new heights of self-effacement, and she invented late duties in the shop in order to leave Evelina and her suitor longer alone in the back room. Later on, when she tried to remember the details of those first days, few came back to her: she knew only that she got up ...
— Bunner Sisters • Edith Wharton
... open break in the household calm, hitherto undisturbed on the surface. Low company and its brutalizing influences were tending to bring about a state of things to which the most patient of wives might find it hard to submit. A role of complete self-effacement was not one it was in her power long to sustain, and the utter moral solitude into which she was thrown consolidated those forces inclining her to the extreme of self-assertion. For together with trials without came the growing sense of superiority, the ennui and unrest springing ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... passage should be told, for it had importance in the history of the Convention; and also it conveys an idea of the limits to which Redmond carried self-effacement. It is important because it acted on Ulster like a red rag shown to a bull. Obviously, if this were the Nationalist view, then the Home Rule Act could not be said to give self-government—for under its system of contract ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... to think," she continued, "that woman's supreme happiness is to be gained by self-effacement. I suppose her custom is with you, as it formerly was here, to renounce her own name ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... self-discipline is all too rare, let us hope he will change his mind), Oscar Sauer, Mathilde Sussin (whose sublime Deaconess in 'When We Dead Awake' so fully meets Ibsen's requirement of the actor of this character: complete self-effacement until the close, and then tragic acting of the highest order; Alfred Kerr, whose words—don't you think?—no other living critic can equal, has called her 'eine der Schattengestalten dieses groessten ...
— Poet Lore, Volume XXIV, Number IV, 1912 • Various
... but now she smiled and the two chatted with a forced vivacity, pretending to ignore the thing of which each was thinking and, though vivacity was foreign to his nature, the sufferer joined in their conversation with a grim sort of self-effacement. Soon they saw another figure approaching by the flagged path. It was the figure of Eben Tollman and his manner was full of solicitude—but as he talked with the father, Farquaharson saw him more than once steal covert glances at the daughter. ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... Republicans, Socialists, and all the other anti-Clericals. Whatever liberalism or republicanism means, socialism cannot mean less than the economic solution of regality and aristocracy in Europe, and in Italy as elsewhere. It does not mean the old-fashioned revolution; it means simply the effacement of all social differences by equal industrial obligations. So far as the Socialists can characterize it, therefore, the actual municipal government of Rome is as antimonarchical as it is antipapal. But the syndic of Rome is a man of education, of culture, of intelligence, and he is evidently ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... a child early destined to sacrifice and self-effacement, and as he grew older and other youngsters came to fill Cassie's cabin, he took up his lot with the meekness of an infantile Moses. Like a Moses he was, too, leading his little flock to the promised land, when he grew to the age at which, barefooted and one-shifted, he ...
— The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... indistinguishable, that Milly had laid aside. This represented, he perceived, the opposite pole from such an effect as that of her wonderful entrance, under her aunt's eyes—he had never forgotten it—the day of their younger friend's failure at Lancaster Gate. She was, in her accepted effacement—it was actually her acceptance that made the beauty and repaired the damage—under her aunt's eyes now; but whose eyes were not effectually preoccupied? It struck him none the less certainly that almost the first thing ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... of the effacement of individual life. One sighs, remembering that it is even so, that life passes, sunrise after sunrise, moonlight upon moonlight, evening upon evening, and we like May-flies on the surface of a stream, no more than they for ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... whenever our motives are challenged or misunderstood, if only for our children's sake. But even that will not long be necessary, for the vindication of our principles will be made manifest in the working out of the problems with which the republic has to grapple. If, however, the effacement of state lines and the complete centralization of the government shall prove to be the wisdom of the future, the poetry of life will still find its home in the old order, and those who loved their State best will live longest ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... that which is as near as great natures may come to the conceiving of the celestial spirit from an emissary angel; and she trembled, the fire ran through her. It seemed to her, that she would be called to help or that certainly they were nearing to an effacement of the woefullest of evils; and if not helping, it would still be a blessedness for her ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... to a reaction against the influence and authority of the Greek clergy. The spiritual domination of the Greek patriarchate had tended more effectually than the temporal power of the Turks to the effacement of Bulgarian nationality. After the conquest of the Peninsula the Greek patriarch became the representative at the Sublime Porte of the Rum-millet, the Roman nation, in which all the Christian nationalities ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... into his own sophomore class. Then was there the extraordinary spectacle of a college boy— quiet, serious, toiling—making the slow way toward the humanities under charge of murder and awaiting trial for his life. And that course Jason Hawn followed with a dignity, reticence, and self- effacement that won the steadily increasing respect of every student and teacher within the college walls. A belief in his innocence became wide-spread, and that coming trial began to be regarded in time as a trial of the good name of the college itself. A change of venue had ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.
... kissed and whispered and come so close in the little adventurous familiarities of the young, shocked me profoundly. I! I! And Rawdon didn't find me indispensable either. I felt I was suddenly repudiated by the universe and threatened with effacement, that in some positive and emphatic way I must at once assert myself. There was no balm in the religion I had learnt, or in the irreligion I had adopted, for ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... should be got with joy, should flower from a sublime moment of perfect union when the man and the woman were lifted out of themselves to some divine pinnacle of experience, of soul and body union and self-effacement. Then conception would be but the carrying over of their deep yearning, each for the other, the hunger of souls and bodies ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... peeping down at them over the thicket above, yawned impatiently and glanced about him for the most convenient avenue of self-effacement when ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... meanwhile be introduced into the womb and the snared limbs seized and pressed against its walls so as to secure the rotation of the uterus along with the body of the fetus. The relaxation of the constriction and the effacement of the spiral folds will show when success has been gained, and the different members at one end of the body should then be brought up so as ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... in short, as if they did not know how to manage their own affairs. Mr. Lay's dreams were suddenly dispelled, and his philanthropic schemes fell to the ground. Neither Prince Kung nor his colleagues had any intention to pave the way for their own effacement. ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... further, that I consider these tender expressions of general regard out of place now, and that I deeply regret my share in them. Today at least, no friend of Oldendorf has any occasion to praise your chivalrous sentiments or your self-effacement. ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... the Irishwoman's mental outfit, namely, the capacity even to conceive that ideal of impersonal self-effacement, which, as Paul said truthfully, is the everywhere accepted standard for servants. Her loquacity was a never-ending joke to Madeleine Lowder and her husband, who were exulting in a couple of deft, silent, expensive Japanese "boys" and who, since Madeleine ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... much self-effacement!" he grinned. "I enjoyed the last occasion when you were my guest, so I'm ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... faulty one, whereas the belief imposed by authority is no interpretation of experience at all. It involves no personal effort. Its blind acceptance seals the resignation of the will and the intellect to effacement and stultification. ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... grown scarcely discernible among the concealing grass and weeds, although the track itself had been built but recently. This railroad sought to efface itself, even as the land sought to aid in its effacement, as though neither believed that this was lawful spot for it. One might say it made a blot upon this picture ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... his character, socially, seemed to be self-effacement, high-bred courtesy, never-failing consideration for others. He was the most charming companion conceivable, having intimately known so many important and celebrated people, and liking to speak of them; but one would never have guessed ...
— Social Pictorial Satire • George du Maurier
... to learn, but also quite ready to teach the stranger its own wisdom. And in similar fashion provincial pride helps the individual man to keep his self-respect even when the vast forces that work toward industrial consolidation, and toward the effacement of individual initiative, are besetting the life at every turn. For a man is in large measure what his social consciousness makes him. Give him the local community that he loves and cherishes, that he is proud to honor and to serve, make his ideal of that community lofty,—give him faith ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... he was not exceedingly optimistic about that best. And further, he was not exceedingly optimistic about the young man. He could imagine himself, in a like situation, consigning Nick and his conditions to the nether regions; certainly not submitting meekly to a year's effacement of his personality for the sake of money. Such ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... flattering paragraph in type,—with the veiled hint that he might be the next candidate for Mayor, on a reform ticket—he sat very still for a moment or two, while his hand shook slightly. No backward step, now! His head was in the noose. He wondered, with a fresh burst of self-effacement, what people would say about it. One thing—they wouldn't accuse him of the truth. Nobody but Mr. Mix himself knew the whole truth—unless perhaps it were Henry Devereux. Henry had developed a ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... Judithe attempted to have a tete-a-tete with Mrs. McVeigh, and learn more about Miss Loring's silent maid, who was the first person she saw on her return from the ride that morning. The absolute self-effacement of an individual whose repose suggested self-reliance, and whose well shaped head was poised so admirably as to suggest pride, made the sad-faced servant a fascinating personality to any one interested in questions concerning her race. No other had so won her attention since she made ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... habits of her life by removing her from her normal surroundings to the depressing exile of a factory-settlement. However much he blamed himself for exacting this sacrifice, it had been made so cheerfully that the consciousness of it never clouded his life with his mother; but her self-effacement made him the more alive to his own obligations, and having placed her in a difficult situation he had always been careful not to increase its difficulties by any imprudence in his conduct toward his employers. Yet, grave ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton |
