"Selfishness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... swallowed and insist upon, in defiance of common reason and the evidence of their senses. The instinct of patriotism is not en evidence. The dominant passion is cupidity, and nothing higher; sheer greed of gain, lust of possession, and nothing nobler. Selfishness and the hope of plunder are the actuating impulses at the poll; crass ignorance and bitter prejudice the mental disposition of the lower class of voters. Four hours' slumming convinced me of this, and must convince ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... Cardinal Patrizi, when all the visitors to Rome were assembled on occasion of the commemoration of his election—10th June—"Modern society is ardent in the pursuit of two things, progress, and unity. It fails to reach either, because its motive principles are selfishness and pride. Pride is the worst enemy of progress, and selfishness by destroying charity, the bond of souls, thereby rendering union impossible. Now God Himself has established the Sovereign Pontiff in order to direct and enlighten society, to point out evil and indicate ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... while her nature was gentle and tranquil, she gradually imbibed the grave and rather prim ideas which were in vogue when Miss Patty was the reigning belle of her county. Although petted and indulged, she had not been spoiled, and remained singularly free from the selfishness usually developed in the character of an only child, nurtured in the midst of mature relatives. When eighteen years old, Leo, accompanied by her governess, Mrs. Eldridge, had been sent to New York and Boston for educational advantages, ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... war brings upon us, it is making us wiser, and, we trust, better. Wiser, for we are learning our weakness, our narrowness, our selfishness, our ignorance, in lessons of sorrow and shame. Better, because all that is noble in men and women is demanded by the time, and our people are rising to the standard the time calls for. For this is the question the hour is putting to each of us: Are you ready, ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... The highly gifted man of that day thought to find it in the sentiment of honour. This is that enigmatic mixture of conscience and egotism which often survives in the modern man after he has lost, whether by his own fault or not, faith, love, and hope. This sense of honour is compatible with much selfishness and great vices, and may be the victim of astonishing illusions; yet, nevertheless, all the noble elements that are left in the wreck of a character may gather around it, and from this fountain may draw new strength. It has become, in a far wider sense than is commonly believed, a decisive ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... seeing that the world is lost, and is living in sin and misery, "I belong to it, and it belongs to me." When you take the loaf of society and cut off the upper crust, slicing it horizontally, you get an elect church. Yes, it is the peculiarly elect church of selfishness. But you should cut the loaf of society from the top down to the bottom, and take in something of everything. True, every church would be very much edified and advantaged if it had in it scholarly men, knowledgeable men; but the church is strong ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... with atheism, when I saw somewhat of the meanness and selfishness of its protagonists, I began to doubt in the honesty of men. If these, our supposed teachers, are so vile, so mercenary, so false,—why, welcome Juhannam! But the more I doubted in the honesty of men, the more did I believe that honesty should be the cardinal ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... ever burning in the heart: a guide to the source of Light, or an instrument of torture. We can make it either. If it burn in an atmosphere of purity, it will warm, guide, cheer us. If in the midst of selfishness, or under the pressure of pride, its flame will be unsteady, and we shall soon have good reason to trim our light, and ...
— Friends and Neighbors - or Two Ways of Living in the World • Anonymous
... doan't say so," began Mr. Lyddon, slowly stuffing his pipe. "No. When a man goes so deep into his heart as what Will have before me this minute, doan't become no man to judge un, or tell 'bout selfishness. Us have got to save our awn sawls, an' us must even leave wife, an' mother, and childer if theer 's no other way to do it. Ban't no right living—ban't no fair travelling in double harness wi' conscience, onless you've got a clean mind. ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... preference of duty to life—not in men, but in silk and cotton, and something that they call "capital." Peace is blessed—peace arising out of charity. But peace springing out of the calculations of selfishness is not blessed. If the price to be paid for peace is this, that wealth accumulate and men decay, better far that every street, in every town of our once noble country, should ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... their duty has brought an heretofore unexperienced peace of mind. For myself I was never happier than I am at present; there's a novel zip added to life by the daily risks and the knowledge that at last you're doing something into which no trace of selfishness enters. One can only die once; the chief concern that matters is how and not when you die. I don't pity the weary men who have attained eternal leisure in the corruption of our shell-furrowed battles; they "went West" in their supreme moment. The men I pity are those ...
— Carry On • Coningsby Dawson
... are governed through their appetites in their infancy are usually governed by their appetites in maturity. Thus it is, by unwise methods of control which appeal wholly to the spirit of greed, emulation and selfishness in the child—the purely animal instincts—with perhaps the occasional degrading influence of corporal punishment, as a later development, that so many young lives are wrecked and the downward path made easy which leads through ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... seemed to be. Perhaps she still thought it necessary to protect him from curious remark. He worked with Needham by day, and she could see him at night, and all of Saturdays and Sundays. Perhaps it was the jealous selfishness of love. She had found him; he was hers. In the spring, when school was over, her granny had said that she might marry him. Till then her dream would not yet have come true, and she must keep him to herself. And yet she did not wish him to lose ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... lie with his eyes shut," answered Mrs. Grant calmly. There was no disagreeableness in her tone: her selfishness was on too gigantic a scale for ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... she whispered. "What have I been to you but a symbol of unbridled selfishness, asking all, giving nothing? How could you know I loved you so dearly that I could stand aside to let you pass? First I loved you selfishly, shamelessly; then I begged your guilty love, offering mine in the passion ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... closed with this handsome offer at once, accepting it in the chummy spirit which is supposed to be generated in the atmosphere of higher culture. A more worldly-wise woman might have suspected him, not only on grounds of general masculine selfishness, but on the fact that he had no business to transact at our hostelry. He did not enter its doors, but remained sitting in the carromata till she joined him. The girl had her mind on salary, however, and had no time to question motives. The ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... said that these thorns grow of selfishness, and that these cares are the cares of individual interest, whereas the Utilitarian's delight and glory is to live, not for himself, but for the commonwealth. But how can a man, who takes pleasure to be his highest ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... she sat beside him in her white temple dress, her beautiful face looking stern and sad against the dusky background of the torchlight, and a great shame and pity filled his heart. The blood of this girl was on his hands, and he could do nothing to help her. His selfishness had dragged her into this miserable enterprise, and now its inevitable end was at hand and he was her murderer, the murderer of the woman who was all the world to him, and who had been entrusted to his care with her father's ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... stares at him with vaguely frightened eyes.) It's had a good start—thanks to her father's blind selfishness—but let's hope that can be overcome. The important thing is to ship her off to a sanatorium immediately. Carmody wouldn't hear of it at first. However, I managed to bully him into consenting; but I don't trust his word. That's ...
— The Straw • Eugene O'Neill
... self-aggrandizement, yet, in point of fact, no man ever manages a legitimate business in this life, that he is not doing a thousand-fold more for other men than he is trying to do even for himself. For, in the economy of God's providence, every right and well organized business is a beneficence and not a selfishness. And not less is it so because the merchant, the mechanic, the publisher, the artist, think merely of their profit. They are in fact working more for others than they are ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... towards his goal. To his possession of a keen sense of humour the Yankee owes much of his success; it leads him, with a shrug of his shoulders, to cease fighting over names when the real thing is granted; it may sometimes lean to a calculating selfishness rather than spontaneous generosity, but on the whole it softens, enriches, and facilitates the problems of existence. It may, however, be here noted that some observers, such as Professor Boyesen, think that there ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... had known each the other from childhood. And she perhaps came nearer to liking him for himself than did any one else of his acquaintance. She was used to his conceit, his selfishness, his meanness and smallness in suspicion, his arrogance, his narrow-mindedness. She knew his good qualities—his kindness of heart, his shamed-face generosity, his honesty, the strong if limited sense of justice which made him a good employer and a good landlord. They had much in common—the same ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... blades of grass edging out, on. That is what will make you see this 'higher law,' some time. That is big politics, higher than what you call your traditions. That will shame little men. Many traditions are only egotism and selfishness. There is a compromise which will be final—not one done in a mutual cowardice. It's one done in a ...
— The Purchase Price • Emerson Hough
... meant disaster. Each seemed to fear lest it should bring on the other some grief more serious than those they felt tempted to share. Was it shyness or friendship that checked them? Was it a dread of meeting with selfishness, or the odious distrust which sunders all the residents within the walls of a populous city? Did the voice of conscience warn them of approaching danger? It would be impossible to explain the instinct which made them as much enemies as friends, at once indifferent and attached, drawn to each other ...
— A Second Home • Honore de Balzac
... for a moment mean to imply that in any particular period of history men were free from the disturbance of their lower passions. Selfishness ever had its share in government and trade. Yet there was a struggle to maintain a balance of forces in society; and our passions cherished no delusions about their own rank and value. They contrived no clever devices to hoodwink ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... no selfishness about him, was going to waken Paganel, that he might see this phenomenon with his own eyes, when something occurred which arrested him. This phosphorescent light illumined the distance half a mile, and McNabbs fancied he saw a shadow pass across the edge of it. Were his eyes ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... a moment; her head was aching so hard that she longed to get away. But selfishness was not one of Jerrie's faults, and putting her ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... would be a paradise to what it has. Real motherhood could and often does rescue such children with joy. That so few children are adopted in a world of women clamouring for motherhood proves the essential selfishness of the claim. It is not the child—it is herself—that the woman who demands motherhood as a "right" is concerned with. What an irony! For to satisfy herself first is the ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden
... gardening also so much. Visions of three yellow, three white, and three purple crocuses blooming in one pot beguile the mind from less happy fancies—perhaps too the largeness and universality of Nature disperse the selfishness of personal cares and worries. Then I think the smell of earth and plants has a physical anodyne about it somehow! ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... result by another route. obtaining money or office in certain specified ways. We must so shape their ambitions that they do not wish to obtain money or office by means that injure the community. We must get them to consider public selfishness as dishonorable a thing as we now consider private selfishness". If a man today crowds himself out of a theater, leaving behind him a trail of bruised women and children, the very newsboy in the street will hiss him ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... allowed to grow beneath the angle of his massive jaw, the rest of his face being clean shaven. The eyes were deep-sunk and of a clear, cold blue. His mouth broad, with firm, solid lips. Dogged resolution, unconquerable will, cold-blooded selfishness, and a keen hog-cunning showed in his face, while his short, stout form—massive but not fleshy—betrayed a capacity to endure fatigue which few men ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... more angry with him for his selfishness and want of consideration, for Ellen, in her torrent of grief, had even disclosed that he had said she did not care for him—no one really in love ever scrupled about ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to have my mother live to a hundred, if she could enjoy life," said Ben, disgusted with his companoin's sordid selfishness. ...
— The Store Boy • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... caring enough for the public welfare not to set personal advantage first. It is a question of inspiring our future citizens while they are boys and girls with the spirit of true patriotism as against the spirit of rank selfishness, the anti-social spirit of the man who declines to take into account any other interest than his own; whose one aim and ideal is personal success. Women both in public and at home, by letting the men know what they think, and by putting it before the children, can make familiar the idea ...
— The Fight For Conservation • Gifford Pinchot
... rest of the valley, and even produces wine: the consequence is, that there is less piety here." Neff even entertained the theory that the poorer the people the greater was their humility and fervour, and the less their selfishness and spiritual pride. Thus, he considered "the fertility of the commune of Champsaur, and its proximity to the high road and to Gap, great stumbling-blocks." The loftiest, coldest, and most barren spots—such as San Veran and Dormilhouse—were, in his opinion, by far the most promising. ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... human nature; and that love cannot be turned to hatred in heaven, but must grow purer and intenser there. The doctrine which makes the saints pleased with contemplating the woes of the damned, and even draw much of their happiness from the contrast, is the deification of the absolute selfishness of a demon. Human nature, even when left to its uncultured instincts, is bound to far other and nobler things. Radbod, one of the old Scandinavian kings, after long resistance, finally consented to ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... in the foregoing pages, it became naturally Rebecca's duty to make herself, as she said, agreeable to her benefactors, and to gain their confidence to the utmost of her power. Who can but admire this quality of gratitude in an unprotected orphan; and, if there entered some degree of selfishness into her calculations, who can say but that her prudence was perfectly justifiable? "I am alone in the world," said the friendless girl. "I have nothing to look for but what my own labour can bring me; and while that little pink-faced ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... her spiritual exertion. The no longer pampered body, subdued to spareness, braced by toil, elastic from exertion, and patient from habit, is not a clog, but a meet companion for its immortal associate. Prosperity, among many other evils, engenders religious apathy, and luxurious selfishness. She presents a gorgeous stage, on which the puppets of vanity and petty ambition act their insignificant parts; adversity educates ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... existence was only revealed by a faint foreshadowing presentiment. In recent times, the idea of civilization has acquired additional intensity, and has given rise to a desire of extending more widely the relations of national intercourse and of intellectual cultivation; even selfishness begins to learn that by such a course its interests will be better served than by violent and forced isolation. Language more than any other attribute of mankind, binds together the whole human race. By its idiomatic properties it ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... industrial North, where the business of life is fiercely competitive, and where each man is wont to seek his own fortune without much outward consideration for his fellows. Yet in the field it would be impossible to imagine minds less touched by selfishness or less influenced by any notion of personal distinction or reward. They did their best for Britain. Honours are but gifts ...
— With Manchesters in the East • Gerald B. Hurst
... Barnet. 'I saw an immense selfishness, a monstrous disregard for anything but pleasure and possession in all those people above us, but I saw how inevitable that was, how certainly if the richest had changed places with the poorest, that things would have been the same. What else can happen when men ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... human race had any other origin than the union of high intelligence with low desires." Was Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon unintelligent? Caesar and Napoleon—were they unintelligent? Has the most monumental and destructive selfishness in human history been associated with poor minds? No, with great minds, which, if the world was to be saved their devastation, needed to be reborn into a new spirit. The transforming gospel which religion brings is indispensable ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... your comfortable home, and think of the unemployed actresses who are suffering from actual want. Is there one among you, who, if you had the chance, would care to strike the bread from the hand of one of these? Ask God that the scales of unconscious selfishness may fall from your eyes. Look about you and see if there is not some duty, however small, the more irksome the better, that you may take from your mother's daily load, some service you can render for father, brother, sister, aunt; some daily household task, so small you may feel contemptuous ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... Cheerfulness and selfishness are often one, sahib, for it was not what we could see that raised our spirits. We marched by village after village that had been combed by the foragers for Turkish armies,—and saw only destitution to right and left, behind and before. ...
— Hira Singh - When India came to fight in Flanders • Talbot Mundy
... that the Zards and Canitaurs both should fail to tell me, whom they claimed to respect as kinsman redeemer and whose decisions would seal their fate for good or ill, that there were other survivors from the Great Wars. I was also shocked by their selfishness, for while they fought pettily amongst themselves over how they would change their lands for the better, a seemingly important question about past and future, they completely ignored the sufferings of other humanoids, to whom their way of living no doubt ...
— The Revolutions of Time • Jonathan Dunn
... is an animal equally selfish and vain. Vanity, indeed, is but a modification of selfishness. From the latter, there are some who pretend to be free: they are generally such as declaim against the lust of wealth and power, because they have never been able to attain any high degree in either: they boast of generosity and feeling. They tell us (perhaps they tell us in ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... ready to profit: No affliction without its stock-jobbers, who all Gamble, speculate, play on the rise and the fall Of another man's heart, and make traffic in it." Burn thy book, O La Rochefoucauld! Fool! one man's wit All men's selfishness how should it fathom? O sage, Dost thou satirize Nature? She laughs at ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... acquaintances been asked who was the man in London the surest to perform nothing to-day which should be remembered on the morrow, they would have thought of Wakefield. Only the wife of his bosom might have hesitated. She, without having analyzed his character, was partly aware of a quiet selfishness that had rusted into his inactive mind; of a peculiar sort of vanity, the most uneasy attribute about him; of a disposition to craft which had seldom produced more positive effects than the keeping of petty ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... sets down the poet's profits at as nearly as possible 500l. Of this sum Burns gave 180l. to his brother Gilbert, who was now in pecuniary trouble. "I give myself no airs on this," he writes, "for it was mere selfishness on my part; I was conscious that the wrong scale of the balance was pretty heavily charged, and I thought that throwing a little filial piety and fraternal affection into the scale in my favour, might help to smooth ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... Hubbard. Thirty-eight to forty years of age. Smooth-shaven. A star journalist with a national reputation; a large, heavy-set man, with large head, large hands—everything about him is large. A man radiating prosperity, optimism and selfishness. Has no morality whatever. Is a conscious individualist, cold-blooded, pitiless, working only for himself, and ...
— Theft - A Play In Four Acts • Jack London
... rulers as they preached salvation through Him. The disciples, who, in accordance with Christ's injunction, awaited the descent of the Spirit, were on the day of Pentecost clothed with power before which bigotry and selfishness passed into faith and charity and self-surrender; and there was won on that day for the Church a triumph such as the might of God alone could have secured—a triumph which the ministry of the Spirit, whenever it is recognised ...
— Exposition of the Apostles Creed • James Dodds
... have only one thing wanting to perfect happiness, my desire for your society." Two longer letters are written to his young friend Lollius (Ep. I, ii, xviii). The first is a study of Homer, which he has been reading in the country. In the "Iliad" he is disgusted by the reckless selfishness of the leaders; in the hero of the "Odyssey" he sees a model of patient, wise endurance, and impresses the example on his friend. It is curious that the great poet of one age, reading the greater poet of another, should fasten his attention, not on the poetry, but on the ethics ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... are still bathed in purity and no wrinkles seam the brow. Charles, so far, had had no occasion to apply the maxims of Parisian morality; up to this time he was still endowed with the beauty of inexperience. And yet, unknown to himself, he had been inoculated with selfishness. The germs of Parisian political economy, latent in his heart, would assuredly burst forth, sooner or later, whenever the careless spectator became an actor in the drama of ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac
... a trail,' to help every one who follows him to find the way a little more easily. That man is called a Pioneer. George Fox was a pioneer in the spiritual world. He discovered a true path for himself, a path leading right through the thick forest of human selfishness and sin and out into the bright sunshine beyond. In his lonely Quest through those years of struggle he was indeed 'blazing a trail' for us. If the track we tread nowadays is smooth and easy to tread, ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... might create serious discussion, or mar the initial success of the Commonwealth had been overlooked. The ablest brains of all the colonies had worked in unison, a great achievement in these days of selfishness and ...
— The Chronicles of a Gay Gordon • Jose Maria Gordon
... should not have discharged the duties of honest men if we had suffered him to go out of this world without desiring him to prepare for death.' The duke joined heartily in the beautiful prayers for the dying, of our Church, and yet there was a sort of selfishness and indifference to others manifest even at ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... the corrupt lives of Christians in the later centuries of the middle ages, the avarice of the Avignon popes, the selfishness shown in the great schism, the simony and nepotism of the Roman court of the fifteenth century, excited disgust and hatred toward Christianity in the hearts of the literary men of the Renaissance, which disqualified ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... imperfect their love may be, a perfect love; and a perfect love means one untinged by any dash of selfishness, incapable of any variation or eclipse, all-knowing, all-pitying, all-powerful. We have made experience of precious loves that die. We know of loves that change, that grow cold, that misconstrue, that may ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Low level selfishness, love of low level luxury, diseased imaginings, and unreasonable dreads and fears, are some of the forms of vice that smother this ...
— The Fertility of the Unfit • William Allan Chapple
... says, and maybe I could not love it as well as I love my lamb, and so its feelings would be hurt. I don't want a parrot, after all, and I want you to take this and buy some shoes." So said little Lucina Merritt, making her sweet assumption of selfishness to cover her unselfishness, for the noisy parrot was the desire of her heart, and to her father's eyes she bore the aspect of an angel, and he swallowed a great sob of mingled admiration and awe and intensest ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... the most base and dastardly. To be sure, during the whole of this long and bloody war, carried on by the despots and tyrants of the earth, their conduct was one continued exhibition of treachery, falsehood, selfishness, and deception. This abandoned race of Sovereigns, Kings and Emperors, who assume a divine origin, and set up a claim of divine rights, have, by their acts, unequivocally proclaimed to the whole world ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... garrison, both of Europeans and natives. It has been always remarked, that the Dutchman, in his eastern settlements, loses the mercantile probity of his European character, while he retains its cold-blooded phlegm and avaricious selfishness. Of this the Amboyna government gave a notable proof. About the 11th of Feb. 1622, old stile, under pretence of a plot laid between the English of the factory and some Japanese soldiers to seize the castle, the former were arrested by the Dutch, ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... this magnificent facade may be pronounced almost unrivalled for beauty and appropriateness; and the entire palace may well be called "a marvellous example of the sumptuousness and selfishness of ancient princes," who expended on the gratification of their own taste and love of display the riches which would have been better employed in the defence of their kingdoms, or in the relief of ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... food, and full of green beans and salad, and green corn. Mustapha tried to persuade me not to give physick, for fear those who died should pass for being poisoned, but both Omar and I are sure it is only to excuse his own selfishness. Omar is an excellent assistant. The bishop tried to make money by hinting that if I forbade my patients to fast, I might pay for their indulgence. One poor, peevish little man refused the chicken-broth, and told me that ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... forces us to admit the possibility of near alliance to over-balance of mind—but counter-balancing, antiseptic, salt. There is abundant if not exactly omnipresent common-sense; excellent manners; an almost total absence in that part of the letters which we are now considering of selfishness, and a total absence of ill-nature.[23] It is no business of ours here to embark on the problem, "What was the dram of eale" that ruined all this and more "noble substance" in Cowper? though there is not much doubt about the agency and little about the principal agents that effected the mischief. ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... heavier often, than the sacrifices made on the field of battle. Death is popularly considered the maximum of punishment in war, but it is not; reduction to poverty brings prayers for peace more surely and more quickly than does the destruction of human life, as the selfishness of man has demonstrated in ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. I., Part 3 • P. H. Sheridan
... remembering her sentimental education, the sentimental ideals that for centuries upon centuries men have imposed upon the more imitative sex? She could not see the simple selfishness of her life,—not then, perhaps later when ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... she said, "I can believe it." The word "generosity" kept echoing in her mind. Generosity—generosity. How much talk there was about it! Everyone was forever praising himself for his generosity, was reciting acts of the most obvious selfishness in proof. Was there any such thing in the whole world as ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... through with it. To what end would be the hideous torture? What was life without him?—Nothing and less than nothing. She could never give herself to another man. She was necessary to no one. Aubrey had no real need of her; his selfishness wrapped him around with a complacency that abundantly satisfied him. One day, for the sake of the family he would marry—perhaps was already married if he had been able to find a woman in America who would accept his egoism along with his old name and possessions. Her life was her own ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... people remind them of a mushroom origin of which they are ashamed. Without pity for the dreadful misery of the masses, they ascribe it wholly to idleness or debauchery because this calumny forms an excuse for their barbarous selfishness. ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... the just" (Luke 14:14) will "each man receive his own reward according to his own labor."—1 Cor. 3:8. Let this blessed teaching be a comfort to some hearts: the redeemed loved ones who have died are "present with the Lord" which "is far better." Then it is cruel selfishness to wish ...
— God's Plan with Men • T. T. (Thomas Theodore) Martin
... place to sleep. Our clothes had dried on us, and we were walking under the half-deck: but not a soul spoke to, or even took the least notice of us. In a newly-manned ship just ready to sail there is a universal feeling of selfishness prevailing among the ship's company. Some, if not most, had, like us, been pressed, and their thoughts were occupied with their situation and the change in their prospects. Others were busy making ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... with moral selfishness, though it often unconsciously does its work. Were it otherwise, I should have passed over in silence this aspect, comprehensive though it is, of Mr. Browning's character. He was capable of the largest ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... the very depths who might have been saved if motherly women, when they saw them unloved and lonely, had reached out to them a helping hand and encouraged them to live useful and good lives. We cry am I my sister's keeper? [I?] will not wipe the blood off our hands if through pride and selfishness we have stabbed by our neglect souls we should have helped by our kindness. I always feel for young girls who are lonely and neglected in large cities and are in danger of being ensnared by pretended sympathies and false friendship, and, to-day, no girl is more ...
— Trial and Triumph • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... undue importance to their own trials and grievances, as to forget in a great measure the sorrows of the slave. Let its cry of wo, coming up from the plantations of the South, suppress every feeling of selfishness in our hearts. Let our regret and indignation at the denial of the right of petition, be felt only because we are thereby prevented from pleading in the Halls of Congress for the "suffering and the dumb." And let the fact, that we are shut out from half ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... fugitives. There is no certain account of Charles's interview with Lord Lovat; we do not know whether the cunning old man turned and upbraided the Prince in his misfortune, or whether the instincts of a Highland gentleman overcame for a moment the selfishness of the old chief. Anyway, this was no time to bandy either upbraidings or compliments. Forty minutes of desperate fighting on the field of Culloden that morning had broken for ever the strength of the Jacobite cause. ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... so he told himself, really rooted in masculine selfishness,—the absorbing selfishness of old bachelorhood, which had grown round him like a shell, shutting him out altogether from the soft influences of feminine attraction,—so much so indeed that he had even come to look upon his domestic indoor servants ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... ability of a designer, but she could appreciate the crashing music of gorgeous colours met together on the right notes. Love of colour was in her Jewish blood, and she was a shrewd business woman also, animated with too vital a selfishness to let any opportunity of advancement go. She seized the new girl's idea at a glance, realized its value and its possible ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... ever comfort me any more; and how could a great, stupid boy like you make up to me for having lost her?" moaned poor little Elisabeth, with the selfishness of ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... be of some use in the world. My husband says I am of use to him, and of course that's my first duty, but it's not enough. When I was married a dear old lady wrote me a letter, and said that marriage often became 'the selfishness of two,' and I do feel that it is true. It's no credit to be good to someone who is dearer than yourself, and giving a few subscriptions is no credit either when you are rich; it was a very different matter when you scraped them out of your dress allowance. I've ...
— Betty Trevor • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... He means this—that he is no mere ecstatic enthusiast or "dervish,'' whose primary aim is to keep up the warlike spirit of the people, taking for granted that Yahweh is on the people's side, and that he is perfectly free from the taint of selfishness, not having to support himself by his prophesying. He could not indeed tell Amaziah this, but it is nevertheless true that he was the founder, or one of the founders, of a new type of prophet. He was also either the first, or one of the first, to write ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... minds; no more can it be those who, under his reign, have usefully served their country in the different branches of the public administration; but that which we can never brand with too severe a stigma, is the system of selfishness and oppression of which Bonaparte is the author. But is not this deplorable system still in full sway in Europe? and have not the powerful of the earth carefully gathered up the shameful inheritance of him whom they have overthrown? And if we ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... ladies are apt to believe that young men of pleasure must be overwhelmed. He had gradually taught himself to think that his own luxuries and his own comforts should in his own estimation be paramount to everything. He was not naturally selfish, but his life had almost necessarily engendered selfishness. Marrying had come to be looked upon as an evil,—as had old age;—not of course an unavoidable evil, but one into which a man will probably fall sooner or later. To put off marriage as long as possible, and when it could no longer be put off to marry money was a part of ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... thought of myself and not of you. When the whispered misgiving would rise up in my mind I forced it down by vowing that if you did not already love me I could and would make you do so. When the blow fell, and I knew that I had lost you, I knew that my selfishness in thinking chiefly of my own happiness had been properly rewarded. At least this was the feeling that possessed my heart after the first. You were young, confiding, inexperienced. I knew better than you ...
— A Manifest Destiny • Julia Magruder
... and Consequences of Selfishness, 87 The Selfish Principle surrendered, 87 Self-Denial defined and applied, 89 Essential to Christian Character, 89 Christ's Example, ...
— A Practical Directory for Young Christian Females - Being a Series of Letters from a Brother to a Younger Sister • Harvey Newcomb
... public character probably could pass unscathed through the fiery ordeal to which he has thus subjected himself. Cicero, it must be avowed, is convicted from his own mouth of vanity, inconstancy, sordidness, jealousy, malice, selfishness, and timidity. But on the other hand no character, public or private, could thus bare its workings to our view without laying a stronger claim to our sympathy, and extorting from us more kindly consideration than we can give to the mere shell of the human being with which ordinary history brings ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... not be forgotten that this old Sir Launfal is only in the dream of the real Sir Launfal, who is still lying on the rushes within his own castle. As the poor had often been turned away with cold, heartless selfishness, so he is now turned away from his own ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... cherishes the landmark; in justice to history which is entitled to the truth; in sympathetic fellowship with those who survived the disaster; and in reverent memory of those who suffered and died in the snow-bound camps of the Sierra Nevadas, I refute the charges of cruelty, selfishness, and inhumanity which have been ascribed to ...
— The Expedition of the Donner Party and its Tragic Fate • Eliza Poor Donner Houghton
... down the master of Stoneleigh lay dead in the room where he had blessed his son and commended him to the care of his brother and Anthony, feeling, certain that the latter would be truer to the trust than the former, in whom selfishness was ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... this maddening but intangible barrier had nothing to do with a change of habit that had not caused an hour of tears and sulks. Helene had a quick temper but a gay and sweet disposition, normally high spirits, little apparent selfishness, and a naive adoration of masculine superiority and strength; altogether, with her high bred beauty and her dignity in public, an enchanting creature and an ideal wife for a busy man of inherited social position and no ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... a convent at the very first glance which had told her of waning love. That was true affection. But this woman would struggle hard, fight to the bitter end, before she would quit the position which was so dear to her. She spoke of her wrongs. What were her wrongs? In his intense selfishness, nurtured by the eternal flattery which was the very air he breathed, he could not see that the fifteen years of her life which he had absorbed, or the loss of the husband whom he had supplanted, ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle
... But he said, "Io non voglio perdere gli uomini perle femminelle."[38] If the Black party furnished types for the grosser or fiercer forms of wickedness in the poet's hell, the White party surely were the originals of that picture of stupid and cowardly selfishness, in the miserable crowd who moan and are buffeted in the vestibule of the Pit, mingled with the angels who dared neither to rebel nor be faithful, but "were for themselves"; and whoever it may be who is singled out in the setta dei cattivi, for ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... him, but in her own good straightforward Dutch, that his present life was only a higher kind of selfishness, spiritual egotism; whereas a priest had no more right to care only for his own soul than only for his own body. That was not his path to heaven. "But," said she, "whoever yet lost his soul by saving the souls of others! the Almighty loves him who thinks of others; and when ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... find that in the accepted methods of accumulation arise many of the causes of current misery and unhappiness. Generally he who is said to succeed pays a price, and a large one, for the prosperity he achieves. To be conspicuously successful commonly involves a degree of selfishness that is almost surely damaging. Often injustice and unfairness are added to the train of factors, and dishonesty and absence of decency give the finishing touch. Every dollar tinged with doubt is a moral liability. If it has been wrested from its rightful ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... cross-purposes on steamships, in railway trains, hotels, casinos, post and telegraph offices—making social intercourse difficult and friendship impossible. The overbearing manners of many German travellers, their aggressive and domineering selfishness, which always demanded the best seats, the best rooms, and the first attention, was year by year becoming more and more intolerable to the British spirit. It cannot be said that we acquiesced. Indeed, it must be admitted ...
— The Drama Of Three Hundred & Sixty-Five Days - Scenes In The Great War - 1915 • Hall Caine
... trait of Miss Petowker left in Mrs Lillyvick, and finding too surely that there was not, begged pardon of all the company with great humility, and sat down such a crest-fallen, dispirited, disenchanted man, that despite all his selfishness and dotage, he was quite an ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... because it forces so many good men among ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty, criticizing the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest.... Slavery is founded in the selfishness of man's nature—opposition to it in his love of justice. These principles are an eternal antagonism, and when brought into collision so fiercely as slavery extension brings them, shocks and throes and convulsions must ceaselessly follow. Repeal the Missouri Compromise, repeal all compromises, ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... confessed his inward thought, as that he felt he had gained some special victory in thus ACKNOWLEDGING HIS BELIEF IN THE POSITIVE EXISTENCE OF THE "Saviour" who formed the subject of Khosrul's prophecy. Full of a singular sort of self-congratulation which yet had nothing to do with selfishness, he became so absorbed in his own reflections that he started like a man brusquely aroused from sleep when the Prophet's strong grave voice apostrophized him personally over the heads of ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... movements, further than he cared about. To creatures of his like human life is nothing compared to what it can produce. Men and women are a means to an end, and that end, the furtherance of his own wealth, his own future. The epitome of prehistoric selfishness, is it not? Club the next man that comes along, and steal from his dead body all that he has worked for. Oh, a pretty sort of a tale this is, ...
— The Riddle of the Frozen Flame • Mary E. Hanshew
... husband were written after her death, and after his second marriage. Do then men love dead women better than they do the living? Perhaps. And then a certain writer has said: "To have known a great and exalted love, and have had it flee from your grasp—flee as a shadow before it is sullied by selfishness or misunderstanding—is the highest good. The memory of such a love can not die from out the heart. It affords a ballast 'gainst all the sordid impulses of life, and though it gives an unutterable sadness, it ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... to. Nothing could be said against this principle—but it tells badly in the management of a family unless, indeed, as we have said, it is managed through the medium of the mother, who takes away all imputation of selfishness by throwing an awful importance and tender sanctity over all that happens to be desirable ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... that this seems to be the aim of Providence; while on the other hand, there is just as evidently to be seen the working of an opposing force, viz., human selfishness, human ignorance, individual ambition, ever seeking its own at the expense of others. A selfish, energetic, and ignorant spirit of individualism (as distinguished from an enlightened, large-minded, social individualism, which only becomes more marked ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Frances had always been her favourite granddaughter, but she had never been blind, clear-sighted old lady that she was, to the little leaven of easy-going selfishness in the girl's nature. She was pleased to see that Frances had conquered ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1904 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... you have it," Mary counseled, still with the contempt that pierced even the hardened girl's sense of selfishness. She pointed toward the door. ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... The stubborn selfishness of the theocracy led to the adoption of a less liberal policy toward Massachusetts. The nomination of the executive officers was retained by the crown, and the governor was given very substantial means of maintaining his authority; he could ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... of her brown eyes, in his quality of Epicurean, Lawrence had not let himself grieve over her. Unluckily one could not pay a chemist to put Bernard Clowes out of his pain! "This is going to be deuced uncomfortable," was the reflection that crossed his mind in its naked selfishness. "I wish I had never come near the place. I'll get away as ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... "Her selfishness does but little harm," returned Dunwoodie. "One of her greatest difficulties is her aversion to the blacks. She says that she never saw but one ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... what they have to do, and are blessed in the doing, while we—Did you think the Socialist helped the matter? Men needed thousand years' education to make their schemes practicable; they ignored all this blindness, all selfishness, and overgrowth of the passions: no wonder these facts knobbed themselves up against their system, and so, in every instance it crumbled to pieces. The things are facts, and here; there is no use in denying that; and it is a fact, too, that almost every life ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... long clamored that their men should break up Jeb's still; and the men had stood the nagging and remained inactive through the hanging-together selfishness of the sex, for with Jeb gone where then would they drink their drams and play Old Sledge? But now Jeb was "a-detainin' of a female," and that was going too far. For a full week Jeb was seen no more, for three reasons: he was arranging an important ...
— In Happy Valley • John Fox
... couldn't be a better day-dream than that and there's no reason I can see why it shouldn't come reasonably true, if you'll honestly try for as much of it as you can get. That's the prescription, anyhow. Give up nobility and all the heroic poses that go with it and practise a little enlightened selfishness instead. Perhaps by force of example you may persuade John Wollaston to abandon about half of his conscience. ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... of the boy annoyed him. But he could do nothing, so at length, giving up in despair, he went down into the cabin, and lighted a fire in the little stove, for he was very chilly. And there he crouched, leaving the work of looking after the sail to his companion. Selfishness bulked large in his nature, and this was never more apparent than now. His own comfort was the first consideration, no matter how much others ...
— Jess of the Rebel Trail • H. A. Cody
... craft autonomy triumphed chiefly because it recognized the existence of a considerable amount of group selfishness. The Knights of Labor held, as was seen, that the strategic or bargaining strength of the skilled craftsman should be used as a lever to raise the status of the semi-skilled and unskilled worker. It consequently grouped them promiscuously in "mixed assemblies" ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman
... neutrality. In short, like the hens, these cats held up a mirror to human nature. They showed what men and women would be, if they were—cats; which they would be, if a few modifying qualities were left out. They exhibit selfishness and greed in their pure forms, and we see and ought to shun the unlovely shapes. Evil propensities may be hidden by a silver veil, but they are none the less evil and bring forth evil fruit. Let cats delight to snarl and bite, but let men and women ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... Jealousy and selfishness; then, were the motives of his "virtuous resolution." He had another, perhaps a nobler incentive. He was in love with the Countess Meghen, widow of Lancelot Berlaymont, and it was privately stipulated that the influence of his Majesty's ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... know how much weight we should attach to the suggestion that Dives seems the better for the discipline of the new life. His selfishness on earth bulks largely in the story. Now in all his trouble he is thinking of his five brothers "lest they also come to ...
— The Gospel of the Hereafter • J. Paterson-Smyth
... the mark of selfishness; The signet of its all-enslaving power Upon a shining ore, and called it gold: Before whose image bow the vulgar great, The vainly rich, the miserable proud, The mob of peasants, nobles, priests, and kings, ...
— By the Golden Gate • Joseph Carey
... at myself for being shocked at people so much my betters.... My abiding feeling is that I had better go back to my beloved Lenox, to the side of the "Bowl" (the Indian name of a beautiful small lake between Lenox and Stockbridge), among the Berkshire hills, where selfishness and moral cowardice and worldly expediency exist in each man's practice no doubt quite sufficiently; but where they are not yet universally recognized as a social system, by the laws of which civilized existence should be governed. You know, "a bad action is a thousand times ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... its proceedings. The scene upon which he gazed was precisely what he had expected from the moment when those three ill-omened lights had burst through the fog and told him that the Golden Fleece was a doomed ship. Here was selfishness supremely triumphant, beating down and eradicating in a moment every nobler instinct of humanity. It was "Every man for himself" with a vengeance; women and children were struck out of men's way with ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... is in sore need of amendment—our first duty is to eschew falsehood and to follow truth in our own lives, in our thoughts and actions. Revolutions spring not from without inwards but from within outwards; and it is often when the external world seems most sick and sorrowful, when selfishness and irresponsibility sit enthroned in the world's seats of government, that the power of truth is most active in the silent region of the soul, strengthening it in order that it may issue forth once again to ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... he clearly says to us, "remind you that if you desire to be My disciple and to win a place in My kingdom, you must fling off selfishness, and put in its place the spirit of service and tenderness." "He that would be first must be servant of all." "You must humble yourself as this ...
— Sermons at Rugby • John Percival
... possession of the King's views on these subjects. He was therefore sent to the Hague. Heinsius was at that time suffering from indisposition, which was indeed a trifle when compared with the maladies under which William was sinking. But in the nature of William there was none of that selfishness which is the too common vice of invalids. On the twentieth of February he sent to Heinsius a letter in which he did not even allude to his own sufferings and infirmities. "I am," he said, "infinitely concerned ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... upon the irreparable blow dealt to the Jacobite cause by the stupid selfishness which impelled Charles Edward's younger brother to become a Romish priest and a cardinal, appears to have definitively decided the extraordinary change in the character of the Young Pretender. During the many years of skulking, often completely ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... cooperation (sec. 21), harmony, are produced, and institutions are the regulative processes and apparatus by which warfare is replaced by system. The historical process has been full of error, folly, selfishness, violence, and craft. It is so still. The point which is now important for us is that the masses have never carried on the struggles and processes by which civilized society has been made into an arena, within which exploitation of man by man is to some extent repressed, and where individual ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... these we have referred to in the remarks on Book III, where we noted Sigurd's mental sufferings. In Book IV we have a discrimination of character that is not epic, but dramatic in its minuteness. In the speech and the deeds of the Niblungs their pride and selfishness is clearly set forth, but the individual members of that race are distinguished by traits very minutely drawn. Thus Hogni is the wary Niblung, and is ...
— The Influence of Old Norse Literature on English Literature • Conrad Hjalmar Nordby
... principles of his ethics are as follows: In sin the love to God created in us has left us and self-love has transgressed its limits; pride has delivered us over to selfishness and misery. Our nature is corrupted, but not beyond redemption. In his actions worthless and depraved, man is seen to be exalted and incomprehensible in his ends; in reality he is worthy of abhorrence, but great in his destination. ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... vanishing among the trees you would certainly have been alarmed, not only because of the hour but owing to today's extraordinary events. Moreover, I felt sure you were coming to the lake, and I did not wish to stop you. That was a bit of pure selfishness on my part. I wanted you to come. If ever a man was vouchsafed the realization of an unspoken prayer, I ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... time now St. Just allowed the conversation to drop; he was gazing wide-eyed, almost appalled at this impudent display of well-nigh ferocious selfishness and vanity. De Batz, smiling and complacent, was leaning back in his chair, looking at his young friend with perfect contentment expressed in every line of his pock-marked face and in the very attitude of his well-fed body. It was easy enough now to understand ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... were. I always knew that would come right. But you have suffered terribly; I am ashamed of my own selfishness when I think ...
— A Canadian Heroine - A Novel, Volume 3 (of 3) • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... brought into something approaching actual conflict. But, stern as the fight with weakness had been, she had emerged chastened and victorious. Realization had come to her—realization of whither her troubles had been leading her. She knew she must not abandon herself to the selfishness which her brief rebellion had prompted. She was young, inexperienced, and of a highly-sensitive temperament, but she was not weak. And it was this fact which urged her now. Metaphorically speaking, she had determined to tackle life ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... flung himself from the tent and tore across the lot as though pursued by demons. By the time he found Colonel Grand and David in the animal tent, however, his blind rage had dwindled to ugly resentment; the overwhelming shame his own child had brought to the surface shrank back into the narrow selfishness from which, perhaps, ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... forms met his view. No one greeted him, no hand of friendship was held forth to welcome him. All the world seemed rushing on for something, he knew not what; and, disheartened at the apparent selfishness that pervaded society, he returned to his room, and wished for the quietness of his own sweet village, the companionship of his own ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... will think me—and I am, I am, and I can't tell him I don't really mean to be," and then her tears burst forth, and she cried, and cried until all the bitterness and selfishness were washed from her heart, and ...
— The Making of Mona • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... it! Ay, we shall fight in such a way, my friend, that all Europe shall hide her face, and feel the shame of the carnage and misery for which her miserable selfishness is responsible. There is one thing about my people, Brand, which is divine, and, thank God, it is in my own blood, too, notwithstanding my years of exile. We love our country, our hills and mountains, our corn-fields and vineyards, our villages and ...
— The Traitors • E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
... not rather self-interest, the fear of making a bad marriage, which influenced her in her renunciation of Mr. Hammond. It was not obedience to me, it was not love for me which made her give him up. It was the selfishness engrained in her race. Well, I have heaped my love upon her, because she is fair and sweet, and reminds me of my own youth. I must let her go, and try to be happy in the knowledge that she is enjoying her life far away ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... Hampden, thought of emigrating to America, but he did not, and by staying in England rendered inestimable service to his fellow-men. The iniquity was this: Parliament enacted a law which made each of these Colonies a distinct country, so far as commerce was concerned. Greed and selfishness prompted the passage of this act, which aimed to make England the distributor of all commerce, not only between the Colonies and other countries, but between this country and England, and, to cap the climax, England was to control the trade between ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... known to me since my childhood, was so old and infirm, and so entirely cheerful, resigned, and even desirous of leaving this world, that few, even of those who knew and loved him better than I did, could, without selfishness, lament his release. Mr. Twiss, the father of my cousin Horace, is dead lately; and it is of him that I speak. He has unfortunately left three daughters, who, though doing well for themselves in the world, will now feel a sad void in the ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... All through those thirty years he had regularly, every morning before going down, drawn from the overseer his allowance of lamp-oil—just as if he had been an eyed miner. What Kundoo's gang resented, as hundreds of gangs had resented before, was Janki Meah's selfishness. He would not add the oil to the common stock of his gang, but would save and ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... when she heard the news she turned to her father with a sudden note of gladness in her voice. "Then you'll have to do the work," she said, "because I'll never be happy till you do. Ever since you sold your claim I've been sorry for my selfishness but now I'm going to pay you back. I'm going to take my five hundred dollars and hire this assessment work ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge
... breath came up to me, and I found her little hand and slipped my finger in it. It was gripped in a baby pressure, and I stood there enraptured, feeling as if a flower had caressed me. I was thrilled through and through with happiness, and with love for this little creature, whom my selfishness might have destroyed. There was nothing in what had happened during this moment or two when I stood by her side to assure me that all was well with her; but I did so believe, and I said over and over: "Thank you, ...
— Painted Windows • Elia W. Peattie
... late! What can I do now? My going to Washington is a forlorn hope, a last, miserable, forlorn hope and in this hour, the darkest of all, you ask me to think of myself—my love, your love, your happiness, your future, my future! Ah, wouldn't it be sublime selfishness?" ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... shying at the gate. This trip has unsettled me, I tell you, letting me, among other things, see my old self. Before I always rather liked the idea of marriage, that is, after I'd been out a couple of years—not too well, but well enough—and now some way I rebel, not from scruples, but from pure selfishness. I'm beginning to find that I want to enjoy myself and to find, further, that I'm not indisposed to take chances—as they say out here. Will you understand, I wonder? And do women who sell themselves ever find any real pleasure in the bargain? The most eloquent ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... list of acts of comparative generosity and self-forgetfulness—fitter, because to those who love much, much is forgiven. Fielding had no occasion to make Blifil, behind his decent coat, a traitor and a hypocrite. It would have been enough to have coloured him in and out alike in the steady hues of selfishness, afraid of offending the upper powers as he was afraid of offending Allworthy—not from any love for what was good, but solely because it would be imprudent—because the pleasure to be gained was not worth the risk of consequences. Such ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... an affection which she is yet resolved to keep within subjection. To be sure it may be said, that all women have something of the princess in them at this epoch of their lives. There is a wonderful selfishness in the heart, while it still asks itself whether it shall love or not. The sentiment of the princess is very elegantly disguised in the jesting vein in which she ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... scenes I would fain describe. Language is quite inadequate to express the feeling which then lived and had its being in the hearts of all Southern women towards the heroes who had risen up to defend the liberties of the South. Exalted far above mere sentiment, holding no element of vanity or selfishness,—idolatrous, if you will, yet an idolatry which inspired the heart, nerved the hand, and made any sacrifice possible. No purer patriotism ever found lodgment in human breast. No more sacred fire was ever ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers
... maketh it a well." Why so? On what ground? If a man had settled down in that valley for life, there would have been no merit in his making it a well. It might, in that case, have been an act of lean-hearted selfishness on his part. Further than this, a man might have done it who could have had the heart to wall it in from the reach of thirsty travellers. No such man was meant in the blessing; nor any man resident in or near ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... all this hypocrisy, this intrigue, this selfishness and dissimulation, there was something more pure and good. It was love, pure and simple, binding the thoughts and hearts of Mattie Chapman and young Tite. That love which forgets everything else in its truth and purity, had been gently binding their young affections together. ...
— The Von Toodleburgs - Or, The History of a Very Distinguished Family • F. Colburn Adams
... war. Cease, you publicists, your wordy war against hostile brothers in the profession, whose superiority you cannot scold away, and who merely smile while they pick up, out of your laboriously stirred porridge slowly warmed over a flame of borrowed alcohol, the crumbs on which their "selfishness" is to choke! That national selfishness does not seem a duty to you, but a sin, is something you must conceal ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... vowed with ardour that if that was how she felt about it he was more than content to remain behind and look after her, provided that she would allow Dick to go. To which compromise she at once smilingly assented. For such is the selfishness of lovers! ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... the wisdom, of Ofellus the sage! Nineteen centuries have come and gone, and the spectacle is still before us of the same selfishness, extravagance, and folly, which he rebuked so well and so vainly, but pushed to even greater excess, and more widely diffused, enervating the frames and ruining the fortunes of one great section of society, and helping ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... the plea that he could not find another, Cecilia, whose nerve was returning, offered it to Dubois. He accepted it calmly and sat down upon it, waiting to hear what she had to say. At this signal instance of arch selfishness Cecilia felt her heart tighten and her temples grow cold as if fillets of fire had been exchanged for ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... majority of people. Not only poetry and romance, but history also, gives us instances wherein men and women differ and break away from accepted types, some in absurd or grotesque ways, others through the sheer force of gifted selfishness, and others still in natural, noble development of ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... was a time to subordinate individual or group selfishness to the national good, that time is now. Disunity at home—bickerings, self-seeking partisanship, stoppages of work, inflation, business as usual, politics as usual, luxury as usual these are the influences which can undermine the morale ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt • Franklin D. Roosevelt
... charms of Mlle. Blanche, he soon discovered the calculating ambition and the utter worldliness concealed beneath such seeming simplicity and candor. Nor was he long in discerning her intense vanity, her lack of principle, and her unbounded selfishness; and, comparing her with the noble and generous Marie-Anne, his admiration was changed into indifference, or ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... been. You know what my wishes are about you, and you don't care one jot. Gratitude! There isn't a spark of it in your whole body. Never was there a more selfish creature, and I can't believe that ingratitude and selfishness are the stuff that makes saints. Don't dare to talk any more rot about duty to your neighbour to me. An Englishwoman to come and spend her money ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp |
