"Self-abnegation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... therein, and in his angry words to the rebels, that he was only an instrument in the divine hand. It was a momentary wavering in a hundred and twenty years of obedience. It was one failure in a life of self-abnegation and suppression. The ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... expression of the emotions which tortured her insatiate soul. After having draped this figure with the highest art, accumulating every species of masculine greatness upon it in order to compensate for the highest of all qualities which she repudiated for it, the grandeur of, "utter self-abnegation for love," which the many-sided poet has placed in the empyrean and called "the Eternal Feminine," (DAS EWIGWEIBLICHE,)—a greatness which is love existing before any of its joys, surviving all its sorrows;—after having ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... to say pretty girl," said Miss Cringle, with calm self-abnegation, "don't mind me, say it. The captain knows what he's about. He told me you were a milksop; he said you were a good young man and ...
— Many Cargoes • W.W. Jacobs
... reply to sympathetic greeting, "I am a little hipped; situation growing too heavy for me. Patriotism all very well; public spirit desirable; self-abnegation, as OLD MORALITY says, is the seed of virtue. But you may carry spirit of self-sacrifice too far. Read my speech at dinner to HARTINGTON, of course? Put it in the right light, don't you think? We Dissentient Liberals, as they call us, are the Paschal ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, May 24, 1890 • Various
... immediate complete socialization of Russia, leaving that to a gradual process of evolution and change of existing conditions. In the ten years preceding the first revolution thousands of young intellectuals joined the party and fought the tsar's regime. They showed a degree of self-abnegation found only in people whose heart is kindled with the true spirit of devotion to a great cause. The revolution of 1905 would never have taken place but for their organized "terror from below." The high regard held for them by the widest circles has caused their rise in power during ...
— The Russian Revolution; The Jugo-Slav Movement • Alexander Petrunkevitch, Samuel Northrup Harper,
... need is to relearn the will of God. For we are so separated from Him that we now look upon His Will as on a cross, as an incomprehensible sacrifice, as but self-abnegation, pain, and gloom. We ...
— The Golden Fountain - or, The Soul's Love for God. Being some Thoughts and - Confessions of One of His Lovers • Lilian Staveley
... integrity of her life at Mrs. McKee's—for this wind-swept little house, tidily ugly, infinitely lonely. There were two crayon enlargements over the mantel. One was Schwitter, evidently. The other was the paper-doll wife. K. wondered what curious instinct of self-abnegation had caused Tillie to leave the wife there undisturbed. Back of its position of honor he saw the girl's realization of her own situation. On a wooden shelf, exactly between the two pictures, was another vase of ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... who have most powerfully influenced mankind, for it was in Asia in an unknown antiquity that the Persian Zoroaster taught the dualism of good and evil; that the Indian Gautama 600 years before Christ declared that self-abnegation was the path to a dreamless Nirvana; that less than a century later the Chinese Lao-tse enunciated the mysteries of Taoism and Confucius uttered his maxims regarding the five earthly relations of man, to be followed within another century by the bold teaching of Mencius that kings should ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... &c adj.; generosity; liberality, liberalism; altruism; benevolence &c 906; elevation, loftiness of purpose, exaltation, magnanimity; chivalry, chivalrous spirit; heroism, sublimity. self-denial, self-abnegation, self-sacrifice, self-immolation, self-control &c (resolution) 604; stoicism, devotion, martyrdom, suttee. labor of love. V. be disinterested &c adj.; make a sacrifice, lay one's head on the block; put oneself in the place of others, do as one would ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... out beyond the river, beyond the sunset, toward an unseen bourne of peace and happiness, and her lovely face had in it a look of utter hopelessness and of sublime self-abnegation. The air was still. It was late autumn, and all around her the russet leaves of beech and chestnut fell with a melancholy hush-sh-sh about ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... Stearns promptly declined. How well I remember his agitation, walking up and down the room, and finally entreating Mr. Stearns for 'friendship's sake' to go and take care of him. I can recall no instance of such self-abnegation in my husband's self-denying career. He did not stoop to an explanation, even when Dr. Howe declared in his presence, some months later, "that he never did any thing in his life he so much wished to take back." I had hoped that Dr. Howe would ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... during intermission last Sabbath; but Marg'et Ann, having arrived at her own position by a process of complete self-abnegation, found it hard to know how to proceed with this stalwart sinner who insisted upon understanding things. It is true he spoke humbly enough of himself, as one who had not her light, but Marg'et Ann was quite aware that she did not believe the Catechism ...
— The Wizard's Daughter and Other Stories • Margaret Collier Graham
... centering at her fireside, forms a painful contrast in many a household to the liberal, genial, brilliant, cultured husband in the zenith of his power, who has never given one thought to the higher life, liberty, and happiness of the woman by his side; believing her self-abnegation ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... nursing, and thousands of young women and girls in the provinces have promised to help their country by making uniforms and bandages. Others will look after the children of widowers who have gone to the front, and in various other ways the women of France are justifying their reputation for cheerful self-abnegation. ...
— Paris War Days - Diary of an American • Charles Inman Barnard
... interest is perfectly legitimate. The love of self cannot be condemned. The Savior himself has enjoined us to love our neighbor as ourselves. To love him more than ourselves is a very high and beautiful virtue. It is the self-abnegation which inspired Christian heroes. But heroism is rare, and cannot be imposed, nor taken, as a rule. Personal interest is a powerful stimulant, and the superior harmony of social relations makes it contribute to ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... his own spirit, in simple, unconscious self-abnegation and thorough devotion to the work. How it chimes in with this, written on the self-same morning to ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... it wi' ma ain eyes,"—for indeed this seemed to Carmichael an impossible height of self-abnegation,—"a man who loved an' served a wumman wi' his best an' at a great cost, an' yet for whom there cud be no reward but his ain luve." Marget's face grew so beautiful as she told of the constancy of this unknown, unrewarded lover that Carmichael left without ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... humiliation, I intend no reproach to men; I simply state a fact dependent upon the nature of things, and upon the primal sentence passed against the pride that, in spite of the prohibition of the Almighty, sought to know all things, 'to become as gods.' Meekness, humility, self-abnegation, affection, are the beautiful flowers that grow by the wayside; but the pathway is not the less thorny, and no good can be accomplished by ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... and unfaithful. He may be bored by monotony, a restless seeker of new experiences and new work, possessed by the devils of wanderlust. He may be an egoist incapable of the continuous self-sacrifice and self-abnegation demanded by the home,—quarrelsome and selfish. Sometimes he is wedded to an ideal of achievement or work and believes that he travels best who travels alone. Often in these days of late marriage he has waited until he could "afford" to ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... a certain strange dignity of self-abnegation. It is not alone the country people of Cumberland or of Scotland, who in their highest moments ...
— Stephen Archer and Other Tales • George MacDonald
... in which they grew up to be what they were under the tuition of a father whose career can only be called romantic, and a mother whose intellectual gifts were so remarkable that, had they not been in some great degree stifled by the exercise of an entire self-abnegation on behalf of her family, she, too, must have become an ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... divine self-abnegation to which very few attain. But those few come nearest to the imitation of Him who 'pleased not Himself,' and I think—God knoweth—often they are the happiest. Let us all ask God for grace to reach it. 'This is My commandment, that ye have ...
— Earl Hubert's Daughter - The Polishing of the Pearl - A Tale of the 13th Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... them. His future had long been determined—duty called him to the rude huts of the far West; thither pointed the finger of destiny, and thither, at all hazards, he would go. He thought that he had habituated himself to sacrifices, but the spirit of self-abnegation was scarcely equal to this trial. Reason taught him that the tenderly-nurtured child of Southern climes would never suit him for a companion in the pioneer life which he had marked out. He folded his arms tightly over his chest, ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... opportunity, and that only in winter, for books or play. My father was a generous-hearted, impulsive, talented, but uneducated man; my mother was a conscientious, self-sacrificing, intelligent, but uneducated woman. Both were devotedly religious, and both believed implicitly that self-abnegation was the crowing glory of womanhood. Before I was seventeen I was employed as a district school teacher, received a first-class certificate and taught with success, though how I became possessed of the necessary qualifications ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... for the fact that the strength of vice in her father becomes an equal strength of virtue in her. Abused since her babyhood, doing the work of a man among degrading companionships, she yet remains capable of the noblest self-abnegation. Mrs. Burnett delights in heroes and heroines who are thus loftily at variance with their surroundings. Her stories are romantic in spirit, offering little to the lover of psychologic analysis. Her character-drawing ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... destruction have won; one knows that Parsifal is eternally damned; he has listened and succumbed, even as Wagner himself did, to the eastern sirens' song of the ease and delight of a life of slothful renunciation, self-abnegation, and devotion to "duty." The music of the last scene sings that song in tones of infinite sweetness; but it cannot satisfy you; you turn from the enchanted hall, with its holy cup and spear and dove, its mystic voices in the heights, its heavy, depressing, incense-laden ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... sincerity of those few might well be open to doubt. For the Deity it speaks of is supposed to be an immortal God disguised as Man,— a God who voluntarily rejects and sets aside His own glory to serve and save His perishable creatures,—thus the root of that religion would consist in Self-abnegation, and Self-abnegation is, as experience proves, utterly impossible ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... in the Society's name. He now found, himself superseded in authority, his services and self-sacrifice unappreciated, his drafts[9] dishonored, his motives distrusted. Nothing could show more strongly his devotion and self-abnegation than his action in the present crisis. Seeing the colony again deserted by the agent and in a state of discontent and confusion, he forgot his wrongs and remained at the helm. Order was soon restored but the seeds of insubordination remained. The arrival of 103 emigrants from Virginia ...
— History of Liberia - Johns Hopkins University Studies In Historical And Political Science • J.H.T. McPherson
... the matter relating to their deepest consciousness, no words had passed between them. She felt as if she were a widow, and hoped he would understand. His full recognition of her position, and acceptance of the fact that she did and must mourn for her lover, his complete self-abnegation, brought her a sense ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... much the more prominent part in all this that he felt himself compelled by his manliness to say something in contradiction to it—something that should have the same flavour about it as had her self-abnegation and declared passion. He also must be unselfish and enthusiastic. 'I do not deny that there is ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... self-conceited and the bragging are never attractive, self being the topic on which all are fluent and none interesting. They who dwell on self in any way—the self-deniers, the self-improvers—are hateful to the heart of civilized man. The Chinese, who knew everything beforehand, are perfect in self-abnegation of manner. "How are your noble and princely son and your beautiful and angelic daughter?" says Mandarin Number One.—"Dog of a son have I none, but my cat of a daughter is well," says ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... its sweet activity, many would have lapsed into a morbid, nervous condition, over which we might justly have thrown the mantle of charity, but this dear friend was so lovely and chastened in her affliction, that she seemed almost a Deity in her attributes of tender love and patient self-abnegation, united to a heroic endurance of pain with which she was daily, hourly and momently ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... Sisters of Charity really better nurses than most other women?' I asked an intelligent lady who had seen much of our military hospitals. 'Yes, they are,' was her reply. 'Why should it be so?' 'I think it is because with them it is a work of self-abnegation, and of duty to God, and they are so quiet and self-forgetful in its exercise that they do it better, while many other women show such self-consciousness and ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... no interest in the ascetic faces which the old masters loved to picture, worn into deep furrows of care by penitence and holy sorrow, though lighted with the triple ray of Faith, Hope, and Love. They have no sympathies with the saints and heroes who have been great through self-abnegation, for such lives are a constant reproach to their own sybaritical tendencies. Constantly mistaking the effervescence of passion for the fire of genius; viewing the sublime realities of religion only as fantastic dreams; seeing nothing but ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... religious emotion has its origin in sexual emotion, which is, again, extremely likely. This community of origin would allow for the transformation of one into the other, and supplies a key to the language of lover-like devotion and self-abnegation which is so prominent in religious devotional literature. The importance attached to dress is also very suggestive; for here, again, the element of sacrifice expresses itself in the cultivation of a studied repulsiveness to the normal attractiveness of costume. "Thus," says Dr. Mercier, "we find ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... close of active operations, General Lee returned to Richmond, and, though subjected to depreciatory criticism by the carpet-knights who make campaigns on assumed hypotheses, he with characteristic self-abnegation made no defense of himself, not even presenting an official report of his night-march in the Cheat Mountain, but orally he stated to me the facts which have formed the basis of this sketch. My estimate of General Lee, my confidence in his ability, zeal, and fidelity, rested on a foundation not ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... the chocolate or the wine to thees girls, or make to them a promenade in the moonlight on the veranda. It is ever so. Unless, my friend," he said, suddenly turning toward me in an excess of chivalrous self-abnegation, "unless you shall yourself take my place. Behold, I gif them to you! I vamos! I vanish! I make track! I skedaddle!" I think he would have carried his extravagance to the point of summoning his four gypsy witches of partners, and committing them to my ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... planet over the hemlock shining faithfully upon her. The next day she reappeared before her parents with a cloudless face and a willingness to make such amends as could be brought about without too much self-abnegation. In the broad light of day the mother could not hold to the horrors of the evening before. She had been nervous and overwrought; it wasn't so bad as they ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... and papers. He found that without meaning it he had often made her miserable. In her journal for the 21st of June, 1856, he read, "The chief interest of to-day expressed in blue marks on my wrists!"* He realised that he had almost driven her to suicide, he the great preacher of duty and self-abnegation. "For the next few years," says Froude, "I never walked with him without his recurring to a subject which was never absent from his mind." Doubtless his remorse was exaggerated. His letters, and his wife's, show that ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... Emperor Alexander's loftiness of soul. She has refused to evacuate Malta. She wanted to find, and still seeks, some secret motive in our actions. What answer did Novosiltsev get? None. The English have not understood and cannot understand the self-abnegation of our Emperor who wants nothing for himself, but only desires the good of mankind. And what have they promised? Nothing! And what little they have promised they will not perform! Prussia has always declared that Buonaparte ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... characterized the rest of the people, or nineteen-twentieths of the nation. I have already sufficiently dwelt on this aspect of national character. I here recur to it merely to enforce the truth that self-arrogation and self-abnegation, haughtiness and humility, proud, high-handed, magisterial manners, and cringing, obsequious obedience, are all elements of character that depend on the nature of the social order. They are passed on from generation to generation more by social ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... quietly of the play, and I was astonished at the keenness of her perceptions, the unerring ease with which she had realized and appreciated the self-abnegation which was the great underlying motif of the whole drama. And in the midst of our conversation, what I had expected happened. A note was brought to me ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... enough, too, to hear sentiments of such sublime self-abnegation quoted in support even of Spoliation; and yet to this tends all this pompous show of disinterestedness! These men so sensitively delicate, that they are determined not to enjoy even peace, if it must be propped by the vile interest of men, do not hesitate to pick the pockets ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... neither mine nor thine, but a oneness that would bring all relations into harmony with itself. The very essence of love is humility, and at the same time its glory is that it abolishes all laws, all rights, all powers, and is to itself alone law, right, and power. By the completeness of self-abnegation may the footsteps of love be traced. This partially the author recognizes, choosing it for the conclusion of the whole matter, but erring in that he makes it come with resistance and reluctance, the conquest of love, instead of spontaneously and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... great power and freedom, showing that Donatello still possessed the vigour and penetration for which the Campanile prophets are notable. The head is full of character; not perhaps what one would expect from the apostle of self-abnegation: but it is determined, strong in the mouth and broad chin. It was, of course, only meant to be seen a few feet from the ground, and the lines do not compare in depth with the Habbakuk or the Zuccone; but there is none the less an analogy in the manner by which Donatello ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... impulse of unselfishness, whereby he elects to share the offence and punishment of Eve, is a vice in him, a "bad compliance." Self-abnegation, the duty of Eve, is hardly within the right of Adam; and Dr. Johnson expressed a half-truth in violently paradoxical terms when he said that Milton "thought woman made only for obedience and man only for rebellion." It would be truer, and weaker, ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... self-abnegation was rendering the conversation intolerably painful, and even the embarrassing situation now at hand was a welcome interruption. Eveena paused before a door opening from the gallery into one of the rooms looking on ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... age of thirty. If it live on, one remedy is, of course, the scientific attitude; that attitude which is bent on considering and discovering the relations of things among themselves, not their personal relation to us. The study of science is a priceless discipline in self-abnegation, but only in negation; it looses us from self, it does not link us to others. The real and natural remedy for the egotism of youth is Life, not necessarily the haunting of cafes, or even the watching of football ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... conviction to steer the ship upon her course. More than that; there was the sinister figure of a Dr. Errington crouching close at hand, ready to seize the helm and make straight—who could doubt it?—for the rocks. In such a situation the voice of self-abnegation must needs grow still and small indeed. Yet it spoke on, for it was one of the paradoxes in Manning's soul that that voice was never silent. Whatever else he was, he was not unscrupulous. Rather, his scruples deepened with his desires; and he could satisfy his ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... Anarchists, who may be said to represent the intellectual rather than the material side of the Socialist movement—there were many fanatics. This fanaticism showed itself in different ways—sometimes in the most admirable self-abnegation, in the sacrifice of wealth, position, and happiness; frequently in abnormal actions of other kinds, and most noticeably in ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... was perfectly correct in his belief that he might have wooed and won the lady who is referred to in these pages as Mrs. Oldcastle. In this, as in other episodes of his life which happen to be known to me, the motives behind his self-abnegation were in the highest degree creditable to him. This I have been asked to say, and I am ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... fool to think that I could ever be anything to her, even a friend," he said to himself bitterly; "women are incapable of friendship. It is all or nothing with them; a blind self-abnegation or the coldest indifference. Devotion cannot touch them, unless the man who gives it happen to be that one man out of a thousand who has the power to bewitch their senses. Truth and affection, of themselves, have no value with them. How many people spoke to me of this Holbrook as an unattractive ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... morbid and unhealthy: yet there was no morbidness in them; unless we are to call morbid all the great and glorious army of men and women who have laid down their own lives for the sake of others. That same fine and rare quality of self-abnegation which has inspired missionaries' lives and martyrs' deaths, inspired Hetty now. The morbidness, if there were any, was in the first entering into her mind of the belief that her husband's happiness could be secured in any way so ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Helen Jackson
... T. STEAD, G.C.B., C.S.I., K.G., V.C.—the great journalist in the shade of whose colossal mounted statue we are now sitting—had suddenly become a convert to the doctrine that war is the great purifier, and had offered in a spirit of extraordinary self-abnegation to command both the Army and the Fleet in action. Volunteer corps armed with scythes, paper-knives, walking-sticks and umbrellas had sprung up all over the country, and had provided their own uniforms and equipment. Lord RANDOLPH CHURCHILL, father of the present Earl ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 3rd, 1891 • Various
... a woman's natural tendency towards asceticism, self-extinction, self-abnegation. All through life she had made painful efforts to understand and follow out her duty. Ratcliffe knew her weak point when he attacked her from this side. Like all great orators and advocates, he was an actor; the more effective because of a certain ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... is not the work of a moment. It begins with moments, and goes on with years; moments of sur- render to God, of childlike trust and joyful adoption [15] of good; moments of self-abnegation, self-consecration, heaven-born hope, and ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... patriot, therefore, France, as against the outer world, was first, no matter what her government might be; but the France he yearned for was a land regenerated by the gospel of humanity, awakened to the highest activity by the equality of all before the law, refined by that self-abnegation of every man which makes all men brothers, and destroys the ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... tangled storms we see, Following the cross, your pale procession led, One hope, one end, all others sacrificed, Self-abnegation, love, humility, Your faces shining toward the bended head, The wounded hands and ...
— Among the Millet and Other Poems • Archibald Lampman
... to arise from such ideas. Unlike Jordan Jackson, and men of his type, there was nothing which his class could gain thereby, except a share in the ultimate glory and success of an enlarged and solidified nation. The self-abnegation which he had learned from three years of duty as a private soldier and almost a lifetime of patient attendance upon a loved but exacting invalid, inclined to him to study the movements of society and the world, without especial reference to himself, ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... our own way in the world, active, live intelligences, writing books, nursing in hospitals, cleaning the plague-spots out of the cities, influencing in a thousand ways the uplift of that coarser brute man and besides all this practicing a thousand acts of self-abnegation in the home. Keeping man's house, cooking ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... same came under my notice. Their diligence, attention, and decency of deportment, afforded me, at the time, much satisfaction." After the lapse of years it is with something of the pathos of martyrdom that we are impressed by the service of these struggling people, who by their self-abnegation and patriotism endeavored to win and deserve the ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... butter without having previously asked the permission of his wife. Fate, in order to try the good-nature of Timothy Cockayne to the utmost, had given him two daughters closely resembling, in patient endurance and self-abnegation, their irreproachable mamma. Sophonisba—at whom the reader has already had a glimpse, and whom we last saw demolishing her second baba at Felix's, was the eldest daughter—and the second was Theodosia. There was a third, Carrie; she was the blue, ...
— The Cockaynes in Paris - 'Gone abroad' • Blanchard Jerrold
... were inflicted. But it was for the truth as he saw it, that is, for the sake of duty, that Southwell thus endured. We must not impute all the evils of a system to every individual who holds by it. It may be found that a man has, for the sole sake of self-abnegation, yielded homage, where, if his object had been personal aggrandizement, he might have wielded authority. Southwell, if that which comes from within a man may be taken as the test of his character, was a devout and humble Christian. In the choir of our singers we only ask: "Dost thou lift up thine ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... money, and that all he wished for was a thorough reform; which in the end would prove equally beneficial to the oppressed and the oppressor. And, notwithstanding the temptations to enrich himself, by which he was surrounded, Clive adhered to this resolution of self-abnegation. The servants of the company would have enabled him to treble his wealth, if he would have consented to connive at their misdoings; and the princes of India offered him money, and jewels, and diamonds in abundance, as the price of his assistance on their behalf; but, steady to ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... impressing on me, with what she heard from Phyllis Devereux, of the work Sister Angela has been doing at Albertstown— the most utter self-abnegation, through bitter disappointment in her most promising pupils—only the charity that is rooted could endure. It is just the old difference Tennyson points out between ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... self-abnegation and self-sacrifice in the cause of suffering humanity having been absolute, and who have nobly vindicated every claim made by their sex to full equality with men in all that serves to dignify human nature. Her rightful place is among "the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... self-abnegation when self was wrapped up in another, and heart and soul were purified by a sweet example. But when the helpful voice was silent, the daily lesson over, the beloved presence gone, and nothing remained but loneliness and grief, then Jo found her promise ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... self-abnegation has rarely been heard of in history. It has made Regulus famous for all time. His advice was taken, the treaty was refused; he, refusing to break his parole, or even to see his family, returned to Carthage with the ambassadors, knowing that he was going to ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... either human or divine. Such are: Stavrogin in "Devils," Dmitry Karamazoff ("The Karamazoff Brothers"), and so forth. His women also can be divided into two similar, contrasting types; on the one hand, the gentle—the type of the woman who possesses a heart which is tender and loving to self-abnegation, like Nelly and Natasha, in "Humiliated and Insulted"; Raskolnikoff's mother and Sonya, in "Crime and Punishment"; Netotchka Nezvanoff, in "The Stripling." On the other hand, there are the rapacious types of capricious, charming women who are tyrannical to the ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... not as if there were any prospect before her of better times. If sickness had failed to soften and sweeten the temper of the Broom-Squire, then nothing would do it. Before her lay a hideous future of self-abnegation, or daily, hourly misery, under his ill-nature; of continuous torture caused by his cruel tongue. And her heart was not whole. She still thought of Iver, recalled his words, his look, the clasp of his arm, his kiss on ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... not a "savior" in the sense of bloody sacrifice for the sins of the people. On the contrary, he was an example to mankind—a man who through moral purification and a life of self-abnegation had prepared himself for this holy office. Mythologically, or astrologically, he was the new sun born at the close of the cycle. He was the great Light which revealed the way to eternal repose—Nirvana. The mythical Buddha was the ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... century was a communal selfishness. Each individual was expected to practise, and did in fact practise to a consummate degree, those difficult arts which make the wheels of human intercourse run smoothly—the arts of tact and temper, of frankness and sympathy, of delicate compliment and exquisite self-abnegation—with the result that a condition of living was produced which, in all its superficial and obvious qualities, was one of unparalleled amenity. Indeed, those persons who were privileged to enjoy it showed their appreciation ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... have trusted me better, papa,' Milly said tenderly; and I knew what perfect self-abnegation there was in the happy smile with which she ...
— Milly Darrell and Other Tales • M. E. Braddon
... sacrificed to it every power of his being and every energy of his mind and body, this man has indeed lost himself. Yet he lives in his art as the other has not, he has saved himself in a sense of which the other knows nothing; and exactly in proportion as he has succeeded in his self-abnegation, so far has he attained, as we say, immortality. There is not, then, one sphere of life in which the paradox is not true. The great historical lovers in romance, the pioneers of science, the immortals in every plane, are precisely those that have fulfilled on ...
— Paradoxes of Catholicism • Robert Hugh Benson
... Vanya," we have Vanya, a man full of goodness, modesty, and self-abnegation contrasted with the celebrated professor Serebriakof, an egoist, unfeeling, scornful, and ungrateful. The latter, who has recently remarried, comes back to the estate which Uncle Vanya, the brother of his first wife, has managed for him. For several years Vanya has been working incessantly; he ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... he could look through them, he was none the less happy. For in those days his heart lived. Warmly and sadly it beat for you, Ingeborg Holm, and his soul embraced your blond, bright, and saucily ordinary little personality in blissful self-abnegation. ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... hardship of a rigid race severance acts cruelly on those whose intelligence and refinement fit them for a companionship with the best of the whites, which they needs must crave, which would be for the good of both races, but which is withheld or yielded in scanty measure. Self-abnegation, patience, power alike to wait and to do,—these are the price they are called to pay. But the prize set before them is worth it all,—the deliverance of their people, and the harmonizing of the long alienated races. They need to beware of jealousies and rivalries of leadership such as ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... her proverbial lack of logic by embracing with enthusiasm state direction and at the same time remain an exemplar of individualistic performance. The Adamistic scheme seems still further to demand for its smooth working that the feminine group show self-abnegation and agree that it is not itself suited ...
— Mobilizing Woman-Power • Harriot Stanton Blatch
... so surely into a woman's arms as a rebuff from another woman. In her heart she saw the finer course, yet the little voices clamoured, told her she would be destroying the ideality of a delicate nature, spoiling something that could never be the same again: on the one side whatever there was of self-abnegation in her love, on the other the habit ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... one in town yet, he shut himself up with his thoughts. They did not differ from the thoughts of the night before, and the night before that, but they were calmer, and they portended more distinctly a life of self-abnegation and solitude from that time forth. He tested his feelings, and found that it was not hurt vanity that he was suffering from: it was really wounded affection. He did not resent Alice's cruelty; he wished that she might be happy; he could ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... this plan was purely the result of despair at my miserable pecuniary situation, and that the only question that required an answer was whether or not I could make money by it, money in return for an unheard-of sacrifice, an act of self-abnegation, which probably I should not have been able to go through with after all? How badly I must have expressed myself! Excuse me for having given rise to such a misunderstanding, and be thanked all the more for the trouble ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... hero was Bagwax! What self-abnegation was there! Should he be less ready to devote himself to his client,—he, who was paid for his work,—than this post-office clerk, who was as pure in his honesty as he was zealous in the cause? 'There are a great many of them, I ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... the castle, but having neglected certain conditions, was shut out, and, on his return, the priestess of Graalburg insisted on his being expelled the court and degraded from knighthood. Parzival then led a new life of abstinence and self-abnegation, and a wise hermit became his instructor. At length he reached such a state of purity and sanctity that the priestess of Graalburg declared him worthy to become lord ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... between men, as, for example, in interchange of words. The interaction of eye and eye dies in the moment in which the directness of the function is lost. But the totality of social relations of human beings, their self-assertion and self-abnegation, their intimacies and estrangements, would be changed in unpredictable ways if there occurred no glance of eye to eye. This mutual glance between persons, in distinction from the simple sight or observation of the other, signifies a wholly ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... argue his humane theories under the smoking roof of a raided settler's cabin, whose owner, however, had forgotten his own repeated provocations, or the trespass of which he was proud. But Atherly's unaffected and unobtrusive zeal, his fixity of purpose, his undoubted courage, his self-abnegation, and above all the gentle melancholy and half-philosophical wisdom of this new missionary, won him the respect and assistance of even the most callous or the most skeptical of officials. The Secretary of the Interior had given him carte blanche; the President trusted him, and ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... self-sacrifice, and now must give up all hope of Alice Renwick. He had accepted the announcement of their engagement. He could not do less, after all that had happened and the painful scene at their parting. And yet would it not be a blessing to her if he were killed? Even now in his self-abnegation and misery he did not fully realize how mean he was,—how mean he seemed to others. He resented in his heart what Sloat had said of him but the day before, little caring whether he heard it or not: "It would be a mercy to that poor girl ...
— From the Ranks • Charles King
... Valetta. At the time when the supreme honour was conferred upon him, in the year 1557, he had passed through every grade of the Order: as soldier, captain, general, Counsellor, Grand Cross: in all of them displaying a valour, a piety, a self-abnegation beyond all praise, A man of somewhat austere manner, he exacted from others that which he gave himself—a whole-hearted devotion to the Order to which he had consecrated his life. Fearing no man in the Council Chamber, ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... harvest. It had a distinctly social purpose, which it partially realized. Nor should it be forgotten that in the psychological sphere it kindled a transient outburst of quasi-religious enthusiasm among its partizans, imbued them with apostolic zeal, inspired them with a marvelous spirit of self-abnegation, and nerved their arms to far-resonant exploits. And the forces which the revolution thus set free changed many of the forms of the European world, but without reshaping it after the image of ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... limit of military abdication. He not only gave General Grant absolute, independent command, placing at his disposal all the military resources of the country, but he even denied to himself any knowledge whatever of the general's plans. In this patriotic act of extreme self-abnegation President Lincoln undoubtedly acted in exact accord with what he believed to be the expressed popular opinion, and probably in accord with his own judgment and inclination; for no one could have been more painfully aware than he had by that time become of ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... would gladly accept the gift of prayer, but few aim at, and labour for the spirit of humility and self-abnegation, without which there can be no true spirit of prayer or recollection. Devotion unsustained by mortification ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"
... is a touch of protection and maternal affection in the way in which Ernest Daudet regards his younger brother, and the latter never mentions his early struggles without recalling the self-abnegation, generous kindliness, and devotion of "mon frere." The two went through some hard times together. "Ah!" says the great writer, speaking of those days, "I thought my brother passing rich, for he earned seventy-five francs a month by being secretary ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... of Socrates. The Euthyphro opens with an allusion by Socrates to his approaching trial, and in the Apology we have a Platonic version of Socrates' speech in his own defence; in Crito we have the story of his noble self-abnegation and civic obedience after his condemnation; in Phaedo we have his last conversation with his friends on the subject of Immortality, and the ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... who, before the war, exhorted the workers, in the name of the gradual transition into Socialism, to be temperate; who, during the war, asked for submission in the name of 'civil peace' and defense of the Fatherland, now again demand of the workers self-abnegation to overcome the terrible consequences of the war. If this preaching were listened to by the workers, Capitalism would build out of the bones of several generations a new and still more formidable structure, leading to a new and inevitable world ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... of that idealism which Giotto had begun. Fra Angelico's angels, saints, Saviour, and Virgin are more divinely calm, pure, sweet, endowed with a more exulting saintliness, a more immortal youth and joy, and a more utter self-abnegation and sympathetic tenderness than are to be found in the saints and the angels, the Saviour and the Virgin of other painters. Neither is it surprising that Fra Angelico's defects, besides that of the bad drawing which shows more in ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... "the sore pity of her treachery." Could they say otherwise since they were the voices of her own heart? And could Jeanne fail to listen to them since she had always listened to them whenever they had counselled her to sacrifice and self-abnegation? ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... it was chiefly owing to the circumstance that I had from the outset, with precocious foresight, confided to him my intention of not putting any of my own verses in the volume. Publishers are appreciative; and a self-abnegation so sublime, to say nothing of its security, was not ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... should sit in one of the two absurdly comfortable armchair arrangements in front. The chauffeur was presently to curl like a tendril round a little crimson toadstool at our feet, and Jack took the tonneau in lonely state. This was, no doubt, an act of fine self-abnegation on his part, nevertheless I could have envied him his safe retirement, from my place of honour, with no noble horses in front to save Molly and me ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... dying, and with eyes fixed upon the high altar, attended by his confessor and children, the worn-out monarch breathed his last. Little as we sympathized with the character of the royal occupant, there was yet something touching in the stern simplicity with which he surrounded his own domestic life. Self-abnegation must have been with him a ruling principle. The cell of a Franciscan monk could not have been more severely simple and plain than that small living and ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... here at night. The doctor thought it wasn't safe to be left here alone with sister Jane. It made it easy for them to pay for the place. It's nearly all gone now. But there'll be enough to last our time out," she commented with a soft sigh of self-abnegation. ...
— A Little Girl in Old New York • Amanda Millie Douglas
... they understood this story more and more clearly, their arms tightened around each other and a look of unutterable affection beamed upon their faces; but that of the girl known as Lady Clara glowed with a look of generous self-abnegation, while her companion was troubled, ...
— The Old Countess; or, The Two Proposals • Ann S. Stephens
... carrying self-abnegation and prudence to their extreme limits, went to the general's quarters, and having warmly thanked him, laid before him the dangers to which he would expose himself by running counter to the opinions of those who had had their own way in the city for the last four months. But General Lagarde ...
— Massacres Of The South (1551-1815) - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... talents except "an unusual power of noticing things which easily escape attention, and of observing them carefully." In addition, however, to this peculiar insight, he had a singular reverence for truth and fact, enormous industry, and great self-abnegation: and his kindliness, modesty, and magnanimity attracted the affection of ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin |
