"Self-sufficient" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... A self-contained and self-sufficient girl, she now felt lonesomely that it would be a great comfort to talk everything over with somebody. Things seemed only to get worse by being kept locked up so tight in her own bosom. Everything was changing so, ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... to the print;—a self-sufficient and consequential beadle, reading the direction of a letter to Francis Goodchild, Esq. Sheriff of London, has all the insolence of office. The important and overbearing air of this dignified personage is well contrasted ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... should be so constructed that it may stand alone and be self-sufficient. Never should a reporter trust to headlines to enlighten his readers upon the meaning of the lead—the exact reverse of this must be true. The story is written first and the headlines are written from the facts contained in ...
— Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence - A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of - Newspaper Writing • Grant Milnor Hyde
... struck wider and deeper, and the middle-classes of England, roused from their religious lethargy, called in vain to the rescue of a Protestantism betrayed. But the minister was unshaken. Successful and self-sufficient, impressed with a conviction that his government in duration would rival that of a Walpole or a Pitt, and exceed both in lustre, he treated every remonstrance with imperious disdain. He had even accustomed his mind to contemplate an ecclesiastical adjustment of Ireland which ...
— Lord George Bentinck - A Political Biography • Benjamin Disraeli
... that alone was like a gift to him. No one else understood—for that matter, no one else had had to listen. He knew that Christine was too tired, and poor overburdened Cosgrave would only have gazed helplessly at him, wondering why this strong, self-sufficient friend should pour out such unintelligible stuff over his own aching head. So he had learnt to be silent. Even now it was difficult to begin. He stammered and was shy and distrustful and eager, sometimes ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... clearly and finally; they have set themselves to legislate and construct on that assumption, and, experiencing the perplexing obduracy and evasions of reality, they have taken to dogma, persecution, training, pruning, secretive education; and all the stupidities of self-sufficient energy. In the passion of their good intentions they have not hesitated to conceal facts, suppress thought, crush disturbing initiatives and apparently detrimental desires. And so it is blunderingly and wastefully, destroying with the making, ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... book for a minute. Then his hand went out and he was once more turning the pages of neat, close writing. Of course, he wouldn't really do a thing like that, but—well, it would solve a mighty big problem! And what a hole that self-sufficient Upton would be in! He couldn't prove that he had left the book in Mr. Daley's study, at least not unless the instructor had seen it there; and somehow Steve was pretty sure he hadn't. Of course a decent ...
— Left End Edwards • Ralph Henry Barbour
... Attempts at self-reliance and a policy of not borrowing from international lenders—sometimes overlooked in recent years—have greatly hindered the development of a broad economic infrastructure. Albania, however, possesses considerable mineral resources and is largely self-sufficient in food. Numerical estimates of Albanian economic activity are subject to an especially wide margin of error because the government is ...
— The 1990 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... on my nerves," he thought. "I've written a letter to-night that may bridge this country over another crisis, and I should be sleeping the sleep of the self-sufficient statesman, or at least excogitating upon weighty matters; and for the last hour I've given no thought to anything but an unknown woman, who has electrified my imagination and my passions. Is there, perhaps, more safety in meeting her and laying the ghost? Imagination plays us such damnable tricks. ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... or less ignored, isolated, humiliated, overlooked outside our own little family circle. Even in that limited mob which the newspapers call New York Society—in that modern, wealthy, hard-witted, over-jewelled, self-sufficient league which is yet too eternally uncertain of its own status to assume any authority or any responsibility for a stranger without credentials,—it would not be possible to make Valerie West acceptable in the slightest sense of the word. Because she is too well known; ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... months, in order to give you time to reflect on the mischief you have done and the great expense you have occasioned by running His Majesty's ship on a shoal called the Turtle Head; and they advise you not to be so self-sufficient in future, and, if it be not morally impossible, to clothe yourself with the robe of humility, and to put all your conceit into the N.W. corner of your chest, and never let it see daylight. And the Court further adjudges you, in consequence of your letting the pilot quit the ship before she was ...
— A Sailor of King George • Frederick Hoffman
... details. The solution of the so-called Negro problem in America, he felt, is to be found along these lines: As his people have more and more opportunity for training and become better and better trained they become more and more self-sufficient. They are developing their own carpenters, masons, blacksmiths, farmers, merchants, and bankers as well as lawyers, teachers, preachers, and physicians. These trained people naturally, for the most part, serve their own race, ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... this, he had his good points. He was brave as a lion; strictly honourable; and though very ignorant, and very self-sufficient, had that sort of dogged good sense which one very often finds in men of stern hearts, who, if they have many prejudices, have little ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... loan program is based on the premise that lending among libraries for the benefit of individuals in Nassau and Suffolk counties is in the public interest and should be encouraged. It is impossible for any one library to be self-sufficient, and interlibrary borrowing and lending is regarded by the libraries participating in this program ...
— The Long Island Library Resources Council (LILRC) Interlibrary Loan Manual: January, 1976 • Anonymous
... Dewey, and dozens of other good men and women in America. I am familiar with the School for the Deaf at Malone, New York, and the School for the Blind at Batavia, where even the sorely stricken are taught to be self-sufficient, self-supporting and happy. I have tumbled down the circular fire-escape at Lapeer with the inmates of the Home of Epileptics, and heard the shouts of laughter from lips that never laughed before. I have seen the Jewish Manual Training School of Chicago transform ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... quietly into the vestibule and the company burst into an incongruous babble. Dorn listened to their voices, again firm and self-sufficient, chattering formalities. He watched Rachel adjusting her hat with over-eager gestures. Her eyes were avoiding him. She seemed breathless, her head squirming under the necessity of having to remain for another moment before the eyes of the ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... activity, high unemployment, and a heavy dependence on foreign grants and technical assistance. Agriculture, including fishing, hunting, and forestry, contributes 40% to GDP, employs 80% of the labor force, and provides most of the exports. The country is not self-sufficient in food production; rice, the main staple, accounts for the bulk of imports. The government - which is hampered by internal political disputes - is struggling to upgrade education and technical training, privatize commercial and industrial enterprises, ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... she replied coldly. "On the few occasions I have seen her I have thought her so cool in her likings and sentiments, so self-sufficient, that I could not think her attractive to a nature so warm as Colonel Digby's. Nor do I think her mental attainments such as to render a real ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... Penny, Jasper; resembled you. Personally, I like it better now." Jasper Penny surveyed with approbation Stephen's full, handsome presence. Jannan was a successful, a big, man. Well, so was he too. But he thought with keen longing of the time when he was twenty-one, and free, free to roam self-sufficient. He thought of that Howat Penny of which they had spoken, black as he was black in the family tradition; he had seen Hesselius's portrait of the other; and, but for the tied hair and continental ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... I was allowed to show you did not make you humble. You took them as a compliment to your powers. And so when you had your chance to go back to help Cynthia, you thought out no plan, you asked no advice. You went down in a very self-sufficient mood, expecting that everything ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... heaven and on earth. We have already commanded those unto whom the scriptures were given before you, and we command you also, saying, Fear God; but if ye disbelieve, unto God belongeth whatsoever is in heaven and on earth; and God is self-sufficient, and to be praised; for unto God belongeth whatsoever is in heaven and on earth, and God is a sufficient protector. If he pleaseth he will take you away, O men, and will produce others in your stead; for God is able ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... considered the other's heart with surprise. True love must rest on a perfect understanding; at the first lifting of the eyes in wonder there is a jar which by and by must make the whole emotion restless. An unconquerable curiosity lay at the very root of their lives. She thought him English and self-sufficient; he thought her foreign and a little superstitious. This ineffable criticism was constant, fretful, and ever nearing the climax of uttered reproach. Sara had inherited all the amazement, but she ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... think that few men have been born with the material for self-sufficient contentment more completely within himself than Edward Gibbon. He had every gift which a great scholar should have, an insatiable thirst for learning in every form, immense industry, a retentive memory, and that broadly philosophic temperament which enables a man to rise above the partisan ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... old gentleman, musing at the change in the attitude of the young man's mind—once so self-sufficient and assertive, now so dependent and inexperienced. "Very few lives are bare and empty enough not to teach one something worth knowing. I know the events of one man's life," he added, after a few moments of thoughtful ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... she was got as Wife, and came home to Berlin in all pomp;—but good came not with her to anybody there. Not only did she bring the poor old man no children, which was a fault to be overlooked, considering Sophie Dorothee's success; but she brought a querulous, weak and self-sufficient female humor; found his religion heterodox,—he being Calvinist, and perhaps even lax-Calvinist, she Lutheran as the Prussian Nation is, and strict to the bone:—heterodox wholly, to the length of ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... there was nothing which went from him or came into him: for there was nothing beside him. Of design he was created thus, his own waste providing his own food, and all that he did or suffered taking place in and by himself. For the Creator conceived that a being which was self-sufficient would be far more excellent than one which lacked anything; and, as he had no need to take anything or defend himself against any one, the Creator did not think it necessary to bestow upon him hands: nor had he any need of feet, nor of the whole apparatus of walking; but the movement ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... quite approve of me. When I was first introduced to her, she looked at me with her great, steady blue eyes, as if analyzing me to the very boots, and evidently set me down as a somewhat arrogant and self-sufficient young fellow who needed a judicious course of discipline to teach him humility. I was generally self-possessed and had no little confidence in myself, but I confess that I was embarrassed in her presence. She was not at all like Bessie, ...
— That Mother-in-Law of Mine • Anonymous
... unreasonableness of the reason" of some modern sciolists "so unreason our reason," as to debar us of the benefit of this principle in future, or to disfranchise us of the highest privilege of our nature. In the second place, if it is admitted that Reason alone is not the sole and self-sufficient ground of morals, it is to Mr. Godwin that we are indebted for having settled the point. No one denied or distrusted this principle (before his time) as the absolute judge and interpreter in all questions of difficulty; and if this is no longer the case, it is because he has ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... was once all in all—how he sailed and took storm and calm alike with undaunted heart, and gave chase to whosoever reechoed his cry, "We are of the sea!" and fought with brains and sinews, self-reliant, self-sufficient, instead of being thrust into the background by unintelligent machinery, as Jack is to-day. So it always is—"man only is ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... have made the choice then, if she could have gone into the world-war with all the might that she possessed and, staking her whole existence, have fought toward the highest goal, she might have won for herself a powerful and self-sufficient place ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... in the Discourses of Epictetus, entitled: "To or against those who obstinately Persist in what they have determined." {101} There could, I think, be no better formulation of purpose grown hard and unworthily self-sufficient. This form of materialism I have termed egoism and bigotry, since the purpose may be either personal or social in scope. But in either case the diagnosis of Epictetus goes to the root of the evil. He thus describes his experience with one of his companions, "who ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... aquiline comeliness pleased the eye without enticing it; her capable, fit-looking clothes were so happily secondary to her personality that even the women could not tell how she was dressed. She was the least seductive person imaginable; and she looked so self-sufficient that it seldom occurred to any one to offer her help. Yet she was in no sense bold or aggressive. No one ever thought of accusing her of being any of those things. Many loved her—loved her wholesomely, with a love in which ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... world. This population is accustomed to a relatively high standard of life, in which, even now, some sections of it anticipate improvement rather than deterioration. In relation to other continents Europe is not self-sufficient; in particular it cannot feed Itself. Internally the population is not evenly distributed, but much of it is crowded into a relatively small number of dense industrial centers. This population secured for itself a ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... negation, by ugliness, by grimace and irony! Myself, in my caprice, in my independence, in my irresponsible sovereignty; myself, set free by laughter, free as the demons are, and exulting in my freedom; I, master of myself, invincible and self-sufficient, living for this one time yet by and for myself! This is what seems to me at the bottom of this merry-making. One hears in it an echo of Satan, the temptation to make self the center of all things, to be like an Elohim, the worst and ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... around one central principle, which he defended with marvellous logical power. He was not a fencer like Abelard, displaying wonderful dexterity in the use of sophistries, overwhelming adversaries by wit and sarcasm; arrogant and self-sufficient, and destroying rather than building up. He did not deify the reason, like Erigina, nor throw himself on authority like Bernard. He was not comprehensive like Augustine, nor mystical like Bonaventura. He ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... the affections of the people of Massachusetts, first from the persons immediately charged with the government of the province, and finally, from the royal authority and whole English dominion. "With an arrogant and self-sufficient manner, constantly identifying himself with the authority of which he was merely the representative, and constantly indulging in irritating personal allusions, he entirely lost sight of the courtesy ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... is noisy and boisterous; truth is meek—error is proud and self-sufficient; truth is modest—error is bold and forward; truth is diffident—error is confident and assuming; truth is resigned to the will of God—error is self-willed. To arrive at the truth is not the design of such persons. It is not their eternal interests, nor those of their fellow creatures ...
— A Review of Uncle Tom's Cabin - or, An Essay on Slavery • A. Woodward
... the drama which you conceive, and of which you give us such magnificent examples in "Tannhauser" and "Lohengrin," it is absolutely necessary to make a breach in the old routine of criticism, the long ears and short sight of "Philistia," as well as the stupid arrogance of that self-sufficient fraction of the public which believes itself the destined judge of works of art by dint ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... reflect the compassion that is so much a part of your makeup. How can we love our country and not love our countrymen, and loving them, reach out a hand when they fall, heal them when they are sick, and provide opportunities to make them self-sufficient so they will be equal in fact and ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... was a wilful lad, And lots of "cheek" young WILHELM had. He deemed the world should hail with joy A smart and self-sufficient boy, And do as it by him was told; He was so wise, he was so bold. If anyone dared stop his play, He screamed out—"Take the wretch away! Oh, take my enemy away! I ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 26, 1892 • Various
... always been very cool to her. She deemed her a self-sufficient coquette. However, the Comtesse Diane was a constant attendant at the gay parties which were then the fashion of the Court, though ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... house ever since ... but the people I meet there make me feel murderous. I like her, a sensible, sonsy woman, and I like him too, although his solemn, priggish airs make me tired, but I cannot bear the crowd they get round them: all the cranks and oddities and smug, self-sufficient, interfering people seem to get into their house, and they're all reforming something or uplifting something else or generally bleating against this country. Things done in England are always inferior to things done elsewhere. English cooking is inferior to French cooking: English ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... wisdom, quite awe-inspiring to his wife. He had visited Boston as a boy, and so had a dim idea of what to expect; moreover, he had sold stock and produce in the large towns near his home, and on the whole felt quite self-sufficient. ...
— Across the Years • Eleanor H. Porter
... country than if they spend their time parading up the avenue of a crowded city and praying that they may some day, somehow, become policemen or boiler-makers side by side with men.... I say to you that it has remained for this self-sufficient 20th century to have produced a womanhood which would stand—even a small proportion of it—in legislative halls and say that they are doing more in this great and terrible war than the men are doing.... Gentlemen, if I were a married woman and my husband was a feminist and on the first Tuesday after ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... wanting the power to render myself intelligible. He as usual was amazed to hear he had not a right to do what he pleased with his own, and to be told it was not his own. Nor was he sparing in pettish reproof to the self-sufficient young lady, who thought proper to dispute the propriety and ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... to his name, with nothing in the shape of resources save a self-sufficient nerve and an infinite eastern contempt for these struggling westerners, he began to ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... skeered out'n thar boots, that's all," interrupted the self-sufficient 'Gene. "They would hev 'lowed they hed viewed yer brazen ghost, bold ez brass, standin' at the head of ...
— His Unquiet Ghost - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... on my account: I don't know who has told you that I liked her, but you may believe me, I never did. For the Damers,(172)they have lived much in the same world that I do. He is moderately sensible, immoderately proud, self-sufficient, and whimsical. She is very sensible, has even humour, if the excessive reserve and silence that she draws from both father and mother -would let her, I may almost say, ever show it. You say, "What ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... the world of sensation, between probative argument and the guess-work of sense-impressions. The former is the world of Being, the world of that which truly is, self-existent, uncreated, unending, unmoved, unchanging, ever self-poised and self-sufficient, like a sphere. [98] Knowledge is of this, and of this only, and as such, knowledge is identical with its object; for outside this known reality there is nothing. In other words, Knowledge can only be of that which is, and that ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... years, on the doctrines of grace, free-will, predestination, reprobation, justification, &c. you will be more entertained, and will believe less, than if I told your majesty a long story of fairies and goblins. You are an eternal prater, said the emperor, and very self-sufficient; but talk your fill, and upon what subject you like till tomorrow morning; but I swear by the soul of the holy Jirigi, who rode to heaven on the tail of a magpie, as soon as the clock strikes eight, you are a dead woman. Well, who ...
— Hieroglyphic Tales • Horace Walpole
... essence. 2ndly. A being, who has no equal, cannot be susceptible of glory; for glory can result only from the comparison of one's own excellence with that of others. 3rdly. If God be infinitely happy, if he be self-sufficient, what need has he of the homage of his feeble creatures? 4thly. God, notwithstanding all his endeavours, is not glorified; but, on the contrary, all the religions in the world represent him as perpetually offended; their sole object is to reconcile sinful, ungrateful, rebellious ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... the popes, "I have loved justice, and hated iniquity: therefore I die in exile"; therefore, in other words, I am cast aside and left behind by readers who are too lazy, too soft and slow of spirit, too sleepily sensual and self-sufficient, to endure the fiery and purgatorial atmosphere of my work. But there are breaths from heaven as surely as there are blasts from hell in the tumultuous and electric air of it. The cynicism and egotism which the editor already mentioned has the confidence ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... these reflections, I was just about to give an answer to the question of the future of our Educational Institutions in the same self-sufficient way, when it gradually dawned upon me that the "natural music," coming from the philosopher's bench had lost its original character and travelled to us in much more piercing and distinct tones than before. Suddenly I became aware that I was listening, that I was eavesdropping, ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... smooth-shaven face speckled on one side as by a powder scar. Beneath a thin-lipped mouth a stubborn chin protruded. He was dressed in a flannel shirt and corduroy trousers, fastened by a black belt. He had the self-sufficient air of the sailor or miner, which is developed by living a great deal apart from other men. It seemed to Wilson that the man was watching him, too, with considerable interest. Every now and then he removed the ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... a self-sufficient boatman have his words more effectually or promptly falsified than on that occasion. The distance between boat and shore at that moment was only a few hundred yards; but the water all the way was deep, and the waves, in consequence, were large and wild. There ...
— The Eagle Cliff • R.M. Ballantyne
... Eighteen Hundred Forty-five, and Thoreau was now twenty-eight years of age. He was homesick for the dim pine-woods with their ceaseless lullaby, the winding and placid river, and the great, massive, sullen, self-sufficient boulders of Concord. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... conceit that dispenses with it! How much better it is to delve for a little solid knowledge, and be sure of that, than to be a proper target for such a sarcasm as a great statesman once shot at a glib advocate, who was saying nothing with great fluency and at great length! "Who," he asked, "is this self-sufficient, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... allows no room for a division of labor, and no opportunity for the application of science; in other words, it shuts out manifoldness of development, diversity of talent, and the luxury of social relations. Every single farmer family is almost self-sufficient; itself produces directly the greater part of what it consumes; and it earns its livelihood more by means of an interchange with nature than by intercourse with society. We have the allotted patch of land, the farmer and his family; alongside ...
— The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte • Karl Marx
... slight his claims to consideration! He learned now definitely that the bishop was the real president of the college, and that Doctor Renshaw was a fairly negligible element in the situation. He divined also the proud and self-sufficient spirit of the place, a pride entirely independent of worldly success, ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... odd, 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
... the streets was always novel and entertaining to one who passed his days in a quiet New England town. Therefore he stopped one of the moving vehicles and in great good humor bade his father good-by; and feeling very self-sufficient to be touring New York by himself, clambered eagerly up ...
— Steve and the Steam Engine • Sara Ware Bassett
... out a multitude of things in which that professed instructor and Mentor of the public, the editor of the Active Inquirer, had made a false estimate of himself, as well as of his fellow-creatures. That such a man should be ignorant, is to be expected, as he had never been instructed; that he was self-sufficient was owing to his ignorance, which oftener induces vanity than modesty; that he was intolerant and bigoted, follows as a legitimate effect of his provincial and contracted habits; that he was a hypocrite, came from his homage of the people; and that one thus constituted, ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... Wisdom and Beauty: The latter is the peculiar Portion of that Sex which is therefore called Fair; but the happy Concurrence of both these Excellencies in the same Person, is a Character too celestial to be frequently met with. Beauty is an over-weaning self-sufficient thing, careless of providing it self any more substantial Ornaments; nay so little does it consult its own Interests, that it too often defeats it self by betraying that Innocence which renders it lovely ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... and ticked them off on his fingers: 'the first is that you took the woman that I wanted. To a man of my temperament that is an unpardonable crime. I have never wanted women either as friends or as amusement. I am one of the few people in the world who are self-sufficient. It happened that I wanted your wife and she rejected me because ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace
... O'Shane was not a person to be despised. He was indeed a man of great natural powers, both of body and mind—of inventive genius, energy, and perseverance, which might have attained the greatest objects; though from insufficient knowledge, and self-sufficient perversity, they had wasted themselves on absurd or ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... of land, accustomed therefore to rule themselves in small groups, and hence independent and markedly individualist. Such historians divide even these rude tribes sharply between the patriarchal and the particularist. The particularist commune developed from the estate which was self-sufficient, isolated, and independent. When they were associated together it was for special and limited purposes, so that independence might be infringed upon to the least possible extent. The patriarchal commune, on the other hand, proceeded from the communal family which provided everything for everybody. ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... acquaintances; for, while their intellectual intimacy was perfect, their air expressed a constant mutual deference and solicitude of approbation not to be confounded with the terrible familiarity of matrimony; and at the same time they constituted a self-sufficient circle, apart from the society around them, as man and wife cannot. Man and wife are so far merged as to feel themselves a unit over against society. They are too much identified to find in each other that sense of support and countenance ...
— A Summer Evening's Dream - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... when he did it was in a purely general way, as women touched some other subject he was discussing. He never paid any attention to the children they met casually in their travels. He seemed absolutely self-sufficient, interested only in the prospect of finding a paying claim. What he would do with wealth, if so be he attained it, he never seemed to know or care. He never asked Bud any questions about his private affairs, never seemed to care how Bud had ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... blood brotherhood of empire, quickened by that dramatic S.O.S. call for men across the sea and cemented by the common trench hazard, be followed by a union of empire after the war that should be self-sufficient. Behind all this eloquent talk of protection and prohibition lay the first real menace to America's new place as a world trade power. It was the opening call to arms for the ...
— The War After the War • Isaac Frederick Marcosson
... conscious of need. They do not think they "know it all;" they appreciate their own insufficiency. They are open-minded and impressionable. Now Jesus says that the first approach to his blessedness is in this teachable spirit. The hardest people for him to reach were always the self-sufficient people. The Pharisees thought they did not need anything, and so they could not get anything. As any one thinks, then, of his own greatest blessings, the first of them must be {59} this,—that somehow he has been made open-minded ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... of the change in Ditmar, and knew the cause of it. Her feelings were complicated. He, the most important man in Hampton, the self-sufficient, the powerful, the hitherto distant and unattainable head of the vast organization known as the Chippering Mill, of which she was an insignificant unit, at times became for her just a man—a man for whom she had achieved ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... well over, so as to give me access to the officials, they could be easily satisfied and made to help on the fraud, in place of being obstacles. The result proved my surmise correct, for such a lot of self-sufficient barnacles no institution in the world was ever ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... America. I think I am not exaggerating when I say I have answered a million in a single evening. My companion at first was disgusted with my wearing myself out in such a manner, but I said, "I am so grateful to them for caring, after the indifference of all these other self-sufficient countries, that I am willing to sacrifice myself at it ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... noted while walking up the stairway. Porters were bearing out articles of some sort, which he did not examine, but which seemed to him pictures, and other things also. Was Maryan leaving the house? Perhaps. It was impossible to foresee what that self-sufficient and stubborn youth was capable of doing. But whatever happened he would not yield, and he would permit no longer that vain method of life, with its mad excesses, excesses which are costly. But in those recent hours everything, not excepting Maryan, had concerned him considerably ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... Calvert. "I hate the very sight of a wasp-waisted, self-sufficient Prussian subaltern. They're everywhere. Imperial arrogance seems to pervade even their beer gardens." His voice trailed off into silence again, as in a preoccupied manner his finger wandered over the map. It stopped suddenly as he leaned closer to study the pink plot on ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... marked me for his own, breathed into my heart a vapour of spiritual pride, which could only have had its source in his own infernal regions. I had risen as high in the church as before in the state. I was, forsooth, the wise, the self-sufficient, the impeccable!—I was the counsellor of councils—I was the director of prelates. How should I stumble?—wherefore should I fear temptation? Alas! I became confessor to a sisterhood, and amongst that sisterhood I found the long-loved—the long-lost. Spare me further confession!—A fallen ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... more human, so man was more divine. In comparison our modern monotheism is cold, abstract, mechanical. Instead of a radiant Apollo, we have the law of gravitation. We have lost the many fair gods of old to enrich One who is remote, unfathomable, self-sufficient. ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... to pelt 'em to a pulp with facts! You've got to get 'em if you take them by the scruff of the neck, Miss MacDonald! While the churches and the teachers and the preachers sit back self-superior and self-sufficient, Miss MacDonald, where's the crowd? They're out in the street! You've got to get 'em! You've got to get the facts before 'em! People curse the yellow journals! All right! But they reach an audience of a million a day; every one of them; and your self-superior journals ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... God hath thus ordered it, that we may learn to bear one another's burdens, for no man is without fault; no man but hath his burden; no man is self-sufficient; no man has wisdom enough for himself alone. But we ought to bear with one another, comfort, help, instruct, and admonish ...
— Thistle and Rose - A Story for Girls • Amy Walton
... is the adventure of a young girl, who was brought out of a convent to marry a certain Duke. The Duke was narrow-hearted, pompous, and self-sufficient; the mother who shared his home, a sickly woman, as ungenial as himself. The young wife, on the other hand, was a bright, stirring creature, who would have been the sunshine of a labourer's home. She pined amidst the dreariness and the formality of her conjugal ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... when occurring, isolated and imperfect, there would still be a supernatural character about them, owing to their permanence and self-sufficiency, where no other sensual pleasures are permanent or self-sufficient. But when, instead of being scattered, interrupted, or chance-distributed, they are gathered together, and so arranged to enhance each other as by chance they could not be, there is caused by them not only a feeling of strong affection towards the object in which they exist, ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... working-men naturally have nothing to do with these institutes, and betake themselves to the proletarian reading-rooms and to the discussion of matters which directly concern their own interests, whereupon the self-sufficient bourgeoisie says its Dixi et Salvavi, and turns with contempt from a class which "prefers the angry ranting of ill- meaning demagogues to the advantages of solid education." That, however, the working-men appreciate solid education when they can get it unmixed with the interested ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... faithless, unworthy servant, who grows proud and self-sufficient upon the strength of property that belongs to me, and which he has stolen. And therefore I am about to change this impudent minister's fete into sorrow and mourning, of which the nymph of Vaux, as the poets say, shall not soon lose ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... no reason, save our own self-sufficient arrogance, to believe that the discovery of these two forces exhausts the treasures of infinite wisdom. Humboldt thus well refutes the folly of such an imagination: "The imperfectibility of all empirical science, and the boundlessness of the sphere of observation, render the task ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... Incessant civil wars between Hellenes kept the numbers down to some extent; but Greek battles were not as a rule very bloody, and every healthy nation has a surprising capacity of making good the losses caused by war. The first effect of the check to emigration was that the old ideal of the 'self-sufficient life,' which meant the practice of mixed farming, had to be partially abandoned. The most flourishing States, and especially Athens, had to take to manufactures, which they exchanged for the food-products of the Balkan States and South Russia. The ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... don't much mind. They are indurated by long use. They do not try to disguise from themselves the facts. There are some men who diligently try to disguise the facts, and who in some measure succeed in doing so. I have known a self-sufficient and disagreeable clergyman who had a church in a large city. Five-sixths of the seats in the church were quite empty; yet the clergyman often talked of what a good congregation he had, with a confidence which would have deceived any one who had not seen it. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... and sour; it never appeals to the affections, but it scatters denunciations, and rules by terror. Scepticism is proud and self-sufficient. It refuses to believe in mysteries and deals in rhetoric and sophistry, and flatters the vanity, by exalting human reason. My poor lost flock will see the change, and I fear, feel it too. Besides, absence is a temporary death. Now I am gone from them, ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... days Percival looked back to that Christmas as his worst and darkest time. His pride had grown morbid, and he swore to himself that he would never give in—that Horace should never know him otherwise than self-sufficient, should never think that but for Mrs. Middleton's or Godfrey Hammond's charity he might have had his cousin as a pensioner. Brooding on thoughts such as these, he sauntered moodily beneath the lamps when the new year was but two ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... Rose-alley ambuscade became almost proverbial;[22] and even Mulgrave, the real author of the satire, and upon whose shoulders the blows ought in justice to have descended, mentions the circumstance in his "Art of Poetry;" with a cold and self-sufficient complacent sneer: ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... spoke at all. Mrs. Montagu cared not a fig, as long as she spoke herself, and so she harangued away. Meanwhile Mr. Melmoth, the Pliny Melmoth, as he is called, was of the party, and seemed to think nobody half so great as himself. He seems intolerably self-sufficient—appears to look upon himself as the first man in Bath, and has a proud conceit in look and manner, mighty forbidding.' Mme. D'Arblay's Diary, ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... may be, my worthy host," said the chevalier with a self-sufficient air, "we men know how to disarm them, and I shall exercise afresh that power in dealing with ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... is the habit of a law-abiding mind—the sight of that broad, belted, self-sufficient back, symbolic of the power and sanity of the law, affected Sally with a mad impulse to turn, hail the officer, and inform him of the conditions she had just quitted. And she actually swerved aside, as if to cross the avenue, before she realised how ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... not that these self-sufficient Swiss need to be blooded, I would turn my army against France to-morrow," ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... the invaders of Syracuse came, made good their landing in Sicily; and if they had promptly attacked the city itself, instead of wasting nearly a year in desultory operations in other parts of Sicily, the Syracusans must have paid the penalty of their self-sufficient carelessness in submission to the Athenian yoke. But, of the three generals who led the Athenian expedition, two only were men of ability, and one was most weak and incompetent. Fortunately for Syracuse, Alcibiades, the most skilful of the three, was soon deposed from his command by a factious and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... documentary proof of the new problems and the changing attitude of the National Administration during the eighties. They indicate that the chief function of the National Government had ceased to be to moderate among a group of self-sufficient States and had come to be the direction of such interests as were national in importance or extent. On February 4, 1887, the Interstate Commerce Law was passed in recognition of a transportation system that had ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson
... work to write a biography of some of the most remarkable ushers. They seem to be the bats of the social scale. Gentlemen will not own them, and the classes beneath reject them. They are generally self-sufficient; the dependency of their situation makes them mean, and the exercise of delegated power tyrannical. If they have either spirit or talent, they lift themselves above their situation; but when they cannot do this, ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... Delia. You can look after mother and Mr. Raymond. We are very self-sufficient persons who don't need anything except a chance to go upstairs ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... in a bush that was all pricked with green points and shoots. And the old monk said, "This is a strange tale, Lord Robert, that you have told me; and the wonder grows as I think of it; but it seems to me that God has led you in a wonderful manner; He made you strong and bold and self-sufficient; and then He has taken these things from you, not gently, because you were strong to bear, but very sternly; He has led you through deep waters and yet you live; and He will set you upon the rock that is higher, so that you ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... can. She's got it; her weather forecast proved that much. You've got to drum that into her; never let her forget it. Maybe I'll be back—I hope so. But first, I have to find others. I need them, and they might need me. We're still not completely self-sufficient. ...
— Stopover • William Gerken
... settlements, where their bark was seized, and they were turned adrift to shift for themselves as they best might. Dampier returned naked to his owners, with a melancholy relation of his unfortunate expedition, occasioned chiefly by his own strange temper, being so self-sufficient and overbearing that few or none of his officers could bear with him; and when once disputation gets in among those who have the command, success is not to be expected. Even in this distress, he was received as an eminent man, notwithstanding his faillings, and was introduced ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... entire families to subsist the year around on the fruits of land and water plus unexacting manual labor. Wealth was concentrated in the hands of the more important planters whose estates were usually self-sufficient and concentrating on trade with England. The natural bounty of the Tidewater region thus actually deterred the development of Virginia along the lines of New England with ...
— The Bounty of the Chesapeake - Fishing in Colonial Virginia • James Wharton
... fathoms of water. I learned that an English girl had become Mrs. Sewall's companion. They were occupying the house in England. No doubt they were very happy together. Sometimes it would sweep over me with distressing reality that nobody really needed me—Breck, or Mrs. Sewall, or self-sufficient Bob in his beloved West. Bob was fast becoming nothing but a memory to me. If I thought of him at all it was as if my mind gazed at him through the wrong end of a pair of opera glasses. He seemed miles away. He must have come to New York occasionally but he didn't look ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty
... talking to Friedemann. He judged him, he could not long take pleasure in this vulgar bantering wit: his mockery and perpetual denial became irritating before long and he felt the impotence of it all: but it did soothe his exasperation with the self-sufficient stupidity of the Philistines. While he heartily despised his companion, Christophe could not do without him. They were continually seen together sitting with the unclassed and doubtful people of Friedemann's acquaintance, ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... remembrance ought always to trace the better present to God, and that memory of conquered sorrows and trials is wholesome only when it is devout, and that the joy of present ease is bracing, not when it is self-sufficient, but when it is thankful. The past, rightly looked at, will yield for us all materials for a feast of tabernacles; and it is rightly looked at only when it is all seen as God's work, and as tending to settled peace and abundance. Therefore the regulations end with ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren |
