"Self-righteous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the war. Now, those idyllic days are gone. So is the waiter. So is the efficacy of the bell. You may ring, but all that will materialise is a self-righteous little girl, in brass buttons, who will shake her head reprovingly and refer you to certain passages in the Defence of the ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... poor people and drew them to Him. It would have been a long while before any penitent woman would have come in and wept over the feet of Gamaliel and his like. It would have been a long while before any sinful men would have found their way, with tears and yet with trust, to these self-righteous hypocrites. But perfect purity somehow draws the impure, though assumed sanctity always repels them. And it is a sign, not that a man is bad, but that he is good in a Christlike fashion, if the outcasts that durst not ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Wilderness. Light, luxury and vice. Such was the summing up of Dr. Bill, and the few who paused in the mad riot for a moment's sober thought. Furthermore Dr. Bill's estimate of the blatant gold city was by no means a self-righteous belief. He had known the place from its birth. He had treated its every ailment at the height of its burning youth. Now, in its maturity, it fell to him to learn much of the inner secrets of its accruing mental disease. He hated it and loved it, almost one ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... leprosies,—the hardness of heart, the insensibility to the higher life,—these moved him with a great pity. Scarcely save in little children did he see the heart-free joy, the natural freedom and happiness, which was his own. The hard-heartedness of the rich, the scorn of the self-righteous for the outcasts, moved his indignation. Thus the holy happiness of his own life was mingled with a profound sense of the ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... whether we appreciate it or not; and so does Christ. Your despondency does not prove that He is not just as near to you as He is to those who see Him more clearly; and it is better to be despondent than to be self-righteous. Don't you see that in afflicting you He means to prove to you that He loves you, and that you love Him? Don't you remember that it is His son—not His ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... confused morals that has not been permitted to go unapplauded. There are those, of course, in every city who could think fondly and smugly of themselves as doing, in this way, preeminently the will of God; and such deeds not infrequently make men self-righteous. ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... dishonesty there was in this! If the time could ever come when the mists and fogs of complacency would be swept off, and we could see that it was the innocent suffering for the guilty, not that these poor souls were sinners above all men, as the self-righteous ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... importance in the scene, all looked a little self-righteous. Occasionally they relieved their feelings by spitting outside the door. Sam did not look greatly concerned; his conscience was clear. True, he felt the degradation of the bound wrists, but must he not presently be ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner
... conspicuous in their clean-cut fairness among the younger instructors in the choir-seats behind the trustees on the platform. Bea had never liked Miss Whiton. It seemed to her now, as she studied the immobile face, that she had always recognized there a suggestion of the self-righteous Pharisee. There could be nothing but misunderstanding and antagonism between the possessor of such a countenance and Miss More with those eyes of hers, that nose and that mouth. Bea's labors over the classes in manners had included ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... violin-playing and liquor-drinking, and Brother Peter Vickers's mild and merciful attitude toward sinners in those un-spiced sermons of his, that held out such affluence of hope to the repentant rather than to the self-righteous. The blood surged unseen into Nehe-miah's face. For shame, for very shame he could not confess himself one with these outcasts. He made a feint of searching in the semi-obscurity for the rickety chair on which he had been seated, and resumed ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... last letter, some allusion to religion, I didn't quite like, and at any other time I would have written you a sermon on the subject. In Calcutta (where I felt so self-righteous) nothing would have prevented me—but now I haven't the spirit. Mark, please, how the whirligig of Time brings its revenges! In Calcutta I thought myself a saint, in Takai I am regarded as a Brand Unplucked. It is rather dispiriting. I ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... wickedness out of their hearts. In like manner, when the great Teacher warned his followers to beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees, he meant that they should eschew on the one hand the lie of self-righteous superstition, and on the other the lie of libertine unbelief. The Apostle Paul, too, while he does not forbid another use, employs the conception, in point of fact, to illustrate the presence and ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... I know ye, self-righteous and papal as ye are—followers of forms, and listeners to bookish preaching; think you, woman, that holy Paul had notes in his hand to propound the Word ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... colony to colony all along the coast, and were already pushing across the mountains to occupy the great interior valleys. And with rapid material development there had come a confident and aggressive spirit, a proud and intractable temper, a certain self-righteous sense of separation from the Old World and its traditions. The very rivalries between colony and colony were the result of close contact and daily intercourse, their very jealousies born of interrelated interests and the ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... with such a rebuff, Patty felt very diffident about mentioning the matter to the remaining members of the class. She had no wish to be considered self-righteous and interfering, but, all the same, she thought she was bound to try and use her influence to set straight what was certainly a doubtful practice, and she meant to persist even at the risk of being called ...
— The Nicest Girl in the School - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... or foe? Stand! stand! I forgive no woman's sin, Hunt her with self-righteous mien, Never take her, mourning, in From the desert ...
— Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... amateurs, laid the foundation of the greatest navy and mercantile marine of the world. It is to these fascinating adventurers, too, that the generations which followed are indebted for the initiative in human comforts and progress. The superficial self-righteous critic may find it an agreeable pursuit to search out their blemishes; but these men cannot be airily dismissed in that manner. They towered above their fellows, the supreme product of the spirit of their day in adventure and daring; they fulfilled their great destiny, and ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... of vice than those which are commonly visited with the vengeance of the law? or, exhibiting the doctrines of christianity in their aspect to the penitent, they thundered forth denunciations against the proud and the self-righteous! The champion of this system, Mr. W. C. Wentworth, turned the artillery of his wrath against the exclusionists: "and shall not," he exclaimed, in the ardour of his youth, "shall not the sole efficacious remedy be administered (the restoration ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... passion for locality was always at his elbow. A few pages further on in Grace Abounding, when he tells us how he abandoned not only swearing but the deeper-rooted sins of bell-ringing and dancing, and nevertheless remained self-righteous and "ignorant of Jesus Christ," he introduces the next episode in the story of his conversion with the sentence: "But upon a day the good providence of God called me to Bedford to work at my calling, and in one of the streets ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... of those unfortunate outcasts of society—tramps and destitute, drunken loafers. If the self-righteous hypocrites who despise these poor wretches had been subjected to the same conditions, the majority of them would inevitably have become ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... the Republic and the Empire, denying myself hours of pleasure daily, missing races and all kinds of contests and toiling over documents and estimates and statistics. But it is true. If I decide this case of yours, ten to one any number of self-righteous nobles will say ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... appeals to the civil arm to protect the victim, but, for reasons which seem good to him, turns tail, breaks his arranged part, and is very nearly accessory to a murder. At the other end of the story, carrying out his general character of prig-pedant, as selfish as self-righteous, he meets Valjean's rather foolish and fantastic self-sacrifice with illiberal suspicion, and practically kills the poor old creature by separating him from Cosette. When the eclaircissement comes, it appears to me—as Mr. Carlyle said of Loyola that he ought to have ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... all boasting out of our thoughts. But, whilst that is so, there is sometimes granted to the man, who has been faithful in his adherence to Jesus Christ, a gleam of sunshine at eventime, which foretells Heaven's welcome and 'Well done!', before it is uttered. He was no self-righteous braggart, but a very rigid judge of himself, who, close by the headsman's block that ended his life, said: 'I have fought a good fight; I have finished my course; I have kept the faith.' 'Put on the whole armour of God,' and when the time comes to put it off, you will have a peaceful assurance as ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... cherished bitter thoughts in her heart concerning him. That imagination of hers—which was always prone to lead her astray—bore most terribly false witness against Christopher just then. It portrayed him as a hard, self-righteous man, ready to sacrifice the rest of mankind to the Moloch of what he considered to be his own particular duty and spiritual welfare, and utterly indifferent as to how severe was the suffering entailed on ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... grandeur of nature. The books my father wrote here embrace this joy of untheoried, peaceful, or gloriously perturbed life of sky and land. Theory of plot or principle was as much beneath him as the cobble-stones; from self-righteous harangues he turned as one who had heard a divine voice that alone deserved to declare. He taught as Nature does, always leading to thoughts of something higher than the dictum of men, and nobler than their greatest beauty of action. He said it was difficult for him ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop |
