"Self-contained" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... gained this grand epitome of knowledge: Each human being has a heart and soul, And self is but an atom of the whole. I hold he is best learned and most wise Who best and most can love and sympathize. Book-wisdom makes us vain and self-contained; Our banded minds go round in little grooves; But constant friction with the world removes These iron foes to freedom, and we rise To grander heights, and, all untrammelled, find A better atmosphere and clearer skies; And through its ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... animation, with its gratitude, its effusion, and eloquence. Fair as the young men of the Elgin marbles, the Adam of the Sistine Chapel is unlike them in a total absence of that balance and completeness which express so well the sentiment of a self-contained, independent life. In that languid figure there is something rude and satyr-like, something akin to the rugged hillside on which it lies. His whole form is gathered into an expression of mere expectancy and reception; he has hardly strength enough to lift his finger [76] to touch ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... talked of our lives before us. To that sacred spot I would lead Sylvia's daughter, and, passing gently from the past to the present, I would tell her of my love and of my fondest hopes. How dignified and appropriate such a spot for a frank, calm, and self-contained avowal! ...
— The Romance of an Old Fool • Roswell Field
... two other boys were then called on as witnesses to the great agitation which Eric had shown during the investigation in the school-room, and then Gibson, who was a sensible, self-contained fellow, said, "I have now done my part. I have shown that the accused had a grudge against Mr. Gordon at the time of the occurrence, and had threatened to be revenged on him; that he was the last boy in the room during the time ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... afterward, to remember for how long she had thought the woman who attended on her a servant. And yet she did think her so until the morning when it suddenly occurred to her that it was not possible any ordinary servant should be so deft and self-contained at once: servants were not so calm—that was it, so calm. Even the best of them were hurried and anxious, and if they were old and valued, they got on one's nerves the more: one had to consider them. Of course, this was a trained nurse. She had decided suddenly that she felt ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... preposterous but for the extremely practical attitude adopted by Fletcher Hill. But when she saw him again on the day after their safe return to Trelevan there was nothing in his demeanour to remind her of the stress through which they had passed. He was, as ever, perfectly calm and self-contained, and wholly uncommunicative. Adela sought in vain to satisfy her curiosity as to the happenings in Barren Valley which her courage had not permitted her to witness for herself. Fletcher Hill was as a closed book, and on some points ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... extreme sensitiveness to criticism exposed Keats to a charge of effeminacy that Lord Houghton attempted to prove, against the evidence of all immediate friends, against the publisher's note to Hyperion, against the | poet's self-chosen epitaph, and against all but one or two of the most self-contained of his letters, that the soul of Keats was so far from being "snuffed out by an article," that it was more than ordinarily impervious to hostile comment, even when it came in the shape of rancorous abuse. In all discussion of the effects produced ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... with some individuality: such a novel as would mark the effects which comparative isolation must produce in a people who are educated and intelligent beyond the average of the British race, intensely self-contained and ambitious, and of whom two-thirds are now native-born,—a novel that would have corrected the too languidly accepted judgments of omniscient elderly gentlemen, who, after a few weeks or months spent among the smallest and most imitative section of Antipodean society, gravely conclude ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... with what they give. In that crude, ingenuous book The Professor, the hero, who is a good instance of how Charlotte Bronte confused rigidity of nature with manliness, surprised by an outbreak of passionate emotion on the part of his quiet and self-contained wife, and still more surprised by its sudden quiescence, asks her what has become of her emotion and where it is gone. "I do not know where it is gone," says the girl, "but I know that whenever it is wanted it will come back." That is a noble touch. It may be true that Paul Emmanuel ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the party last week?... Well, so did we, for that matter, all-but.... And just look how they had run away together! Wasn't that them coming back? Yes, it was; and artificial calm ensued, and more self-contained manners. But then, before the other two young lovers could rejoin them, she had ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... of universal import; in other words, they are not merely personal but ethical. That is ethical which is at once personal and universal. Perhaps the simplest way to make this evident is to notice that the relations of man to God are the relations to God not of atoms, or of self-contained individuals, each of which is a world in itself, but of individuals which are essentially related to each other, and bound up in the unity of a race. The relations of God to man, therefore, are not capricious though they are personal: they are reflected or ...
— The Atonement and the Modern Mind • James Denney
... was quiet and self-contained—too old for his years by far. Which always carries its own punishment. Had a Subaltern, or a Tea- Planter's Assistant, or anybody who enjoys life and has no care for tomorrow, done what he tried to do not a soul would have cared. But when Peythroppe—the estimable, virtuous, economical, ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... peace did not sit enthroned in Georgia's soul. Her movements were not calm and self-contained as one by one she removed the paper bags from her typewriter. "So silly!"—she sputtered to herself. What were the men in this office, anyway? College freshmen? Hanging paper bags all over her things every time she stepped out of the office—and ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... us. His Troilus is a noble, sensitive, generous, pure- souled, manly, magnanimous hero, who is only confirmed and stimulated in all virtue by his love, who lives for his lady, and dies for her falsehood, in a lofty and chivalrous fashion. His Cressida is a stately, self-contained, virtuous, tender-hearted woman, who loves with all the pure strength and trustful abandonment of a generous and exalted nature, and who is driven to infidelity perhaps even less by pressure of circumstances, ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... jessamine and purple bougainvillea, spread with Nixey's best plate and linen, crystal, and dishes of Staffordshire china piled with golden mandarins, and loquats, the fruit of October; there was a great uprising of those phlegmatic, self-contained Britons. Straight as the flames of unblown torches, they burned about the table. And with a simultaneous movement all those eyes of varied colours turned to the lean brown face of the Chief, as the sweet ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... for a minute, and I patted her. It was so unlike my mother-in-law to speak in this way; she's usually so self-contained that it made me sort of awestruck. After a moment she went on in a ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... figure shone upon the farmer's eyes it lighted him up as the moon lights up a great tower. A man's body is as the shell, or the tablet, of his soul, as he is reserved or ingenuous, overflowing or self-contained. There was a change in Boldwood's exterior from its former impassibleness; and his face showed that he was now living outside his defences for the first time, and with a fearful sense of exposure. It is the usual experience of strong natures when ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... days of peace, prosperity, and progress can hardly be assumed as yet, and not even the most distant and self-contained Dominions can afford to ignore the menace of blood and iron. No power, indeed, is likely to find the thousand millions or so which it would cost to conquer and hold Canada, Australia, or South Africa; but a lucky raid on their commerce or some undefended port might cost many millions by way ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... orderly processes of representative government. Those who would propose any other method of reform are enemies of this country. America will not be daunted by threats nor lose her composure or calmness in these distressing times. We can afford, in the midst of this day of passion and unrest, to be self-contained and sure. The instrument of all reform in America is the ballot. The road to economic and social reform in America is the straight road of justice to all classes and conditions of men. Men have but to follow this road to realize the full fruition of their objects and purposes. Let those beware ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... answer to the first is: a social and industrial system based on small, self-contained, largely self-sufficing units, where supply follows demand, where production is primarily for use not profit, and where in all industrial operations some system will obtain which is more or less that of the guilds of the Middle Ages. I should like to go into this ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... outside himself, which even his imagination could not follow; that she had caught the notion of an existence in which her relation as a daughter played but a part. She was transformed by a dignity which recast her speech and made it self-contained. She found herself in the sweep of a feeling so large that the immediate loss of a kingdom seemed of little consequence to her. Even an act which might be construed as disrespect to her father was justified in her eyes, because she was vainly striving to fill out this larger conception of ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... wasn't so long ago, when every home lighted and heated itself, and every little industry was a self-contained unit, that a fool couldn't do great damage unless he inherited a throne or was placed in command of an army, and that didn't happen nearly as often as our leftist social historians would like us to think. But today, everything we depend upon is ...
— Day of the Moron • Henry Beam Piper
... remained an old-world protest against the big clock in the tower over the gymnasium that set the time for the clanging school bell. Situated in the midst of beautiful scenery, the large grounds formed a little self-contained kingdom, shut off from the rest of the world: the numerous tennis courts and the playing fields provided ample space for outdoor sports; the home farm supplied milk, butter, and eggs; the kitchen garden grew the fruit and ...
— The Nicest Girl in the School - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... the voyage, West was treated with extreme coolness by every one. It did not seem to abash him in the least. He came and went in the crowd with the utmost sang-froid, always preoccupied, always self-contained. Cynthia observed him from a distance with admiration. The man had taken her fancy. She was keenly interested in his methods, as well as in his decidedly unusual personality. She observed Rudd also, and noted the obvious suspicion with which ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... Solomon Binkus next day to the address on the card of Lieutenant Clarke. It was the house of the General, who was waiting with his son in the reception room. They walked together to the Almack Club. The General was self-contained. It would seem that his bad opinion of Yankees was not quite so comprehensive as it had been. The whole proceeding went forward with ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... a most complete little Projector.... It is quite self-contained and will protect a thirty-inch picture anywhere at ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 15, 1914 • Various
... and, as he looked at her, the reserve of the held-in, self-contained man was broken. He bent ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners
... violets, or a box of candy. She would glance up from the soiled and rumpled sewing of some small girl to find Jim smiling at her from the stage door, or come back from her little shopping round and have a moment's chat with him on the steps. She grew more and more silent, more and more self-contained, but her beauty deepened daily, and her eyes shone ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... and a boy, one of the men being skipper, and the nearest approach to a human machine you ever saw. He is a Highlander, a thorough seaman, hard as mahogany and about as dark, stiff as a poker, self-contained, silent, except when ...
— The Eagle Cliff • R.M. Ballantyne
... he was habitually silent, it is hardly surprising to find that he had few intimates at the Academy. Caring nothing for the opinion of others, and tolerant of association rather than seeking it, his self-contained nature asked neither sympathy nor affection. His studious habits never left him. His only recreation was a rapid walk in the intervals of the classes. His whole thoughts and his whole energy were centred on doing his duty, and passing into the army with all the credit he ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge; a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old Sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait.... He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn't ...
— The Harmsworth Magazine, v. 1, 1898-1899, No. 2 • Various
... of the Altai Mountains and the desert of Gobi cut off her thinly peopled province of Eastern Siberia from the Chinese Empire; while in the remote East her shores verged upon ice-bound and inhospitable seas. Hers was thus an extraordinarily isolated and self-contained empire, except on the side of Europe; and even on the side of Europe she was more inaccessible than any other state, being all but land-locked, and divided from Central Europe by a ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
... well-meaning officiousness bringing forward his coat and hat. His presence helped to dissipate an impulse which seized Major Graham to rush upstairs again for one other word of farewell. Had he done so what would he have found? Anne sobbing—sobbing with the terrible intensity of a self-contained nature once the strain is withdrawn—sobbing in the bitterness of her grief and the cruelty of her ...
— Four Ghost Stories • Mrs. Molesworth
... letters running round the eaves, the carved trophies and arabesques which framed the stately doorway, the sleepy fountain with its cupids, in the courtyard, the graceful loggia on the northern side. It stood, aloof and self-contained, amid the lightnings and arrows of ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... could see the distant outline of Karpathos, and on the far horizon behind it the summits of the Cretan chain. Crete itself bars on the south the entrance to the AEgean, and is almost a little continent, self-contained ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... was a mail in. I had a letter, too," he added after a little hesitation, due to the fact that he had intended telling Miss Welland about that letter first. Thus do confidences, once begun, inspire even the self-contained to further confidences. ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... pair of nags with their attendants, and two excellent sumpter-mules carrying provisions and blankets. The guide was Manoel Reyes, who has already appeared in the 'Specialities of a Residence Above the Clouds.' He is a small, wizen-faced man, quiet, self-contained, and fond—exceedingly fond—of having his own way. By dint of hard work we left the Fonda Gobea at 9 A.M. on March 23, with loud cries of 'Mulo!' and 'Anda, caballo!' and 'So-o-o!' when the bat-beasts ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... tutor was needed for the boys, and an old broken-down gentleman accepted the billet at low pay, on condition that he was allowed to bring his little daughter with him. When he died, the daughter still stayed on, and was made governess to the new generation of young folk. She was a queer, self-contained girl, saying little; and as Hugh walked in, she looked up at him, and wondered what new trouble was bringing him to his mother with the open ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... wilderness looking for a place to settle or "squat." It was the experience of the "Swiss Family Robinson" made real. The little community, with its waggons and tents, its horses, oxen, sheep, dogs, perhaps also with a few poultry in one of the waggons, would have to live for many months an absolutely self-contained life. The family and its servants would provide wheelwrights, blacksmiths, carpenters, veterinary surgeons, cattle-herds, milkers, shearers, cooks, bridge-builders, and the like. The children brought up under those conditions won not only fine healthy frames, but an alertness of mind, a wideness ...
— Peeps At Many Lands: Australia • Frank Fox
... expert skin diver, had never before felt such a sense of ease and freedom under water. He was moving, light and self-contained, in a green, magical world. With no air tanks chafing his back, he felt akin ...
— Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung • Victor Appleton
... see a handsomely gowned young woman who had the stamp of a patrician's daughter in her bearing and her countenance—a brunette, with delicate features, though determination shone in her eyes and appeared in the self-contained poise of her head. She was the imperious type of beauty and suggested to Haines the dry point etchings of Paul Helleu. He instinctively conceived her to be intensely ambitious, and of this Haines was soon to have unexpected evidence. Gazing at her with a sense of growing admiration, ...
— A Gentleman from Mississippi • Thomas A. Wise
... and handsome, looked quite self-contained. She is one of the best-bred girls I know, but it required a stronger imagination than mine to fathom what mysterious change had transformed her from the impulsive, loving creature of Charlie Hardy's story to this serene-eyed woman, who ...
— The Love Affairs of an Old Maid • Lilian Bell
... the greatest hindrance has been its treatment within a self-contained "history of time measurement" in which sundials, water-clocks and similar devices assume the natural role of ancestors to the weight-driven escapement clock in the early 14th century.[1] This view must presume that a generally sophisticated knowledge ...
— On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass • Derek J. de Solla Price
... language of Parmenides, Melissus, and their followers, who stoutly maintain that all being is one and self-contained, and has no place in which to move. What shall we do, friend, with all these people; for, advancing step by step, we have imperceptibly got between the combatants, and, unless we can protect our retreat, we ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... temporarily finished-off, provisionally complete personality. I felt then, and I still feel to-day, that every man, as he fights for his breath, must stand out at least part of his time for the right of being self-contained. It is, and always will be, one of the appalling sights of New York to me—the spectacle of the helplessness, the wistfulness, of all those poor New York people without one another. Sometimes the city seems to be a kind of huge monument or idol or shrine of crowds. It ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... of God reveals to us the quality of that Divine Fatherhood to which His Sonship corresponds. The Spirit, as the Divine Energy proceeding from the Father and the Son, is the assurance that the life of GOD can never be self-contained or aloof, but is for ever going forth from Himself, so as to be eternally operative and active, alike in the processes of Nature and in the lives of men. For "the Spirit of the Lord filleth the world," and the Divine Wisdom "reacheth from one end to the other mightily, and sweetly ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... a crash! No human being, however self-contained, could have withstood the shock of that surprise; coming as it did so swiftly, so unexpectedly, and with such awful inappropriateness. Gilbert and Nancy let go of You Dirty Boy simultaneously, and he fell to the floor in two large ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... we camped beside a small creek, together with several other outfits. One of them belonged to a doctor from the Chilcoten country. He was one of those Englishmen who are natural plainsmen. He was always calm, cheerful, and self-contained. He took all worry and danger as a matter of course, and did not attempt to carry the customs of a London hotel into the camp. When an Englishman has this temper, he makes one of the ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... ethics, which as we have seen were taken over, with the Platonic metaphysics, by Christianity. Stoicism teaches men to venerate and obey natural law; to accept with proud equanimity the misfortunes of life; to be beneficent, but to inhibit the emotion of pity; to be self-reliant and self-contained; to practise self-denial for the sake of self-conquest; and to regard this life as a stern school of moral discipline. All this is simply detestable to the new spirit, which is sentimental, undisciplined, and hedonistic. ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... of Catenac seemed to irritate Mascarin so much, that calm, and self-contained as he usually was, he pulled off his cap and dashed it ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... up in his arms—a harder feat than of yore, because of her greater weight and his own sapped strength,—and hugged her tight to his breast. Winking very fast indeed to disperse tears that had no place in the eyes of a self-contained man of twelve, he ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune
... control events, do nothing of the kind. Somewhere above, in the unknown, there is a power which guides affairs at its own will, and (here is the special point) deliberately 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, ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... functions dominated by a thoroughly charming personality, the formal precision of the receptions at the White House was somewhat chilling and forbidding. President Buchanan, bachelor, with his handsome but somewhat self-contained niece, was not equal to this social rivalry.[648] Moreover, the cares of office permitted the perplexed, wearied, and timid executive no respite ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... to put his foot off his own territory as seldom as possible. He sent his wool annually down to Brisbane, and received his stores, tea and sugar, flour and brandy, boots, clothes, tobacco, etc., once or twice a year from thence. But the traffic did not require his own presence at the city. So self-contained was the working of the establishment that he was never called away by his business, unless he went to see some lot of highly bred sheep which he might feel disposed to buy; and as for pleasure, it had come to be altogether beyond the purpose of his life ...
— Harry Heathcote of Gangoil • Anthony Trollope
... can answer with any certainty; but from the answer to that one we infer the answers to all the others. As it is only the wise who learn, so it is only the good who improve. When we see a man gaining upon his faults as he advances in life, when we find him more self-contained and cheerful, more learned and inquisitive, more just and considerate, more single-eyed and noble in his aims, at fifty than he was at forty, and at seventy than he was at fifty, we have the best reason perceptible by human eyes for concluding that he has ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... left the room he was apparently, in every respect, his usual self-contained self. However, it was not until the following morning that he so much as thought of the sheaf of papers lying unread in the drawer of ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith
... onslaughts, never had one of Palmerston's abrupt demands for funds to plate the rocks of the English coast with iron, made such a sensation. Sir Francis M——'s address was completely overshadowed. The doctor had shown himself moderate, sublime, and self-contained, in one; he had uttered the ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... the young orator had his audience with him. He was a small man, but his voice was magnificent, and his oratory powerful, self-contained, full of ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... offered. Brief excursions into the world to the homes of her friends had filled her with a yearning for freedom and for independence, for a greater range of thought and action. Her artistic studies had served to foster an unrest she struggled against bravely and to conceal which she became daily more self-contained. Her reserve was like a barrier about her. She was sweet and gentle to all around her, but a little aloof and very silent. To the other girls she had been a heroine of romance, puzzling mystery surrounded her; to the Nuns an enigma. The Mother Superior, alone, had arrived at a partial ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... frowns from the battlements of such a stronghold of militant civility. For this reason, perhaps, the architectural features in certain pictures and drawings have an indescribable power of suggestion. The city, self-contained and fortified, overlooking a wide expanse of country, stands for safety and society; the little group of figures, parleying at the gate, or moving down into the plain, awakens in the mind a sense of far-off things,—the moving accidents of ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... kindness slumbering interlocked in every part and feature; the bride, a saintly weariness on her pale face, her awesome eyes lifted in adoration upon the image of the Saviour; the small knots of friends behind: Madame Thompson, large, fair, self-contained; Jean Thompson, with the affidavit of Madame Delphine showing through his tightly buttoned coat; the physician and his wife, sharing one expression of amiable consent; and last—yet first—one small, shrinking female figure, here at one ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... rid me of my cold, and with the return of strength, and the coming of confidence, full, joyous appreciation of wild environment and life made me unspeakably happy. And I noticed that my companions were in like condition of mind, though self-contained where I was exuberant. Wallace galloped his sorrel and watched the crags; Jones talked more kindly to the dogs; Jim baked biscuits indefatigably, and smoked in contented silence; Frank said always: "We'll ooze along easy like, for we've all the time there is." Which sentiment, ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... free him from the labor and expense and uncertainty of crushed ice. Science bent to the service of money-making. MacRae grinned to himself when he surveyed the coiled pipes, the pumping engine. His new boat was a floating, self-contained cold-storage plant. He could maintain a freezing temperature so long as he wished by chemico-mechanical means. That meant a full load every trip, since he could follow the trollers till he got a load, if it took a week, and his salmon would ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... dropped upon his knees in prayer. But prayer comes not from the knee but from the heart, and the whole strength of his nature breathed itself out in silent thanks to that great Fate which goes its way regardless either of thanks or reproaches. The doctor saw a pale self-contained young man before him, and thought ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... committees, obeying every behest of the party whips, without forcing themselves into the limelight or seizing every opportunity to air their opinions. Now that Spargo met him in the flesh he proved to be pretty much what the journalist had expected—a rather cold-mannered, self-contained man, who looked as if he had been brought up in a school of rigid repression, and taught not to waste words. He showed no more than the merest of languid interests in Spargo when Breton introduced him, and his face was quite expressionless ...
— The Middle Temple Murder • J.S. Fletcher
... all the centers, through all the emotions. A child must learn to contain itself. It must learn to sit still if need be. Part of the first phase of education is the learning to stay still and be physically self-contained. Then a child must learn to be alone, and to adventure alone, and to play alone. Any peevish clinging should be quite roughly rebuffed. From the very first day, throw a child back on its own resources—even a little cruelly sometimes. ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... experiences; they are not achievements; their worth is in the leverage they afford, not in the accomplishment they represent. To take the phenomena presented at a given age as in any way self-explanatory or self-contained is inevitably to result in indulgence and spoiling. Any power, whether of child or adult, is indulged when it is taken on its given and present level in consciousness. Its genuine meaning is in the propulsion it affords toward a higher ...
— The Child and the Curriculum • John Dewey
... handicap of a woman's presence; and the little flotilla of canoes that set sail from the terrace at Msala one morning in November, not so many years ago, was essentially masculine in its bearing. The four white men—quiet, self-contained, and intrepid—seemed to work together with a perfect unity, a oneness of thought and action which really lay in the brain of one of them. No man can define a true leader; for one is too autocratic and the next too easily led; one is too quick-tempered, another too ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... has been of great advantage to both countries. The ideal put forward by advocates of railway nationalisation and Irish independence, that in respect of trade and traffic Ireland should be a sort of watertight compartment, self-supporting and self-contained, is, I submit, a mischievous delusion which, if put into practice, would undo much of the good progress Ireland has recently made. Such an ideal would also be the exact contrary of the line of national development ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... dressing station is merely an advanced party from the field ambulance which itself is divided into three sections, each of which may operate independently according to the nature of the country. Each ambulance is self-contained, having its own transport, and by using tents can work in an area which has no ...
— On the Fringe of the Great Fight • George G. Nasmith
... dazzling glimpse of my berth; then I pitched the roll of my bedding into the bunk but took no trouble to spread it out. I wasn't sleepy now, neither was I tired. And the thought that I was done with the earth for many many months to come made me feel very quiet and self-contained as it were. Sailors will understand what ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... away to give evidence in a county court; at other times taking a look in at his own home to kiss his wife or dandle his child before dashing off per express to follow up a clue to John O'Groats or the Land's End. Here, and there, and everywhere—calm, self-possessed, and self-contained, making notes in trains, writing reports in his office, making discoveries and convictions, and sometimes making prisoners with his own hands by night and day, with no fixed hours for work, or rest, or meals, and no certainty in anything concerning him, save in the uncertainty of his movements, ...
— The Iron Horse • R.M. Ballantyne
... smiling. He liked to see this bashfulness in Leam. It was the sign of submission in one so unsubdued that flattered his pride as men like it to be flattered. Now indeed he was the man and the superior, and this trembling little girl, blushing and downcast, was no longer his virgin nymph, self-contained and unconfessed, but the slave of his love, like so many ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... of his own age, clean-shaven and sharp-featured. He had calm, somewhat cold, gray eyes, a deliberate, self-contained manner of speaking, and a pallid, dry complexion that suited with his thin features. His dress was plain, although it was thoroughly neat. He had no flowered satin waistcoat; but something in his bearing told you that he was a man who had no anxiety about the narrow things ...
— The Story of a New York House • Henry Cuyler Bunner
... her hands twitched the folds of her dress convulsively, and her eyes had a glassy stare that was almost terrible. It could be no common thing that had caused such deep emotion in one who was usually so self-contained. ...
— The Living Link • James De Mille
... wonderful difference in the progress of the two animals—the one awkward, and seeming as if running on stilts; the other compact, muscular, and self-contained, evidently possessing double the endurance with an equal speed to ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn
... which we observe in perception through the senses. In this sense-perception we are aware of something which is not thought and which is self-contained for thought. This property of being self-contained for thought lies at the base of natural science. It means that nature can be thought of as a closed system whose mutual relations do not require the expression of the fact that ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... hear it," pursued Mr. Steel, "for I think you will be pleased. It is not like the ordinary run of hotels. Your rooms are your castle—regular self-contained flat—and you needn't see another soul if you don't like. I am staying in the hotel myself, for example, but you shall not set eyes on me for a week ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... Self-contained and unembarrassed, I awaited at the Tuileries The issue, for I trusted the Nation's Common Sense; And although the rowdy Faubourgs tried a few of their Tom-fooleries, My soldiers soon let ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, Issue 10 • Various
... indeed to Longmore that she took his reappearance with no pleasure. But he was uncertain, for he immediately noted that in his absence the whole character of her face had changed. It showed him something momentous had happened. It was no longer self-contained melancholy that he read in her eyes, but grief and agitation which had lately struggled with the passionate love of peace ruling her before all things else, and forced her to know that deep experience is never peaceful. She ...
— Madame de Mauves • Henry James
... questioning the evidence of her coral-pink ears. She knew that she was furiously angry because she felt so cool about it. She knew that the more furious one was, the more calm and self-contained the senses become. The man meant nothing, either—one could see that by the respectful expression of ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... never did occur to him that this very striving might make him unfit in other ways to be her mate. His isolated life, absolutely unrelieved by any social intercourse with his fellows, made him silent by choice, still and self-contained in manner, abrupt of speech. In his unconsciousness it never occurred to him that it is the little courtesies and graces of speech and action which commend a man first to the notice of the woman he wants to win. He was, though he did not know it, a melancholy spectacle; ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contained I stand and look at them long and long. They do not sweat and whine about their condition, They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, No one kneels to another, nor to one of his kind that lived thousands of years ago." ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... died during the war, and myself, to draft the new scheme. The objects kept in view in framing our peace organization were to suit it to war conditions, as far as they could be foreseen, to base it on an efficient self-contained unit, and, while allowing for the wide differences between naval and military requirements, to ensure the maximum co-operation between the two branches of the Service. Success beyond expectation was achieved in the ...
— Aviation in Peace and War • Sir Frederick Hugh Sykes
... Aristotle who first made politics a branch of separate study: and, unlike many of their modern successors, they pursued it throughout in close connexion with the kindred studies of ethics and psychology. Their scope was, of course, confined to the field of their own experience, the small self-contained City-States of Greece, and it did not fall within their province to foreshadow, like the Jewish Prophets, the end of warfare, or to speculate on the ultimate unity of mankind. Their task was to interpret the work of their own fellow-countrymen on the narrow ...
— Progress and History • Various
... the other side of the railway. The centre is unlike old Oxted, for it is the church; but you cannot get a picture of Limpsfield as separate and self-contained as of old Oxted. Oxted sets itself on its hillside more charmingly than any village of the Surrey weald; you get the picture from halfway up the road to the station, and you should look at it when the sun is setting. Then the white ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... the drawing-room less jolly. The Squire and the doctor, Mr. Bangs and Mr. Bigglethorpe, kept the conversation lively, and would have hurt the feelings of Orther Lom, who arrived by the stage, if he had had any to hurt. The contracting parties were grave and self-contained, as became their position; and, to look at Mr. Errol, no one could have dreamt of his ever having gone on the splore. Dr. MacPhun came late, in his own buggy, accompanied by his daughter Maggie, a pretty girl ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... is much too cold. "Lovers" would serve better, but is perhaps too expansive to be used of a self-contained race. "Friends" is more appropriate because heartier, for hearty the relations between Daudet and his Anglo-Saxon readers certainly were. Whether it was that some of us saw in him that hitherto unguessed-at phenomenon, a French Dickens—not an imitator, indeed, but ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... in the centre of the square, under the flag to whose renown he had added three stars. Straight he was, and square, and self-contained. No weakening tremor of exultation softened his face as he looked upon the men by whose endurance he had been able to do this thing. He waited until the white smoke of the last gun had drifted away on the breeze, until the snapping of ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... an old town, full of intelligence and vitality, but also full of patrician pride, self-contained, and self-satisfied. There was a bourgeois aristocracy with a taste for work and the higher culture, but narrow and pietistic, who were calmly convinced of their own superiority and the superiority of their city, and quite content to live in family isolation. There were ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... silent and self-contained, had been the centre of much curious wonder among his fellow passengers. Much apart he had been, unmingled with the ship's social life, despite all allurement. The children called him blessed, for he had entered with their own relish into all their ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... Stead was proud to see Jeph holding his own, though the youngest among these determined-looking men. These two years had made a man of the rough, idle, pleasure-loving boy, and a man after the Ironsides' fashion, grave, self-contained, and self-depending. Stead had been more like the elder than the younger brother in old times, but he felt Jeph immeasurably his elder in the new, unfamiliar atmosphere; and yet the boy had a strong sense that all was not right; that these were interlopers in the kind old Dean's house; that the ...
— Under the Storm - Steadfast's Charge • Charlotte M. Yonge
... who little knew how nervous and miserable her self-contained and dignified visitor felt as she sat there, nor how reluctantly she rose to go to Baines, Jones & ...
— A City Schoolgirl - And Her Friends • May Baldwin
... brought with her a tall young woman with eyes of dark blue and hair of brown shot with gold wherever the firelight fell upon it. This girl showed a sinuous grace when she walked and she seemed to Prescott singularly self-contained. ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... certainly never have commented upon it if they had. Whether they were glowing with joy at the sight of you or thrilled at receiving a friend, their welcome was equally composed. They were devoted to one another and never quarrelled; they were seldom wild and never naughty. Perfectly self-contained, truthful and deliberate, I never saw them lose themselves in my life and I have hardly ever seen the saint or hero that excited their ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... when Michel was born, and although the moralists talk much about woman's vanity and extravagance, the theory gets no backing from this quarter. She was a plain woman in appearance, quiet and self-contained, with no nerves to speak of, a sturdy, physical endowment, and commonsense enough for two. When scarcely out of dresses the boy began to draw pictures. He drew with charcoal on the walls, or with a stick in the sand, and shaped curious things ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... 263, and the authorities there cited.) It is contemptible on my part to speak thus frivolously of events which will stand out in such golden letters so long as America has a history, but I wanted to illustrate the yearning for sympathy which I felt. You who were among people grim and self-contained usually, who, I trust, were falling on each other's necks in the public streets, shouting, with tears in their eyes and triumph in their hearts, can ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... suffering, so full of life, when she learned that her darling must die. Yet was there no small consolation mingled with the shock. Fear vanished, and love returned with grief in twofold strength. She flew to him, and she who had been so self-contained, so composed, so unsubmissive to any sway of feeling, broke into such a storm of passionate affection that the vexilla mortis answered from his bosom, flaunting themselves in crimson before her eyes. In vain, for Leopold's sake, the curate had sought to quiet her: she had resented his interference; ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... E. J. Rawlinson, Dogma, Fact and Experience, p. 16. "All the virtues in the Aristotelian canon are self-contained states of the virtuous man himself .... In the last resort they are entirely self-centred adornments or accomplishments of the good man; and it is significant of this self-centredness of the entire conception that the qualities of display (megaloprepeia) ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... I did. I saw he did not understand me. In him, as in most strong and self-contained temperaments, was a certain slowness to receive impressions, which, however, being once received, are indelible. Though I, being in so many things his opposite, had none of this peculiarity, but felt at once ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... for this plenitude lay in the fact that France, to a very great extent, is a self-contained, self-supporting land, which England distinctly is not; and another reason undoubtedly was that the French, being more frugal and careful than their British or their American brethren ever have been, make culinary use of a great deal of healthful provender ...
— Eating in Two or Three Languages • Irvin S. Cobb
... founding of Massachusetts was preeminently a self-conscious movement, the work of able and resolute men who brought an unquenchable moral enthusiasm to the support of a clearly defined purpose. They had counted the cost and made their choice; and every instinct of proud and self-contained men disposed them to minimize the difficulties which they encountered in the New World and to exaggerate those which they had overcome in the Old. Having staked their judgment on the wisdom of the venture, they were bound to be justified in the ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... illustrate weighs 11 tons, and is all self-contained, the standards being mounted on a strong bedplate, which also carries the bearings for the shaft with fast and loose pulleys, belt gear, etc. Thus no ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 324, March 18, 1882 • Various
... her husband: "Very good indeed; beats Dickens out of the world"; but his greatest effort was "Esmond," which accordingly is accounted "the most perfect, artistically, of his fictions." Of Thackeray, in comparison with Dickens, M. Taine says, he was "more self-contained, better instructed and stronger, a lover of moral dissertations, a counsellor of the public, a sort of lay preacher, less bent on defending the poor, more bent on censuring man; brought to the aid of satire a sustained common-sense, great knowledge of the heart, consummate cleverness, powerful reasoning, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... countenance, brazen as she was. Everybody stared at her and her husband, and seemed dying of laughter. M. le Prince looked at the scene from behind the King, and inwardly laughed at his malicious trick. This amusement lasted throughout all the ball, and the King, self-contained as he usually was, laughed also; people were never tired of admiring an invention so, cruelly ridiculous, and spoke of it ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... parts of the engine are self-contained; they no longer depend upon the foundation, and in many cases the condensing is effected either by surface condensers, or, where there is not sufficient water, the condensation is, in a few instances, effected by ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 312, December 24, 1881 • Various
... Emperor of Rome. I command you to forget your qualms and to banish your fears. Officially as Chief Pontifex I judge you a ministrant most acceptable to your Goddess, as a most fit and suitable Vestal. I judge that no girl naturally austere, frigid and self-contained could be half so pleasing to Vesta as a tempestuous child like you who curbs her temper and schools her outward behavior all she can in the effort to be all she ought to be; whose feelings even tame themselves without any effort of hers in the ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... to yourself, lad. All your young life you've been too self-contained and exclusive in your habits. 'The noblest study of mankind is man.' It would broaden you to go into politics for a time, and do much to develop your character and relieve the ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Work • Edith Van Dyne
... the hands held out to her, hanging her head on one side, and smiling her tremorous, bashful smile. The other two, Kate and Mary, came forward, affectionate, but more self-contained. Anne realised with a curious surprise that she was coming back to a household that she knew, that knew her and loved her. In the last week she had ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... that—so long—" said Josephine, in her self-contained voice. "You make me uncomfortable." She gave an odd little grunt of a laugh, and the tip of her tongue went over her lips as she glanced sharply, ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... farmed their own land, and lived on their own produce, though the barns and rick-yard belong to the house no longer. The red-brick front is just an addition made for the sake of stateliness at some time of prosperity. It is a charming self-contained little place, with a forgotten family tradition of its own, a place which could twine itself about the heart, and be loved and remembered by children brought up there, when far away. There is no sign of wealth about it, but ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... quietly, is reducing things to order, and in the few hours which have gone by since the dreadful occurrences of yesterday he has succeeded in attending to the thousand small details which demanded his attention. He is organising his dependents into a little self-contained camp; he is making the hordes of converts come to his aid and strengthen his lines; in fact, he is doing everything that he should do. Already I honour this little man; soon I feel I shall ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... Miss Gussie Fink seemed a shade cooler, more self-contained, and daisylike than ever. From somewhere at the back of her head she could see that Heiny was avoiding her desk and was using the services of the checker at the other end of the room. And even as the poison of this was eating into her heart she ...
— Buttered Side Down • Edna Ferber
... nature confiding, happy, satisfied with its conditions, hopeful of the future, and unaware from any sad experience that life ever admitted of changes. Her beauty bore the marks of intelligence; her manner was not enough self-contained to be called courtly; yet it was easy, and carried its own certificate of culture; it yielded too much to natural affection to deserve the term dignified. One listening to her, and noticing the variableness of her mood, which in almost the same instant could pass from gay ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... companion singularly meek and kindly. Indeed he seemed a different man. His old swagger and roaring bluster disappeared; he drank less, diced less, blasphemed less, and stormed less than in the old days before the halt at Penrith; but rode, a silent, thoughtful figure, so self-contained and of so godly a mien as would have rejoiced the heart of the sourest Puritan. The wild tantivy boy had vanished, and the sobriquet of "Tavern Knight" was fast ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... was a phlegmatic man; a self-contained and a reticent man. If Captain Roy had told him to get ready to sail to the moon that afternoon, he would probably have said "Very well, sir," in the same tone ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... has the right to say: "Come unto Me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest"? Ah no, sweet soul. I know your words are true. I know that what we all want is inward rest; rest of heart and brain; the calm, strong, self-contained, self-denying character; which needs no stimulants, for it has no fits of depression; which needs no narcotics, for it has no fits of excitement; which needs no ascetic restraints, for it is strong enough to use God's gifts without abusing them; the character, in a word, which is truly temperate, ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... float down the stream of life like icebergs,—cold, reserved, unapproachable and self-contained. In their presence you involuntarily draw your wraps closer around you, as you wonder who left the door open. These refrigerated human beings have a most depressing influence on all those who fall under the spell of their radiated chilliness. But ...
— The Majesty of Calmness • William George Jordan
... know John Bunyan. As a half-blood gypsy tinker he must have been self-contained and pleasant. He had his wits about him, too, in a very Romanly way. When confined in prison he made a flute or pipe out of the leg of his three legged-stool, and would play on it to pass time. When the jailer entered to stop the noise, John replaced the leg in the stool, and sat ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... salone, where the old Count's portrait hung, I found the family assembled. Andrea and Gemma sat together, a little pinched, I thought, but decent and self-contained, like mourners who expect to inherit. Donna Marianna drooped near them, with something black over her head and her face dim with weeping. Roberto received me calmly and then ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... The conductor, a pompous, self-contained old fellow, started towards Bart to haul him over the coals, but Bart wisely walked farther down the platform, the conductor gave the go-ahead signal and shook his fist sternly at Bart, while the latter with a gay, relieved laugh waved him ...
— Bart Stirling's Road to Success - Or; The Young Express Agent • Allen Chapman
... ascertaining the risk before embarking in the enterprise, and the prompt payment of the money required, even before it could be said to have assumed the shape of a debt, were both parts of a self-reliant and independent character. Self-contained also was she. During the whole time that the volume of poems was in the course of preparation and publication, no word was written telling anyone, out of the household ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... inner frustration. What in the devil was wrong with the man? He sounded like a child just learning the language. Yet there was nothing else to indicate backwardness. He looked pretty much like a self-sufficient, self-contained adult. ...
— Ten From Infinity • Paul W. Fairman
... should be solved in the early stages previously, if possible, to any official or unofficial consumption tests. Whether the oil be supplied to the turbine bearings by a self-contained system having the oil stored in the turbine bedplate or by gravity from a separate oil source, does not affect the question in its present aspect. The necessary points to investigate are four in number, and may be headed ...
— Steam Turbines - A Book of Instruction for the Adjustment and Operation of - the Principal Types of this Class of Prime Movers • Hubert E. Collins
... Major Ralston had been engaged upon the same task, she realized that it was his effort alone that had brought Tommy back. And—she saw it clearly—it was sheer love and nought else that had obtained the mastery. This man whom she had always regarded as a being apart, grimly self-contained, too ambitious to be capable of more than a passing fancy, had shown her something in his soul which she knew to be Divine. He was not, it seemed, so aloof as she had imagined him to be. The friendship between ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... Diana, self-contained Diana, talked to her friend of the things which lay deep beneath the surface, but now she revealed her soul to the little woman who had known love in all its fulfilment, and who, having lost that ...
— Glory of Youth • Temple Bailey
... and the habits of a domestic life which knew neither cares nor troubles. Many a dwelling is like a dream, the sparkle of passing pleasure seems to hide some ruin beneath the cold smile of luxury; but this parlor, sublime in reality, harmonious in tone, diffused the patriarchal ideas of a full and self-contained existence. The silence was unbroken save by the movements of the servant in the kitchen engaged in preparing the supper, and by the sizzling of the dried fish which she was frying in salt butter according to ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... both do." The rebreathers, unlike Scubas, which were filled with compressed air, used oxygen which was recycled through a canister of chemicals that removed water vapor and carbon dioxide. They were completely self-contained; no bubbles were emitted. ...
— The Flying Stingaree • Harold Leland Goodwin
... last they found what they were seeking. A young woman knelt before a charcoal fire which she was blowing with a bellows. It was Betty. Her face was pale and weary, her hair dishevelled, her shapely arms blackened with charcoal, but notwithstanding she looked calm, resolute, self-contained. Lydia was kneeling by her side holding a bullet-mould on a block of wood. Betty lifted the ladle from the red coals and poured the hot metal with a steady hand and an admirable precision. Too much or too little lead would make an imperfect ball. The little missile had to be just so for those ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... summer residence. Julia was nervously anxious to be on the road again, and showed by every word and action that restlessness of spirit which is the inheritance of hungry hearts. Estella, quiet and self-contained, attended to the details of moving a vast and formal household with a certain eagerness which in no way resembled Julia's feverish haste. Estella seemed to be one of those happy people who ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... represent a crude form of socialism, paralysing to individual energy and inconsistent with the fundamental principles of our rule. The cardinal duty which we have to discharge in India is to keep the peace. The villages formed self-contained communities, each regulating its own affairs, and bound by loose customs, leading to quarrels which could only be settled by blood-feuds and the strong hand. Strict laws and a rigid administration of justice are incompatible with such modes of determining disputes between man and man ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... separate from the race which He came to redeem, or the Church, which is the part of humanity in actual process of redemption. Professor Inge, in his work on Mysticism and Personal Idealism, has justly denounced the miserable theory which regards human personalities as so many impervious atoms, as self-contained and isolated units. This popular view is theologically disastrous when the Atonement is interpreted in the light, or ...
— Gloria Crucis - addresses delivered in Lichfield Cathedral Holy Week and Good Friday, 1907 • J. H. Beibitz
... his hair was cut, and his clothes like anybody's else. He even went so far as to keep his hat brushed, his trousers creased and his shoes polished. For the rest he was a vigorous, deep-chested youth of middle height with rugged features and glowing dark eyes. He had a self-contained, even a dogged look. Like all men susceptible of deep feeling, he did not choose to wear his heart upon ...
— The Deaves Affair • Hulbert Footner
... renounced all other men, and movement, and the real things of life. Love was all very well, and those snug domestic houses, with the kitchen below and the nursery above, which were so secluded and self-contained, like little islands in the torrents of the world; but the real things were surely the things that happened, the causes, the wars, the ideals, which happened in the great world outside, and went so independently of these women, turning ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... vacancy. Afterwards he always thought of that hour as one of the bitterest of his life. A strong and self-reliant man, he had all his life ignored companionship, had been well content to live without friends, self-contained and self-sufficient. To-night the spectre of a great loneliness sat silently by his side! His heart was sore, his pride had been bitterly touched, the desire and the whole fabric of his life was in ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... herself "Mary Battle"—never tired of that. And then she died, and he bided on till he was a very old, ancient man, with my son to help him. And then he died too, and was buried along with his wife. He was always self-contained and self-respecting. He took his luck for granted and never made no fuss about it; and such was his character that no man ever envied him his good fortune. In fact, I do believe that everybody quite agreed with his own opinion: that he hadn't got any more ...
— The Torch and Other Tales • Eden Phillpotts
... America would starve them. France, for many reasons, dare not offend England and America beyond a point. Thus, in every country except America, a successful Communist revolution is impossible for economico-political reasons. America, being self-contained and strong, would be capable, so far as material conditions go, of achieving a successful revolution; but in America the psychological conditions are as yet adverse. There is no other civilized ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... him, the tears rolled down his cheeks and his voice trembled so that he could hardly speak. Washington was unable to say anything; he looked from Laura to the miserable creatures who were walking in the corridor with unutterable disgust. Laura was alone calm and self-contained, though she was not unmoved by the sight of the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... their convictions or their policy. Thus over a great part of Europe the Catholic Church was split up into territorial or national churches, which, whatever the theoretical ties which bound them together, were in fact separate organizations, tending ever more and more to become isolated and self-contained units with no formal intercommunion, and, as the rivalry of nationalities grew, with increasingly little even ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... within his own blood when he was a boy, and had sent him out into the world to fight and jostle men, to win renown, and prove his manhood by risking life and limb in all kinds of mad adventure? Nothing had so moved that self-contained, moody man for years, and even obtuse Tom could see that his story had touched some hidden spring of feeling. The stern lines had relaxed, and there was a softer though more intense light in ...
— Viking Boys • Jessie Margaret Edmondston Saxby
... reward and encouragement. I will not dwell upon the experiments already described, except with the view of completing, or more clearly expressing, some ideas advanced by me before, and also with the view of rendering the study here presented self-contained, and my remarks on the subject ...
— Experiments with Alternate Currents of High Potential and High - Frequency • Nikola Tesla
... tablets of soap that will float upon the surface of water, by inserting cork, or floats, or a metallic plate in such a manner that there is an air space between the metal and the soap. The more usual method is to incorporate into hot soap sufficient air, by means of a specially designed self-contained jacketed crutcher, in which two shafts carrying small blades or paddles rotate in opposite directions, to reduce the density of the soap below that of water and so enable the compressed tablet to float. The difference in weight of a tablet ...
— The Handbook of Soap Manufacture • W. H. Simmons
... he believed it to be impossible to gauge the limitations of that essentially British intelligence—something as self-contained as a London flat. One thing only was certain: Roddy didn't always think in terms of beef and Bass; he was nobody's facile fool; he could make a shrewd inference as well as strike ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... tranquil Quaker dwellings, With their demure brick faces and immaculate marble doorsteps; And the gabled houses of the Dutch, with their high stoops and iron railings, (I can see their little brass knobs shining in the morning sunlight); And the solid self-contained houses of the descendants of the Puritans, Frowning on the street with their narrow doors and dormer-windows; And the triple-galleried, many-pillared mansions of Charleston, Standing open sideways in their gardens of ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... a chance to see something of each other; a chance which Miss Powder improved with manifest satisfaction. She was a wax-Madonna sort of beauty, with a sweet face, fair, pure, placid, but either somewhat impassive or quite self-contained in its character. Her figure was good, her few words showed her not wanting ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... prudent reference to resources which seemed ever to be expected and never to arrive. Nevertheless, under the vines in front of some inn at Genzano or Albano, Ibsen would duly be discovered, placid and dreamy, always self-sufficient and self-contained, but not unwilling to exchange, over a flask of thin wine, commonplaces with a Danish friend. It was at Ariccia, in one of these periods of villegiatura, during the summer and autumn of 1865, that Brand, which had ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... Beth said nothing. She had passed through the stages of surprise, anger and bewilderment, and was now still indignant but quite self-contained. When he thought of Beth's description of the Ghost of Black Rock House, Peter was almost tempted to forget the terrors of the redoubtable McGuire. A man of his type hardly lapses into hysteria at the mere thought of a "bandy-legged buzzard." And yet McGuire's terrors had been so real ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... correspondence you will consider him dead for the next two months." A similar notice is reproduced in "Arrows of the Chace," and this one thing, I think, illustrates as forcibly as anything in Mr. Ruskin's work the self-contained characteristics of the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... strong and vigorous, a judgment sound and well-poised, a calm and self-contained temper, which impelled him to the right and restrained him from the wrong, and a moral sense which guided and controlled his purposes and his actions along the path of absolute rectitude, he lived a life adorned by noble virtues and filled with noble deeds. Gentle but firm, decided, and ...
— Memorial Addresses on the Life and Character of William H. F. Lee (A Representative from Virginia) • Various
... to the Leopard Woman his changed decision. He was self-contained and direct. She smiled secretly to herself. She thought she understood both the change of decision and the brusqueness. One was the magic of the tropic moon; the other was the shy, half-ashamed reaction of the strong man whose emotions have controlled him. The ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... to her as they walk back—the three as they came—"I believe he will recover, for all that. I believe Dr. Merridew believes it, too. I am certain the fingers moved." Her manner lays stress on her own equanimity. It is more self-contained than need ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... small communities upon each other, I may mention the united kingdom of Germany, which is composed of numerous small States and nations, which have been drawn together by the power of mutual attraction. Until recently they were each self-contained, separate constitutions, with their own kings and forms of government; but the attracting force, assisted by forces from without, has proved too much for them, and the great and powerful united kingdom of ...
— The Romance of Mathematics • P. Hampson
... they greeted me, so I fancied, like old acquaintances. The meek-looking "Belle Jardiniere" was as lamb-like as ever; the pearly nymph of Correggio invited the stranger's eye as frankly as of old; Titian's young man with the glove was the calm, self-contained gentleman I used to admire; the splashy Rubenses, the pallid Guidos, the sunlit Claudes, the shadowy Poussins, the moonlit Girardets, Gericault's terrible shipwreck of the Medusa, the exquisite home pictures of Gerard Douw and ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... He betrayed not the smallest feeling of curiosity. It was marvellous how he had acquired the manner of these self-contained Sons ...
— Tomaso's Fortune and Other Stories • Henry Seton Merriman
... and fetched provisions for the household consumption, no tradespeople save milkman and baker being allowed to call, and they remarked that they never once found the area gate unlocked. And while these two women, prim and self-contained, went on with the cooking and housework and kept the doorstep clean, the so-called Miss Adela Mimpriss went on with the woolwork flowers at the dining-room window, where she could get most light, and the world outside had no suspicion of anything being wrong in the staid, old-fashioned house ...
— Begumbagh - A Tale of the Indian Mutiny • George Manville Fenn
... Dauphine in its vast theatre of upright hills, St. Julien in the Limousin, Aubusson-in-the-hole, Puy (who does not connect beauty with the word?), Mansle in the Charente country—they had all been half dead for over a century when the railway came to them and made them jolly, little, trim, decent, self-contained, worthy, satisfactory, genial, comforting and human [Greek: politeiae], with clergy, upper class, middle class, poor, soldiers, yesterday's news, a college, anti-Congo men, fools, strong riders, old maids, and all that makes a state. In England the railway brought in that beneficent class, the ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... himself against the ropes. By the time he had got out of that uncongenial position, two more of the Kid's swings had found their mark. Mr. Wolmann, somewhat perturbed, scuttered out into the middle of the ring, the Kid following in his self-contained, solid way. ...
— Psmith, Journalist • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... Dago Duke's frank impudence as she swaggered to her seat at the end of the long dining-room and faced them. He was as different in his way from the men about him as the Dago Duke, yet he differed, too, from that conspicuous person. He seemed self-contained, reserved to the point of reticence, but with a quiet assurance of manner as pronounced as the other's effrontery. He was dressed in a blue flannel shirt and worn corduroys. His face was tanned but it ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... should, so to speak, have made a conventionally social 'slip' in his protest against smoking women;— but there the trifles stopped. Maryllia knew well enough that only the very strongest feeling, the very deepest and most intense emotion could have made the quiet, self-contained 'man o' God' as Mrs. Spruce called him, speak to her as he had done,—and she also knew that only the most bitter malice and cruel under-intent to do mischief could have roused Roxmouth, usually so coldly self-centred, to the white heat of wrath which had blazed out of him that evening. Between ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... Gwythyl-Corners say"—she directed my glance, by one of her own, through the open door to Mr. Percy—"because HE'LL hear you and know that the sketch-book was only a shallow pretext of mine to see you. Do be a little manfully self-contained, or you'll get us talked about! And as for 'this time of night,' I believe it's almost ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... grown into a bulky matron, but she was a colourless personage, and her existence made hardly any difference in James Steadman's life. She had brought him no children, and their fireside was lonely; but Steadman seemed to be one of those self-contained personages to whom a solitary life is ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... the mystical foundation of its authority;[115] whoever carries it back to first principles destroys it. Nothing is so faulty as those laws which correct faults. He who obeys them because they are just, obeys a justice which is imaginary, and not the essence of law; it is quite self-contained, it is law and nothing more. He who will examine its motive will find it so feeble and so trifling that if he be not accustomed to contemplate the wonders of human imagination, he will marvel that one century has ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... the invariable reply. Even, and this was strangest of all, Seymour Portman did not know where she was. Braybrooke met him one day at the Marlborough and spoke of the matter, and Seymour Portman, with his most self-contained and reserved manner, replied that he believed Lady Sellingworth had gone abroad to "take a rest," but that he was not sure where she was "at the moment." She was probably ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... when the soul Masters itself, and cleaves to Truth, and comes— Possessing knowledge—to the higher peace, The uttermost repose. But those untaught, And those without full faith, and those who fear Are shent; no peace is here or other where, No hope, nor happiness for whoso doubts. He that, being self-contained, hath vanquished doubt, Disparting self from service, soul from works, Enlightened and emancipate, my Prince! Works fetter him no more! Cut then atwain With sword of wisdom, Son of Bharata! This doubt that binds thy heart-beats! cleave ...
— The Bhagavad-Gita • Sir Edwin Arnold
... with hinting to Raymer that he had money to invest. From every point of view a partnership with the young iron-founder promised to afford the golden opportunity. The industry was comparatively small and self-contained; and Raymer was himself openly committed to the cause of uplifting. Griswold waited patiently; he was still waiting on the Wednesday afternoon when Raymer called him over the telephone and made the appointment for a meeting at the house ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... quietly. Katherine glanced at him quickly. It was a peremptory order, but delivered in a quiet friendly tone whose calm assertiveness admitted of no debate. With an impatient gesture Harvey obeyed. Indeed, as Katherine looked almost shyly at this big, self-contained man she wondered if it would be possible to disobey him. And with the sudden realization of his secure authority came a wave of pity for her own father, the man who had thrown himself against this human rock and who was suffering for it. She turned away an instant for fear ...
— The Short Line War • Merwin-Webster
... of confession varies with individual temperaments; for many it is high. There are few so self-contained and self-sufficient that they do not seek to express their emotions to others. It is not surprising that the gregarious human creature should find confession a restorative and a solace. Human beings are not only natively responsive to the emotions of others, but by nature tend ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... Gloomy and wide-reaching between her banks of tamarack and spruce, now opening into a lake expansion, here narrowing between her stony ramparts, but ever hurrying on and on and on to that far ocean of ice, the Mackenzie has always been good to her own, the self-contained and silent people along her banks. In this vast land men speak not of bread as the staff of life; their unvoiced prayer is, "Give us our fish in due season." From the waters of this river, since man was, have the Indians drawn and dipped and seined their sustenance—inconnu, ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron |
