"Self-asserting" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... frozen gems pressed out by injured pride. On the other hand, there are men as soft, as modest, as celestially sympathetic, as almost any woman. Still, the cardinal contrast holds, that women are self-forgetful, men self-asserting; women hide their surplus affection under a feigned indifference; men hide their indifference under a feigned affection. Of course, in this comparison, depraved women are excluded: these are generally far more heartless and calculating than men. The aphorism of Rochefoucauld "In ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... Canadians. It kindled their imagination; from being colonists of no account in the backwash of the world's affairs, they became integrally a part of a great Imperial world-wide movement of expansion and domination; were they not of what Chamberlain called "that proud, persistent, self-asserting and resolute stock which is infallibly destined to be the predominating force in the future history and civilization of the world"? Moreover, it gave them a sense of their special importance here in Canada where the population was not "homogeneous ...
— Laurier: A Study in Canadian Politics • J. W. Dafoe
... share in time, perhaps, because they are not immortal in thought. Love, beauty, wisdom, goodness are intelligent, but this power moves only to seize its prey. It is not necessarily either malignant or the reverse, but it has no scope beyond demonstrating its existence. When conscious, self-asserting, it becomes (as power working for its own sake, unwilling to acknowledge love for its superior, must) the devil. That is the legend of Lucifer, the star that would not own its centre. Yet, while it is unconscious, ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... what sort of notions and traditions our forefathers had, and what sort of song inspired them. Let the poetic fragments which breathe forth their fierce bravery in battle and their trust in fierce gods who helped them, be treasured with affectionate reverence. These seafaring, invading, self-asserting men were the English of old time, and were our fathers who did rough work by which we are profiting. They had virtues which incorporated themselves in wholesome usages to which we trace our own political blessings. Let us know and acknowledge ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... speech after two or three failures. All who knew him, his whole party, had been aware of his failure; and his one good speech had been regarded by many as no very wonderful effort. But he was a man who was pleasant to other men,—not combative, not self-asserting beyond the point at which self-assertion ceases to be a necessity of manliness. Nature had been very good to him, making him comely inside and out,—and with this comeliness he had crept ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... not only richly endowed but highly cultivated; at any rate her small vanity had vanished also, and she was in contrast as self-distrustful and hesitating in manner as she formerly had been abrupt and self-asserting. Moreover she had either lost her interest in her neighbor's petty affairs, or else had been made to feel that a tendency to gossip was not a captivating trait, and we heard no more about what this one said or that one wore on her return ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... well. But shall the New Redeem the pledge the Old Year made, Or prove a self-asserting heir? But healthy hearts few qualms invade: By shot-chests grouped in bays 'tween guns The gossips ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... Quinet laughed, and she probably did understand more than reluctant, anxious Isaac Gardon thought she did, of his winning, gracious, yet haughty, head-strong little charge, so humbly helpful one moment, so self-asserting and childish the next, so dear to him, yet so ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of seventeen, education complete, looking down on us all—terribly learned (I know for a fact that she kept Mrs. Hemans in her pocket); terribly self-asserting, too. If she had not married happily, and not had a little brood about her in after years (which she did), I think she would have made one of the most terrible Sorosians of our time. At least that is the way I think of it now, looking back across the basted turkey (which she ate without gravy) ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin |
