"Self-made" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is bad enough at first. You have had a heavy trial indeed, poor Emma; but what is a trial but something to try us? Would it not be more manful to face the pain of going home, and to take up your allotted work? Then you would be submitting, not to a self-made rule, but to Heaven's ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Aunt Polly, I know he's stupid! All self-made men are; they tell you about how they made themselves, and what wonderful ...
— King Midas • Upton Sinclair
... am I for a bird? I believe no one will know me, and that is just as well; for now I am so fine that I shall myself refuse to know any one. Ho! This ought to give some ideas to that conceited Peacock family! I am a self-made man. I am an artist who knows how to adapt his materials. I am a genius. King Solomon himself will wonder at my glory. And as for the Eagle, King of the Birds, he will grow pale with envy. King of the Birds, indeed! It is now I who should ...
— The Curious Book of Birds • Abbie Farwell Brown
... streaking the wall of the whitewashed room with slender, forklike fingers. Jacques and the three men were knotted in talk beside the ruddy fire glow. Claire RenA(C) braced herself with a sharp sigh. No soldier ever went into battle with a more self-made courage ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... possession of a mind and heart thoroughly educated; since there is an inner work to be performed by the subject of those advantages before he can lay claim to the possession of a well-disciplined and richly-stored intellect and affections. The phrase, "self-made men" is often so used as to convey the idea that the persons who have enjoyed the advantages of a liberal education, are rather made by their instructors. The ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... looked hard at the three verses in the big Bible the doctor had handed him, with a somewhat suspicious glare. He was a self-made man, with land and houses of his own in plenty, and he didn't quite like this suggestive talk about selling them and laying the prices at the apostles' feet. It savoured to him both of communism and priestcraft. 'That's an awkward text, you know,' he said, looking up curiously ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... grew up to be the friend and co-worker of Garrison and Phillips, the eloquent spokesman of his race, the honored guest of distinguished peers and commoners of England, one of the noblest examples of a self-made man that the world ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... condescension he had observed in so many Canadians toward the American. It did not worry him in the slightest as an American. He put it down to that self-satisfaction which is not infrequently acquired by self-made men in the process of their own manufacture, and to remnants of that cumulative British arrogance of forebears who had for centuries ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... entered into the clothing business in Brattle street, in which he prospered; and had it not been for his great liberality and hospitality, he would have become wealthy. In 1828, he married Miss Eliza ——. He was emphatically a self-made man, and he spent all his leisure moments in the cultivation of his mind. Before the Anti-Slavery Reformation had assumed a form, he was ardently engaged in the work. His hands were always open to contribute to the wants of the fugitive. His house was the shelter and the home of the ...
— Walker's Appeal, with a Brief Sketch of His Life - And Also Garnet's Address to the Slaves of the United States of America • David Walker and Henry Highland Garnet
... recent culture, in the songs and tales of Stevenson, in the cult of George Borrow and in the delightful little books published by Mr. E.V. Lucas. It is the one true excuse in the core of Imperialism; and it faintly softens the squalid prose and wooden-headed wickedness of the Self-Made Man who "came up to London with twopence in his pocket." But when a poorer but braver man with less than twopence in his pocket does the very thing we are always praising, makes the blue heavens his house, we send him to a house built for infamy and flogging. We take poverty ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... flight of time on school mornings, strangled her into dumbness. But she clasped the paper in her breast as a drowning man might a spar from the wreck. At least Number 4 was intact. She had been mercifully spared the fracture of this one of her self-made commandments. ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... think he is a Henry Clay, I suppose—anyhow, a lot of other people do; but I'm telling you his resemblance to Henry Clay is all on the outside—it doesn't strike in any farther than the hair roots. He calls himself a self-made man. Well, he's not; he's self-assembled, that's all. He's made up of standardised and interchangeable parts. He's compounded of something borrowed from every political mountebank who's pulled that old bunk ...
— The Thunders of Silence • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... girls, whom he didn't know, and who didn't know him. The truth was, he didn't know anybody to whom he could give his heart, but longed, with a certain twenty-four-year power, for her to whom he could offer it,—her who was worthy to receive his whole self-made being, and in exchange give him all that queer imagined bliss, which is or ought to be in the world, as every one ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors • Various
... the age of our present civilization is by no means that which the Bible stipulates, but is merely an atom in the vast space-time of this earth. The reason for this disparity is that with the development of the mind of man throughout the ages there was conceived also his self-made religious systems, based on a subjective interpretation of the universe, and not on an objective ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... his mere soldierlike qualities, to the rank of military tribune. Rome, too, had learnt to know him, for he was chosen tribune of the people the year after the murder of Caius Gracchus. Being a self-made man, he belonged naturally to the popular party. While in office he gave offence in some way to the men in power, and was called before the Senate to answer for himself. But he had the right on his side, it is likely, for they found him stubborn and impertinent, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... his self-made gibbet fast, Self-pilloried to the public view, A mark for every passing blast Of ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... in the dark?" Thorpe questioned. "Or...." He visioned dimly some denizen of the vast depths, living beyond the limits of the sun's penetration, far in the abysmal darkness where its only light must be self-made. But his mind failed in the attempt to picture what manner of horror this thing ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... kill and I make alive. I wound and I heal." This antithesis still continues; the world has only changed its idols. It still always seeks the life from the dead, from the gross idol of sin up to the refined idol of a self-made abstract god, whether he be formed from logical notions or from emotions and feelings. But how much soever they may strive to give life to their idols, they remain dead, although they should even attain to a semblance ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... were at her feet. Attentions, civil, kind, and recommendatory, showered on Miss Hazel from all sides. Would that little head stand it, with its wayward curls and some slight indication of waywardness within? How would it keep its position over such a crowd of servants self-made in her honour? Some of them were very devoted servants indeed, and seemed willing to proclaim their devotion. Among these was Mr. Kingsland, who constituted himself her right-hand man in general; but Dr. Maryland was not far ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... each broad Western "R" out of her Vocabulary, and she could walk right up to a French Bill of Fare without the quiver of an Eye-Lash. Also she could hand out that Dear Boy line of Polite Guff to all of those rugged and self-made Bucks who get back to Earth every day at 5 P. M. and begin calling feebly for Barbers and Masseurs and Manicures and ...
— Knocking the Neighbors • George Ade
... into a new nation. All racial and religious antagonisms, all sectional and intercolonial jealousies, all class prejudice, were in some manner comprehended and reconciled in Franklin. He was as old as the century and touched it at every point. What an inclusive experience was that of this self-made provincial who as a printer's boy heard Increase Mather preach in Boston and in his old age stood with Voltaire in Paris to be proclaimed the incomparable benefactor of mankind! Provincial! But was this man provincial? Or was that, indeed, ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... to him gradually that this great, cumbersome creature was not a shrewd, thrifty, self-made and self-finished adult at all; only a big, wistful, lonely boy, without comrades and with nowhere to play. On Plank's round face there remained no trace of shrewdness, of stubbornness, nothing even of the heavy, saturnine placidity of a dogged ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... question of the day if he, too, would succeed in founding a princely house. The greater States had an obvious interest in hindering it, and even Francesco Sforza thought it would be all the better if the list of self-made sovereigns were not enlarged. But the troops and captains sent against him, at the time, for instance, when he was aiming at the lordship of Siena, recognized their interest in supporting him: 'If it were all over with him, we should have to go back and plough our fields.' Even while besieging him ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... a Socialist, don't you, Miss Abbeway?" he demanded. "You're not allowing the fact that you're an aristocrat and that I am a self-made man to ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... belabored Captain Short of the royal navy with his cane. Far from trying to hide the obscurity of his origin, he leaned to the opposite foible, and was apt to boast of it, delighting to exhibit himself as a self-made man. New England writers describe him as honest in private dealings; but, in accordance with his coarse nature, he seems to have thought that any thing is fair in war. On the other hand, he was warmly patriotic, and was almost as ready to serve New England ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... stimulated the stomach to rebellion, we cannot say; but Freddy roused himself from his recumbent position, and, as we have seen, came (very unintentionally) head foremost down the steps. Alas, there is no one to sympathise with him in his self-made trouble, Aunt Mary won't permit it; and Master Frederick Ellis has to dine in the kitchen, a most humiliating necessity which would not have been submitted to, but for the inward cravings which ...
— Aunt Mary • Mrs. Perring
... was essentially a shrewd, far-sighted man. Like other self-made men, he attached great importance to good blood. In a moment he realized that Nan Challoner of the Friary was a very different person from Nan Challoner of Glen Cottage, the cousin of Sir Henry Challoner. Under the latter circumstances she would be received on equal terms ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... dozen pairs of well-darned woollen stockings, the few decent shirts that Isaac had left, his winter flannels, which had already served six years, his comb and brush, a hand mirror that had been one of his mother's wedding presents, likewise a couple of towels that had formed a part of her self-made trousseau; and we must not forget the neckties that Abbie had sewed from remnants of her dresses, and which Isaac naively considered masterpieces ...
— McClure's Magazine, January, 1896, Vol. VI. No. 2 • Various
... of this or that man that he is a self-made man—that he was born of the poorest and humblest parents, and that with every obstacle to overcome he became great. This is a mistake. Poverty is generally an advantage. Most of the intellectual giants of the world have been nursed at the sad but loving ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... sitting in the street car, are all honest and upright, and recognize a certain duty toward the forlorn children of the community. The self-made man is encouraging one boy's own efforts; the philanthropic lady is helping on a few boys; the workingman alone is obliged to include all the boys of his class. Workingmen, because of their feebleness in all ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... nonchalant; Rand with less control and certainty of himself. The one said with perfection the proper things, the other said them to the best of his ability. Young Fairfax Cary, standing by, twisting his riding-whip with angry fingers, curled his lip at the self-made man's awkwardness of phrase. Rand saw the smile, but went on with his speech. Colonel Churchill, who had been talking with Adam Gaudylock, left the hunter and came up to Cary. "Ludwell, you and Fair are not going to Greenwood to-night! I have orders from the ladies to bring you ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... a lumpish clumsy caricature of the self-made man, brutally strong, unashamedly misfit to the society of the smooth-wise, smiling, easy mannered people that he and Bryce had joined; a model of everything that Bryce was trying to ...
— The Man Who Staked the Stars • Charles Dye
... saw every thing through the medium of his servant Francis Burnens, an ignorant peasant. Now this ignorant peasant was a man of strong native intellect, possessing that indefatigable energy and enthusiasm which are so indispensable to make a good observer. He was a noble specimen of a self-made man, and afterwards rose to be the chief magistrate in the village where he resided. Huber has paid the most admirable tribute to his intelligence, fidelity and ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... King Charles XIV. of Sweden, died in his eighty-first year. During the last years of his reign he received many signs of love and appreciation from his adopted people, notably on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of his coronation. Shortly before his death this self-made king asserted with good reason: "No one living has made ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... what its most exclusive society accepts for one, comprise two entirely different personages. I found this emphasized especially in the old society of Washington, which takes its traditions from Washington's time or even the pre-Revolutionary period. For such society a self-made man was impossible. Such are the remarkable, indeed astounding, ramifications of the social system of a people who cry to heaven of their democracy. "Americans are all equal—this is one of the gems in our diadem." This ...
— As A Chinaman Saw Us - Passages from his Letters to a Friend at Home • Anonymous
... me that I recall it even at this distance: a string of jokes spoken with an effect of rapid-fire smartness, and simply reeking with commercialism. I could not describe it better than to say that it was on the ethical level of the "Letters of a Self-Made Merchant to His Son". Again, I attended a debate on Socialism, in which the capitalist end was taken by another famous clergyman, pastor of the Metropolitan Temple, the Rev. J. Wesley Hill. He was so ignorant that when he wished to prove that ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... bears with honor and dignity a name associated with all the glories of France; the general with the gray mustache is a hero, and charged at Rezonville with the intrepidity of a Murat; the painter, the poet, have faithfully served Art and Beauty; the chemist, a self-made man who began life as a shop-boy in a drug-store, and to whom the learned world listens to-day as to an oracle, is simply a man of genius; these high-born dames are generous and good, and they will often dip their fair hands courageously ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... of his success Rantoul, quite by accident, met a girl in her teens named Tina Glover, only daughter of Cyrus Glover, a man of millions, self-made. The first time their eyes met and lingered, by the mysterious chemistry of the passions Rantoul fell desperately in love with this little slip of a girl, who scarcely reached to his shoulder; who, on her part, instantly made up her mind that she had found the husband she intended to have. Two ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... of his own making may properly be proud of his possession, even if it is nothing more than a stamp album, but a person who has been gifted by Providence or Fairy Godmothers should not be conceited. A self-made man may be proud of his money, but his son may not. Pride in what has been given freely to you is an empty pride, and she was prouder of her beauty than a poet is of his odes—it was her undoing in ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... that rugged, self-made type of manhood that did right to prosper in this world and hope for felicity in the next. He studied under private tutors and spent two years at Oberlin College. Like many successful statesmen, he served his time in the classroom as a teacher. It was during his teaching career that he was persuaded ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... with each succeeding cycle of its history. So luminous was his mind, so profound and far-reaching his sympathy, that he understood the obscure workings of the mediæval mind as clearly as he appreciated Mirabeau’s transcendent genius. He believed that humanity, like Prometheus, was self-made; that nations modelled their own destiny during the actions and reactions of history, as each one of us acquires a personality through the struggles and temptations of existence, by the evolving power every ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... but it was all deliberate. The old ties of duty seemed lost, or at least merged in one another. Beforetime, to serve the king was to serve the Clan of the Priests, from which he had been chosen, and whose head he constituted. But Phorenice was self-made, and appeared to be a rule unto herself; if Zaemon was to be trusted, he was the mouthpiece of the Priests, and their Clan had set her at defiance; and how was a mere honest man to choose on the instant ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... Alice we felt chiefly a sympathy for Queen Victoria, who had not then, and never did, overcome her grief at the loss of Prince Albert. In the decease of Bayard Taylor we remembered with pride that he was a self-made gentleman of a school for which there is no known system of education. Regarded as a dreamy, unpractical boy, nothing much was ever expected of him. When he was seventeen he set type in a printing office in Westchester. It was Bayard Taylor ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... secretary in the United States, if not in the world, is Maria de Barril, and she is secretary not to one rich woman but to New York society itself. Her position, entirely self-made, is unique and secure, and ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... he had put aside—as he had this woman's message! Susy had told him nothing new of his wife—but the truth of HIMSELF! And the revelation came from people who he was conscious were the inferiors of himself and his wife. To an independent, proud, and self-made man it ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... Graystone, who could boast of the most aristocratic descent, and whose haughty family had considered it quite a condescension when she married the self-made merchant—if the little lady had sinned very deeply in wishing to secure for her only child a husband in every way suitable, in her opinion, to a descendant of the Leveridges of Leveridge, she was destined ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... is termed a "self-made" man,—that is, he owed nothing to the chances of birth; he had received little early cultivation, but he had educated himself, and therefore all the knowledge he had acquired was positive mental gain, and brought into active use. He had inherited no patrimony, and started ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... or preparing lessons in the school-room, would stop me in the street on their way to represent nations or peoples whose lives were out of chime, or to inaugurate the existence of new republics. One face I shall never forget. It was that of the self-made temporary dictator of a little country whose importance was dwindling to the dimensions of a footnote in the history of the century. I had been acquainted with him personally in the halcyon day of his transient glory. Like his picturesque land, he ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... is a self-made man, the son of a blacksmith. He brought the anvil, the hammer, and bellows into the pulpit, and he pounded and blew, for he was in earnest. I felt the more respect for him because he was in earnest. But when he snapped his fingers and said, ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... up from totally different stations in life. Bruno was a man of the people—a self-made man—who bore upon his person the marks of the hammer. Galileo was of noble blood, and traced an ancestry to a Gonfalonier of Florence. From early infancy he had enjoyed association with polite persons, and had sat on ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... his own grit put those dollars there, Jimmie. Just put it out of your head that it's luck makes a self-made man." ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... despite confusing evidence, men still have faith in biologic heredity. A too easy fortune saps ambition and relaxes energy; and thus rich men's sons, if not most carefully and wisely trained, are often made paupers in spirit, while the self-made fathers think their boys have better opportunities than they themselves enjoyed. The greater social loss is not the dissipated fortunes, but the ruined characters. Andrew Carnegie said that it would be a good thing if every boy had to start in poverty and make his own way. Cecil Rhodes recorded ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... interest and genuine worth is equal to any of the lines penned by Mr. Samuel Smiles, is The Autobiography of Peter Taylor, just issued by Mr. Gardner of Paisley. It is the story of a self-made man, related in no boastful spirit, but abounding with homely touches and delightful reminiscences.... It is a most notable little book, abounding with capital stories, the pawky humour of which will ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... that is ours. There is one day when all we Americans who are not self-made go back to the old home to eat saleratus biscuits and marvel how much nearer to the porch the old pump looks than it used to. Bless the day. President Roosevelt gives it to us. We hear some talk of the Puritans, but don't just remember who they were. Bet we can lick 'em, ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... interests of free labor and slave labor, by which the victory just won would be turned into a defeat. This is a despicable device of dishonest men. We spurn such compromises. We firmly adhere to the principles which directed our votes in your favor. We trust that you, the self-reliant because self-made man, will uphold the Constitution and the laws against secret treachery and avowed treason. If to this end you should be in need of men, the German free workingmen, with others, will rise as one man at your call, ready to risk their lives in the effort to maintain the victory already won ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... He accepted a gin rickey, but declined rather curtly the suggestion of a little spree over Sunday to a resort on the Cape which formerly he would have found enticing. On another occasion he encountered in the lobby of the Parker House a more intimate friend, Chester Sprole, sallow, self-made, somewhat corpulent, one of those lawyers hail fellows well met in business circles and looked upon askance by the Brahmins of their profession; more than half politician, he had been in Congress, and from time to time was retained by large business interests because of his persuasive gifts ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... unprotected orphan. Even where they are only referred to incidentally in the course of the story, you are given to understand that they and their kind furnish the principal source of income for the doctor; that if he hasn't the tact to humor or the skilled duplicity to plunder and humbug these self-made sufferers, he might as well retire from practice. In short, the entire atmosphere of the drama gives the strong impression that if people—particularly the wealthy classes—would shake themselves and go about their business, two-thirds ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... very much to inflict such indignity on deserving soldiers, General," said Canker, stumbling into a self-made trap. "Until their guilt is established they are innocent ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King
... energies have raised themselves in the world; and when we hear that the son of a washerwoman has become Lord Chancellor or Archbishop of Canterbury we do, theoretically and abstractedly, feel a higher reverence for such self-made magnate than for one who has been as it were born into forensic or ecclesiastical purple. But not the less must the offspring of the washerwoman have had very much trouble on the subject of his birth, unless he has been, when young as well as when old, a very great man indeed. ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... credulity about the action of drugs, a belief in their supreme control and exactness of effect which amounts to superstition, and fills many of us with amazement. This form of idolatry is at times the dull-witted child of laziness, or it is a queer form of self-esteem, which sets the idol of self-made opinion on too firm a base to be easily shaken by the rudeness of facts. But, if you watched these men, you would find them changing their idols. Such too profound belief in mere drugs is apt, especially in ...
— Doctor and Patient • S. Weir Mitchell
... whose spirit still lives in the memory of older graduates, also came at this time. He was, unlike most other members of the Faculty, for the most part a self-made scholar of whose ability as a teacher one former student rather ruefully remarked that the "students knew something about mathematics when they got through with him." He was always a prominent figure in the shaping of University policies ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw
... a sense, a self-made man, having begun as stoker of one of the annealing furnaces when both he and the Works were young. He had climbed steadily, serving his apprenticeship in each department, and studying at a night-school, when such were in operation, until the sudden demise of Mr. ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... either hard as nails or soft as mush. My governor had the iron in his. He banked everything on—me—and I wasn't up to the expectation. I was made out of the odds and ends that were left out of his constitution—and we didn't get on. My mother—" Jock pulled himself together; "she was the sort those self-made men generally hanker after, all lady, and pretty and ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... the self-made man, the hopeful, buoyant soul in the face of all difficulties and odds, constitute an example for the American youth, which will never ...
— From Canal Boy to President - Or The Boyhood and Manhood of James A. Garfield • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... it all; and I think that if he were a man of low condition he would be careful not to use slang. Self-made persons are usually precise in their language; they rarely violate the written laws of society. Besides, his pronunciation of some words is so distinct that an idea crossed me once that he might be an actor. But then it is not uniformly distinct. I am sure that he has some object ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... power in dealing with literary evidence, his practical abilities as a navigator, his tenacity of purpose and boldness of execution, his lack of fidelity as a husband and a lover,... all stand out in clear relief.... Of all the self-made men that America has produced, none has had a more dazzling success, a more pathetic sinking to obscurity, or achieved a more universal celebrity ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... allow me to say it, I'm short metre, large print, and open to the public seven days in the week. And yet you probably all make one mistake about me: you take me for the alumni of some university. Not so. I'm a self-made man. I made myself; and considering that I'm the first man I ever made, I think—pardon the seeming egotism—I think I've done well. A few years ago there dwelt in humble obscurity among the granite hills of New England, earning his bread ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... 'Vestiges of Creation.' I met Miller daily for several years. He was tall, and of a well-built and massive frame, and evidently capable of great endurance, both of mind and body. Considered as one of the distinguished instances of self-made men, Hugh Miller finds his only parallel in Horace Greeley, although the path to greatness was in the first instance even more laborious than in the latter. Let any one read Miller's experiences and adventures, as described in ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... To the child everything American is good and right. There comes a time when the parents cannot guide him or instruct him; he knows more than they; he looks upon their advice as of no value. If ever there was a self-made man, that man is the son of the immigrant. But the street and the street gang have a great responsibility; they are making the children of a hundred various languages from every part of the ...
— Aliens or Americans? • Howard B. Grose
... his leisure was spent at Master Swift's cottage, and in reading his books. The schoolmaster had marked an old biographical dictionary at pages containing lives of "self-made" men, who had risen as inventors or improvers in mechanics or as discoverers of important facts of natural science. Jan had not hitherto studied their careers with the avidity Master Swift would have liked to see, ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... but I thought there would be small consolation then in hearing anything about me. There were you, respected and esteemed. There was my brother, as I read in chance North Country papers now and then, rising to be prosperous and famous. There was I a dragoon, roving, unsettled, not self-made like him, but self-unmade—all my earlier advantages thrown away, all my little learning unlearnt, nothing picked up but what unfitted me for most things that I could think of. What business had I to make myself known? After letting all that time go by me, what good could ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... as she herself. She was as exquisitely dressed as when he had caught her in his arms on the stairs of the Beach grand-stand, the fragile hand she laid on the car door carried the vivid flash of jewels. Somehow he divined that her father exacted this, that in his pride of self-made millionaire he would insist upon extravagance as other men might upon economy. And she would yield. He remembered her playful speech at their first meeting: "I am the only passive member of a strong-willed family." His impression was of ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... was silent, though tremendously excited. His brown rags fluttered in the self-made breeze, and his brown pony scrambled over the ground quite as fast as Rob Roy. We reached a clump of underwood in time, and pulled up, panting, beside a bush which was high enough to conceal ...
— Six Months at the Cape • R.M. Ballantyne
... this task was that of reading humorous books to J. P. When he was in the right mood and would submit to the process, I read to him the greater part of "Dooley," of Artemus Ward, of Max Adler, and portions of W. W. Jacobs, of Lorimer's Letters of a Self-made Merchant to His Son, of Mrs. Anne Warner's Susan Clegg and Her Friend Mrs. Lathrop, and of some of Stockton's delightful stories. My greatest triumph was in inducing him to forget for a while his intense aversion to slang and to listen to the shrewd and genial ...
— An Adventure With A Genius • Alleyne Ireland
... is not quite like that," I answered, remembering how very little our self-made men as a class had done for others. "Every one is expected to look out for himself here. I fancy that there would be very little rising if men were expected to rise for the sake of others, in America. How is it with you in Altruria?" I demanded, ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... the father, whose history shows most pointedly how much may be accomplished by devoted study, deserves especial mention. He was born in Milford, Conn., in the year 1805. He is, in the most proper sense, a "self-made" man. Possessing but few opportunities for acquiring an education, he yet made the most of those he had, and is to-day a man of varied culture, an excellent example of the Christian gentleman. At the age of twenty-one years he apprenticed ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... selected these three men from among a host of applicants for membership in the expedition, because of the special fitness of each one. Dr. Goodsell was a solid, sturdy, self-made physician of Pennsylvania stock. His specialism in microscopy I trusted might give valuable results in a field not hitherto investigated in the North. He was to make microscopic studies of the germ diseases of ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... enliven you a little, introduce to you a new acquaintance, self-made, that I meet at the chapel, and who always sits next me when there is room,— Mrs. J—, wife to the Bishop of K—: and before the service begins, she enters into small talk, with a pretty tolerable degree of frankness, not much repressed by ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... his own knowledge of men, he doubted if Don Ramon, any more than himself, had ever thought of the possibility of a matrimonial connection between the families. He doubted if he would consent to it. And unfortunately it was this very doubt that, touching his own pride as a self-made man, made him first seriously consider his wife's proposition. He was as good as Don Ramon, any day! With this subtle feminine poison instilled in his veins, carried completely away by the logic of his wife's illogical premises, he almost hated his ...
— A Millionaire of Rough-and-Ready • Bret Harte
... papers of mark in "Punch" were those signed "Q." His style was now formed, as his mind was, and these papers bear the stamp of his peculiar way of thinking and writing. Assuredly, his is a peculiar style in the strict sense; and as marked as that of Carlyle or Dickens. You see the self-made man in it,—a something sui generis,—not formed on the "classical models," but which has grown up with a kind of twist in it, like a tree that has had to force its way up surrounded by awkward environments. Fundamentally, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... had not languished before, and did not cease to occupy a front place in the attention of the principal of that establishment now. In boastful proof of his promptitude and activity, as a remarkable man, and a self-made man, and a commercial wonder more admirable than Venus, who had risen out of the mud instead of the sea, he liked to show how little his domestic affairs abated his business ardour. Consequently, in the first few weeks of his resumed bachelorhood, ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... rarely appears in that fiction which sprang from local color except as the canny trader of some small town or as the ruthless magnate of some glittering metropolis. David Harum remains his rural avatar and The Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son his most popular commentary. Doubtless the existence of this type in every community tends to warn off the searchers after local figures, who have preferred, in their fashion, to be monopolists when they could. Doubtless, also, the ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... a self-made man, but not a rough diamond,—rather one of Nature's gentlemen. The pleasant urbanity of his manner was so conspicuous that no person of sensibility could approach him without being impressed by it. His was a character such as those ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... expected at any moment to see a reversion to some earlier and uglier type. Across the chastened accents of the journalist there sounded the wild intemperate tongue of the man of the people. Miss Batchelor used to declare that Tyson was a self-made man, because he was constructed on such eccentric principles. His slightest movements showed that he was uncertain of his ground, and ready to fight you for it, if it came to that. And now he still met you with the twinkle in his small blue eyes, but there was a calculating light ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair
... one, however, after all this, fancy that I am unaware of Alexander Smith's true merit. He very neatly fitted into his mosaic word-pictures the titbits he had culled in his commonplace-book out of many poets, and so utilised them. A self-made and self-taught man, "elbow to elbow," as he told me, "with Jack, Tom, and Harry in a workshop," as a designer of patterns, he had well and wisely made the most of his scant opportunities of culture, ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... HOW TO BECOME RICH. This wonderful book presents you with the example and life experience of some of the most noted and wealthy men in the world, including the self-made men of country. The book is edited by one of the most sucecessful men of the present age, whose own example is in itself guide enough for those who aspire to fame and money. The book will give you ...
— Jack Wright and His Electric Stage; - or, Leagued Against the James Boys • "Noname"
... traduce labor, and lead retainers to war—would be a government for the few over the many, an aristocracy of blood and privilege, of curled moustache and taper fingers; but not a republic of patriots, of self-made men, of equal privilege and just laws. It would be a return to semi-barbarism, to the age of Louis XIV., or ...
— Government and Rebellion • E. E. Adams
... not the word impossible—"a word that exists only in the dictionary of fools." In fact, his mind, naturally unbending, was now working more and more in self-made grooves. Of these the deepest was his commercial warfare; and he pushed on, reckless of Europe and reckless of the Czar. In the middle of December he annexed the North Sea coast of Germany, including Oldenburg. The heir to this duchy had married Alexander's sister, whose hand Napoleon had claimed ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... along, "more fat than bard beseems." As he passes, lost in reverie, many turn round and look at him. Some point him out to their companions, and by what they say, we learn that this is Horace, the favourite of Maecenas, the frequent visitor at the unpretending palace of Augustus, the self-made man and famous poet. He is still within sight, when his progress is arrested. He is in the hands of a bore of the first magnitude. But what ensued, let us hear from his own lips ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... friendship for France, and suspicion of the Holy Alliance led to an era of national self-assertion of which the Monroe Doctrine was only one expression. The raw Jacksonism of the West seemed to be gaining upon the older civilizations represented by Virginia and Massachusetts. The self-made type of man began to pose as the genuine American. And at this moment came forward a man of natural lucidity and serenity of mind, of perfect poise and good temper, who knew both Europe and America and felt that they ought ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... as it seemed to me typical of much that is evil in Scotland, Maybole is also typical of much that is best. Some of the factories, which have taken the place of weaving in the town's economy, were originally founded and are still possessed by self-made men of the sterling, stout old breed—fellows who made some little bit of an invention, borrowed some little pocketful of capital, and then, step by step, in courage, thrift, and industry, fought their way upward to an ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... swallow, and I will never wed beneath me. Prove that your love is not presumption. Show yourself my peer. For I could love a brave and valiant knight before whose spear men bowed as to a king, nor would I ask his parentage, prouder far to know that my children took their nobleness from a self-made nobleman. But a weeping, love-sick page! No! Go, fight and battle—show me something that you do that I can love. Meantime I look for such a lover, and I care not if his name be Guy ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... the two eras, and marking the transition from spiritual to practical interests, is Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), a "self-made" man, who seems well content with his handiwork. During the latter part of his life and for a century after his death he was held up to young Americans as a striking example of practical wisdom ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... The self-made man, with all his splendid intellectual faculties developed, with his independence of judgment, and his acquired habit of thinking for himself instead of leaning on precedent and borrowed wisdom, rides the dummy Government class with whip and spur. He lays on ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... panorama of rock waste—level, rugged, shingly, and mountainous, according to locality. In places only it is penetrated by large and permanently flowing streams. On the eastern borderland the Nile pours a mighty flood, winding a sinuous passage along its self-made flood-plain, the Egypt of history. In the west the Niger has forced its way into the confines of the desert and then, as if ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... has a great future, especially now that intelligence is beginning to encourage and help it. But while admitting that love is fallible we must be careful not to decry it for mistakes with which it has no concern. It is absurd to suppose that every self-made match is a love-match: yet, whenever such a marriage is a failure, love is held responsible. We must remember, too, that there are two kinds of love and that the lower kind does not choose as wisely as the higher. Where animal passion alone is involved, parents cannot be blamed for trying to curb ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... manhood bids thee do, from none but self expect applause: He noblest lives and noblest dies who makes and keeps his self-made laws. All other Life is living Death, a world where none but Phanton's dwell, A breath, a wind, a soul, a voice, a ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... it is well to do, but because they do not choose to attempt it. And why do they not choose? So far as this question affects middle life, it is largely because so few of us have the grit to face its difficulties, and attack them, when we have to do it with the serious handicap of self-made disadvantages. It is while you are young that you must lay up these stores of living material for the after years; and this is the significance of it all—you can only do it, or you can do it most effectually, when you are young. As touching certain ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd
... believes that in so doing he is preparing him to meet the difficulties which, when he goes into the world, there will be no one to help him through; and finds confirmation for this belief in the fact that a great proportion of the most successful men are self-made. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... rather, the company of which he was managing director and principal shareholder—if these other fruiterers and greengrocers did not buy their stuff from his company, he tried to smash them by opening branches in their immediate neighbourhood and selling below cost. He was a self-made man: an example of what may be accomplished by ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... the fisheries, he made a fortune, most of which he left to his son William. The young Pepperrell learned what little was taught at the village school, supplemented by a private tutor, whose instructions, however, did not perfect him in English grammar. In the eyes of his self-made father, education was valuable only so far as it could make a successful trader; and on this point he had reason to be satisfied, as his son passed for many years as the chief merchant in New England. He dealt in ships, timber, naval stores, fish, and miscellaneous ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman
... and I early got him started, and then adroitly worked him around onto his own history for a text and himself for a hero, and then it was good to sit there and hear him hum. Self-made man, you know. They know how to talk. They do deserve more credit than any other breed of men, yes, that is true; and they are among the very first to find it out, too. He told how he had begun life an orphan lad without money and without friends ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... especially in the Middle West, are suggestive of spontaneous melody forest-born, and as unconscious of scale, clef or tempo as the song of a bird. The above "hand-shaking" ditty at the altar gatherings apparently took its tune self-made, inspired in its first singer's soul by the feeling of the moment—and the strain was so simple that the convert could join in at once ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... lovely. Had the ancient Greeks chiselled but the wasp waists of our modern belles, their hideous works would have sunk into oblivion in as little time as our self-made martyrs drop into ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... in Vienna on the fifteenth of January, 1791. His father, Wenzel Grillparzer, a self-made man, was a lawyer of the strictest probity, who occupied a respectable position in his profession; but, too scrupulous to seize the opportunities for profit that lawyers easily come upon, he lived a comparatively ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... match trust, Russell A. Alger, of Michigan, received the War Department. The president of the First National Bank of Chicago, Lyman J. Gage, received the Treasury. The other secretaries, too, were men of solidity, generally self-made, and likely to inspire confidence in the world ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson
... was dressed and caparisoned in the height of martial fashion; his clear eyes, glistening coat, and joyous bearing spoke of the perfection of health; his every glance and movement told of elastic vigor and dauntless spirit. He was a horse with a pedigree,—let alone any self-made reputation,—and he knew it; more than that, he knew that I was charmed at the first greeting; probably he liked it, possibly he liked me. What he saw in me I never discovered. Van, though demonstrative eventually, was reticent and little given to verbal flattery. ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... Clay, the American orator," with autobiography; and a meteoric shower of lesser biographies emanating from Tremont Temple. Nat carried a book in his pocket, and "Pockets have been of great service to self-made men. A more useful invention was never known, and hundreds are now living who will have occasion to speak well of pockets till they die, because they were so handy to carry a book. Roger Sherman had one when he was a hard-working shoemaker, etc., etc., etc. Napoleon had one in which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... a Botanic Physician, and talented gentleman of Philadelphia, is a member of the class of 1851-52, of the Eclectic Medical School of that city. Dr. Bias deserves the more credit for his progress in life, as he is entirely self-made. ...
— The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States • Martin R. Delany
... you wish to forget it? I think I shall be proud of it when I have risen far enough above it to claim you. It is no small thing to be a self-made man." ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... centre of a village, on that strip of seacoast in the southeastern part of New Hampshire, lived a self-made trader, Joshua Jackson. He occupied a small, unpainted house, two stories in front, with the roof sloping down at the back part to one story. In the rear was the barn, with its generous red door, a well with its long "sweep," a pig-pen, and a hen-pen; but the hens seemed equally ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 6, June, 1886, Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 6, June, 1886 • Various
... girl must have. Most of them, all of them, as far as Mrs. Blackwell knows and I have been able to find out, were young men at the office where she worked, or friends of that sort—not the ordinary clerk, but of the rising, younger, self-made generation. Still, they don't seem to have interested her particularly as far as I have been able to discover. She merely liked them. There is absolutely nothing known to point to the fact that she was any different from ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... him full of the most serious problems essential to his self-knowledge; and in the story of his life he has exploited all available resources of this genetic period of storm and stress more fully perhaps than any other writer. At the other extreme, we have writers like Charles Dudley Warner,[2] a self-made man, whose early life was passed on the farm, and who holds his own boyhood there in greater contempt than perhaps any other reputable writer of such reminiscences. All the incidents are treated not only with seriousness, but with ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... who were the chief instruments of the process were 'self-made'; they were the typical examples of Mr. Smiles's virtue of self-help; they owed nothing to government or to the universities which passed for the organs of national culture. The leading engineers began as ordinary mechanics. John Metcalf ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... misused by fate,—beings who ought by rights to prosper in this life, but who live and die unhappy, tortured by some evil genius, the victims of unfortunate circumstances. The innocent and naturally light-hearted Eugenie had fallen into the hands and beneath the malicious despotism of a self-made man on leaving the maternal prison. Angelique, whose nature inclined her to deeper sentiments, was thrown into the upper spheres of Parisian social life, with the bridle ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac |
