FREE-TRANSLATOR.COM • More 'Self-renunciation' Quotes from Famous Books

... thought, dogma, and formula, but breaking loose from the environment which smothered it. The price it pays for the revelation is a hopeless love informed by temptation, but lifted away from ruinous elements by self-renunciation, to end with the inevitable parting, poignant and permanent, a task of the soul finished and the toll of the journey ...

— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... bitterly, "you have been educated in too good a school, and are too thoroughly a Hohenzollern, not to believe in the complete self-renunciation of women. At this court, ...

— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach

... other child, a younger son, Angelo, who, notwithstanding his heavenly name, seems to have been a boy after Bernardone's own pattern; since he, later on, reviled Francis and called him a fool for his piety and self-renunciation. Angelo's descendants were still living in Assisi in the latter half of the sixteenth century. Whether they shared their ancestor's contemptuous opinion of the Saint has not been recorded; but it seems probable that the homage of the world, rendered to ...

— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various

... through the fault of her belongings, seemed to her in her excited state easy and nowise strange—mere difficulty of the negotiation apart. She elected to shut her eyes to a fact we and the story can guess—we are so shrewd, you see!—and to make a parade in her own eyes of a self-renunciation approaching that of Marcus Curtius. If only the gulf would open to receive her she would fling herself in. She ignored the dissimilarities of detail in the two cases, especially the conceivable promised land at the bottom of her gulf. The Roman Eques had nothing but death and darkness ...

— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan

... us in ethical inquiries, as follows: is there a sense in which it is needful, right, and praiseworthy, that man should be much habituated to look back upon himself and keep his eye upon himself; a self-regard, and even a self-respect, which are compatible with the self-renunciation and self-distrust which belong to Christianity? In the observance of a single distinction we shall find, perhaps, a secure and sufficient answer. We are to respect our responsibilities, not ourselves. We are to respect the duties of which we are capable, but not our capabilities simply considered. ...

— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley

... little spring in her heart, there came the memory of the crippled boy, to whom years before in her childhood she had plighted her troth. And the vision of her duty and the thought of his disappointment led her to refuse pleasure's spiced cup, and choose self-renunciation and a life for others. That heavenly vision saved her from plunging into the abyss of selfishness, even as the lightning's flash in the dark night reveals the precipice to ...

— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis

... these historians; if she was seeming to be what she was not, and carrying a burden heavier than any one else carried, because she had to bear it alone, she was only doing what thousands of women do, with a self-renunciation and heroism, of which men, impatient and complaining, have no conception. Have not these big babies with beards filled all literature with their outcries, their griefs and their lamentations? It is always the gentle sex which is hard and cruel and ...

— The Gilded Age, Part 6. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner

... opposite to Emmeline's feeble character, the heroine of the present story is intended to set forth the manner in which a Christian may contend with and conquer this world, living in it but not of it, and rendering it a means of self-renunciation. It is therefore purposely that the end presents no great event, and leaves Marian unrecompensed save by the effects her consistent well doing has produced on her companions. Any other compensation would render her ...

— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... and drew back into the darkness, out of the dim, starlit path, and standing there with her head high, her arms outspread, she made her solemn vow of self-renunciation. ...

— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon

... on the subject?" interposed Heliobas, with a slight smile. "I have heard all this so often before, from divers kinds of men both educated and ignorant, who have a willful habit of forgetting all that Christ Himself prophesied concerning His creed of Self-renunciation, so difficult to selfish humanity: 'Think not that I come to send peace on the earth. I come, not to send peace, but a sword.' Again 'Ye shall be hated of all men for my name's sake.' ... 'all ye shall be offended because of me.' Such plain words as these seem utterly thrown ...

— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli

... fatal results of his error. Then, like the steadfast and upright old Puritan that he was, he publicly acknowledged his terrible mistake. It is one of the finest instances of true nobility of soul and of absolute self-renunciation that the world affords. And the deep strain, the sharp wrench of the step is made more apparent still by the fact of the disapproval of his fellow-judges of his public confession and recantation. The yearly entries in his diary, simply expressed yet deeply speaking, ...

— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle

... ourselves where lay the nobler gain? Were we to be led hither and thither like blind children? What was right—what wrong, but what our own God-given judgment told us? Was it wrong of the woman to perform this act of self-renunciation, yielding up all things to love? No, it was great—heroic of her. It would be her cross of victory, ...

— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome

... unwitnessed and unratified, but he held it inviolable nevertheless. And it lay but lightly upon him, joyfully almost—rather as a ridding of himself of possible perturbations and obsessions, than as an act of most austere self-renunciation. In his ignorance he merely went forward with an increased freedom of spirit. All of which is set down, not without underlying pathos, in the diary ...

— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet

... years before Christ a religion of an entirely new sort. It is a religion without a god and without rites; it ordains only that one shall love his neighbor and become better; annihilation is offered as supreme recompense. But, for the first time in the history of the world, it preaches self-renunciation, the love of others, equality of mankind, charity and tolerance. The Brahmans made bitter war upon it and extirpated it in India. Missionaries carried it to the barbarians in Ceylon, in Indo-China, Thibet, China, and ...

— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos

... it lead to suffering and death; his passion grows ever stronger, for it is ever supported by hope. But if his hopes are realised, he will owe everything to the gracious favour of his lady, for his own merits can avail nothing. Sometimes he is not prepared for such complete self-renunciation; he reproaches his lady for her coldness, complains that she has led him on by a show of kindness, has deceived him and will be the cause of his death; or his patience is at an end, he will live in spite of her and try ...

— The Troubadours • H.J. Chaytor

... but flowers do not enter into the system of our prison. I appreciate very much your magnanimous attention—I kiss your hands, madam—" I said, "but I am compelled to decline the flowers. Travelling along the thorny road to self-renunciation, I must not caress my eyes with the ephemeral and illusionary beauty of these charming lilies and roses. All flowers ...

— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev

... reference to the truths of revealed religion; and as she seldom read the Holy Scriptures, and was almost a stranger to their sacred contents, her imagination pictured an easier way to escape from the power and the consequences of sin than in that self-renunciation which the Gospel enjoins. In some memoranda of her experience, she says, in reference to the snares by which her mind was entangled:—"I was led to a love of metaphysical studies, and fancied I discovered, with clearness, that human vice, and consequently human misery, sprang ...

— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley

... readers in this country by Cowper's translations, were received by many with the same welcome as the works of Madame de Bourignon. If there were few who could appreciate the high-strung mystic aspirations after perfect self-renunciation, self-annihilation, and absorption in the abyss of the Divine infinity, the ecstatic joy in self-denial and suffering, whereby the soul might be so refined from selfishness as to surrender itself ...

— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton

... who seek virtue seek pleasure in so doing, and her philosophy of life seems to be that people should do as they like. The morality she commends to our sympathy and admiration is a morality of instinct and emotion, not of reason and principle. Self-renunciation, immolation of desire in obedience to accepted precept, is ignored. Sentiment is supreme. Duty, as a motive ...

— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas

... to the practice of its precepts. For its rewards are such as "eye hath not seen, nor ear heard;" and its threats are eminently calculated to terrify offenders. The Bible everywhere abounds with an intenseness of zeal for the Divine glory, and with a depth of self-renunciation on the part of the writers. And what a contrast does it, in this respect, exhibit to all other productions of authorship! In Scripture, God is all in all: in other writings, man is always a prominent, ...

— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy