"Self-preservation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sense of sin would flash over her that she felt as if she must confess that hideous fact of her girlish past. It seemed so shameful that she should be living there among the rest, a criminal with the innocent, and not tell them what she was. Then the instinct of self-preservation would carry it over her conscience, and she would press back her thoughts and go out, as to-day, to cool her feverish blood, and grow calm to bear and strong to hold the heavy burden which she had fashioned by her own mad deed and laid for life ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... most unquestioned right thus to challenge the power of Great Britain. It was indeed the most effective challenge which a nation jealous of Britain's commerce could deliver, but it is none the less true that the plain policy of self-preservation compelled Britain to take up ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... of full Negro suffrage meant one of two alternatives to the South: (1) The uplift of the Negro for sheer self-preservation. This is what Schurz and the saner North expected. As one Southern school superintendent said, "The elevation of this class is a matter of prime importance, since a ballot in the hands of a black citizen is quite as potent as in the hands of ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
... agent. "It's hell forty ways from the Jack. It's tough for me, but for a pretty woman with a lot o' rich fools jumping out o' their automobiles and hanging around stage doors, it must be something awful. I ain't blaming the women. They say 'self-preservation is the first law of nature,' and I guess that's right; but sometimes when the show is over and I see them fellows with their hair plastered back, smoking cigarettes in a holder long enough to reach from here to Harlem, and a bank-roll that would bust my pocket and turn ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... theirs was indeed a trying business, preaching to men a generosity and unselfishness which they and everybody knew would, in the existing state of the world, reduce to poverty those who should practice them, laying down laws of conduct which the law of self-preservation compelled men to break. Looking on the inhuman spectacle of society, these worthy men bitterly bemoaned the depravity of human nature; as if angelic nature would not have been debauched in such a devil's school! Ah, my friends, believe me, it is not ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... pulsed through him that tremendous and passionate instinct for self-preservation which comes to every man at such a time. What Tex meant to do he could not guess, but he knew that if he were left alone with the fellow he might as well give up all hope. He was weak as a cat, and felt sure that no appeal ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... instinctive feeling of their country's claims still exists in their hearts; and because an involuntary pride in the name it bears, or the vague reminiscence of its by-gone fame, suffices to give them the impulse of self-preservation. ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... or two I felt as if I should fall. Then the instinct of self-preservation moved me to act, and with my hands stretched out before me I went ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn
... Seaton," he urged. "They're firing on your skipper and engineer this time. It's up to us to answer 'em—clear case of self-preservation. The first law that ...
— The Motor Boat Club and The Wireless - The Dot, Dash and Dare Cruise • H. Irving Hancock
... Union are assailed, invaded, and threatened with destruction; our ancient rights and liberties are in danger; the peace and tranquillity of our homes have been invaded by lawless violence, and their further invasion is imminent; the instinct of self-preservation ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... weight of the King's hand and the impulse of self-preservation were however not the only reasons why they yielded. It is undeniable that the conception of the Universal Church, according to which the National Church did but form part of a larger whole, was nearly as much lost among the clergy as among ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... he developed an exaggerated love for solitude, a predilection for self-preservation and still worse, a constant fear of death and mania of persecution, which ran like a black thread through all his writings and brought on gradually the final tragic catastrophe.—He became insane in 1891 and died in 1893 ...
— Mademoiselle Fifi • Guy de Maupassant
... possibility of restraining cattle or horses from stampeding—they did it from the instinct of self-preservation, for, whilst running with the wind, its force of driving cold was proportionately lessened, and some loss of heat was made good by the exertion of running, which they had to keep up till in safe shelter ...
— Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed (2nd ed.) - The Conspiracy of the 19th Century Unmasked • C. H. Thomas
... army of men charged with the task of deluding and hypnotizing the people, and all this, by means of electricity which annihilates distance, under the direct control of men who regard such an organization of society not only as necessary for profit, but even for self-preservation, and therefore exert every effort of their ingenuity to preserve it—what an invincible power it would seem! And yet we need only imagine for a moment what will really inevitably come to pass, that is, the Christian social standard replacing the heathen social standard and established ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... capability of performing her duty to herself, her family, and to society, taking self-preservation as the first law of her nature. At present she does not fully act in her sphere. The lid of the ballot-box shuts out more than one-half of her duty to herself, family, and society. The eye of the law is diseased, and woman must be made ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... under pain of becoming in their turn victims of the outrages they have tolerated. Modern Europe cannot allow a people to be seized like a herd of cattle; she cannot continue deaf to the repeated protest of threatened nationalities. She owes it to her instinct of self-preservation to forbid such abuses of her power. She knows too that the unity of France is now, as in the past, a guarantee of the general order of the world, a barrier against the spirit of conquest and invasion. Peace concluded at the price of cession of territory could be nothing but a costly truce, ...
— Birdseye Views of Far Lands • James T. Nichols
... recognized the bearing of the slavery question upon the presidential election of the following year. The Abolitionists had laid siege to the conscience and humanity of the people, and their moral appeals were to be a well-spring of life to the nation in its final struggle for self-preservation; but as yet they had agreed upon no organized plan of action against the aggressions of an institution which threatened the overthrow of the Union and the end of Republican government. But now ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... others did at the moment I can't say; for with that selfish instinct of self-preservation which makes a man in the instant of danger grasp anything, regardless of what his comrades in distress might be doing, I grappled hold of one of the oars and the pork breaker, besides the stern-sheet ...
— The Penang Pirate - and, The Lost Pinnace • John Conroy Hutcheson
... are there, that might be enumerated, where there is no tribunal to do justice to an oppressed and deeply wronged individual? If he be subjected to a tame submission to insult and disgrace, where no power can shield him from its effects, then indeed it would seem, that the first law of nature, self-preservation, points out the only remedy for his wrongs. The history of all animated nature exhibits a determined resistance to encroachments upon natural rights,—nay, I might add, inanimate nature, for it also exhibits a ...
— The Code of Honor • John Lyde Wilson
... in order to serve the King; that he was weary of their actions, and foresaw nothing but ruin would attend them; that he never repented him of any thing so much, as his being drawn in to that faction; in which he found himself so greatly involved, he could not retire with any credit; but since self-preservation was the first principle of nature, he had resolved to make that his aim, and rather prove false to a party, who had no justice and honour on their side, than to a King, whom all the laws of heaven and earth obliged him to serve; however, he was so far ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... keep within the law, but that is not the question. It is a question of spirit, and men who love to hunt are yielding to and always developing the old primitive instinct to kill. The meaning of the spirit of life is not clear to them. An argument may be advanced that, according to the laws of self-preservation and the survival of the fittest, if a man stops all strife, all fight, then he will retrograde. And that is to say if a man does not go to the wilds now and then, and work hard and live some semblance of the life of his progenitors, he will weaken. It seems that ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... spirit that possesses a man and shapes his conduct and regulates his behaviour. It was in fact the expression of a crude attempt on the part of the early psychologists of Iran to explain the working of the instinct of self-preservation. ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... bold, and completely possessed of his presence of mind, Albert Lee, who had been from the loopholes a watchful observer of every measure which had been taken by his besiegers, had resolved to make one desperate effort for self-preservation. While the head of the sentinel on the opposite platform was turned from him, and bent rather downwards, he suddenly sprung across the chasm, though the space on which he lighted was scarce wide enough ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... building to exchange colds with, you'll be lucky. To leave your home on a night like this is fairly clamouring for the special brand of trouble they keep for paralytic idiots. I've known you all too long to expect sagacity, but the instinct of self-preservation characterizes even the lower animals. What swine, for instance, would leave ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... civilized from the savage appreciation is the passion for order. The tendency to order, said Senancour, should form "an essential part of our inclinations, of our instinct, like the tendencies to self-preservation and to reproduction." The two latter tendencies the savage possesses as completely as the civilized man, but he does not share the civilized man's instinct for correlation. And in this sense, I think, a certain savagery is justly to be ascribed to the impressionist. ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... will not scruple to charge the slightest and most natural offences with the most opprobrious epithets; and that a poor slave, who perhaps has no otherwise incurred his master's displeasure than by endeavouring (upon the just and warrantable principles of self-preservation,) to escape from his master's tyranny, without any criminal intention whatsoever, is liable to be deemed rebellious, and to be arraigned as a capital offender. "For every slave and slaves that shall run away, and continue but for the space of twelve months, except ...
— Some Historical Account of Guinea, Its Situation, Produce, and the General Disposition of Its Inhabitants • Anthony Benezet
... and the Two-Paws don't understand what you're pleased to call a cat's egoism.... Our instinct of self-preservation, our dignity, our modest reserve, our attitude of weary renunciation (which comes of the hopelessness of ever being understood by them), they dub, in haphazard fashion, egoism. You're not a very discriminating dog, but at least you're free from prejudice. Will ...
— Barks and Purrs • Colette Willy, aka Colette
... Afterwards supper. Cremorne and the Argyle Rooms were my favourite haunts. My mother suffered, and expected ruin, for I took no trouble to conceal anything; I boasted of dissipations. But there was no need to fear; for I was naturally endowed with a very clear sense of self-preservation; I neither betted nor drank, nor contracted debts, nor a secret marriage; from a worldly point of view, I was a model young man indeed; and when I returned home about four in the morning, I watched the pale moon setting, and repeating some verses of Shelley, I thought how I should go to Paris when ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... preservation and his happiness. But from one point of view this appears to be simply to say that the conditions of existence necessitate a certain harmony, and that the harmony is therefore to be a consequence of his self-preservation. From the opposite point of view, which Stewart accepts, it appears that the self-preservation is the consequence of a pre-established harmony, which has been divinely appointed in order that he may live. Stewart, in short, is a 'teleologist' of the Paley variety. ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... his cheek from a shrapnel wound still had power to move her. For he had "done splendidly" in the war, enlisting in 1915 and showing marked courage, though his very highly-developed instinct for self-preservation had enabled him to escape dangers where some men might have been caught. No wonder that as Laura stood there with her hand through his strong arm, she thrilled to the certainty that he would break with ease through every obstacle in life, ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... having twenty clauses, twenty thousand clerks are created and five more hotels sequestered for their accommodation. No laws which do not bear directly or indirectly upon the slaying of Prussians have been made in recent years. This is sometimes called government, but used to be known as self-preservation when men dressed in yellow ochre and ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... Montagu stood breathless,—but the next instant, they saw Russell's head emerge, and then another wave foaming madly by, made them run backwards for their lives, and hid him from their view. When it had passed, they saw him clinging with both hands, in the desperate instinct of self-preservation, to a projecting bit of rock, by the aid of which he gradually drew himself out of the water, and grasping at crevices or bits of seaweed, slowly and painfully reached the ledge on which they had stood before they took the leap. He presented a pitiable spectacle; his face, pale as death, was ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... left the delegates unconvinced and with the feeling that his argument was over-refined. They felt that there could be no objection to endeavouring to ascertain the source of Pax's power—the law of self-preservation seemed to indicate such a course as necessary. And it had, in fact, already been discussed vaguely by several less conspicuous delegates. Accordingly it was voted, with but two dissenting voices,[2] to summon what was known as Conference ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... Proof.- The effort for self-preservation is the essence of a thing (III:vii.); therefore, if any virtue could be conceived as prior thereto, the essence of a thing would have to be conceived as prior to itself, which is obviously absurd. Therefore no virtue, ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza
... full blaze of happiness, could not illumine it. But it has sent its daughter, Pity, more familiar with gloomy misfortune, and she has dispelled the cloud, and opened again all the avenues of my soul to sensations of tenderness. The impulse of self-preservation awakes, when I have something more precious than myself to support, and to support through my own exertions. Do not let the word "pity" offend you. From the innocent cause of our distress we may hear the term without humiliation. ...
— Minna von Barnhelm • Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
... influence and the passion of a great common crusade. The devil is a great master of strategy and knows that if he can keep our forces divided there is nothing in them that need be feared. We must therefore close up our ranks and present a united front, not merely as a measure of self-preservation but in order to do well the work that has been committed to us. This will involve some real self-sacrifice on the part of us all, but it is the way the Master went and His followers must not shrink from it. If we ...
— The War and Unity - Being Lectures Delivered At The Local Lectures Summer - Meeting Of The University Of Cambridge, 1918 • Various
... motto, from which I do not depart. A Private Corporation must have protection! Self-preservation is the first consideration, the first law. I am full of little formulas of both manner and speech—they afford me ample protection. Make-talk is the complete salvation of the female Banker (social). ...
— The Inner Sisterhood - A Social Study in High Colors • Douglass Sherley et al.
... law, doubtless, but a law neither more nor less normal than that of destruction, even self-destruction. Is it possible that the whole normal law of humanity is contained in this sentiment of self-preservation?" ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... of self-preservation, which sent the Romanist into cloisters and convents, and tore him from the sweet sanctities of domestic life, has perpetuated itself more than some of us think in Protestant thought and church legislation. ...
— Amusement: A Force in Christian Training • Rev. Marvin R. Vincent.
... affected. An outcry for the change of a disastrous policy swelled rapidly in the manufacturing and trading towns; and erelong the battle of the colonists was being fought by allies upon English soil, who were stimulated by the potent impulse of self-preservation. These men cared nothing for the principle at stake, nothing for the colonists personally; but they cared for the business by which they sustained their own homes, and they were resolved that the destroying Stamp Act should be got out of their way. Such an influence ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... against the schemes of her cruel destroyer; and, after all my cogitations, resolutions, and schemes, I found myself compelled to rest satisfied with seeing her, laying before her the true nature of her danger, and leaving to the operation of the instinctive principle of self-preservation the working out of her ultimate safety. At the same hour of the evening at which my former visit was made, I repaired to the back entrance of the large mansion, and, upon rapping at the door, was fortunate enough to be answered by the young woman ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... 'state of nature' was a fiction. The true basis of our inquiries is the actual man known to us by observation. The main fault of this being was the excess of the instinct of multiplication, and the way to improve him was to show how it might conflict with the instinct of self-preservation. In this shape the doctrine expressed the most characteristic tendency of the Utilitarians, and divided them from the Socialists or believers in ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... that bore him swung back. He knew instinctively that they were preparing to hurl him into the heart of the fire, and the instinct of self-preservation rushed upon him, stabbing him to vivid consciousness. With a gigantic effort he writhed himself ...
— Rosa Mundi and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... fear and self-preservation settled down into a sort of despairing stupor. He had sent for Sir Donald, but either the message was not delivered, or that aristocrat declined to come. Possibly Sir Donald had been refused admittance to the prison. Mary ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... the men, ready to spring out upon them, when there came a terrific interruption. There was a sudden crash in the brush behind him, a menacing snarl, and a huge wolfish brute launched itself at his throat. The swift instinct of self-preservation turned the weapon intended for the men over the fire upon this unexpected assailant. The snarling fangs of the husky were gleaming in his face and the animal's body was against the muzzle of his revolver when Philip fired. Though he escaped the ...
— Flower of the North • James Oliver Curwood
... in a mounting fury. He almost threw her into her room, and closing the door, he turned the key in it. His face reminded her of her father's the night he had beaten her, and her instinct of self-preservation made her put the ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... have been adopted with an intention of remedying this evil, though the origin of it is beyond the reach of decree. It originates in that distrust of government which reconciles one part of the community to starving the other, under the idea of self-preservation. While every individual persists in establishing it as a maxim, that any thing is better than assignats, we must expect that all things will be difficult to procure, and will, of course, bear a high price. I fear, all the empyricism of the legislature cannot ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... situation was, to a man of his peculiar temperament, an element of patient strength. The instinct of self-preservation was still strong in him, but he had no fear of death, nor, indeed, any presentiment of it; yet if it came, it was an easy solution of the problem that had been troubling him, and it wiped off the slate! He thought of the sarcastic prediction of his cousin, and death in the ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... of the impulsive action of the heart in Leo—the reaction from a state of imperious, defiance. The heat of rage or energy and deathless courage results in the IDEAS of something to be encountered, overcome, and of self-preservation. The dual soul descends still another volve in the spiral of its celestial journey ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... to win a victory or to submit to a massacre. Neither flight nor surrender was possible. They knew how much quarter they could expect from the lances of the Spaniards or the waters of the Dollart. Their only chance of salvation lay in their own swords. The instinct of self-preservation, thus invoked, exerted a little of its ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... than the social instinct, and far older, is the love of life and the instinct of self-preservation. Devices for the protection of life were developed long before the evolution of mankind, and it is quite certain that animals, even those highest in the scale of life, are unconscious of the inevitability of death and the ultimate fate of all living things. This knowledge ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... of devotion similar to that of this heroic woman, but happily attended by more fortunate results. In the great majority of instances, however, the instinct of self-preservation triumphed over every other feeling, rendering the wretched people callous to the dangers and sufferings of others. Still worse was the conduct of the half savage peasantry. They hastened into the towns like vultures to their prey. Instead ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... bleak northern strand, where life is mere existence, where the genial board has never welcomed the wearied traveller, where freezing cold benumbs even the soft affections of the heart, and where, from the first great law of self-preservation, compassion is monopolized by internal penury and want? Ill-fated passengers! it was not here, in the chill atmosphere of personal misery, your woes should have sought redress; the commiseration which is your due can only be conceived by those who ...
— Brief Reflections relative to the Emigrant French Clergy (1793) • Frances Burney
... self-confident man a matter of no great risk. Nor did he find it so. He reached his strong room, procured his securities and was leaving the house, without having suffered an alarm, when some instinct of self-preservation suggested to him the advisability of arming himself with a pistol. His own was in Maine, but he remembered where Sears kept his; he had seen it often enough in that old trunk he had brought with him from the Sierras. He accordingly went up stairs to the steward's ...
— The Woman in the Alcove • Anna Katharine Green
... within an arm's length, but which in that state of the public mind, could he but have once grasped it, would have enabled him to blow up Presbyterian and Independent both. If ever a lawless act was defensible on the principle of self-preservation, the murder of Charles might be defended. I suspect that the fatal delay in the publication of the 'Icon Basilike' is susceptible of no other satisfactory explanation. In short it is absurd to burthen this act on Cromwell and his party, in any special sense. The ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... extinction within one single revolution of the moon. For all the rebel movements, subsequent to the morning of Vinegar Hill, are to be viewed not at all in the light of manoeuvres made in the spirit of military hope, but in the light of final struggles for self-preservation made in the spirit of absolute despair, as regarded the original purposes of the war, or, indeed, as regarded any purposes whatever beyond that of instant safety. The solitary object contemplated was, to reach some district lonely enough, and with elbow room enough, for quiet, ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... determined on one thing. No matter about the escaped convict and their desire to capture him, self-preservation must stand first on the calendar; and if he really found himself in a position where he anticipated an attack from the big cat, he meant to pour in the contents of both ...
— The Strange Cabin on Catamount Island • Lawrence J. Leslie
... but still breathing hard; "it was the instinct of self-preservation. I was unsteady on my feet for a moment, and sought something to take hold of. That pirate was the nearest thing, and I caught hold of his cloak; I'm sure it was a cloak, and that makes me sure he was a human villain of some sort. He ...
— The Port of Missing Men • Meredith Nicholson
... tasks, however, which may be approximately expressed, as work that is done for support, for daily bread, and work which is done because certain faculties of mind and heart and soul demand expression, development, and scope. We all have powers which are willing to be set in action primarily for self-preservation—for personal, material, and transitory ends. We are also endowed with faculties which react, primarily, in behalf of universal aims, though that may not debar them from also bringing an advantage to ourselves. In proportion ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... human nature remains the same. Whether with grenade or gas, from submarine or aeroplane, a man after all possible woe and suffering is no more than killed. Human nature will submit to losses in battle up to a certain point, after that the frailties are asserted. The instinct of self-preservation dominates. Organization and discipline and reason are dissipated. A condition ensues similar to that which we have ...
— The Plattsburg Manual - A Handbook for Military Training • O.O. Ellis and E.B. Garey
... rests upon a sense of the prevailing goodness of things. It seems to me cruel that what is called salvation, the solution of the problem of life, should depend upon an accidental discovery. We are all turned loose with our animal passions and instincts, of self-preservation, by an indifferent Creator, in a wilderness, and left to find our way out as best we can. You answer that Christ showed us the way. There are elements in his teaching I cannot accept—perhaps because I have been ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... ultimate consummation of these plans must be pursued with, if possible, even greater energy and expedition than before. It was also seen by the more perspicacious of them that the methods hitherto adopted must in future be radically altered. A rejuvenated though unreformed Turkey, bent on self-preservation, could not be despised, and it was understood that if the revolutionary bands of the three Christian nations (Greece, Serbia, and Bulgaria) were to continue indefinitely to cut each others' throats in Macedonia the tables might conceivably be ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... our day who condemn appeals to fear, we should be ignoring a large part of Scripture, including many of our Lord's utterances, and at the same time ignoring that fear of hurtful consequences which the Author of our nature has implanted in us as a great means of self-preservation. To hope as well as to fear much is addressed in the Bible, and the missionary who would approve himself to his Master is bound to appeal to both principles, while, like his Master, he makes his constant and main appeal to the higher part ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... "An instinct of self-preservation should prevent such an addition. That might be as injudicious as it would have been for some bright young man in ancient Egypt, five thousand years before the Christian era, to express a doubt concerning the divinity of the sacred ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... coldness on your side. Possibly I am mistaken, but if I am right I assure you, my dear friend, on my word of honour, that I refused not because I did not care to be under an obligation to you, but simply from a feeling of self-preservation; I was behaving stupidly in Paris, and an extra thousand francs would only have been bad for my health. Believe me that if I had needed it, I would have asked you for a ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... of self-preservation inspired Stephen Vallance to make that frantic rush, though there was no possible means of escape out of the vessel, except into the open boat, or the still more open sea. As he receded from the advancing detective, one of the fishermen sprang ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... closely, in order to see, forsooth, whether they are not their virtues. The belief that mankind should by nature tend to evil, he considered absurd and unscientific, for the strongest instinct in all creation is self-preservation; and that certain men should love darkness rather than light was mainly because governments and religions have warped man's nature through oppression and coercion until it no longer acts normally. "Normal man seeks the light, just as the flowers do. Man, if not too much interfered ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... congenial to her. This beautiful fabric of imagination vanishes at the severe touch of truth. The spirit of benevolence, cherished and invigorated by plenty, is repressed by the chilling breath of want. The hateful passions that had vanished reappear. The mighty law of self-preservation expels all the softer and more exalted emotions of the soul. The temptations to evil are too strong for human nature to resist. The corn is plucked before it is ripe, or secreted in unfair proportions, and the whole ...
— An Essay on the Principle of Population • Thomas Malthus
... parallel in suddenness of collapse. But whether this prove to be the fact or not, nay, even if the reestablishment of the Union had been hopeless from the first, a government which should have abandoned its capital, which should have flinched from the first and plainest duty of self-preservation, which should have admitted by a cowardly surrender that force was law, that treason was constitutional, and fraud honorable, would have deserved and received the contempt of all civilized nations, of England among ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... true hypnotic condition, when a patient voluntarily submits to the operator, any attempt to make suggestions against the interests of the patient can invariably be frustrated by the patient. Self-preservation is the first law of nature, and some of the best known operators who have recorded their experiments assert that suggestions not in accord with the best interest of the patient could not be carried out. No one was ever ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... authority under him. But as a matter of fact, a form of society did for some purpose or other exist, and had been permitted to exist for 5000 years, owning Beelzebub's sovereignty. It must defend itself, or must cease to be, and it could not be expected to make no effort at self-preservation. Faithful had come to Vanity Fair to make a revolution—a revolution extremely desirable, but one which it was unreasonable to expect the constituted authorities to allow to go forward. It was not a case of false witness. A prisoner who admits that he has taught the people ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... their own dictation. The business, then, of the Church is to study carefully the ignorance of the people and conform to it. On this one thing does its stability depend. Therefore it must, as a matter of self-preservation, suppress any chance intellect that is ahead of its time, lest this man honeycomb the whole ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... been taken of it to the prejudice of the dissenters. Dr. Hoadley, bishop of Bangor, endeavoured to prove that the occasional and schism acts were in effect persecuting laws; and that by admitting the principle of self-defence and self-preservation in matters of religion, all the persecutions maintained by the heathens against the professors of Christianity, and even the popish inquisition, might be justified. With respect to the power of which many clergymen appeared so fond and so zealous, he owned ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... differently understood, and a period of readjustment, doubt and negation, of misery and despair, was the natural issue. Man, being naturally religious, was sure sooner or later to secure a new and more hopeful faith: it was a matter of spiritual self-preservation. But realism in letters, for the moment, before a new theory had been formulated, was a kind of pis aller by which literature could be produced and attention given to the tangible things of this earth, many of them ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... may take his novel up and put it down, spend days upon it in vain, and write not any more than he makes haste to blot. Not so the Beginner. Human nature has certain rights; instinct—the instinct of self-preservation—forbids that any man (cheered and supported by the consciousness of no previous victory) should endure the miseries of unsuccessful literary toil beyond a period to be measured in weeks. There must be something for hope to feed upon. The beginner must have a slant ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... learned in the wars of Charles V. and in the conquest of Peru and Mexico, aided, too, by the forces of France and the terrors of the Vatican and the money of the Flemish manufacturers? It was the dictate of self-preservation which induced Elizabeth to prevaricate, and to deceive the powerful monarchs who were in league against her. If ever lying and cheating were justifiable, they were then; if political jesuitism is ever defensible, it was in the sixteenth century. So ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... will do it, Bates," cried Vixen. "I don't jump. How can I help it if papa has given me a jumping pony? If I didn't let Titmouse take a gate when he was in the humour, he'd kick like old boots, and pitch me a cropper. It's an instinct of self-preservation that makes me let him jump. And as for poor dear, pretty little mamma," continued Vixen, addressing herself to Roderick, and changing her tone to one of patronising tenderness, "if she had her way, I should be brought up in a little box wrapped ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... came those ideas to rise up and fill the whole air? The answer is that, with all their contradiction, shallowness, and danger, such ideas fitted the crisis. They were seized by virtue of an instinct of national self-preservation. The evil elements in them worked themselves out in infinite mischief. The true elements in them saved France, by firing men with ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 8: France in the Eighteenth Century • John Morley
... ten o'clock in the morning. The pangs of hunger and the torments of thirst were racking me with redoubled vigor. All instinct of self-preservation had left me, and I felt that the hour had come when I must cease to suffer. Just as I was on the point of casting myself headlong into the sea, a voice, which I recognized as Dowlas's, broke upon ...
— The Survivors of the Chancellor • Jules Verne
... could be no more complete hallucination. Cranley was one of those egotists who do undoubtedly exist, but whose existence, when they are discovered, is a perpetual surprise even to the selfish race of men. In him the instinct of self-preservation (without which the race could not have endured for a week) had remained absolutely unmodified, as it is modified in the rest of us, by thousands of years of inherited social experience. Cran-ley's temper, in every juncture, was precisely that of ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang
... in her life," cried her father, "it is her only fault that she has not anger enough in her nature for self-preservation." ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... for news perhaps, which they take daily as a man takes his bitters, and then fall silent and think they are thinking. But the mind goes out under this regimen, like a fire without a draught; and it is not very strange, if the instinct of mental self-preservation drives them to brandy-and-water, which makes the hoarse whisper of memory musical for a few brief moments, and puts a weak leer of promise on the features of the hollow-eyed future. The Colonel was kept pretty well in hand as yet by his wife, and though it had happened to him ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... prayer is in the sense of dependance, and in the instinct of self-preservation or self-interest. The first objects of prayer to the infant man will be those on which by his localities he believes himself to be most dependant for whatever blessing his mode of life inclines him the ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 'No self-preservation like a country life and early rising,' said Theodora, laughing. 'You have not kept yourself as well, Georgina. I am sorry to see ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... real his processes are, the more incurable he is bound to be—secretly if he is sensitive, and offensively if he is callous. In either case the fact is the same. The child unconsciously acts on the principle that self-assertion is self-preservation. One of the first things that he discovers is that self-preservation is the last thing polite parents desire in a child. If he is to be preserved, they ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... them prisoners. The Marechal possessed too much tact, however, to make such an attempt, as in the one case he must incur the everlasting enmity of the heir-presumptive to the Crown, or, in the other, Gaston, roused by a feeling of self-preservation, might attempt to renew the conflict, and finally retrieve the fortunes of the day. By the fall of Montmorency, moreover, sufficient had been accomplished to annihilate the faction of Monsieur; and thus the royal general offered no impediment to the retreat of the Prince, whom he permitted to retire ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... the feet of Fracasse's company; the air is split and racked and wrenched and torn with hideous screams of invisible demons. The men stop; they act on the uncontrollable instinct of self-preservation against an overwhelming force of nature. A few without the power of locomotion drop, faces pressed to the ground. The rest flee toward a shoulder of the slope through the instinct that leads a hunted man in a street into an alley. In a confusion of arms and legs, pressing one on the ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... for him to decide was whether his country should survive the crisis and flourish, or be dismembered and perish. His predecessor in office had already decided the question in favor of national dismemberment, by denying to it the right of self-defense and self-preservation—a right which belongs ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... vindicate himself still further, since, after all, Susie was Nell's sister, "Schloshold-Markheim is a very insignificant corner of this earth; not so big, in fact, as many of our English shires. Self-preservation is the first law of nations. Why should England imperil herself? You see, the whole question reduces itself to that old, heartless, but very sane doctrine of the greatest good of the ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson
... time; but they have scarcely been there since until Shaw. I mean that Shakespeare, being interested in everything, put everything into a play. If he had lately been thinking about the irony and even contradiction confronting us in self-preservation and suicide, he put it all into Hamlet. If he was annoyed by some passing boom in theatrical babies he put that into Hamlet too. He would put anything into Hamlet which he really thought was true, from his favourite nursery ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... I shall consider our lethargy as incurable. The present juncture is so interesting, that if it does not produce correspondent exertions, it will be a proof, that motives of honour, public good, and even self-preservation, have lost their influence upon our minds. This is a decisive moment, one of the most, I will go further and say, the most important America has seen. The court of France has made a glorious effort ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 3 (of 5) • John Marshall
... sympathies were with the seceding States. Most of its people felt also that if coercion was attempted, the issue would become for Virginia and North Carolina, no less than for South Carolina and Alabama, simply a matter of self-preservation. As early as January, in the exciting days when Floyd's resignation was being interpreted as a call to arms, the Virginia Legislature had resolved that it would not consent to the coercion of a seceding State. In May the Speaker of the North Carolina Legislature assured ...
— The Day of the Confederacy - A Chronicle of the Embattled South, Volume 30 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... disparity between varieties of the same species engenders an aversion from one another of the different varieties which seems to arise, in men and animals alike, through the instinct of sexual jealousy which is probably bound up with the primary instinct of self-preservation. Those people who profess belief in the inherent superiority of a particular race naturally look upon the tendency towards race-blending as a perverse proclivity, while those who think that all men are potentially equal regard it as a wholesome instinct provided by ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... passed: the instinct of self-preservation was quick to assert itself. Each time, he took a fresh grip on the slack reins and kept his horse plodding onward, ever onward, through the heavy sand and blistering alkali dust, and always to the northeast, where somewhere there ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... disobedience or the worst extreme of falsehood and hypocrisy. These are not the principles which should rule the conduct of men whom you have constituted the guardians of your property, and checks on the morals and fidelity of others. The care of self-preservation will naturally suggest the necessity of seizing the opportunity of present power, when the duration of it is considered as limited to the usual term of three years, and of applying it to the provision of a future independency; therefore every renewal of this term is liable ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke
... "this characteristic of caution was the chief mark of Joubert's conduct in the field as a military commander. His idea of warfare was to act ever on the defensive." Let this be qualified so far as to say that his idea appears always to have been to act within limits of safety, to consider self-preservation—the preservation, that is, of his own forces—more important than the destruction of the enemy, and we have a view, not of Joubert only, but of his race, which goes {p.199} far to explain the failures at Ladysmith, Kimberley, and Mafeking, and likewise ...
— Story of the War in South Africa - 1899-1900 • Alfred T. Mahan
... Sweets of Liberty, dance to the Musick of their Chains, which was, indeed, the greater Part of the Inhabitants of the Globe, would brand this generous Crew with the insidious Name of Pyrates, and think it meritorious, to be instrumental in their Destruction.—Self-Preservation therefore, and not a cruel Disposition, obliged him to declare War against all such as should refuse him the Entry of their Ports, and against all, who should not immediately surrender and give up what their Necessities required; but in a more ...
— Of Captain Mission • Daniel Defoe
... ourselves to a raft, rather than to these burning planks; and that, if we wait till daylight, so many will be attempting to get on it, that we shall be all lost together. I don't ask you to desert your shipmates, Peter; but self-preservation, you know, is the first law ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... which is bringing up children with nothing to hold by, and nothing to which they can appeal. Girls are inclined to go even further than boys in this unrestraint through their greater excitability and recklessness, and their having less instinct of self-preservation. It is a problem for the local authorities. Their lavish expenditure upon sanitation, adornment, and—to use the favourite word—"equipment" of their schools does not seem to touch it; in fact it ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... the reality was less suited to impress by its actual presence, than the record by its touching pictures and its affecting appeals? The reality appealed to but the fears of men through the instinct of self-preservation, and even this languidly in some cases, leaving the imagination unimpressed; whereas the wild scenes of Defoe filled the whole mind, and impressed vividly through the influence of that sense of the poetical which, in some degree at least, all minds ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... of the great powers which men willingly acknowledged in the Pope as the upholder of the standard of morality greatly prejudiced the success of Innocent's policy elsewhere. In its origin this was a policy of self-preservation. The civil government of Rome was in the hands of a prefect representing the Emperor and a senator who was the spokesman of the Commune. The Pope was either a prisoner or a nonentity in his own capital. The Empire being in abeyance, it was not difficult ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley
... locomotion was a matter affecting their individual self-preservation, as well as that of their race, the existence of the want led to the means ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... bent in various ways on self-preservation, one of the sailors, who had taken his post with many others over the magazine, awaiting with great patience the dreaded explosion, at last cried out, as if in ill-humour that his expectation was likely to be disappointed, "Well, if ...
— The Loss of the Kent, East Indiaman, in the Bay of Biscay - Narrated in a Letter to a Friend • Duncan McGregor
... mean your comfortable rich—seem to have taken a kind of oath of self-preservation. To do what is expected of one, to succeed, you must take the oath. You must defend their institutions, and all ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... paces from him stood a poised and hooded figure, a squat, fire-eyed apparition that looked more like monster than man in that first glance. Something acted within him that was swifter than reason—a sub-conscious instinct that works for self-preservation like the flash of powder in a pan. It was this sub-conscious self that received the first photographic impression—the strange poise of the hooded creature, the uplifted arm, the cold, streaky gleam ...
— The Golden Snare • James Oliver Curwood
... different times, three distinct species of birds as the Uira-para, I gave up the story as a piece of humbug. The simplest explanation appears to be this: the birds associate in flocks from the instinct of self-preservation in order to be a less easy prey to hawks, snakes, and other enemies than they would be if ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... Egypt and North Africa. The burning of the library of Alexandria remains forever the symbol of the triumph of a militarist "culture" over civilization. This easy belief of the dull and violent that war "braces" comes out of a real instinct of self-preservation against the subtler tests of peace. This type of person will keep on with war if it can. It is to politics what the criminal type is to social order; it will be resentful and hostile to every attempt to fix up a pacific order in ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... in a thousand other matters, Nature will burst out laughing in the face of the would-be philosopher, and bringing forward her town boy, will say, 'Look here!' For the town boys are Nature's boys after all, at least so long as doctrines of self-preservation and ambition have not turned them from children of the kingdom into dirt-worms. But I must stop, for I am getting up to the neck in a bog of discrimination. As if I did not know the nobility of some townspeople, compared ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... without pity, upon the dead and wounded. They are natural; they belong to the scene; what else should he see? Moreover, the essential sentiments of the time and place are, first, a hard egoism which thinks mainly of self-preservation, and second, a stern sense of duty which regulates it. In the fiercer moments of the conflict even these feelings are drowned in a wild excitement which may lie either exultation or terror. Thus it is that the ordinary sympathies of ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... the father, so had the son, from the instinct of fear and self-preservation, studied every accent, every glance of Olivier,—so had he constituted himself a spy upon the heart whose perfidy was ever armed, that he detected at once in the proposal some scheme hostile to his interests. He made, however, no opposition to the plan suggested; and seemingly ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... it was all over with us; fully expecting that the next sea would also break aboard, completely swamp the boat, and leave us all to swim for a few brief, agonising moments, and then to vanish for ever; yet with the never-slumbering instinct of self-preservation, I put the tiller hard over as the crest of the wave swept forward, and then frantically threw out an oar over the stern, with which to sweep the boat round head to sea. How it was achieved I know not to this day, but so furious ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood
... of the brain of each of them began to assume shape and a definite aspect. The man had the craftier mind, but the woman had a woman's intuition, and she already had read his thoughts while yet he had no clue to hers. For the primal instinct of self-preservation, blazing up high, had burned away the bond of bogus love that held them together while they were putting her drunkard of a husband out of the way, and now there only remained to tie them fast this partnership of a ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... molest them, and France would not. But whilst, from the want of a common system, they individually permit England to do it, because individually they cannot resist it, they put France under the necessity of doing the same thing. The supreme of all laws, in all cases, is that of self-preservation. ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... temple swelled slightly and began to throb. It seemed to him that this impossible woman was tearing his nerves apart in a remorseless effort to get at the inmost secrets of his consciousness. By all the laws of self-preservation, he had every right to drive her from the room. By all the laws of chivalrous courtesy, he must lie there, prostrate, at her mercy, and listen to her with an unflinching smile, until the wheels of her enthusiasm should run down—if, ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... to do, that we do "automatically." Likewise we automatically make gestures, movements of welcome and aversion which we have never learned but which we do "naturally." They have their springs of action in the instinct of self-preservation and in the feelings connected with it. But what we are accustomed to do, we must first have learned and practiced. It is just that practice, the frequent repetition, that brings about the performance of ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... irresistible passion of the race, the passion for release from mortal existence, the passion for death. At that moment he felt, and probably felt truly, that had he been in dire peril, he would not have lifted a finger in self-preservation. He turned his eyes inward upon himself with greed for his own life, for his own blood, and back of that was the ravening thirst for release from the world and the flesh and the miseries which appertained to them, as one suffocating might thirst for air. He realized ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... to seem unnecessary, I fancy. You mustn't let yourself get worried, dear Clovy. The old lady means kindly enough, I think, only she's naturally tiresome, and has become helpless from habit. Be nice to her, but hold your own. Self-preservation is the ...
— Clover • Susan Coolidge
... tell her story: and show herself, as she may easily have been, not altogether bad; though a woman of weak maternal instincts, and one whose nature was powerless against the fear of pain, and the impulse to self-preservation. She describes with appalling vividness the experiences of the night: the moonlit forest—the snow-covered ground—the wolves approaching with a whispering tread, which seems at first but the soughing of a gentle ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... colonies throw down the gauntlet to England for less cause? Did not Japan throw down the gauntlet to Russia for less cause than the Empress Dowager had for desiring that "each strive TO PRESERVE FROM DESTRUCTION AND SPOLIATION HIS ANCESTRAL HOME AND GRAVES"? It was not for conquest but for self-preservation the Empress Dowager was ready to go to war; not for glory but for home; not against a taunting neighbour, but against a "ruthless invader." Her unwisdom did not consist in her being ready to go to war, but in allowing herself to be allied ...
— Court Life in China • Isaac Taylor Headland
... inhabitants of the island. That wealth must not leave us another year, not until every grain of it is fought for in every stage, from the tying of the sheaf to the loading of the ship; and the effort necessary to that simple act of self-preservation will at one and the same blow prostrate British dominion and landlordism together." In reference to this piece of writing, and many others of a similar nature, his lordship remarked that no effort had been made to show ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... here for I don't know. It is no business of mine. But art is a luxury. Men attach importance only to self-preservation and the propagation of their species. It is only when these instincts are satisfied that they consent to occupy themselves with the entertainment which is provided for them by writers, painters, ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... around him, Henry instantly countermanded the order, and saved the remainder of the prisoners. The bare facts of the case, from first to last, admit of no other alternative than for our judgment to pronounce it to have been altogether an imperative inevitable act of self-preservation, without the sacrifice of any life, or the suffering of any human being, (p. 174) beyond the absolute and indispensable necessity ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 2 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... of the accused brothers in that fatal room, just after notification that one of them must take the life of Judge Driscoll or lose his own the moment the parties should meet, clearly signifies that the natural instinct of self-preservation moved my clients to go there secretly and save Count ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... She saw that pity was entirely wasted here. Diana was so eminently able to look after herself when it came to the matter of self-preservation. ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... yawning precipice, at the bottom of which lay heaven; that would have been beautiful; but it was not thus. We must render an account of the things which went on in this soul, and we can only tell what there was there. He was carried away, at first, by the instinct of self-preservation; he rallied all his ideas in haste, stifled his emotions, took into consideration Javert's presence, that great danger, postponed all decision with the firmness of terror, shook off thought as to what he had to do, and resumed his calmness as ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... practical farmer, fills him with wrath when this immigrant takes possession of his pastures. Cattle will not eat the acrid, caustic plant—a sufficient reason for most members of the Ranunculaceae to stoop to the low trick of secreting poisonous or bitter juices. Self-preservation leads a cousin, the garden monk's hood, even to murderous practices. Since children will put everything within reach into their mouths, they should be warned against biting the buttercup's stem and leaves, that are capable ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... Spencer (presuming the child already supplied with his bare implements, reading, spelling, and penmanship) is led, after a long discussion, to conclude that 'the uniform reply is, Science.' The 'counts' on which he bases this verdict, are, the purposes of self-preservation; the gaining of a livelihood; the due discharge of parental functions; qualification for political responsibilities; the production and enjoyment of art; and discipline, whether intellectual, moral, or religious. Taken at his own showing, Mr. Spencer seems to contemplate, as his model of an educated ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... of our national defences and offering a bridge to invasion. The danger of the thing is in her making her territory foreign under any circumstances; and it is a danger which the government must prevent, if only for self-preservation. Within the limits of the constitution two sovereignties cannot exist; and yet what practical odds does it make, if a State may become sovereign by simply declaring herself so? The legitimate consequence of secession is, not that a State becomes sovereign, but that, so far as ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... regarded their cause as her own. Then came a desperate struggle for a tremendous stake. Everything dear to nations was wagered on both sides: nor can we justly blame either the Irishman or the Englishman for obeying, in that extremity, the law of self-preservation. The contest was terrible, but short. The weaker went down. His fate was cruel; and yet for the cruelty with which he was treated there was, not indeed a defence, but an excuse: for, though he suffered all that tyranny could inflict, he suffered nothing ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... after my dismissal in the summer of 1918 I spoke in the Herrenhaus on foreign policy, and warned everyone present against trying to undermine the Quadruple Alliance. When I declared that "honour, duty to the Alliance, and the call for self-preservation compel us to fight by the side of Germany," I was misunderstood. It did not seem as though the public realised that the moment the Entente thought the Quadruple Alliance was about to break up, from that moment our cause was lost. Had the public no knowledge ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... that in giving its incomparable fleet it had rendered all the service that its political interests, according to former standards of expediency, justified; and it could have been plausibly suggested that the ordinary considerations of prudence and the instinct of self-preservation required it, in the face of the deadly assault by the greatest military power in the world, to reserve its little army for the defense of its own soil. England never hesitated, when the Belgian frontier was crossed, but moved with such extraordinary speed ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... pettifogging, but certainly no more so than any other shrewd rat or animal that burrows its way onward—and shall we say upward? The deepest controlling principle which animated these individuals was the oldest and first, that of self-preservation. Picture, for example, a common occurrence—that of Senator John H. Southack, conversing with, perhaps, Senator George Mason Wade, of Gallatin County, behind a legislative door in one of the senate conference chambers toward the close of a session—Senator ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... mysterious vengeance, of supernatural punishment. And so it is, too, with the thunderstorm, with illness, with death, with the myriad phenomena and accidents of life. It would seem as though the true alarm of our soul, the great fear which stirs other instincts within us than that of mere self-preservation, is only called forth by the thought of a more or less determinate God, of a mysterious consciousness, a permanent, invisible justice, or a vigilant, eternal Providence. But does the "interpreter of life," who succeeds in arousing this fear, bring us nearer to truth; and ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... of April, 1795, concluded at Basle that treaty to which we owe all our conquests and Germany and Italy all their disasters? It is not probable that the parent of pacification will destroy its own progeny, if self-preservation does not ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... a personal survival of the soul and even of the body was based upon a strong instinct of human nature, the instinct of self-preservation. Social and moral conditions in the empire during its decline gave it greater strength than it had ever possessed before.[38] The third century saw so much suffering, anguish and violence, so much unnecessary ruin and so many unpunished crimes, that the Roman world took refuge in the expectation ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... ascending the stairs. The terrified girl fancied at the moment she heard a door open on the floor immediately below her, and some one dart suddenly up the flight communicating with the spot on which she stood. Without waiting to satisfy herself, she rushed with all the mechanical instinct of self-preservation back into her own apartment. As she passed the bed-room window, she glanced once more hastily into the area below, and there beheld a sight that, filling her soul with despair, paralysed all further exertion. A tall savage was bearing off the ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... beginning. My parents abandoned me. Why? They were starved to it, forced to it. Self-preservation is the first law. I don't clear them, but I understand. They were starving and irresponsible. I merely paid the price of relief, the price ...
— The Dominant Dollar • Will Lillibridge
... glass jar, unable ever to leave it, and more than ever at the mercy of his captor's least whim. Not that he had any delusion that he would live long in any case: it was just the simple strong instinct of self-preservation that made him grab ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... experiences had taught him the significance of certain signs, and when Dr. Harpe appeared with her hair curled and wearing a lingerie waist, the fact which roused the risibilities of her friends stirred in him a feeling which resembled the instinct of self-preservation. ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... ingratitude. It was the instinct of self-preservation. The very bravery of the Americans made the men whom they had defended hate and fear them; and there was a continual influx of young men from the States. The Mexicans said to each other: 'There is no end ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... cry of "Police!" the crowd had seemed to melt away from him like the bank fog at the sweep of a breeze. A dozen comrades had seized the prostrate Jean and hurried him away, and Pete, with the instinct of self-preservation, had snatched up his clothes and dodged down a dark alley toward the dirty drinking-shops ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... life, the secret instinct and power of death in us, which labors continually for the destruction of all that seeks to be, to take form, to exist; it is the passion for destruction, the tendency toward suicide, identifying itself with the instinct of self-preservation. This antipathy toward all that does one good, all that nourishes and heals, is it not a mere variation of the antipathy to moral light and regenerative truth? Does not sin also create a thirst for death, a growing ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... protested, "while that sort of philanthropy is very delightful when one can afford the luxury, it is scarcely practical when one is teetering on the verge of financial ruin. After all, Bryce, self-preservation is the first law of human nature, and the sale of those farms would go a long way toward helping the Cardigan Redwood Lumber Company out of the hole it is in ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... profoundest feeling among the masses, the most influential element in their character, is the religious element. It is as instinctive and elemental as the law of self-preservation. It informs the whole intellect and personality ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... Merchant, and the Lawyer; nay, to be free with you, I believe to that also we are beholden for our Spectator. I am apt to think, that could we look into our own Hearts, we should see Money ingraved in them in more lively and moving Characters than Self-Preservation; for who can reflect upon the Merchant hoisting Sail in a doubtful Pursuit of her, and all Mankind sacrificing their Quiet to her, but must perceive that the Characters of Self-Preservation (which were doubtless originally the brightest) are sullied, if not wholly defaced; and that those of Money ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... sensitive in the matter of colonial climate, besides other limitations testifying to the delicacy of her nature—and her tastes. Though he judged his alarm sardonically he did not dismiss the improper thought from his mind. The instinct of self-preservation was strong within him. On the contrary, he repeated it mentally with profane emphasis and a fuller precision: "Damn it! If that infernal Heat has his way the fellow'll die in prison smothered in his fat, and she'll never ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... one feeling, that of self-preservation; only one desire, that of preserving our lives, which each of us believed to be threatened. You had your neighbour's head cut off so that your neighbour should not have ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... merely lives of commerce. You do not realise that there is with us a profound sentiment of affection for the Union. No people worth anything ever lived without the very human desire of national self-preservation. It has the force of a man's personal desire for self-preservation. Pardon me, I suppose that I have the ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... little slow, more assertive, sharper of tongue, more acutely intelligent, and equally smartly dressed. She has still a remnant of real, sincere feeling buried under a cynical mask which her life in a fast set has developed for her self-preservation. TROTTER is a foolish young person, meaning well enough according to his lights, which are not of the ...
— The Climbers - A Play in Four Acts • Clyde Fitch
... influence added in this direction might have driven me insane, while the diversion afforded by Valeria's counter-enthusiasm and the necessity of making an active defence of my own, roused me, and brought back the blood to the surface of my life. It was, therefore, partly an instinct of self-preservation which led me to Valeria,—and she saved me—my noble wife saved me for ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... before putting down the instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic being. A living thing seeks above all to DISCHARGE its strength—life itself is WILL TO POWER; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent RESULTS thereof. In short, here, as everywhere else, let us beware ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... if, in that way, a general emancipation and expatriation could be effected; and, gradually, and with due sacrifices, I think it might be. But, as it is, we have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in the one scale and self-preservation in ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various
... master, he resolved to gratify his wish, and punish him, at the same time, for the curses which he incessantly launched against Mahomet and all who believed in him, by stabbing him to the heart. He, therefore, aimed a blow at his master, as he sat one day at table; but the instinct of self-preservation being stronger than the desire of martyrdom, Raymond grappled with his antagonist, and overthrew him. He scorned to take his life himself; but handed him over to the authorities of the town, by whom he was afterwards ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... had so completely stupefied this unfortunate Elizabeth, that, though threatened by the hatchet, she did not even think of protecting her face by holding her hands before her head, with that mechanical gesture which the instinct of self-preservation prompts on such occasions. She scarcely raised her left arm, and extended it slowly in the direction of the murderer, as thought to keep him off. The hatchet penetrated her skull, laying it open from ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... 396): "To what I have offered with regard to sudden rencounters let me add, that the blood already too much heated, kindleth afresh at every pass or blow. And in the tumult of the passions, in which the mere instinct of self-preservation has no inconsiderable share, the voice of reason is not heard; and therefore the law, in condescension to the infirmities of flesh and blood, doth ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various |
