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More "Self-seeking" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... born in man, and become a governing conviction, that he must under no circumstances commit a certain act, though to do so would be easy and advantageous, and detection not to be feared? Why should the moral consciousness of the higher races accept the principle which places self-sacrifice above self-seeking? There is only one explanation for this paradoxical phenomenon: it is that, as men rise in the moral scale, there dawns on them the sense of a law that is not of this world, an Ought-to-be, which speaks with a strange authority, and will not be denied; and ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... except in the business of getting-on (in which he might well have been taken as a model by Samuel Smiles). One thinks of him sometimes as a sort of Deacon Brodie, sometimes as the most innocent sinner who ever lived. For, though he was brutal and snobbish and self-seeking and simian, he had a pious and a merry and a grateful heart. He felt that God had created the world for the pleasure of Samuel Pepys, and had no ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... it Broadmead, after the name of their home in England. Love for the old country was still alive in Colonel Barrington, and it was only after grave deliberation that he had drawn the sword, convinced that he drew it for the right. Doubtless there were some in this great conflict who were self-seeking, but this was certainly not the case with Henry Barrington. He had much to lose, nothing personal to win which seemed to him of any consequence. Broadmead he loved. He had been born there. In due time he had brought home to it his beautiful young wife, daughter of a French family in Louisiana, and ...
— The Light That Lures • Percy Brebner
... communal culture where the dominant note of life is the unanalysed and undifferentiated solidarity of the individual with the group with which his life is bound up. When he enters upon the predatory stage, where self-seeking in the narrower sense becomes the dominant note, this propensity goes with him still, as the pervasive trait that shapes his scheme of life. The propensity for achievement and the repugnance to futility remain the underlying economic motive. The propensity changes only in the form of its expression ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... even death, perhaps, might be evaded by the skill of a new science. Who could tell? Franklin had suggested this, half in jest, years before; Condorcet believed and asserted it now. Ignorance and misery, at all events, should come to an end. When kings and a wicked self-seeking aristocracy should be swept away, the divine sense of right, which God had implanted in the people, would rule; there could be no wars; armies and fleets would become useless; taxes would amount to nothing. All the nations would form one grand republic, with a universal convention sitting at ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... individual ambitions and personal gains. And as this process of growth and increasing productive efficiency went on, the control exercised by neighborly surveillance, through the sentiment of the common good as against the self-seeking pursuits of individuals and sub-groups, would gradually slacken; until by progressive disuse it would fall into a degree of abeyance; to be called into exercise and incite to concerted action only in the face of unusual ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... like a sharp, quick blow, or that the stroke of his pen was sometimes like a thunderbolt. It was not the time for hesitation, or doubt, or even argument. He meant his imperiled country should be saved, and whatever by half-loyalty or self-seeking seemed to stand in the way only attracted ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... sooner have an Englishman at our side than any other man. Men and country—'dear souls and dear, dear land'—these are the elements which make up the real thing called patriotism and which, in spite of all our curses and all our self-seeking, lead us in millions to work or die for our country, and will, while life lasts, bring ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... were he to do it, it would be said of him that it had been done because the man was Duke of Omnium. There are positions exalted beyond the reach of benevolence, because benevolence would seem to be self-seeking. "Your father, if he were here," said he, "would know that I could ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... what used to be common civility, and we are sinking into perfect barbarism.... The spirit of anarchy which prevails in Boston is more than I am able to cope with." The instigators of the mob, it was well known, were certain artful and self-seeking demagogues, of whom the chief had formerly been dames Otis; but in late years Mr. Otis, "with his mob-high eloquence," had given way to an abler man, Samuel Adams, than whom, Mr. Hutchinson thought, there was not "a greater incendiary in the King's dominion, or a man of greater malignity ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... of Japan's relations with Korea, so far as it has been carried above—namely, to the close of the Empress Kogyoku's reign (A.D. 645)—discloses in the Korean people a race prone to self-seeking feuds, never reluctant to import foreign aid into domestic quarrels, and careless of the obligations of good faith. In the Japanese we see a nation magnanimous and trustful ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... the final blow. Petit-Claud was a double-dealer of the profoundly cautious stamp that is never caught by the bait of a present satisfaction, nor entangled by a personal attachment, after his first initiation into the strategy of self-seeking and the instability of the human heart. So, from the very first, he had put little trust in Cointet. He foresaw that his marriage negotiations might very easily be broken off, saw also that in that case he could not accuse Cointet of bad faith, and he had taken his measures accordingly. ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... Knight, parented in fairy-far Avilion, the Fortunate Youth, the Awakener of England. Now he was but a base-born young man who had attained a high position by false pretences; an ordinary adventurer with a glib tongue; a self-educated, self-seeking, commonplace fellow. At least, so he saw himself in his Princess's eyes. And he had meant that she should thus behold him. No longer was he entering lists to fight for her. For what hopeless purpose ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... by the Virginia Companies and Council for New England, as the representative of the Adventurers, he has only been recently generally reckoned a chief man of the Adventurers. A Protean friend of the Pilgrims, never reliable, ever pretentious, always self-seeking, and of no help. He was finally ruined by the disasters to his ship, the PARAGON, which cost him all his interests. Having attempted treacherously to secure to himself the Patent granted in the Colony's interest, he was compelled by the Council to ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames
... is unquestionably egoism. The man who accepts such a doctrine and consistently walks in the light must be set down as self-seeking. But self-seeking, as understood by different men, appears to take on different aspects. Shall we class all those who frankly accept it as man's only ultimate motive with ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... crowd now has all there is. The difference between private and public ownership, it seems to me, is mainly in the natural selection of those most competent to foresee the future and to direct labor into the most productive channels, and the greater poignancy of the illusion of self-seeking under which the private owner works. The real problem, under socialism as well as under individualism, is to ascertain, under the external economic and inevitable conditions, the equilibrium of social desires. The ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... selflessness which is the saint's gift. Those who ask nothing for themselves, whose whole strength is spent on affections that are their life, and on ideals at one with their affections, are not easily popular, like the self-seeking, parti-colored folk who make up the rest of us; who flatter, caress, and court, that we in our turn may be flattered and courted. Their gentleness masks the indomitable soul within; and so their fellows are often unaware of ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... hard and repellant. But men who, like Thackeray, have seen life and tasted its bitterness and felt its hollowness, know how to prize it. Thackeray does not merely expose the cant, the emptiness, the self-seeking, the false pretenses, flunkeyism, and snobbery—the "mean admiration of mean things"—in the great world of London society: his keen, unsparing vision detects the base alloy in the purest natures. There are no "heroes" in his ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... Colonel House is that he has been possessed all his life, almost passionately, with that instinct which makes boys run to fires. His fastening upon the favorably placed, whether it was Morton in his youth, or Wilson in his maturity, was not ordinary self-seeking, not having for its object riches or power or influence. It was merely desire to see for the pure ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... that kindled in many minds ambition, cruelty, bloodthirstiness, self-seeking and jealousy—producing the morale, in a word, of the Spain of sixty years ago. Some sided with the Queen Regent Christina, and rallied round the child-queen because they saw that that way lay glory and promotion. Others flocked to the standard of ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... two or three at her service: it was the most natural thing in the world for people to think as they did. Yet not a human being ever accused Hetty of flirting; her manner was always as open, friendly, and cordial as an honest boy's, and with no more trace of self-seeking or self-consciousness about it. She was as full of fun and mischief, too, as any boy could be. She had slid down hill with the wildest of them, till even ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Anonymous
... many tricks in politics—and, God help me, I'm back in politics!" returned the General. He looked them over there in the room, from face to face and eye to eye. "You cannot accuse me of vanity, self-seeking, or ambition at my age, gentlemen. I've been Governor of this State once. I didn't enjoy the experience. I'm going into this thing again simply because I believe that I can put some honesty into public affairs. This State ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... trade union movement, as a whole in the United States, has not yet shown a thorough comprehension of the economic system of which it is a part; it has, therefore, often erred in its efforts to end an evil or injustice. Particular unions and leaders have often pursued mean, short-sighted and self-seeking policies—which have reflected upon the whole movement. Much like other economic groups, when their own interest has not coincided with the general interest, they have frequently put their own ...
— The Settlement of Wage Disputes • Herbert Feis
... will not take the trouble to use them, unless prompted by her own interests. Selfishness is too short-sighted, however, to secure lasting benefits. Usually, nothing is more fatal than the success of mere self-seeking. While Madge pressed unwaveringly toward the goal of her hopes, she did not do so in thoughtless or callous indifference toward those who had true claims upon her. With her sister she soon saw that all was well—that she was, as before, absorbed and content with the routine of her life. ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... over-crowed. When the woman that a man loves laughs at his moral enthusiasms, it is like a black frost on the delicate tips of budding trees. It is up-hill work, as we all know, to battle with indolence and selfishness, and self-seeking and hard-hearted worldliness. Then the highest and holiest part of our nature has a bashfulness of its own. It is a heavenly stranger, and easily shamed. A nimble-tongued, skilful woman can so easily show the ridiculous side of what seemed heroism; and what is called common-sense, ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... you give me a notion of the cost? Of course, when I come, you will let me enjoy your own company in peace, and not drag me out a-visiting. I have no desire at all to see your curate. I think he must be like all the other curates I have seen; and they seem to me a self-seeking, vain, empty race. At this blessed moment, we have no less than three of them in Haworth parish—and there is not one to mend another. The other day, they all three, accompanied by Mr. S., dropped, or rather rushed, in unexpectedly ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... I, Yuan Shih-kai, have admired the example of the Emperors Yao and Shun, who treated the empire as a public trust, and considered that the record of a dynasty in history for good or ill is inseparably bound up with the public spirit or self-seeking by which it has been animated. On attaining middle age I grew more familiar with foreign affairs, was struck by the admirable republican system in France and America, and felt that they were a true embodiment of the democratic ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... high answer. "I thought you a great people, and I used my strength, my wealth and influence to further your power. But you are not worthy. Who are you that dare to assume authority over millions—you who can not rule yourselves, you who idle away your lives in folly and self-seeking? Well may you crown yourselves with the laurels which your fathers won! You have none of your own—and see to it that those faded emblems from a high past are not snatched from your palsied fingers. I at least have flung from me a yoke which I despise. ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... the rainbow. Nor is the doctrine of perfectability anywhere one with itself. It speaks in diverse tongues. Its processes and objects are variant. It seems but an iridescent dream which lends itself equally to the fancies of the impracticable and the scheming of the self-seeking, breeding ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... Friends, wrote a book against slavery, published in 1733, entitled, "A Testimony against that Anti-Christian Practice of MAKING SLAVES OF MEN.[378] It was well written, and the truth fearlessly told for the conservative, self-seeking period he ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... brief reign of Edward VI., Sir Henry Sidney had been nicknamed "the only odd man and paragon of the court." The same stanch virtues that made him "odd" in Edward's time rendered him a man apart at the fawning, flattering, self-seeking court ...
— With Spurs of Gold - Heroes of Chivalry and their Deeds • Frances Nimmo Greene
... his. No, there was but one right way, and in that way stood the feet of the pioneer. His way led directly, unerringly, to the land of freedom. All other ways, and especially the Liberty party way, twisted, doubled upon themselves, branched into labyrinths of folly and self-seeking. "Ho! all ye that desire the freedom of the slave, who would labor for liberty, follow me and I will show you the only true way," was the tone which the editor of the Liberator held to men, who were battering with might and main to breach the ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... won his victories in China by sheer personal gallantry, and nothing else, have taken a very shallow view of the case, and not condescended to study the details. In his general conception of the best way to overcome the Taepings he was necessarily hampered by the views, wishes, jealousies, and self-seeking purposes of his Chinese colleagues. But for them, his strategy would have been of a very different character, as he himself often said. He had to adjust his means to the best attainable end, and it must be allowed that he did this with remarkable tact and patience—the very qualities in which ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume I • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... l'Hopital, wearing his crimson robe lined and edged with ermine, and his cap on his head according to the privilege of his office. This courageous man, seeing that his benefactors were traitorous and self-seeking, held firmly to the cause of the kings, represented by the queen-mother; at the risk of losing his head, he had gone to Rouen to consult with the Connetable de Montmorency. No one ventured to draw him from the reverie in which he was plunged. Robertet, the secretary of ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... been put back twenty-five years, there could have been no Russo-Japanese war, and China, instead of being, as she now is, a third-rate Power, might have held the premier position in Asia, as Japan so splendidly and skilfully does now. But, as so often happens, greed and dishonesty, self-seeking and cowardice on the part of high officials, nullified the efforts of the brave seamen who unavailingly gave their ...
— A Chinese Command - A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas • Harry Collingwood
... there! About this time next year may I be there or there-abouts! With so many young bloods in the heyday of youth and strength beyond my own I feel there will be a most difficult task in making choice towards the end and a most keen competition—and a universal lack of selfishness and self-seeking with a complete absence of any jealous feeling in any single one of the comparatively large number who at present stand a chance of being on the last piece ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... creditors, who were individually maltreated by the crowd before the very eyes of the consul. In addition, the dread of the Sabine war spread, and when a levy was decreed, nobody gave in his name: Appius was enraged, and bitterly inveighed against the self-seeking conduct of his colleague, in that he, by the inactivity he displayed to win the favour of the people, was betraying the republic, and, besides not having enforced justice in the matter of debt, likewise neglected even to hold a levy, in obedience to the decree of the senate. ...
— Roman History, Books I-III • Titus Livius
... no false sentiment here; there is no self-seeking. The guards are down. The soul of the man stands forth as it is. In the Valley of the Shadow his own simple declaration of his sincerity, his own revelation of the unselfish quality of his devotion to the ...
— The Attempted Assassination of ex-President Theodore Roosevelt • Oliver Remey
... seemed to pass into a greater peace than she had known for years; the last faint hope of happiness was gone; it would, perhaps, be more accurate to say, of the bright happiness she had planned for herself in her early youth. Unconsciously, she was being weaned from self-seeking in any shape, and her daily life became, if possible, more innocent and pure and holy. One of the canons used to laugh at her for her constant attendance at all the services, and for her devotion to good works, and call her always the reverend sister. Miss Monro ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell
... himself a man of cold, clear-sighted, self-seeking temperament. In almost all English histories dealing with this period his steadiness and solid unshowy qualities are contrasted with Essex's flightiness and failure, to the natural disadvantage of the latter. This, however, is not perhaps quite the last word upon the matter, and it is only fair ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... rose, turned his back to the mantel-piece, and looked down upon her. He thought of the great, wide world: its thorny ways, its deserts, its bitter waters, its unrighteousness, its self-seeking greeds, its weaknesses, its under and over reaching, its unfaithfulness; and then again of this—child, thrust all at once a thousand miles into it, with never—so far as he could see—an implement, a weapon, a sense of danger, or a refuge; well ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... consciousness, and tends to limit it within the boundaries of our personal self. It is this Avidya, this ignorance, this limiting of consciousness that creates the hard separateness of the ego, and thus becomes the source of all pride and greed and cruelty incidental to self-seeking. When a man sleeps he is shut up within the narrow activities of his physical life. He lives, but he knows not the varied relations of his life to his surroundings,—therefore he knows not himself. So when a man lives the life of Avidya he is confined within his self. It ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... had stood out against taxation without representation because of his own business interests, now stood firmly for American Independence for the good of the majority, with little left of the self-seeking spirit which had animated his earlier efforts. Occupied as he now was with the many duties incident on a public life, it is said he was never too busy to redress a wrong, and never unwilling to give lavishly where ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... don't deny that: nothing makes a man so selfish as work. But I was not self-seeking: it seemed to me that I had put justice above self. I tell you life meant something to me then. Do you see that dirty little ...
— Captain Brassbound's Conversion • George Bernard Shaw
... had become known to Prince Kung and his friends that he had left the governing authority during the minority of his son, a child of less than six years of age, to a board of regency composed of eight of the least intelligent and most arrogant and self-seeking members of the imperial family, with Prince Tsai at their head. The emperor died on August 22. A few hours later the imperial decree notifying the last wishes of the ruler as to the mode of government was promulgated. ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... their own in the sharp competition of professional life are a great, if not the greatest, need of the coloured race in this country. Over wide areas most of their clergy are illiterate, immoral, self-seeking, bitter sectarians, and the most determined opponents of every kind of improvement. So, too, the lack of lawyers, editors and physicians of sufficiently broad and thorough training to be able to defend their weaker brethren against designers or incapable advisers ...
— From Slave to College President - Being the Life Story of Booker T. Washington • Godfrey Holden Pike
... after such an evening as this, to you; to see your dear eyes brighten at the recital of all I have seen and all I have heard; to hear your beloved voice inspiring me to more exertion and more patience. After sitting through so many party debates, so much transparent self-seeking, and so much ungenerous opposition as I cannot help seeing in Parliament, how refreshing to see, among such men as I have met to-day, the pure, genuine public spirit which Jane first showed me the example of in the midst of her hardest trials. This reform does not bring personal ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... comfort from his loyal heart, and wait in hopes that at least a musket may be put into his hands with which to trust him against the foe. These are very simple variations; they turn upon the proportion of selfish feeling which the men possess. A self-seeking man will turn villain under the encroachment of other people's egotism. The sight of too many trophies will convert a friend into a covert enemy, who, without being treacherous, will nevertheless betray a great cause by his jealousy of its great supporter. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... public economy of a people are the workings of self-interest so apparent as in the determination of prices. When the price of a commodity is once fixed by the conflict of opposing interests,(601) the self-seeking of every individual dictates that he should thereby gain as much as possible of the goods of others, and lose as little as possible of his own. In this struggle, the victory is generally to the stronger, and the price is higher or lower, according ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... last months was fit to cast a gloom upon my character. I had met many men, some of them leaders in Israel, whether by their birth or talents; and who among them all had shown clean hands? As for the Browns and Millers, I had seen their self-seeking, I could never again respect them. Prestongrange was the best yet; he had saved me, had spared me rather, when others had it in their minds to murder me outright; but the blood of James lay at his door; and I thought his present dissimulation with myself ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Rachel, "I shall do nothing without inquiry. I will find out all about him, but I cannot see any opening for distrust. Schemes of charity are not compatible with self-seeking and dishonesty." ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... been caused by a few self-seeking men. For instance, a man may secure through political influence a license to trade among the Indians. By his unprincipled practices, often in defiance of treaty agreements, such as gross overcharging and the use of liquor to debauch the natives, he accumulates ...
— The Indian Today - The Past and Future of the First American • Charles A. Eastman
... things than ye are slaves: and higher Than them or ye would be so, did they not Prefer an independency of torture To the smooth agonies of adulation, In hymns and harpings, and self-seeking prayers, To that which is omnipotent, because It is omnipotent, and not from love, But terror ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... history appreciate, has overtaken European history in all its bearings, there are but two things that have retained their vigor and their propagating force in the midst of all that shriveling blight of self-seeking that pervades European life. These two things are science and the people, science and the workingman. And the union of these two is alone capable of invigorating European culture ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... which the afflicted and needy could turn; and so long as the rules of the Orders were observed in the spirit and in the letter, they were a genuine help towards a life of self-devotion, of self-abnegation whereof the ultimate motive was not always a subtle form of self-seeking. But as time passed, the monasteries became the recipients of the bounty of pious benefactors. Their inhabitants, in spite of ascetic regulations, found that life was none so hard—at least in comparison with that of serfdom or villeinage; luxuries were not less available than to the laity. The ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... degrees individualised, most of them completely so; but still in each group there is a quality common to all the members, or one spirit breathing through them all. Here we have unselfish and devoted love, there hard self-seeking. On both sides, further, the common quality takes an extreme form; the love is incapable of being chilled by injury, the selfishness of being softened by pity; and, it may be added, this tendency to extremes is found again in the characters of Lear and Gloster, and ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... and selfish and unquiet cares, brings to it an unspeakable peace and freedom; this is true simplicity. This state of entire resignation and perpetual acquiescence produces true liberty; and this liberty brings perfect simplicity. The soul which knows no self-seeking, no interested ends, is thoroughly candid; it goes straight forward without hindrance; its path opens daily more and more to "perfect day," in proportion as its self-renunciation and its self-forgetfulness increase; and its peace, amid whatever troubles ...
— Daily Strength for Daily Needs • Mary W. Tileston
... that is sin in one of its thousand forms. The Lord Jesus does not fill dirty cups. Anything that springs from self, however small it may be, is sin. Self-energy or self-complacency in service is sin. Self-pity in trials or difficulties, self-seeking in business or Christian work, self-indulgence in one's spare time, sensitiveness, touchiness, resentment and self-defence when we are hurt or injured by others, self-consciousness, reserve, worry, fear, all spring from self and all are sin and make our cups unclean.[*] But all of them were put into ...
— The Calvary Road • Roy Hession
... who become the unknown fathers of great men. And so, on a salary that would have meant penury to a man of self-seeking tastes, he managed to save always the major part of his earning. At the bank he was a modest but regular visitor to the receiving-teller, and almost a total stranger to ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... good, acceptable and a common prayer, or a work of the Holy Day and of the assembled congregation, which they make who make their own petty prayers, one for this, the other for that, and have nothing but self-seeking, selfish prayers, which ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... of the spirit; the external clothing of the being, in which Character ultimates itself. If the Character be simple and sincere, the Manners will be at one with it; will be the natural outbirth of its traits and peculiarities. If it be complex and self-seeking, the Manners will be artificial, affected, or insincere. Some persons make up, put on, take off, alter, or patch their Manners to suit times and seasons, with as much facility, and as little apparent consciousness of duplicity, as if they were treating their clothes ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... be convincing. Well, then, let us appeal to experience. Let us see what the systematic cultivation of his natural faculties has done for the child in Utopia. I have already pointed out that the unselfishness of the children—the complete absence of self-seeking and self-assertion—is one of the most noticeable features of the life of their school. Now there is no place for moral teaching on the time-table of the school: and I can say without hesitation that the direct inculcation of morality is ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... use of "flesh," the antithesis of "spirit," as the name of the evil principle. Paul indeed uses "the flesh" in no restricted sense of merely sensual sin. With him it equally includes all other forms of wrong, like malevolence and pride and self-seeking. But the nomenclature and the way of thought which it reflected put a stigma on the whole physical nature of man. In that stigma lay the germ of asceticism, hostility to marriage, depreciation of some vital ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... voyage. Wesley, mourning the man who had been his stanch friend, was guiltily conscious of his thwarted ambition. "There goes my city church," he thought, and flung the thought back at himself in anger at his own self-seeking. He was forced into accepting the first opportunity which offered. His mother had an annuity, which he himself had insisted upon for her greater comfort. When she died, the son was nearly penniless, except for the house, which was old and ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... in thy presence must offend— That, set aside some few caprices wild, Those humorous clouds that flit o'er brightest days, In all my threadings of this worldly maze, (And I have watched thee almost from a child), Free from self-seeking, envy, low design, I have not found a whiter ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... creatures that suited that sort of thing; but for a man who wrote his letters from Brookes's, and whose dinner invitations included all that was great in town, to stoop to such an alliance was as bold a defiance as one could throw at a world of self-seeking and conventionality. ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... Sympathy of the individual mind. If such sympathies exist, and if nothing is done to uproot or paralyze them, they will urge men to do good to others, irrespective of all theories. Good done from any other source or motive is necessarily self-seeking. It is a common remark, with reference to the sanctions of a future life, that they create purely self-regarding motives. Any proposal to increase disinterested action by moral obligation contains a self-contradiction; it is suicidal. The rich may be made ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... throughout his entire life, he also accepted human nature as it is, and worked with keen, practical good sense to achieve results with the instruments at hand. It is impossible to conceive of a man farther removed from baseness, farther removed from corruption, from mere self-seeking; but it is also impossible to conceive of a man of more sane and healthy mind—a man less under the influence of that fantastic and diseased morality (so fantastic and diseased as to be in reality profoundly immoral) which makes ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... she had seen some monster. It never occurred to her that she was possibly unjust to Ida, who was, after all, as she was made, a being on a very simple and primitive plan, with an acute perception of her own welfare and the means whereby to achieve it. Ida was in reality as innocently self-seeking as a butterfly or a honey-bee. She had never really seen anybody in the world except herself. She had been born humanity blind, and it was possibly no more her fault than if she had been born ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... Benedict read the first part of the letter he laughed hastily, and said, "The abbot hath no such lily." But when he had finished it, he said, "GOD rid my soul of self-seeking! The common children shall ...
— Last Words - A Final Collection of Stories • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... so of the little innocent babe, who may be God's messenger to lead her back to Him. Think again of her first words—the burst of nature from her heart! Did she not turn to God, and enter into a covenant with Him—'I will be so good?' Why, it draws her out of herself! If her life has hitherto been self-seeking, and wickedly thoughtless, here is the very instrument to make her forget herself, and be thoughtful for another. Teach her (and God will teach her, if man does not come between) to reverence her child; and this reverence will shut out ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... intelligence of this 'Lord Chancellor of nature?' Grant that you do so—and what guarantee have you for the virtue and the happiness which you assume as the concomitants of the gift? See Bacon himself; what black ingratitude! what miserable self-seeking! what truckling servility! what abject and pitiful spirit! So far from intellectual knowledge, in its highest form and type, insuring virtue and bliss, it is by no means uncommon to find great mental cultivation combined with great moral corruption." ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... as though he were seeking something,—he knew not what. A more generous fellow, who delighted more in giving, hesitated more in asking, more averse to begging though a friend of beggars, less self-arrogant, or self-seeking, or more devoted to his profession, never lived. He was a man with prejudices,—kindly, gentlemanlike, amiable prejudices. He thought that a clergyman should be a graduate from one of the three ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... they dimly saw thrones for themselves. Hence James and John try to secure the foremost places, and hence the others' anger at what they thought an unfair attempt to push in front of them. What a contrast between Jesus, striding on ahead with 'set' face, and the Twelve unsympathetic and self-seeking, lagging behind to squabble about pre-eminence! We have in this incident two parts: the request and its answer, the indignation of the Ten and its rebuke. The one sets forth the qualifications for the highest place in the kingdom; ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... if there could be such a thing as our search to-night! Hollow places, hidden away for evil cause, do not go with it at all! There is the story of gracious invention and glorious gift; here the story of greedy gathering and self-seeking, ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... that freely fell were not of grief, but tears of yearning love, of sympathy, of solemn joy and gratitude to God for such a life in its rounded completeness, such an example and testimony, such fidelity to conscience, such recoil from all self-seeking, such unswerving devotion to duty, come what might of peril ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney
... these men, all of whom she knew. Caius Nepos, selfish and callous; Ancyrus, the elder, avaricious and self-seeking; young Escanes whom she knew to be unscrupulous; Philippus Decius whose ostentation and lavishness she despised. She vaguely wondered why my lord Hortensius Martius ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... fellow-men, has commonly no knowledge of human nature in the larger sense, but merely knows from observation how the average man of a certain limited class is likely to act within a narrow prescribed sphere of self-seeking. Town life, then, strongly favours the education of certain shallow forms of intelligence. In actual attainment the townsman is somewhat more advanced than the countryman. But the deterioration of physique which accompanies this gain causes a weakening of mental fibre: the potentiality of intellectual ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... match in modern history. Save in a few large cities, every American community lies under a sacerdotal despotism whose devices are disingenuous and dishonourable, and whose power was magnificently displayed in the campaign for Prohibition—a despotism exercised by a body of ignorant, superstitious, self-seeking and thoroughly dishonest men. One may, without prejudice, reasonably defend the Catholic clergy. They are men who, at worst, pursue an intelligible ideal and dignify it with a real sacrifice. But in the presence of the Methodist clergy it is difficult ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan
... self-seeking and cruel as lawless times had made such men, they were not devoid of all better feelings; and although, had there been no interposition on his behalf, Paul might have been a victim to their irritation at being thus duped, as it was his life ...
— In the Wars of the Roses - A Story for the Young • Evelyn Everett-Green
... as anything with these people was their loneliness. Parvenus are not always pushing and self-seeking, nor do they invariably throw down the ladder by which they have climbed. The Grossenstecks would have been so well content to keep their old friends, but poverty hides its head from the glare of wealth and takes ...
— Love, The Fiddler • Lloyd Osbourne
... afterwards recanted and re-recanted. They were all a dubious lot, I'll admit. That is why I hate to see a girl like Viola Lambert put in their class by a self-seeking fakir like Clarke." ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... wonder," she said; "when they would come home to Fontenoy and say, 'Lewis Rand spoke to-day,' I used to wonder if I should ever hear you speak! And when they blamed you I said to my aching heart, 'They need not tell me! He's not ambitious, self-seeking, a leveller, a demagogue and Jacobin!-he is the man I met beneath the apple tree!' And I was right—I ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... could you impute to me such preposterous self-seeking? To solicit out of hand, for my private behoof, an hundred dollars from a perfect stranger? I am not mad, ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... suitability of character; these are the only bonds between my companions and myself; among them I would be a man, not a person of wealth; the charm of their society should never be embittered by self-seeking. If my wealth had not robbed me of all humanity, I would scatter my benefits and my services broadcast, but I should want companions about me, not courtiers, friends, not proteges; I should wish my friends to regard ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... parliamentary intriguer. Indeed, he is almost certainly less so, for he must at least in some fashion serve, even if only that he may deceive them, those whose servant he should be. At any rate, the purely self-seeking demagogue is certainly a recurrent figure in democratic politics, and of the self-seeking demagogue Aaron ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... wider of the mark than the notion that a system of political education would increase the number of self-seeking, power-hunting "politicians." Such men are the product, not of political education, but of the lack of it. What is the present situation? To the ordinary boy, politics, when it first obtrudes itself on ...
— The School and the World • Victor Gollancz and David Somervell
... in a House of half a hundred or fewer leading men, with the rest of the Parliament driven sheep. But the whole mischief of the present system is that the obscure members of Parliament are not sheep; they are a crowd of little-minded, second-rate men just as greedy and eager and self-seeking as any of us. They vote straight indeed on all the main party questions, they obey their Whips like sheep then; but there is a great bulk of business in Parliament outside the main party questions, and obedience is ...
— In The Fourth Year - Anticipations of a World Peace (1918) • H.G. Wells
... increasing. No recent census had been taken when I was at Tiberias, but I know that the congregation of fleas which attended at my church alone must have been something enormous. It was a carnal, self-seeking congregation, wholly inattentive to the service which was going on, and devoted to the one object of having my blood. The fleas of all nations were there. The smug, steady, importunate flea from Holywell Street; the pert, jumping puce from hungry France, the wary, watchful ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... Winstanley attempts to prove that the coming reign of Righteousness, and the overthrow of the Covetous, Self-Seeking Power, are entirely in accordance with the prophesies of the Scriptures, more especially with Revelation and John. In its final pages he vehemently protests against the continued union of Church and State, or rather against ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... neighbour," is the virtue only of the petty people: there it is said "like and like," and "hand washeth hand":—they have neither the right nor the power for YOUR self-seeking! ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... expect that a man of his character will avoid all mistakes. It was a time when feeling ran high on religious questions, and he was a declared partisan; but at least we may say that the public good, judged from the highest point, was his objective; there was no room for self-seeking in his heart. Nor did this wide extension of his activity mean neglect of his earlier crusades. On the contrary, he continued to work for the good of the classes to whom his Factory Bills had been so beneficial. Not content with prohibiting ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... 7. So that either we must have a reformation displeasing to God, or displeasing to men. It is not the right reformation which is not displeasing to a Tobiah, to a Sanballat, to a Demetrius, to the earthly-minded, to the self-seeking politicians, to the carnal and profane; it is but the old enmity between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent (Gen. iii. 15): nay, what if reformation be displeasing to good men, in so far as they are unregenerate, carnal, earthly, proud, unmortified ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... but for her able cooperation. She thinks she cannot talk but we know that she can work. She has done the drudgery of this association for more than twenty years and I hope the woman who will be chosen in her place, whoever she may be, will be as consecrated and free from all self-seeking." ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... exercising in nature's own way the activity bestowed upon women, and yet impelled to spend it in some way or other, Mademoiselle Gamard had acquired the habit of using it in petty intrigues, provincial cabals, and those self-seeking schemes which occupy, sooner or later, the lives of all old maids. Birotteau, unhappily, had developed in Sophie Gamard the only sentiments which it was possible for that poor creature to feel,—those of hatred; a passion hitherto latent under the calmness and monotony of provincial life, but which ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... child learned by example and precept the great principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, he was going to remain what by nature we all are,—imperious, demanding, and self-seeking. The whole scheme must fail if his education failed. It is not too much to say that the success of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution depended, in the minds of certain early Democrats, upon the woman. The doctrines of these great instruments would be worked out according to the ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... dissatisfied with Brougham's speech, and, indeed, would have been dissatisfied with anything short of a complete logical application of his whole system. He held Brougham to be 'insincere,'[40] a trimmer and popularity-hunter, but a useful instrument. Brougham's astonishing vanity and self-seeking prompted and perverted his amazing activity. He represents the process, perhaps necessary, by which a philosopher's ideas have to be modified before they can be applied to practical application. Brougham, however, could speak generously of men no longer in ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... thus their fair share. Under Responsible Government, with all power in the hands of the Legislative Assembly, the balance would be overthrown and the democracy would be supreme. To Haliburton, control by the democracy meant control by the crafty, self-seeking professional politician, as he saw him, or thought he saw him, in the neighbouring United States. The people, well meaning, but ignorant and greedy, were at the mercy of the appeals to prejudice and pocket of these wily knaves. Government should be the affair ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant
... them as their vocation to diffuse the knowledge of God in Israel,—the knowledge that He seeks truthfulness and love, justice and considerateness, and no gifts; but they, on the contrary, in a spirit of base self-seeking, foster the tendency of the nation towards cultus, in their superstitions over-estimate of which lies their sin and their ruin. "My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge; ye yourselves (ye priests!) reject knowledge, and I too will reject ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... the ecstasy of sacrifice; with that maternal compassion which is a vital element in woman's love for man. Sublimated beyond passion and self-seeking, and asking only the right to give, she poured out the treasure of her soul at his feet, though her pride demanded that he must ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed
... passionate abhorrence of democracy, his admiration of strong character, his disposition to work from historical bases rather than from absolute principles, but representing them at once with a prudence of common sense and a prudence of self-seeking and timidity which are alike foreign to ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... personal character, which prevailed in Germany, obtained by a process of elimination and misunderstanding, is represented by this critic when he records without modifying his statement: "Various times Yorick shows himself as the most genuine foe of self-seeking, of immoral double entendre, and particularly of assumed seriousness, and he scourges them emphatically." The review of the third and fourth parts contains a similar and perhaps even more significant passage illustrating the view ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... yet—especially Mr. Flaxman, who guessed, as she was quite sure, what had happened to her? He must despise her to have imagined it. His outburst had filled her with the oddest and most petulant resentment. Were all men self-seeking? Did all men think women shallow and fickle? Could a man and a woman never be honestly and simply friends? If he had made love to her, he could not possibly—and there was the sting of it—feel towards her maiden dignity that romantic respect which she herself cherished towards it. For ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... owes much indeed to the opportunities of the American republic. The son, therefore, is an American patriot, and what though it seem at times overtaxed, his patriotism, unlike that of the individual under our first type, is genuine, for it is not primarily self-seeking. When he speaks of ideals, it is not to say we have no need of religions at all, but rather that we all in America have more or less the same belief only that we choose to express it differently, each according to his ancestral ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... child. I have washed my robes in the tears of repentance; I can come before the altar whither my guardian angel, my beloved Calyste, has led me. With what tender comfort I give you that name, which the step I now take sanctifies. I love you without self-seeking, as a mother loves her son, as the Church loves her children. I can pray for you and for yours without one thought or wish except for your happiness. Ah! if you only knew the sublime tranquillity in which I live, now that I have risen in thought above all petty earthly ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... morning, noon and eve in the garden of the soul, calling it to a happiness which affrights it. And the timid and self-seeking soul strives to hide itself under the stars, under the clouds of heaven, under human love, under the distractions of work and pleasure and study, offers itself as a wistful servitor to child and man and nature, if they will but afford it a refuge from the persistent and gentle accents of pursuivant ...
— The Hound of Heaven • Francis Thompson
... about money! This has been so often noticed that it has become a common saying, "Have no money dealings with your friend." Even near relations become bitter, and are estranged, over some provision in a will. All this arises from self-seeking. Each cares for ...
— The Village Pulpit, Volume II. Trinity to Advent • S. Baring-Gould
... lower Manas during earth-life has been strongly attached to material objects and to intellectual pursuits directed by a self-seeking motive, the desire body may have acquired a very considerable automatism of an intellectual character, and may give forth responses of considerable intellectual merit. But still the mark of non-originality will be present: the apparent intellectuality will only give out reproductions, and ...
— Death—and After? • Annie Besant
... melt in rain-drops, met his, which were alight with all the fire that an aroused and passionate spirit could kindle in them. She saw what she had never beheld before indeed, but the meaning of which no woman ever yet mistook. It was her work—the assurance of her disgrace—the offspring of her self-seeking and unwomanly behavior; and yet, as she looked, the blood rose gradually to her pale cheeks, and stained them with a deeper and yet deeper spot of red; her glance caught a spark from his, and her fragile and drooping figure seemed to dilate and grow stately, as if inspired by some burst of ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... his colleagues on the Bond of Association, his future bride, had showed themselves fatiguing, perhaps worthless, certainly disheartening and independent accessories to his life. Here, at last, was some one brilliant, stimulating, by no means self-seeking, ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... have written upon the bland, complacent face all the cynicism of his nature. Triumph makes cynicism arrogant, so the man is losing his mask. His nature is leering out of his eyes, snarling out of his mouth, and where the little, lean lines have pared away the flesh from his nose, a greedy, self-seeking pride is peering from behind a great masterful nose. Thomas Van Dorn should be in the adolescence of maturity; but he is in the old age of adolescence. His skin has no longer the soft olive texture of youth; it is brown and mottled and leathery. His ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... was offered the nomination for Governor of Illinois, and declined the honor. Mrs. Lincoln, who had supreme confidence in her husband's ability, tried to make him more self-seeking in his political efforts. He visited his old home in Indiana, making several speeches in that part of the State. It was fourteen years after he and all the family had removed to Illinois. One of ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple
... the heritage of their disappointments without any heritage of hope. From early childhood parents and friends are hypnotizing the child into beliefs and unbeliefs, and too often they are exiling all nobility out of life, all confidence, all trust, all hope; they are insinuating a mean self-seeking, a self-mistrust, a vulgar spirit which laughs at every high ideal, until at last the hypnotized child is blinded to the presence of any beauty or nobility in life. No country can ever hope to rise beyond a vulgar mediocrity where there is not unbounded confidence in what ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... working, keeping before him as his lode-star—"Our Father, hallowed be Thy name; Thy kingdom come; Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven;" and asking even for his daily bread for that purpose and no other, would find selfishness and self-seeking die out of him, and active benevolence grow up in him. He would find past sorrows and falls turned unexpectedly to practical use for his own and other's good; and discover to his delight, that his Father ...
— Out of the Deep - Words for the Sorrowful • Charles Kingsley
... the simple student of nature in holy reverence; and while there live sensualists, despots, and men who are wholly self-seeking, I cannot bear to have these sincere workers held up in the least degree to reproach. And let us have truth, even if the truth be the awful denial of the good God. We must face the light and not bury ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... should this be the meaning? For this seems a needless exhortation; what church would not readily yield an especial honor to apostles and evangelists above pastors and teachers? This would savor too much of self-seeking in the apostle, and providing for his own honor. This implies that the text hath reference to apostles and evangelists, whereas it evidently speaks only of ordinary ruling and ...
— The Divine Right of Church Government • Sundry Ministers Of Christ Within The City Of London
... I have been little else but self-seeking," he said, half aloud. "For I gave not to the man, but to myself. I clutched at a personal reward, if not of spoken gratitude yet of subjective content. It has not come. I suppose I ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... independence of the Slave States, and at the same time on the ruins of the Mexican Republic setting up a mock Empire. In similar spirit has he conspired against German Unity, whose just strength promised to be a wall against his unprincipled self-seeking. ...
— The Duel Between France and Germany • Charles Sumner
... acting on behalf not merely of their interests, but of an absolute democratic principle. Their angry resentment becomes transformed in their own minds into righteous indignation; and there may be turned loose upon the community a horde of self-seeking fanatics—like unto those soldiers in the religious wars who robbed and slaughtered their opponents in the ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... her fleeting impressions, in one picture—and failed. He had made himself very agreeable, the single time she had met him; but.... There was Richard's opinion of him: Richard did not like him or trust him; he thought him unscrupulous in business, cold and self-seeking. Poor, poor little Agnes! That such a misfortune should befall just her! Stranger still that she, Polly, should be ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... assuredly be limited, and if limited it would be most prejudicial to the race, as I have pointed out in Hereditary Genius, but may be permitted to do so again. The doctrine would only be followed by the prudent and self-denying; it would be neglected by the impulsive and self-seeking. Those whose race we especially want to have, would leave few descendants, while those whose race we especially want to be quit of, would crowd the vacant space with their progeny, and the strain of population would ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... imagine of goodness, truth, and beauty; that they can see His footprints everywhere in nature, and feel His presence within them as the very life of their life, so that in proportion as they come to themselves they come to Him. They tell us that what separates us from Him and from happiness is, first, self-seeking in all its forms; and, secondly, sensuality in all its forms; that these are the ways of darkness and death, which hide from us the face of God; while the path of the just is like a shining light, which shineth more and more unto the perfect ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... in the city tenant as compared with the sentiments and status of home-ownership in the village, the mobility of the urban dweller in his necessary routine of work and his restless quest for pleasure, the sophistication, the front, the self-seeking of the individual emancipated from the controls of the primary group—all ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... there went, on the psychological side, the further assumption of a general selfishness or self-seeking as the principal motive of the individual in the economic sphere. Oddly enough this assumption—the most warrantable of the lot—was the earliest to fall under disrepute. The plain assertion that every man looks ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... looking back either through the history of England to much earlier generations or to the legislation and administrations of later times, we are justified in saying that many of the evils under which our country now suffers are the consequences of folly, ignorance, neglect, or self-seeking in those who, at different times have wielded the powers of rank, office, and money. But the more bitterly we feel this, the more loudly we utter it, the stronger is the obligation we lay on ourselves to beware, lest ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... realization that he, too, had been unconscious of his own higher self until his love had made him feel the need of it in her. They two, from the depths of self-satisfied power, had gone blindly in their paths of self-seeking—till each had awakened the other. A strange, ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... connection with this case a striking example may be seen of the divine impartiality of the Scriptures. Some persons, with a view to objects of their own, take pleasure in representing ministers of religion as more self-seeking and less generous than those who make no religious profession. The contrast between the Levite and the Samaritan, if this case stood alone, might seem to support their theory. But there is no respect of persons or classes ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... sympathy comes into the student's eye. He is glad to believe that, all those years, Francis could see in his comings and goings the cloister of Clara; and that this sacred gleam of human fellowship,—love purified of all self-seeking,—tender, visionary, celestial affection, ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... whose habits, manners and customs, alone I am personally acquainted; and the lingering traces of whose old forms of life—so gay, kindly, and suggestive—I saw some thirty years ago, just before they sank under the mammonism, commonplace, critical apery, and cold material self-seeking, which have hitherto been the plague of the present generation. We have become more practical and knowing than our forefathers, but not so wise. We are now a "fast people;" but we miss the true goal of life—that is, sober happiness. Fast to smattering; ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... transfigured his face, though he was unconscious of it. A shining face caused by contact with God! Shall not we, to whom the Master has said, "follow Me," get alone with Him and His blessed Word, so habitually, with open or uncovered face, that is, with eyesight unhindered by prejudice or self-seeking, that mirroring the glory of His face we shall more and more come to bear His very likeness upon ...
— Quiet Talks on Prayer • S. D. (Samuel Dickey) Gordon
... sins, and could now depart bravely to work out his penance. Softened and exalted, he little realised that the penance was unnecessary and self-imposed, that the mood which now took on the heroic tone of self-sacrifice was still a mood of self-seeking, that his love for Lena was selfish now as it had always been, and utterly unworthy of the devotion he received. It was true that he loved her, but he loved himself and his ambitions and revenges more. Her forgiveness was but permission to indulge them ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... to take up that"; one does not feel for him at any point in his career as one feels for Mr. George Wyndham or even for Lord Randolph Churchill; from its outset until now that career stretches before our eyes in a flat and uneventful plain of successful but inglorious and ineffective self-seeking. ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... conjure up to some imaginations. I mean an earnest direction of attention in all parts of the country to this necessity for a studied and elaborated project of conciliation and social co-operation We cannot afford to leave such things to specialised politicians and self-appointed, self-seeking "experts" any longer. A modern community has to think out its problems as a whole and co-operate as a whole in their solution. We have to bring all our national life into this discussion of the National Plan before us, and not simply newspapers and periodicals and books, ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... in that way was not easy. I was so accustomed to the thought of Nature as a complex of self-seeking cruelties, the strong preying on the weak, and the weak defenceless, that the mere idea of its containing a ruling co-operative principle seemed at times far-fetched. To the common opinion of the day, my own included, the conception of a universe that would come ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... contrast between the ideal of honour and the practice of pecuniary corruption has always been a peculiar feature of Spain and her settlements." If we hear one thing oftener than another said of Spain, it is fault-finding with her public men; the evils of bribery, corruption, and self-seeking amongst what should be her statesmen, and, above all, her Government employees, are pointed out, and by none more than by Spaniards themselves. There is a good deal of truth at the bottom of these charges; they are the melancholy legacy of the years of misrule and of the darkness ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... of popular government, we suffer ourselves to be led about by self-seeking politicians like a blind man by a scurvy poodle; we made partisanship paramount to patriotism—have reserved the ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... in the affirmative, Mr. Lincoln said he "had received a letter from a little girl called Grace Bedell, advising me to wear whiskers, as she thought it would improve my looks." He said the character of the "letter was so unique and so different from the many self-seeking and threatening ones he was daily receiving that it came to him as a relief and a pleasure." When the train reached Westfield, Mr. Lincoln made a short speech from the platform of the car, and in conclusion ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various
... the civilities of social life become, through her influence, something beside an exchange of heartless forms, or of self-seeking attentions? Precisely so soon, and so fast as woman shall determine to reject the empty adulation of fops and simpletons, to be commended only for what deserves praise, and to be entirely sincere and Christian, ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... very desirous of having none but me with him, and told me one day, "If they never spoke to me against you, I should be more easy, and you more happy." In this journey I committed many faults of self-love and self-seeking. I was become like a poor traveler that had lost his way in the night and could find no way, path, or track. My husband, in his return from St. Reine, passed by St. Edm. Having now no children but my first-born son, who ...
— The Autobiography of Madame Guyon • Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon
... had bidden his wife good-by and was riding through the cold gray mist to do his weary, hopeless best for an obstinate, foolish, impracticable king, and to put some heart, if it were possible, into a dwindling handful of unprincipled, self-seeking, double-minded men. The day was full of omens, and they were all against him. Twice a hare ran across the road, and Grimond muttered to himself as he rode behind his master, "The ill-faured beast." As they passed through Glenfarg, a raven ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... more than a moral police department of the State. Saints like Ken and preachers like South are replaced by fashionable prelates like Cornwallis, who made Lambeth Palace an adjunct to Ranelagh Gardens, and self-seeking pluralists like Bishop Watson. The Church could not even perceive the meaning of the Wesleyan revolt; and its charity was the irritating and complacent patronage of the obstrusive Hannah More. Its learning decayed, its intelligence slumbered; and the main function it fulfilled until ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... his integrity. And Jefferson shared these misgivings, though the exigencies of politics made him dissemble his feelings. It is significant, also, that Burr was always surrounded by men of more than doubtful intentions—place-hunters and self-seeking politicians, who ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... lawsuit for the mere sake of putting money into his own pocket. He lampooned England's allies as well as England's great general; he described the Dutch, whom the Tory ministers had shamefully betrayed, as self-seeking and perfidious traitors, for whose protection we were sacrificing all, until we found out that they were secretly juggling with our enemies for our destruction. No stronger argument could be found to condemn the conduct of the Tory ministers than the mere fact that Swift and Arbuthnot failed to ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... For him the whole body of our industrialism is rotten with selfishness and covetousness, the high note of service entirely absent from it, the one energy which informs it the energy of aggressive self-seeking. Such a system cannot be patched. It is anti-Christian. It ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... inimitable. The old gentlewomen, or caretakers, dry and twisted, brittle and sharp, repositories of emotion—vanities and malice and self-seeking—like echoes of the past, or fat and loquacious, with alcoholic sentimentality, are wonderfully ingratiating. They gather like shadows, ghosts, about the feet of the young, and provide Mr. Walpole with one of his main resources—the ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... of the business, whose interests were therefore his own. Sechard meant to sell dear; David, of course, to buy cheap; his son, therefore, was an antagonist, and it was his duty to get the better of him. The transformation of sentiment into self-seeking, ordinarily slow, tortuous, and veiled by hypocrisy in better educated people, was swift and direct in the old "bear," who demonstrated the superiority of shrewd ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... honorable emulations. Here at least men are not flung out of employment to degenerate because there is no immediate work for them to do. They are fed and drilled and trained for better services. Here at least a man is supposed to win promotion by self-forgetfulness and not by self-seeking. And beside the feeble and irregular endowment of research by commercialism, its little short-sighted snatches at profit by innovation and scientific economy, see how remarkable is the steady and rapid development of method and appliances in naval and military ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... curiosity. If she begins to speak on an interesting subject, and, leaving it unfinished, passes on to another that wearies me, I take care not to remind her of the interruption, for it seems to me that no good can come of self-seeking. ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... your experience is much the same?' I did not answer this and after a pause he went on, still staring out of window, 'I believed in the Lord's Anointed, for my part: but allowing, for argument's sake, the right's on that side, there's enough villainy and self-seeking mixed up with it to poison an honest man. . . . I shouldn't wonder now that there's something to be said even ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... college. This was Dr. Hue King Eng, who came to prepare for her life work. Gentle, modest, winning, her heart fixed on a goal far ahead, she was an example to the earnest Christian girl and a rebuke to any who had self-seeking aims." ...
— Notable Women Of Modern China • Margaret E. Burton
... be of help, good, acceptable and a common prayer, or a work of the Holy Day and of the assembled congregation, which they make who make their own petty prayers, one for this, the other for that, and have nothing but self-seeking, selfish prayers, which ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... vanity. Our real favorites are the dark-eyed Queen Titania, the small imperious person who drives in state in 'Strange Adventures of a Phaeton,' and sails with such high courage in 'White Wings,' and the half-sentimental, half-practical, wholly self-seeking siren Bonny Leslie in 'Kilmeny' who develops into something a little more than coquettish in the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... and the lingering traces of whose old forms of life—so gay, kindly, and suggestive—I saw some thirty years ago, just before they sank under the mammonism, commonplace, critical apery, and cold material self-seeking, which have hitherto been the plague of the present generation. We have become more practical and knowing than our forefathers, but not so wise. We are now a "fast people;" but we miss the true goal of life—that is, sober happiness. Fast to smattering; fast to outward, isolated show; fast to ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... had the power to charm or frighten rudimentary souls into an aggravated witch-dance in his honour; he could also fill the small souls of the pilgrims with bitter misgivings: he had one devoted friend at least, and he had conquered one soul in the world that was neither rudimentary nor tainted with self-seeking. No; I can't forget him, though I am not prepared to affirm the fellow was exactly worth the life we lost in getting to him. I missed my late helmsman awfully—I missed him even while his body was still lying in the pilot-house. ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... antagonists of a romantic drama. I was suddenly influenced to a mood of scorn. Jervaises and Banks alike seemed to me unworthy of any admiration. The members of those families were just a crowd of self-seeking creatures with no thought beyond their own petty interests. The Jervaises were snobs upset by the threat to their silly prestige. Brenda was a feather-headed madcap without a scrap of consideration for any one but herself. Banks was an infatuated ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... he felt rebuked. Could anything be little that was so loved of God? If the primal truth, if Purity Itself and Love Itself could make so amazing a courtship of the human soul, how dared anyone despise what was so honoured of the King? No, under all the self-seeking, the impure motives, the horrid cruelties of life, he must never lose sight of the delicate loveliness, the pathetic aspiration, the exquisite powers of love that are never completely extinguished. ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... error, it was possible that a new one might become so in new ways, unless watched. The second observation touches the real weakness of the Brook Farm institution: "It struck me as rather odd, that one of the first questions raised, after our separation from the greedy, struggling, self-seeking world, should relate to the possibility of getting the advantage over the outside barbarians in their own field of labor. But to own the truth, I very soon became sensible that, as regarded society at large, we stood in a position ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... sermons on Sunday. Their gospel does not touch the many interests of life. Their virtues are not concrete. Holiness, purity, love, truth, beauty, justice, goodness are metaphysical abstractions. Too much self-centred and self-seeking, they make little or no sacrifice for others. Many self-supporting churches do not shelter weaker ones and have no thought for the heathen. There are churches that are fortunate in having in their ...
— The Defects of the Negro Church - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 10 • Orishatukeh Faduma
... in which a man loses the world but remains captain of his soul; actually he ends his life rather than exhibit himself as motley to the multitude. As a foil for the idealist Hetman—who is a sort of inverted Nietzsche; also a self-portrait in part of the dramatist—there is the self-seeking scamp Launhart who succeeds with the very ideas which Hetman couldn't make viable, ideas in fact which brought about his disaster. They are two finely contrasted portraits, and what a grimace of disgust is aroused when Launhart tells the woman who loves Hetman: "O Fanny, Fanny, a living ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... were not of grief, but tears of yearning love, of sympathy, of solemn joy and gratitude to God for such a life in its rounded completeness, such an example and testimony, such fidelity to conscience, such recoil from all self-seeking, such unswerving devotion to duty, come what might of peril or loss, ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney
... or cure!' he said, with that queer courage which never deserted him, even if it were based entirely upon self-seeking and self-interest. He threw his head back with the characteristic action with which he always swallowed his medicine, and went back to ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... in that mysterious world beyond the grave. Show me that though the body—dear home and vehicle of love—may die, yet love in its essence remains everlastingly conscious, faithful and complete. Bend my will to harmony with Thine, O Lord, and cleanse me of self-seeking. Ah! but still let me see his face once again, once again, oh, my God—and I will rebel no more. Let me look on him, once again, if only for a moment, and I shall be content. Hear me, I am greatly troubled, I am ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... and that is sin in one of its thousand forms. The Lord Jesus does not fill dirty cups. Anything that springs from self, however small it may be, is sin. Self-energy or self-complacency in service is sin. Self-pity in trials or difficulties, self-seeking in business or Christian work, self-indulgence in one's spare time, sensitiveness, touchiness, resentment and self-defence when we are hurt or injured by others, self-consciousness, reserve, worry, fear, all spring from self and ...
— The Calvary Road • Roy Hession
... the public economy of a people are the workings of self-interest so apparent as in the determination of prices. When the price of a commodity is once fixed by the conflict of opposing interests,(601) the self-seeking of every individual dictates that he should thereby gain as much as possible of the goods of others, and lose as little as possible of his own. In this struggle, the victory is generally to the stronger, and the price is higher or lower, according to the superiority of the buyer or ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... fit to cast a gloom upon my character. I had met many men, some of them leaders in Israel, whether by their birth or talents; and who among them all had shown clean hands? As for the Browns and Millers, I had seen their self-seeking, I could never again respect them. Prestongrange was the best yet; he had saved me, had spared me rather, when others had it in their minds to murder me outright; but the blood of James lay at his door; and I thought his present dissimulation with myself a thing below ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... partially expressed the nature of man when we have spoken of him as delighting in independent self-expression, as being self-centered and self-seeking. Man is inherently social in his nature and desires nothing more than the approval of his fellows. That which society approves we do with enthusiasm. We change our forms of amusements, our manner of life, and our daily occupations according to the whims of society. Fifteen years ago the riding ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... speak some revealing, sealing word, but the presence of the mother restrained him. Helen, recognizing the returning tide of his love, to which she related no self-seeking, was radiant. ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... eloquently while all men listened, for he reminded them of mighty warriors of old who had not won such glorious fame, and warned them against pride and lack of generosity and self-seeking; and then, ending with thanks and fresh gifts to Beowulf, he bade the feast continue with increased jubilation. The tumultuous rejoicing lasted till darkness settled on the land, and when it ended all retired to rest free from fear, since no more ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... passed through the doorway and out into his own self-seeking life. But Anna Agar's revenge began from that moment. To a man of his nature, in whose veins ran the taint of a semi-superstitious Oriental blood, there was a nameless terror in the hatred of a human being, however helpless. Surely the ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman
... transferred from the debtors to the creditors, who were individually maltreated by the crowd before the very eyes of the consul. In addition, the dread of the Sabine war spread, and when a levy was decreed, nobody gave in his name: Appius was enraged, and bitterly inveighed against the self-seeking conduct of his colleague, in that he, by the inactivity he displayed to win the favour of the people, was betraying the republic, and, besides not having enforced justice in the matter of debt, likewise ...
— Roman History, Books I-III • Titus Livius
... afternoon by a visit from Orin Stanton, the half brother of John. The sculptor had never before come to see her, and, although Milly was little given to censoriousness, she could not avoid the too-obvious reflection that, in one known to be so consistently self-seeking as was Orin, the probability was that some selfish motive lay behind the call. Orin had never been especially fond of Milly, and since his return from Europe, where he had been maintained by the liberality of an old lady, who, in a summer visit to Feltonville, ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... its power is to be sought elsewhere. Financially bankrupt and numerically unstable, the I.W.W. relies upon the brazen cupidity of its stratagems and the habitual timorousness of society for its power. It is this self-seeking disregard of constituted authority that has given a handful of bold and crafty leaders such prominence in the recent literature of fear. And the members of this industrial Ku Klux Klan, these American ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... distinguished poet, of his country and generation, still remaining with us and still in full voice. It is rendered to the comrade—to the man who, with his modesty and fortitude and the absence of self-seeking—with the quips and quirks that cover his gravest moods, with his attachment for the city which has given him that which Lamb so loved, "the sweet security of streets"—it is rendered, I say, to the man who best preserves for us, in his living presence, the traditions of all that an English-speaking ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... must be,—recognizes the necessity of change, to forestall revolution with healthy development,—and believes that there is no real antagonism between Old and New, but only a factitious one, the result of man's obstinacy or self-seeking. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... as in their virtues, there is always abundant material for an indictment on the ground of bad character. The Americans of the revolutionary war, together with much fortitude, integrity, and public spirit, showed without doubt a good deal of levity, self-seeking, vindictiveness, and incompetence; and whoever chooses to amass, magnify, and isolate evidences of their guilt can demonstrate their unfitness for self-government just as well as he can demonstrate the same proposition ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... Elise was a little disturbed. For she was of a jealous and self-seeking disposition, and resented any attentions that were not given to her. The advent of this bright and sparkling young girl,—probably three or four years younger than herself, made her suddenly feel neglected, and ...
— Patty and Azalea • Carolyn Wells
... not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be," Rom. viii. 7. So that either we must have a reformation displeasing to God, or displeasing to men. It is not the right reformation which is not displeasing to a Tobiah, to a Sanballat, to a Demetrius, to the earthly-minded, to the self-seeking politicians, to the carnal and profane; it is but the old enmity between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent (Gen. iii. 15): nay, what if reformation be displeasing to good men, in so ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... the light. It was a phrenetic indictment, but under the paltry rhetoric of the man there was genuine indignation and pain. There were revolting details of cruelty to the miserable, helpless, and defenceless; there were greed, and self-seeking, stripped naked; but more revolting to see without a mask was that falsehood which had been hiding under the words that for ages had spurred men to noble deeds, to self-sacrifice, to heroism. What was appalling was ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... heroism that led this brave soldier in gray so utterly to forget himself for the sake of doing a deed of mercy to his enemies. There is more grandeur in five minutes of such self-renunciation than in a whole lifetime of self-interest and self-seeking. There is something Christly in it. How poor, paltry, and mean, alongside the records of such deeds, appear men's selfish strivings, ...
— Making the Most of Life • J. R. Miller
... tastes, suitability of character; these are the only bonds between my companions and myself; among them I would be a man, not a person of wealth; the charm of their society should never be embittered by self-seeking. If my wealth had not robbed me of all humanity, I would scatter my benefits and my services broadcast, but I should want companions about me, not courtiers, friends, not proteges; I should wish my friends to regard me as their host, not their patron. Independence and equality ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... capacity for winning these prizes, and who work at least as hard as those who win them, but deliberately adopt a line which makes the winning of them impossible, must be judged to have an aim in life other than personal advancement; whatever admixture of self-seeking may enter into the detail of their lives, their fundamental motive must be outside Self. The pioneers of Socialism, Anarchism, and Syndicalism have, for the most part, experienced prison, exile, and poverty, deliberately incurred because they would not abandon ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... Rutherford, like Shepard, could not keep the thought of what men would think out of his weak and evil mind, both before, and during, but more especially after his preaching. And that poisoned and corrupted and filled the pulpit with death to Rutherford, in a way and to a degree that nobody but a self-seeking preacher will believe or understand. Rutherford often wondered that he had not been eaten up of worms in his pulpit like King Herod on his throne, and that for the very same atheistical ...
— Samuel Rutherford - and some of his correspondents • Alexander Whyte
... see much—too much, dear boy—of self-seeking people. It is as refreshing to me to hear you, as a draught of water to a thirsty man. At the same time, let me suggest that you are innocently raising difficulties, where no difficulties exist. I have already mentioned as one ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins
... days, I, Yuan Shih-kai, have admired the example of the Emperors Yao and Shun, who treated the empire as a public trust, and considered that the record of a dynasty in history for good or ill is inseparably bound up with the public spirit or self-seeking by which it has been animated. On attaining middle age I grew more familiar with foreign affairs, was struck by the admirable republican system in France and America, and felt that they were a true embodiment of the democratic precepts of the ancients. When last ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... thing; but for a man who wrote his letters from Brookes's, and whose dinner invitations included all that was great in town, to stoop to such an alliance was as bold a defiance as one could throw at a world of self-seeking and conventionality. ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... independence, which at that time would have been absurd, to conciliate public opinion in the Grand-Duchy of Warsaw. Unfortunately the experiment proved a complete failure, largely owing to the factious and self-seeking Polish nobility who have always been the worst enemy of their country. Alexander after a time lost patience, and in 1820 he felt compelled to withdraw some of the liberties which he had conferred in 1815. After this the breach between the Russian Government and the Polish people began to widen, ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... "but he teaches more than that. I knew a girl in Paris who studied with him. She was quite intricate and self-seeking when she began. And in six months he had changed her whole nature. She became elemental and direct, and," she put her hands together and threw them apart with the gesture which he knew so well, "and splendid! ...
— Katrine • Elinor Macartney Lane
... a time to subordinate individual or group selfishness to the national good, that time is now. Disunity at home—bickerings, self-seeking partisanship, stoppages of work, inflation, business as usual, politics as usual, luxury as usual these are the influences which can undermine the morale of the brave men ready to die at the front for ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... and that the Englishman had given some grave offence for which even his brave action was not a sufficient atonement. But he cared little, for his nature was not a courtier's, and even then the English Normans were colder and graver men than those of France, and more overbearing in arms, but less self-seeking, one ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... Adhelmar was at strict pains to act as common-sense dictated, and Falstaff is scarcely describable as immaculate: Villon thieved, Kit Marlowe left a wake of emptied bottles, and Will Sommers was notoriously a fool; Matthiette was vain, and Adelais self-seeking, and the tenth Marquis of Falmouth, if you press me, rather a stupid and pompous ass: and yet to each in turn it was granted to love greatly, to know at least one hour of magnanimity when each was young in the world's ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... aspect, as more or less immoral. Man is required to have no passions. Passion, it is true, is not quite the suitable word for what I wish to express. I mean here nothing more than human activity as resulting from private interests, special, or if you will, self-seeking designs—with this qualification, that the whole energy of will and character is devoted to their attainment, and that other interests (which would in themselves constitute attractive aims), or, rather, all things else, are sacrificed to them. The object ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... and a watchful eye for escape. His nature was such that he had no qualms of conscience in regard to opposing his red-skinned friends. That part he accepted philosophically. He had so long played a game of self-seeking treachery that his present condition came quite easily ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... Considers. Equal and entire, Therein benevolence, desire, Elsewhere ill-join'd or found apart, Become the pulses of one heart, Which now contracts, and now dilates, And, both to the height exalting, mates Self-seeking to self-sacrifice. Nay, in its subtle paradise (When purest) this one love unites All modes of these two opposites, All balanced in accord so rich Who may determine which is which? Chiefly God's Love does in it live, ...
— The Victories of Love - and Other Poems • Coventry Patmore
... she said, coolly. "Nearly all men and women are alike—worldly, selfish, self-seeking. Look at my father," she went on, as coolly as before. "He thinks of nothing but money; he has spent his life fighting, scrambling, struggling for it; and ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... is passed, they being never likely to give him more; how he [the King] hath great opportunity of making himself popular by stopping this Act against Conventicles; and how my Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, if the Parliament continue, will undoubtedly fall, he having managed that place with so much self-seeking, and disorder, and pleasure, and some great men are designing to overthrow [him], as, among the rest, my Lord Orrery; and that this will try the King mightily, he being a firm friend to my Lord Lieutenant. So home; and to supper a ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... should'st be friend of righteousness to know That zealous patriot and pure-minded man, Of whom thou spakest; surely he hath taught thee More than mere classic lore—wisdom and faith To help this stricken people from the thrall Of their idolatrous, self-seeking rulers? ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards
... face to me,—it was singularly gentle and refined,—not a face to associate with an idea of self-seeking ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... might be evaded by the skill of a new science. Who could tell? Franklin had suggested this, half in jest, years before; Condorcet believed and asserted it now. Ignorance and misery, at all events, should come to an end. When kings and a wicked self-seeking aristocracy should be swept away, the divine sense of right, which God had implanted in the people, would rule; there could be no wars; armies and fleets would become useless; taxes would amount to nothing. All the nations would form one grand republic, with a universal ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... bidden his wife good-by and was riding through the cold gray mist to do his weary, hopeless best for an obstinate, foolish, impracticable king, and to put some heart, if it were possible, into a dwindling handful of unprincipled, self-seeking, double-minded men. The day was full of omens, and they were all against him. Twice a hare ran across the road, and Grimond muttered to himself as he rode behind his master, "The ill-faured beast." As they passed through Glenfarg, a raven followed them for a mile, ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... to to-day, a great many worthy people who have been afraid of the Pope and the influence of Catholicism in this country, and have been exceedingly jealous of the influence of foreigners, especially of those of the Roman Catholic Church. Self-seeking political adventurers and demagogues have not been slow to take advantage of this feeling for their own purposes. They have, for some reason, always preferred to make their political movement in secret ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... curse it! has corrupted and poisoned everything, the very best things of this life, and when the best things are corrupted and poisoned they become the worst things. And praise does not escape this universal and fatal law. Weak, evil, and self-seeking men are near us, and we lean upon them, look to them, and listen to them. We make them our strength and support, and seek repose and refreshment from them. They cannot be all or any of these things to us; but we ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... It's a difficult thing for men to govern themselves, though they can do it better than anyone else has ever done it for them. We are making this wonderful experiment here in the new world. The fate of unborn millions hangs on its success. You're done with self and self-seeking. Ambition is a dream that is passed. Good! Lay your life in unselfish sacrifice on the altar of your country. Only the man who has given up ambition is fit for great leadership. He alone dares to seek and know and ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... its good. To a new political society, freshly exposed to the temptations of party struggles for power, no greater service can be rendered than a public life absolutely clear from any suspicion of self-seeking, governed uninterruptedly and long by public spirit, public ends, and a strong sense of duty. Such a service General Church has rendered to his adopted country. During his residence among them for nearly half a century they have become familiar, not in word, but in living reality, with some of ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... family in its earliest stages is essentially an egoistic and ungenerous proceeding. Even Mr. Withers must have been self-seeking once or twice in his life, else had he never had a son to mourn. So, since life in this world is for the living, and his own life was likely to go on many years after Mr. Withers had been gathered to the reward of the righteous, ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... unnaturally. Jane, I assure you, had thought very little of herself hitherto—in both senses of the phrase. Joyous because she could not help it, full of gratitude, admiration, generosity, she occupied her thoughts very much with other people, but knew not self-seeking, knew not self-esteem. The one thing affecting herself over which she mused frequently was her suffering as a little thrall in Clerkenwell Close, and the result was to make her very humble. She had been an ill-used, ragged, work-worn child, and something of that degradation seemed, in her ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... November 6, he proposed that Ministers be heard in the National Assembly, the Archbishop of Bordeaux instigated Montlosier and Lanjuinais to oppose him. Both were men of high character, and both had some attainments; and in their aversion for him, and for his evident self-seeking, they carried a motion forbidding deputies to take office. By this vote, of November 7, which permanently excluded Mirabeau from the councils of the king, the executive was deprived of authority. It is one of the decisive acts of the Constituent Assembly, for ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... Accessions. All this can and does progress, but mostly slowly, intermittently, with short violent paroxysms of excess and long sleepy reactions of defect, with one-sidedness, travesties, and—worst of all—with worldly indifference and self-seeking. The grace and aid of the Simultaneous Richness are here also always necessary; nor can these things ever really progress except through a deep religious sense—all mere scepticism and all levelling down are simply so much waste. Still, we can speak of progress in ...
— Progress and History • Various
... like sudden darkness—I can bear with a willing pain, as if I was sharing the Redeemer's cross. For I feel it, I feel it—infinite love is suffering too—yea, in the fulness of knowledge it suffers, it yearns, it mourns; and that is a blind self-seeking which wants to be freed from the sorrow wherewith the whole creation groaneth and travaileth. Surely it is not true blessedness to be free from sorrow, while there is sorrow and sin in the world: sorrow is then a part of love, and love does ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... powerful family, a wealthy territorial magnate, and an Englishman with thoroughly national tastes for sport, his weighty and disinterested character made him a statesman of the first rank in his time, in spite of the absence of showy or brilliant qualities. He had no self-seeking ambitions, and on three occasions preferred not to become prime minister. Though his speeches were direct and forcible, he was not an orator, nor "clever"; and he lacked all subtlety of intellect; but he was conspicuous for solidity of mind and straightforwardness of action, and for conscientious ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... unexpected victory for the party which Scarborough advocated, and everywhere the talk was that he had been the chief factor—his skill in defining issues, his eloquence in presenting them, the public confidence in his party through the dominance of a man so obviously free from self-seeking or political trickery of any kind. Dumont, to whom control in both party machines and in the state government was a business necessity, told his political agent, Merriweather, that they had "let Scarborough go about far enough," unless he could ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... and fine, and for the remainder of his life Bacon devoted himself to science, rejecting every suggestion toward a renewal of his political activity. The moral laxity of the times throws a mitigating light over his fault; but he cannot be aquitted of self-seeking, love of money and of display, and excessive ambition. As Macaulay says in his famous essay, he was neither malignant nor tyrannical, but he lacked warmth of affection and elevation of sentiment; there were many things which he loved more than virtue, ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... conviction, that he must under no circumstances commit a certain act, though to do so would be easy and advantageous, and detection not to be feared? Why should the moral consciousness of the higher races accept the principle which places self-sacrifice above self-seeking? There is only one explanation for this paradoxical phenomenon: it is that, as men rise in the moral scale, there dawns on them the sense of a law that is not of this world, an Ought-to-be, which speaks with a strange authority, and will not be denied; and when this ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... All self-seeking I forsake; In my soul a silence make. There was joy to feel I could, That I had some power of good, That I was not vainly tost: Now I'm empty, empty quite; Fill me, God, or I am lost; In my spirit shines no light; All the outer world's wild press Crushes in my emptiness. Am I giving ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... minds met the same qualities in their leader. Some knew and welcomed the fact that the devil was their guest of honor; perhaps others did not know it. Deluded as they all were and blinded by pride and self-seeking, the same handwriting that told Belshazzar of disaster was on the wall, but they could not or would not see it. There was no Daniel to ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... provocation, to all who approached him. Perhaps a still more potent agent was a quality which was dimly felt from the beginning, and is fully recognised to-day—his sincerity of nature and honesty of purpose. In the painful revelations which, alas! time is apt to bring of double-dealing and self-seeking on the part of men in power, no public character of his day stands out more honourably in the strong light which posterity is already concentrating on the words and actions of the past, than does Prince Albert for undeniable ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... medley of man's composition, deeper far than his superficial working delusion that he is a separated self-seeking individual, an instinct for cooperation and obedience. Every natural sane man wants, though he may want it unwittingly, kingly guidance, a definite direction for his own partial life. At the bottom of his heart he feels, even if he does not know it definitely, that ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... is only vanity, narrowness and self-seeking, that spoil a good thing. Women would never be too good housekeepers for their own peace and that of others, if they considered housekeeping only as a means to an end. If their object were really the peace and joy of all concerned, they could bear to have their cups and saucers broken more ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... figures of that day,—the Chancelier de l'Hopital, wearing his crimson robe lined and edged with ermine, and his cap on his head according to the privilege of his office. This courageous man, seeing that his benefactors were traitorous and self-seeking, held firmly to the cause of the kings, represented by the queen-mother; at the risk of losing his head, he had gone to Rouen to consult with the Connetable de Montmorency. No one ventured to draw him from the reverie in which he was plunged. ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... off the visible part than we can heal small pox by cutting out the pustules. Prisons are not the right remedy; they inflame and disseminate the poison we would be rid of and prevent any chance of cure. The soul of all crime is self-seeking in place of neighborly good will; we send men to prison to get them out of our way, and that is criminal self seeking and ill will to the neighbor—delegating to hirelings our ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... He measured the universe by that narrow scrap of tape which was the span of his own littleness. To him Caesar was an imperial brigand, Cicero a hypocritical agitator. To him all great warriors were greedy time-servers like John Churchill; all statesmen plausible placemen; all reformers self-seeking pretenders. Nor did Captain Paget wish that it should be otherwise. In his ideal republic, unselfishness and earnestness would have rendered a man rather a nuisance than otherwise. With the vices of his fellow-men the diplomatic Horatio was fully ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... Princess of Wales, entertained her in the June of 1808, with a grand banquet, from which Lady Eldon was compelled by indisposition to be absent. And there, four years later, when he was satisfied that her Royal Highness's good opinion could be of no service to him, the crafty, self-seeking minister gave a still more splendid dinner to the husband whose vices he had professed to abhor, whose meanness of spirit he had declared the object of his contempt. "However," writes Lord Campbell, with much satiric humor, describing this alliance between the ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... within the boundaries of our personal self. It is this Avidya, this ignorance, this limiting of consciousness that creates the hard separateness of the ego, and thus becomes the source of all pride and greed and cruelty incidental to self-seeking. When a man sleeps he is shut up within the narrow activities of his physical life. He lives, but he knows not the varied relations of his life to his surroundings,—therefore he knows not himself. So when a man lives the life of Avidya he is confined within his self. ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... who may be God's messenger to lead her back to Him. Think again of her first words—the burst of nature from her heart! Did she not turn to God, and enter into a covenant with Him—'I will be so good?' Why, it draws her out of herself! If her life has hitherto been self-seeking, and wickedly thoughtless, here is the very instrument to make her forget herself, and be thoughtful for another. Teach her (and God will teach her, if man does not come between) to reverence her child; and this reverence will shut ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... Honora, that I'm grieving for! It's those hot-headed, misguided, wayward fellows of mine! They've left the homes I tried to help them win, they've followed a self-seeking, half-mad, wholly vicious agitator, and their lives, that I meant to have flow on so smoothly, will be troubled and wasted. I know so well what will happen! And then, their hate! It hangs over me like a cloud! I'm not supposed to be sensitive. I'm looked on as a ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... others with more vehemence. He had not the temperament which, when once possessed with an idea, rests neither night nor day in pursuit of it and spares neither others' labour nor its own to carry the conception into effect. There was an element of inertia in his nature, and of the ordinary self-seeking motives which impel men not a trace. Ambition he had none—none, at all events, in the last ten or fifteen years, during which I have known him. As for vanity, I never saw a man so entirely devoid of it. His modesty amounted to a defect, in that he always ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... whom, if the Hesea's tale be true, I did once lay down my royal rank and dare the dangers of an unsailed sea; O thou whom in ages gone I would have sheltered with my frail body from the sorceries of this cold, self-seeking witch; O thou whom but a little while ago at my own life's risk I drew from death in yonder river, ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... people see or think of it. They just live and forget that beneath them lie their fathers' bones. They forget that in some few days—perhaps more, perhaps less—other unknown creatures will be standing above their forgotten bones, as blind, as self-seeking, as puffed up with the pride of the brief moment, and filled with the despair of their failure, the glory of their success, ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... him when he emerges from the naive communal culture where the dominant note of life is the unanalysed and undifferentiated solidarity of the individual with the group with which his life is bound up. When he enters upon the predatory stage, where self-seeking in the narrower sense becomes the dominant note, this propensity goes with him still, as the pervasive trait that shapes his scheme of life. The propensity for achievement and the repugnance to futility remain the underlying economic motive. The propensity ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... Mystery" was silent, solitary, free from all self-seeking. It was silent, because all speech is of necessity feeble and imperfect; therefore the souls of my ancestors ascended to God in wordless adoration. It was solitary, because they believed that He is nearer to us in ...
— The Soul of the Indian - An Interpretation • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... sense—the qualities by which they themselves longed to be distinguished, and by which, in their happier moments, they believed they were. If ever they began to have misgivings, there, at any rate, was the example of Lord Hartington to encourage them and guide them—Lord Hartington who was never self-seeking, who was never excited, and who had no imagination at all. Everything they knew about him fitted into the picture, adding to their admiration and respect. His fondness for field sports gave them a feeling of security; and certainly there could be no nonsense about a ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... deferential valet in The Rivals, "it hurts his conscience to be found out." There is no honesty or sincerity in the man. His covert gibes are the spiteful emanation of personal disappointment; his lofty morality is a cloak for unscrupulous self-seeking. He has always shown himself ready to say anything or do anything that may serve his own interests. In the general election of 1885 he made frantic efforts to get into Parliament as a member of the Irish Party. He ghosted every member of the party whose influence he ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (2 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... 'tis not all to be Self-seeking pleasure-hunters; higher far Are works of kindliness and charity Which we can do, whate'er our frailties are. And we have learned that pain and sorrow, though Unwelcome guests, have each a work ...
— The Song of the Exile—A Canadian Epic • Wilfred S. Skeats
... duty, and that you will go in a gallop. What the devil do you suppose that Texans want with a two- faced little icicle like yourself in the United States Senate? What taxpayer has asked you to become a candidate? Despite all your wire-pulling, your trading and self-seeking, and the further fact that you are employing the state machinery to strengthen your pull, you really stand no more show of succeeding Roger Q. Mills than you do of succeeding the Czar of Russia. You have managed to get thus far, not on your own merits, ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... manna bent and mortal ends," and their conception of the future is a world in which one nation competes against another for the acquisition of markets and commodities. In effect, therefore, materialism challenges the classics, but it accepts the self-seeking ideals of the past generations, and accepts also, as an integral part of the future, the scramble of conflicting interests, labour against capital, nation against nation, man against man. Now the first characteristic of the ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... appeared very desirous of having none but me with him, and told me one day, "If they never spoke to me against you, I should be more easy, and you more happy." In this journey I committed many faults of self-love and self-seeking. I was become like a poor traveler that had lost his way in the night and could find no way, path, or track. My husband, in his return from St. Reine, passed by St. Edm. Having now no children but my first-born ...
— The Autobiography of Madame Guyon • Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon
... however, but the beginning. Under the cloak of religion British administration continued to display its hate against our people and nationality, and to conceal its self-seeking aims under cover of the most exalted principles. The aid of religion was invoked to reinforce the policy of oppression in order to deal a deeper and more fatal blow to our self-respect. Emissaries of the London Missionary Society slandered ...
— A Century of Wrong • F. W. Reitz
... Aristogeiton and the constancy of Harmodius had a strength which undid their power. And, therefore, the ill-repute into which these attachments have fallen is to be ascribed to the evil condition of those who make them to be ill-reputed; that is to say, to the self-seeking of the governors and the cowardice of the governed; on the other hand, the indiscriminate honour which is given to them in some countries is attributable to the laziness of those who hold this opinion of them. ...
— Symposium • Plato
... often has great powers of discernment, but will not take the trouble to use them, unless prompted by her own interests. Selfishness is too short-sighted, however, to secure lasting benefits. Usually, nothing is more fatal than the success of mere self-seeking. While Madge pressed unwaveringly toward the goal of her hopes, she did not do so in thoughtless or callous indifference toward those who had true claims upon her. With her sister she soon saw that all was well—that she ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... the other. These characters are in various degrees individualised, most of them completely so; but still in each group there is a quality common to all the members, or one spirit breathing through them all. Here we have unselfish and devoted love, there hard self-seeking. On both sides, further, the common quality takes an extreme form; the love is incapable of being chilled by injury, the selfishness of being softened by pity; and, it may be added, this tendency to extremes is found again in the characters of Lear and Gloster, and is the main source ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... universities, and of business interests and the higher social classes, had the confidence of the people. The King did not. He had their loyalty as their sovereign, but the spiritual and cultural welfare of a colony overseas carried little weight amid the political cross-currents and the self-seeking ...
— Religious Life of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century - The Faith of Our Fathers • George MacLaren Brydon
... dismissed creed, he fretted in bonds from which he could never get wholly free. Intrepid, independent, steadfast, frugal, prudent, dauntless, he trampled on the pride of kings with the pride of Lucifer. He was clannish to excess, painfully jealous of proximate rivals, self-centred if not self-seeking, fired by zeal and inflamed by almost mean emulations, resenting benefits as debts, ungenerous—with one exception, that of Goethe,—to his intellectual creditors; and, with reference to men and manners around him at ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... very verge of winning a triumphant success. That he failed was due to the fact that the French Navy... was honeycombed by the intellectual and moral vices which were bringing France to the great Revolution—corruption, self-seeking, acrid class insolence, and skinless, morbid vanity."—THE ROYAL NAVY, David Hannay, ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... hypothetical backgrounds of lofty or blameless motive, he was in practice as exempt from amiable illusions as he was from narrow spite. Himself the most exact and precise in his dealings with the world, he could pardon the excesses and irregularities of a great nature; but sordid self-seeking under the mask of high ideals revolted him. He laughed at the boyish freaks of Lander's magnificent old age, which irritated even his large-hearted wife; but he could not forgive Louis Napoleon the coup d'etat, and when the liberation of Lombardy was followed ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... dishonesty, obscenity of thought and spreading scandal. The injustice he saw practiced on shore had always turned him with a sense of relief to the cleansing challenge of the sea; always, brought in contact with cunning and self-seeking men and heartless schemes, with women cheapened by a conviction of the indecency of life, he was in a state of hot indignation. From all this Taou Yuen offered ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... thought. In daily prayer he sought as in his Master's presence to sift from the pure grain of a godly purpose to glorify Him, all the chaff of selfish and carnal motives, to get rid of every taint of worldly self-seeking or lust of applause, and to bring every thought into captivity to the Lord. He constantly probed his own heart to discover the secret and subtle impulses which are unworthy of a true servant of God; and, believing that a spiritually minded brother often helps one to an insight into his own heart, ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... "rightful"doer. He who acts Free from self-seeking, humble, resolute, Steadfast, in good or evil hap the same, Content to do aright-he "truly" acts. There is th' "impassioned" doer. He that works From impulse, seeking profit, rude and bold To overcome, unchastened; slave by turns Of sorrow and of joy: of ...
— The Bhagavad-Gita • Sir Edwin Arnold
... the rules of the Orders were observed in the spirit and in the letter, they were a genuine help towards a life of self-devotion, of self-abnegation whereof the ultimate motive was not always a subtle form of self-seeking. But as time passed, the monasteries became the recipients of the bounty of pious benefactors. Their inhabitants, in spite of ascetic regulations, found that life was none so hard—at least in comparison with that of serfdom or villeinage; luxuries were not less available than to the laity. The ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... the virtue above all others which we, as members of this school, should seek to attain, and, in the very nature of things, nothing so entirely kills it as any self-seeking; while if you wish to be worth anything as an individual, remember that nothing is so smallening, so alien to any true greatness—to the most far-off touch of greatness—as the wish to be ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... aspirations of encouraged plebianism,—a dangerous factor in any republic. It means the mixing of ignoble blood with good, a gradual lowering of ideals until a general level of sordidness, individualism in its most selfish and self-seeking form, and political corruption, are the inevitable results. You, your Excellency, are an autocrat. It is odd that your principles should coincide so closely ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... Bond of Association, his future bride, had showed themselves fatiguing, perhaps worthless, certainly disheartening and independent accessories to his life. Here, at last, was some one brilliant, stimulating, by no means self-seeking, Quixotic ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... in their muscles nor fire in their hearts. Slowly the column straggled on, their horses spiritless, their arms neglected. The men grumbled at the sun, the dust, the weather, and were as ready to quarrel as they were unwilling to work. To these disadvantages were added Caecina's inveterate self-seeking and his newly-acquired indolence. An overdose of success had made him slack and self-indulgent, or, if he was plotting treachery, this may have been one of his devices for demoralizing the army. It has often been believed that it was Flavius ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... after, closer and more intimate union and communion. I would be transformed into thine image; I would be thy temple; I would have thee live in me, walk in me, make me one with thee; I would be delivered from self-will, self-wisdom, self-seeking; I would be delivered from that philosophy and vain deceit which spoils souls and leads them off from their head: then, and not till then, shall I cease to wander, shall 'run and not be weary, walk and ...
— The Power of Faith - Exemplified In The Life And Writings Of The Late Mrs. Isabella Graham. • Isabella Graham
... Potterisms—and yet with an odd tide of hope surging through the sickness, because of human nature, which is so mixed that natural cowards will sometimes take a steep and hard way where they might take an easy one, and because we all, in the middle of our egotism and vanity and self-seeking, are often sorry for what we have done. Really sorry, beneath all the cheap penitence which leads nowhere. So sorry that we sometimes cannot bear it any more, and will break up our own lives ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... not wholly ignoble, the marriage market. To understand the game of life is to be prepared, and women like Doris Fletcher were not entirely self-seeking when they presented their best to what they believed should be the best. Nancy was worthy, as Martin often said, to carry on the truest American tradition of womanhood, so it became a reverent concern to help this matter personally, ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... March, "that there was a great deal of mixed motive in the men who went into the war as well as in those who kept out of it. We canonized all that died or suffered in it, but some of them must have been self-seeking and low-minded, like men in other vocations." He found himself saying this in Dryfoos's behalf; the old man looked at him gratefully at first, he thought, and ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Montemurlo, and finally was murdered in that very fortress, outside the Porto a Faenza, which he had counseled Alessandro to construct for the intimidation of the Florentines.[1] The historians with the exception of Nerli agree in describing him as a pleasure-loving and self-seeking man, whose many changes of policy were due, not to conviction, but to the desire of gaining the utmost license of disorderly living. At the same time we cannot deny him the fame of brilliant mental qualities, a princely bearing, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... thus by the blunder of a servant, he met this little vexation with the characteristic effrontery which had served his turn so well in the endless intrigues of his self-seeking career. Without altering his attitude a hair's breadth, one leg in a silk stocking advanced, his head twisted over his left shoulder, ...
— The Point Of Honor - A Military Tale • Joseph Conrad
... "And that's old enough to know that nine-tenths of your 'nice human people' are self-seeking vampires living on the generosity of the other tenth. Besides, you have only to wait till you come out professionally and you can have as many so-called friends as you choose. You'll scarcely need to lift your little ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... admirably for a very long period. But as time went on negligence and self-seeking crept in. Those whose duty it was to superintend, threw more and more responsibility on their inferiors in office, and in time it became rare for the rulers to interfere or to interest themselves in any of the ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... with both arms and legs, and swears at the wind, the sleet, the darkness; the man who curses the sea while others work. The man who is the last out and the first in when all hands are called. The man who can't do most things and won't do the rest. The pet of philanthropists and self-seeking landlubbers. The sympathetic and deserving creature that knows all about his rights, but knows nothing of courage, of endurance, and of the unexpressed faith, of the unspoken loyalty that knits together a ship's company. The independent offspring of the ignoble freedom of the ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... dishonorable, in a manx. Well, Catasaqua had a beautiful family of cattings; and they were of different colors, to harmonize with their characters. Cattaraugus, the eldest, was white, and he had high impulses and a pure heart; Catiline, the youngest, was black, and he had a self-seeking nature, his motives were nearly always base, he was truculent and insincere. He was vain and foolish, and often said that he would rather be what he was, and live like a bandit, yet have none above him, than be a cat-o'-nine-tails and ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... for these men, all of whom she knew. Caius Nepos, selfish and callous; Ancyrus, the elder, avaricious and self-seeking; young Escanes whom she knew to be unscrupulous; Philippus Decius whose ostentation and lavishness she despised. She vaguely wondered why my lord Hortensius Martius ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... sacrifice—to have it put upon a low motive from the lower plane of sacrifice in many otherwise kind people. We give our money to an institution of charity, and it is said that it was for notoriety, or self-seeking, or at the expense of our kin. We lead a forlorn hope in politics, or some other arena, to establish a cause or assist a principle, with the certain result of defeat, and we are said to be jealous or malignant. Perhaps we make a book ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... and difficult circumstances we unavoidably become rude, because then only the inferior and harsher faculties of our nature are called into existence. When, on the contrary, there is leisure and abundance, the self-seeking and self-preserving instincts are allowed to rest, the gentler and more generous sentiments are evoked, and man becomes that courteous and chivalric being which he is found to be amongst the upper classes of almost all civilized countries. These, then, may be said to be the chief ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... gold at the end of the rainbow. Nor is the doctrine of perfectability anywhere one with itself. It speaks in diverse tongues. Its processes and objects are variant. It seems but an iridescent dream which lends itself equally to the fancies of the impracticable and the scheming of the self-seeking, breeding ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... necessary for you to die,—it would be very troublesome and inconvenient to him if, by some chance, you were cured, and continued to live. When you are gone he will marry Catherine, your only child and heiress, and he will have no further personal anxieties. I dislike this self-seeking attitude on his part, and my only wonder is that you do not perceive it. For the rest, my antagonism to Dr. Brayle is instinctive and has its origin far back—perhaps in a ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... gentleman does not meet with what used to be common civility, and we are sinking into perfect barbarism.... The spirit of anarchy which prevails in Boston is more than I am able to cope with." The instigators of the mob, it was well known, were certain artful and self-seeking demagogues, of whom the chief had formerly been dames Otis; but in late years Mr. Otis, "with his mob-high eloquence," had given way to an abler man, Samuel Adams, than whom, Mr. Hutchinson thought, there was not "a greater incendiary in the King's dominion, or ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... revolt of Douglas without crediting him with any but self-seeking motives. They could not bring themselves to believe other than ill of the man who had advocated the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. Republicans accepted his aid in their struggle against the Lecompton fraud, but for the most part continued to regard him with distrust. Indeed, Douglas ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... Johnny Fairfax had no interests in the city; he had no fear; his viewpoint was free from all sham; he was newly in from the outside. Through his eyes things fell into perspective. Suddenly San Francisco upper society became to Keith what it really was: a welter of cheap, bragging, venal, self-seeking men, with here and there an honest fine character standing high above. And he began, but dimly, to see that the real men of the place were not—as yet—well known. Probably one of the most impressive and typical figures of the time was Justice of the ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... back to the mantel-piece, and looked down upon her. He thought of the great, wide world: its thorny ways, its deserts, its bitter waters, its unrighteousness, its self-seeking greeds, its weaknesses, its under and over reaching, its unfaithfulness; and then again of this—child, thrust all at once a thousand miles into it, with never—so far as he could see—an implement, a weapon, a sense of danger, or a refuge; well pleased with ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... God's message to a people who had refused to listen to his anti-slavery prophets and priests; and its sad, weird, and heart-touching descriptions and dialogues restored the milk of human kindness to a million hearts that had grown callous in an age of self-seeking and robbery of ...
— 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
... alone. I never take any money for myself alone. That would be self-seeking. Anything I earn or take is for the Lord, not me. I never keep it. The Lord doesn't allow ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... love itself for him. He hinted it, looking as from a distance at me in my attitude of protest and restraint. If I loved him enough, I could forego love itself for him. Somewhere there is a fault, it would seem, somewhere in my abandon is restraint, in my love, self-seeking. Remorse overcame me just as he was about to leave, and I schooled myself to think that there had been no affront, that it honours a woman to be wanted no matter for what end, that every use is a noble use, that we die the same, loved or used. If Herbert Wace wants ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... Dickens's sympathetic extravagances, it will seem hard and repellant. But men who, like Thackeray, have seen life and tasted its bitterness and felt its hollowness, know how to prize it. Thackeray does not merely expose the cant, the emptiness, the self-seeking, the false pretenses, flunkeyism, and snobbery—the "mean admiration of mean things"—in the great world of London society: his keen, unsparing vision detects the base alloy in the purest natures. There are no "heroes" in his books, ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... the occasion to declare, What spoken in thy presence must offend— That, set aside some few caprices wild, Those humorous clouds that flit o'er brightest days, In all my threadings of this worldly maze, (And I have watched thee almost from a child), Free from self-seeking, envy, low design, I have not found a ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... surplice. He feared that his whole scheme had degenerated to, even though it might not have originated in, a social unrest which had no foundation in the nobler instincts; which was purely an artificial product of civilization. There were thousands of young men on the same self-seeking track at the present moment. The sensual hind who ate, drank, and lived carelessly with his wife through the days of his vanity was a ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... the "world" and his fellow-men, has commonly no knowledge of human nature in the larger sense, but merely knows from observation how the average man of a certain limited class is likely to act within a narrow prescribed sphere of self-seeking. Town life, then, strongly favours the education of certain shallow forms of intelligence. In actual attainment the townsman is somewhat more advanced than the countryman. But the deterioration of physique ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... out for all, those nearest, those farthest. He talked of all nations, of a world. His follower must have a long reach to keep up. That word ambition has been much abused. It has been used much in connection with selfish self-seeking, until that meaning has become almost its whole meaning in the thinking of many people. But with the purpose dominant in Jesus we can properly use it in its old literal meaning. Originally it simply meant going around, being ...
— Quiet Talks on Service • S. D. Gordon
... something! To have a real interest! To find something to do besides the nursery games disguised under new forms for the grown-up yet never to be grown-up infants of the world. And THAT kind of politics doesn't sound shallow and dull. There's heart in it—and brains—real brains—not merely nasty little self-seeking cunning." She took up the handbill again and read a paragraph ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... primitive simplicity, unselfishness, and absolute devotion of the time of Christ and the apostolic period. This revolution could be accomplished, he saw, only by a personal example so strong, so undeviating, so entirely free from self-seeking, that all men would be compelled to pause and consider it, and then to act upon it. He therefore sacrificed his whole life for the good of the race. In the end he achieved his aim, single-handed, single-souled. No one ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... acquire a more just idea of the grammar which is displayed in English grammars, he will discover at least one reason for the title which has been bestowed upon the work. Such as the book is, I present it to the public, without pride, without self-seeking, and without anxiety: knowing that most of my readers will be interested in estimating it justly; that no true service, freely rendered to learning, can fail of its end; and that no achievement merits aught with Him who ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... Arabs have a proverb that a man is more the son of the age in which he lives than of his own father. This was not so with Columbus; he hardly seems to belong at all to his age. At a time when there was never more of worldliness and self-seeking; when Alexander Borgia was Pope; when Louis the Eleventh reigned in France, Henry the Seventh in England, and Ferdinand the Catholic in Arragon and Castille—about the three last men in the world to become crusaders—Columbus was ...
— The Life of Columbus • Arthur Helps
... has all there is. The difference between private and public ownership, it seems to me, is mainly in the natural selection of those most competent to foresee the future and to direct labor into the most productive channels, and the greater poignancy of the illusion of self-seeking under which the private owner works. The real problem, under socialism as well as under individualism, is to ascertain, under the external economic and inevitable conditions, the equilibrium of social desires. The real struggle is between the different groups of producers of the several objects ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... judiciary, the superintendence of the administration of the business affairs of the nation, the guidance of our international affairs. Therefore the President must be a keen judge of men capable of distinguishing the honest, efficient servant of the nation from the self-seeking politician; he must resist political pressure; he must be national in his patriotism and breadth of vision; he must know our foreign relations intimately, that the continuity of policies may not be broken and the efficiency of our foreign service weakened thereby. He must have the ...
— History of the United States, Volume 6 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... to be a little mad in order to prophesy and to enjoy poetic ecstasies; and in the case of Schlatter the flower of altruism which often blossoms in the hearts of such "madmen" was manifested in his complete lack of self-seeking and in his compassion for the poor and suffering which drew crowds around him. As to his miracles, we may—without attempting to explain them—state decisively that they do not differ from those accomplished by means of suggestion. The cases of blindness treated by Schlatter ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... not the grosser passions and forms of vice alone that darken the understanding and alienate the heart from the truth. Pride, vanity, ambition, avarice—in a word, the spirit of self-seeking and self-exaltation in every form—will effectually hinder the man in whose bosom they bear sway from coming to the knowledge of the truth; for they will incline him to seek a religion which flatters him and promises him impunity in sin, and will fatally ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... the one given to himself the day before. His uncle had never shown such pleasure on his arrival; but he felt no jealousy of the girl who was so evidently preferred before himself; for, whatever his faults might be, he was free at least from any tinge of self-seeking. The lazy smile lingered on his face as he listened to the exchange of question ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... contribute and in which they share, so Socialism insists upon its ideal of an organized social order which every man serves and by which every man benefits. Their common enemy is the secret-thinking, self-seeking man. Secrecy, subterfuge and the private gain; these are the enemies of Socialism and the adversaries of Science. At times, I will admit, both Socialist and scientific man forget this essential sympathy. You will find specialized ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... far from insignificant was the fact that in Connecticut a sincere and spontaneous movement toward the Episcopal Church had arisen among men honored and beloved, whose ecclesiastical views were not tainted with self-seeking or servility or with an unpatriotic shame for their colonial home and sympathy with its political enemies. Elsewhere in New England, and largely in Connecticut also, the Episcopal Church in its beginnings was handicapped with a dead-weight of supercilious and odious Toryism. The example of a man ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... testimony to his worth, however, that he was able to win Charlotte Bronte in spite of the fact that his predecessors had inspired in her such hearty contempt. 'I think he must be like all the curates I have seen,' she writes of one; 'they seem to me a self-seeking, vain, ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... vigorous flea in each ear, which did much to disturb his complacency. Bennie had not made him thoughtful, only vengeful. There is nothing quite so discomposing as the scornful rejection of proffers of self-seeking philanthropy. Bennie's indignation was instinctive rather than analytical, the inherent instinct that puts up the back and tail of a new-born kitten at its first ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... passes by, and that is sin in one of its thousand forms. The Lord Jesus does not fill dirty cups. Anything that springs from self, however small it may be, is sin. Self-energy or self-complacency in service is sin. Self-pity in trials or difficulties, self-seeking in business or Christian work, self-indulgence in one's spare time, sensitiveness, touchiness, resentment and self-defence when we are hurt or injured by others, self-consciousness, reserve, worry, fear, all spring from self and all are sin and make our cups unclean.[*] But all ...
— The Calvary Road • Roy Hession
... being terrified with the menaces of the clergy, had some time before gone over to the other party; and he now openly in the church, though invested with the highest civil character in the kingdom, did penance for his obedience to the parliament, which he termed a "carnal self-seeking." He accompanied his penance with so many tears, and such pathetical addresses to the people for their prayers in this his uttermost sorrow and distress, that a universal weeping and lamentation took ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... there was a time to subordinate individual or group selfishness to the national good, that time is now. Disunity at home—bickerings, self-seeking partisanship, stoppages of work, inflation, business as usual, politics as usual, luxury as usual these are the influences which can undermine the morale of the brave men ready to die at the front for ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... against slavery, published in 1733, entitled, "A Testimony against that Anti-Christian Practice of MAKING SLAVES OF MEN.[378] It was well written, and the truth fearlessly told for the conservative, self-seeking period ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... fight Beaton had waged against adversaries how many and multifarious, how murderous, self-seeking, treacherous, and hypocritical, we have seen. He maintained the independence of Scotland against the most recklessly unscrupulous of assailants, though probably he was rather bent on defending the lost cause of a Church entirely and ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... of a family in its earliest stages is essentially an egoistic and ungenerous proceeding. Even Mr. Withers must have been self-seeking once or twice in his life, else had he never had a son to mourn. So, since life in this world is for the living, and his own life was likely to go on many years after Mr. Withers had been gathered to the reward of the righteous, Thane worked himself ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... the secret realized fully that the girl was being endowed with an immense fortune, and that she would inevitably be the quarry of every self-seeking relative whose interest would be served by attacking her rights in the premises. "The lawsuits must be cut out," was Williams' order to the judge. "Mart's brothers are a wolfish lot. We don't want any loose ends for them to ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... "The self-seeking demagogue starts out with the captivating doctrine, the rule of the people, but his end will be the dangerous despotism of one man rule—the rule of himself. Could you or any reasoning man who has followed the demagogues ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... He should have this great virtue; and in spite of many shortcomings (for what man is there who liveth and sinneth not?), naturalists as a class have it to a degree which makes them stand out most honourably in the midst of a self-seeking and mammonite generation, inclined to value everything by its money price, its private utility. The spirit which gives freely, because it knows that it has received freely; which communicates knowledge without ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... to gather from text-books the idea that the policy of the manufacturing party in England has always been liberal, progressive and patriotic; whereas that of the landed interest has been retrograde and selfish. There cannot be a greater delusion. English manufacturers have been just as self-seeking and narrow-minded as other people—no more and no less; they have been quite as ready to sacrifice the interests of others when they believed them to be opposed to their own, as the much-abused landowners. At this time every nation in Europe regarded the outlying portions of the Empire ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous
... as rather odd, that one of the first questions raised, after our separation from the greedy, struggling, self-seeking world, should relate to the possibility of getting the advantage over the outside barbarians in their own field of labor. But, to own the truth, I very soon became sensible that, as regarded society at large, we stood in a position of new hostility, rather than ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... antithesis of "spirit," as the name of the evil principle. Paul indeed uses "the flesh" in no restricted sense of merely sensual sin. With him it equally includes all other forms of wrong, like malevolence and pride and self-seeking. But the nomenclature and the way of thought which it reflected put a stigma on the whole physical nature of man. In that stigma lay the germ of asceticism, hostility to marriage, depreciation of some ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... high culture, of wide experience, of supreme ability, and, strangest of all, with a keen sense of humour—that such an one should voluntarily step down from high social position at the bidding of a vulgar, selfish, self-seeking, and, according to some hints dropped here and there, grossly immoral man, should, at beck of his fat forefinger, go forth to a strange land to live amid sordid circumstances, and with uncongenial company, to work ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, June 20, 1891 • Various
... singularly effective. His addresses were not only free from all ambition as to ornate or attractive language, but also as to original or characteristic thought. There was such an entire absence of all self-seeking about the man, and he so thoroughly identified himself with the people whose interests he pleaded, that, possessing a fair readiness of speech, and aptness for ad captandum argument, he could not fail to secure the favourable attention of earnest men on a subject where ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... not perhaps far-fetched that, as Cardinal Beauchamp had great possessions, he took this occasion to testify how in his heart he slighted them. Or again—for history seems to prove that he was not an entirely scrupulous man, nor entirely untainted by self-seeking—that his tribute to Noble Poverty may have been the assertion, by a spirit netted among the briars of this world's policy, that at least it saw and suspired after the way to Heaven. Video ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... arguments as these are perhaps too much in the air to be convincing. Well, then, let us appeal to experience. Let us see what the systematic cultivation of his natural faculties has done for the child in Utopia. I have already pointed out that the unselfishness of the children—the complete absence of self-seeking and self-assertion—is one of the most noticeable features of the life of their school. Now there is no place for moral teaching on the time-table of the school: and I can say without hesitation that the direct inculcation of morality is wholly foreign ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... of the Sea" in his righteous indignation at the conduct of the greedy, grasping woman; and the moral of the story remained with me, as the story itself did. I think I understood dimly, even then, that mean avarice and self-seeking ambition always find their true level in muddy earth, never ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... and his fellow-men, has commonly no knowledge of human nature in the larger sense, but merely knows from observation how the average man of a certain limited class is likely to act within a narrow prescribed sphere of self-seeking. Town life, then, strongly favours the education of certain shallow forms of intelligence. In actual attainment the townsman is somewhat more advanced than the countryman. But the deterioration of physique which accompanies this gain causes a weakening of mental fibre: the potentiality of intellectual ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... which is but one. I exhort you, brethren, in your comings together, Let all things be done decently, and in order, according to the Scriptures. Let all things be done among you without strife and envy, without self-seeking and vain-glory. Be clothed with humility, and submit to one another in love. Let the gifts of the church be exercised according to order. Let no gift be concealed which is for edification; yet let those gifts be chiefly exercised which are most for the perfecting of ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... the entire College of Cardinals and every official in the service of the Holy See, for the purposes of the expedition against the Muslim, who was in arms against Christianity. Naturally that tax was not popular with luxurious, self-seeking, cinquecento prelates, who in the main cared entirely for their own prosperity and not at all for that of Christianity, and you may realize how, by levying it, Alexander laid himself open ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... demagogue than he was as courtier, lackey, or parliamentary intriguer. Indeed, he is almost certainly less so, for he must at least in some fashion serve, even if only that he may deceive them, those whose servant he should be. At any rate, the purely self-seeking demagogue is certainly a recurrent figure in democratic politics, and of the self-seeking demagogue Aaron Burr ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... to these same Accessions. All this can and does progress, but mostly slowly, intermittently, with short violent paroxysms of excess and long sleepy reactions of defect, with one-sidedness, travesties, and—worst of all—with worldly indifference and self-seeking. The grace and aid of the Simultaneous Richness are here also always necessary; nor can these things ever really progress except through a deep religious sense—all mere scepticism and all levelling down are simply so much waste. Still, we can speak of progress in the Science of Religion ...
— Progress and History • Various
... republic. The son, therefore, is an American patriot, and what though it seem at times overtaxed, his patriotism, unlike that of the individual under our first type, is genuine, for it is not primarily self-seeking. When he speaks of ideals, it is not to say we have no need of religions at all, but rather that we all in America have more or less the same belief only that we choose to express it differently, each according to his ancestral traditions. The three rings, says Nathan der Weise, may ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... myself, Honora, that I'm grieving for! It's those hot-headed, misguided, wayward fellows of mine! They've left the homes I tried to help them win, they've followed a self-seeking, half-mad, wholly vicious agitator, and their lives, that I meant to have flow on so smoothly, will be troubled and wasted. I know so well what will happen! And then, their hate! It hangs over me like a ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... page to the fall of the light. It was a phrenetic indictment, but under the paltry rhetoric of the man there was genuine indignation and pain. There were revolting details of cruelty to the miserable, helpless, and defenceless; there were greed, and self-seeking, stripped naked; but more revolting to see without a mask was that falsehood which had been hiding under the words that for ages had spurred men to noble deeds, to self-sacrifice, to heroism. What was appalling was the sudden perception that all the traditional ideals ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... and most single-minded men who ever entered Canadian public life. From Ireland came Dr. William Warren Baldwin, whose son Robert, born in Canada, was less surpassingly able than the younger Bidwell but equally moderate and equally beyond suspicion of faction or self-seeking. ...
— The Canadian Dominion - A Chronicle of our Northern Neighbor • Oscar D. Skelton
... remembering that his father had called him "son" in a poignancy of sympathy all through the trials of the past, and it hurt to hear it now. It linked that time with this, as Madame Beattie, in her unabashed self-seeking, linked it. Perhaps he was never to escape. A prisoner, that was what he was. They were all prisoners, Madame Beattie to her squalid love of gain, Esther to her elementary love of herself, Lydia—he looked at her as she stood still in the background ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... of shame, of remorse, of tender remembrance, shot across the heart of the decorous, worldly, self-seeking man, who owed all that he now was to the ci-devant vaurien before him. Again he stretched forth his hand, and this time grasped De Mauleon's warmly. "Forgive me," he said, feelingly and hoarsely; "forgive me, I was to blame. By character, and perhaps by the necessities ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... be saints, her priests shining lights, her people stars in her firmament. If she is Divine, her policy must be unerring, her acts all gracious, her lightest movements inspired. There must be no brutality anywhere, no self-seeking, no ambition, no instability. How should there be, ...
— Paradoxes of Catholicism • Robert Hugh Benson
... said good-morning to him—if you only looked at him once, on the street—I don't see how you could possibly imagine.... Why, Cally, he's about the least self-seeking human being that ever lived. He's so absolutely un-self-seeking that he gives away every single thing he's got, to anybody that comes along and wants it. In the first place, he's giving away his life.... Some of his ideas may ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... re-recanted. They were all a dubious lot, I'll admit. That is why I hate to see a girl like Viola Lambert put in their class by a self-seeking fakir ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... of mean purpose and low conception of the sacredness of fact and reality. Who has not observed inferior original power achieving greater results even in the intellectual field itself, where the superior understanding happens to have been unequally yoked with a self-seeking character, over scenting the expedient? If Hume had been in the early productive part of his life the hypocrite which he wished it were in his power to show himself in its latter part, we may be tolerably sure that European philosophy would have missed ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... it only makes room for another. True, "Punch" killed the craze for sunflowers and long necks; but then "Punch" invented it. It was merely made to be destroyed brilliantly, like a Chinese cracker or a Roman candle. Folly is older than "Punch's" jokes, and will survive them. Snobbery and self-seeking, pettiness and stupidity, envy, hate, and all uncharitableness, were no secret to the mummies in the British Museum. "Unto the place whither the rivers go, thither they go again." Are there not a hundred sayings in Ecclesiastes and Menander, in Horace and Moliere, as apt to-day as ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... with the rest of the philosophes. That there were charlatans among them, vain men, pretentious men, profligate men, selfish, self-seeking, and hypocritical men, who doubts? Among what class of men were there not such in those evil days? In what class of men are there not such now, in spite of all social and moral improvement? But nothing but the conviction, among the average, ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley
... the "Great Mystery" was silent, solitary, free from all self-seeking. It was silent, because all speech is of necessity feeble and imperfect; therefore the souls of my ancestors ascended to God in wordless adoration. It was solitary, because they believed that He is nearer to us in solitude, and there were no priests authorized ...
— The Soul of the Indian - An Interpretation • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... their sorrow may turn from self-seeking to God and good deeds. But sorrow may come in a trivial nature from trivial causes; the soul may be plunged into despair because one has been denied a gift or a pleasure. The demonstrativeness of grief or sorrow is not ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... anywhere one with itself. It speaks in diverse tongues. Its processes and objects are variant. It seems but an iridescent dream which lends itself equally to the fancies of the impracticable and the scheming of the self-seeking, breeding visionaries and pretenders. ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... great many useless and expensive court offices. On the 17th of January 1648 he procured the marriage of the tsar with Maria Miloslavshaya, himself marrying her sister, Anna, ten days later. The Miloslavskis were typical self-seeking 17th century boyars, whose extortions made them generally detested. In May 1648 the people of Moscow rose against them, and the young tsar was compelled to dismiss both them and their patron Morozov. The successful issue of the Moscow riots was the occasion of disquieting disturbances all over ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... of the State justly commended Mr. Gaston's conduct in not forcing his own nomination, a course so completely in accord with his character, and his entire devotion to the party welfare. He did not display the least semblance of self-seeking. ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II. No. 5, February, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... if the Hesea's tale be true, I did once lay down my royal rank and dare the dangers of an unsailed sea; O thou whom in ages gone I would have sheltered with my frail body from the sorceries of this cold, self-seeking witch; O thou whom but a little while ago at my own life's risk I drew from death ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... had meditated a murder and not a sacrifice. In our late bloody and lamentable wars, how many drew swords on either side, from the purest and most honourable motives? How many from the culpable suggestions of ambition, self-seeking, and love of plunder? Yet while they marched in the same ranks, and spurred their horses at the same trumpet-sound, the memory of the former is dear to us as patriots or loyalists—that of those who acted on mean or unworthy promptings, ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... enemies, but he early in his career became convinced that no man could accomplish anything of value in this world without running counter either to the opinions of honest men, who were as sincere as he, or to the self-seeking of the dishonest and the unscrupulous. Up to this time he had had mainly to deal with the former class, as in his successful efforts to establish the National Academy of Design on a firm footing; but in the future he was destined to make many and bitter enemies of both classes. In ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... supereminent persons, his passionate abhorrence of democracy, his admiration of strong character, his disposition to work from historical bases rather than from absolute principles, but representing them at once with a prudence of common sense and a prudence of self-seeking and timidity which are alike foreign to his ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... however, that he was able to win Charlotte Bronte in spite of the fact that his predecessors had inspired in her such hearty contempt. 'I think he must be like all the curates I have seen,' she writes of one; 'they seem to me a self-seeking, vain, empty race.' ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... we must have a reformation displeasing to God, or displeasing to men. It is not the right reformation which is not displeasing to a Tobiah, to a Sanballat, to a Demetrius, to the earthly-minded, to the self-seeking politicians, to the carnal and profane; it is but the old enmity between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent (Gen. iii. 15): nay, what if reformation be displeasing to good men, in so far as they are unregenerate, ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... such a good Christian! And yet she had so nobly and so undeniably saved Mr. Keller's life! What right had I to impute self-seeking motives to such a woman as this? Mean! mean! there ...
— Jezebel • Wilkie Collins
... not otherwise express itself, and that was thrown into moulds shaped by habitual refinement and cultivated taste. It was from the first a movement from which, as much by instinct and temper as by deliberate intention, self-seeking in all its forms was excluded. Those whom it influenced looked not for great things for themselves, nor thought of making ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... a depressing sight when an artist in life, even on a small scale, who has grown old in elegant trifles and ostentation and self-seeking, instead of coming to a sudden end in a fight or as he goes home at night from the tavern, must live on to grow melancholy and end as a dabbler in the sentimental reflections which have always been foreign to him. But since life is incontestably a powerful composer, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... another. Some were for Harcourt, some for Morley, some for a leader in the House of Lords. Presently these disputations died down; what logicians call "the process of exhaustion" settled the question, and Campbell-Bannerman—the least self-seeking man in public life—found himself the accepted leader of the Liberal party. The leadership was an uncomfortable inheritance. There was a certain section of the Liberal party which was anxious that Lord Rosebery should return on his own ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... that it is not the grosser passions and forms of vice alone that darken the understanding and alienate the heart from the truth. Pride, vanity, ambition, avarice—in a word, the spirit of self-seeking and self-exaltation in every form—will effectually hinder the man in whose bosom they bear sway from coming to the knowledge of the truth; for they will incline him to seek a religion which flatters him and promises him impunity ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... the opinions and character of the men who are to succeed this generation: that they maybe suited to that blessed work, one, whose public course is ended, invokes them to draw their creed from the fountains of our political history, rather than from the lower stream, polluted as it has been by self-seeking place-hunters and ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... of sacrifice; with that maternal compassion which is a vital element in woman's love for man. Sublimated beyond passion and self-seeking, and asking only the right to give, she poured out the treasure of her soul at his feet, though her pride demanded that he ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed
... service: it was the most natural thing in the world for people to think as they did. Yet not a human being ever accused Hetty of flirting; her manner was always as open, friendly, and cordial as an honest boy's, and with no more trace of self-seeking or self-consciousness about it. She was as full of fun and mischief, too, as any boy could be. She had slid down hill with the wildest of them, till even her father ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Anonymous
... answered; "but he teaches more than that. I knew a girl in Paris who studied with him. She was quite intricate and self-seeking when she began. And in six months he had changed her whole nature. She became elemental and direct, and," she put her hands together and threw them apart with the gesture which he knew so well, "and splendid! Like ...
— Katrine • Elinor Macartney Lane
... qualities required is such as would hardly be found for centuries together. The most fine and sensitive tact of piety would be essential. With it must go absolute sincerity and singleness of purpose. Any dash of mere conventionalism or self-seeking would spoil the whole. There must be that clear illuminated insight that is only given to those who are in a more than ordinary sense 'pure in heart.' And on the other hand, along with these unique spiritual qualities must go a sound and exact scientific training, a just ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... and in that way stood the feet of the pioneer. His way led directly, unerringly, to the land of freedom. All other ways, and especially the Liberty party way, twisted, doubled upon themselves, branched into labyrinths of folly and self-seeking. "Ho! all ye that desire the freedom of the slave, who would labor for liberty, follow me and I will show you the only true way," was the tone which the editor of the Liberator held to men, who were battering with might and ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... of his character as an agent do not desert him when he emerges from the naive communal culture where the dominant note of life is the unanalysed and undifferentiated solidarity of the individual with the group with which his life is bound up. When he enters upon the predatory stage, where self-seeking in the narrower sense becomes the dominant note, this propensity goes with him still, as the pervasive trait that shapes his scheme of life. The propensity for achievement and the repugnance to futility remain the underlying economic motive. The propensity changes only in the form of its ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... a very long period. But as time went on negligence and self-seeking crept in. Those whose duty it was to superintend, threw more and more responsibility on their inferiors in office, and in time it became rare for the rulers to interfere or to interest themselves in any of the operations. This was the ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... thing of sinister aspect, as more or less immoral. Man is required to have no passions. Passion, it is true, is not quite the suitable word for what I wish to express. I mean here nothing more than human activity as resulting from private interests, special, or if you will, self-seeking designs—with this qualification, that the whole energy of will and character is devoted to their attainment, and that other interests (which would in themselves constitute attractive aims), or, rather, all things else, are ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... eve in the garden of the soul, calling it to a happiness which affrights it. And the timid and self-seeking soul strives to hide itself under the stars, under the clouds of heaven, under human love, under the distractions of work and pleasure and study, offers itself as a wistful servitor to child and man ...
— The Hound of Heaven • Francis Thompson
... any Mr. Jones as for the Duke of Omnium; but were he to do it, it would be said of him that it had been done because the man was Duke of Omnium. There are positions exalted beyond the reach of benevolence, because benevolence would seem to be self-seeking. "Your father, if he were here," said he, "would know ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... a little mad in order to prophesy and to enjoy poetic ecstasies; and in the case of Schlatter the flower of altruism which often blossoms in the hearts of such "madmen" was manifested in his complete lack of self-seeking and in his compassion for the poor and suffering which drew crowds around him. As to his miracles, we may—without attempting to explain them—state decisively that they do not differ from those accomplished by means ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... his mode of creating a product, there is no equilibrium within the subgroup. The more efficient user of labor and capital is able to draw away labor and capital from the less efficient one, and the self-seeking impulse which is at the basis of competition impels him to do it. The producer who works at the greater advantage is foreordained to underbid and supplant the one who works under more unfavorable conditions. That a static state may exist and that the movements of labor and capital ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... missed, of failure, of limitation, evoked another, as solemn, but sweeter and more touching, of human lives irrevocably dependent on his, of the pathetic unalterable claim of marriage, the poverty and hopelessness of all self-seeking, the essential wealth, rich and making rich, of all self-spending. As he thought of his wife and son a deep tenderness flooded the man's whole nature. With a long sigh, it was as though he took them ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... nature, and feel His presence within them as the very life of their life, so that in proportion as they come to themselves they come to Him. They tell us that what separates us from Him and from happiness is, first, self-seeking in all its forms; and, secondly, sensuality in all its forms; that these are the ways of darkness and death, which hide from us the face of God; while the path of the just is like a shining light, which shineth more and more unto the perfect day. As they have toiled up the narrow way, the Spirit ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... of the court reading the New Testament instead of pagan poetry, or heard their voices chanting godly psalms rather than the old love-ballads. She did not object openly to the pious form of speech which was known as the "language of Canaan." She was a passionless woman, self-seeking but not revengeful, and adopted a certain degree of tolerance, no doubt, from her patriotic counsellor, L'Hopital, who resembled the Prince of Orange ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... Democracy. All had thus their fair share. Under Responsible Government, with all power in the hands of the Legislative Assembly, the balance would be overthrown and the democracy would be supreme. To Haliburton, control by the democracy meant control by the crafty, self-seeking professional politician, as he saw him, or thought he saw him, in the neighbouring United States. The people, well meaning, but ignorant and greedy, were at the mercy of the appeals to prejudice and pocket of these ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant
... maintains that the original motive in all living things was self-preservation for self-realisation; and that this elementary law was in itself necessary and good, the essential condition of progress. But just as we to-day know well how hard it is to draw the line which distinguishes a right self-seeking from the wrong, so it has been from the outset. The distinction is a fine one, and the balance is easily upset. We have but to suppose that this perversion of the right and lawful happened at an early stage, to see that nothing more would have been required ...
— God and the World - A Survey of Thought • Arthur W. Robinson
... looking as from a distance at me in my attitude of protest and restraint. If I loved him enough, I could forego love itself for him. Somewhere there is a fault, it would seem, somewhere in my abandon is restraint, in my love, self-seeking. Remorse overcame me just as he was about to leave, and I schooled myself to think that there had been no affront, that it honours a woman to be wanted no matter for what end, that every use is a noble use, that we die the same, ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... us, and this heritage is one of jealousy and hate, not of charity and toleration. It is an heritage of legalism and technicalities, of self-will and individualism, of shibboleths that have become a dead letter, of prejudices that are fostered on distorted history and the propaganda of the self-seeking and the vain. The spirit of Christ is not in it, but the malice of Satan working upon the better natures of men and justifying in the name of conscience and principle what are frequently the workings of self-will and ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... could never do. This reaching-out of feeble human hands, this new compelling force which is going to bind us all together, this deep desire for cohesion which swells in our hearts and casts out all smallness and all self-seeking—this is what we mean when we speak of the Next of Kin. It is not a physical relationship, but the great spiritual bond which unites all those whose hearts have grown more tender by sorrow, and whose spiritual eyes are not dimmed, but washed ...
— The Next of Kin - Those who Wait and Wonder • Nellie L. McClung
... said March, "that there was a great deal of mixed motive in the men who went into the war as well as in those who kept out of it. We canonized all that died or suffered in it, but some of them must have been self-seeking and low-minded, like men in other vocations." He found himself saying this in Dryfoos's behalf; the old man looked at him gratefully at first, he ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Lady Maulevrier believed that the end would sanctify the means. Lesbia, once married to a worthy man, such a man as Lord Hartfield, for instance, would soon rise to a higher level than that Belgravian swamp over which the malarian vapours of falsehood, and slander, and self-seeking, and prurient imaginings hang dense and thick. She would rise to the loftier table-land of that really great world which governs and admonishes the ruck of mankind by examples of noble deeds and noble thoughts; the world of statesmen, and soldiers, and thinkers, and reformers; ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... and stirring, Miserable sinners! 'Mong ignorant and erring, Miserable sinners! Sloth and self-seeking from us cast, Believing this the fittest fast, For of all prayers prayed 'neath the sun There is no prayer like work ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... temperance man. He was a practical, as well as an ardent, advocate of temperance, and the organization of the so-called "Third party" prohibitionists, excited, at once, his indignation and contempt. He was one of the first prohibitionists of Kansas to distrust St. John, and to denounce him as a self-seeking, ambitious demagogue. He had no use for any man who was not entirely sincere, or who was not willing to subordinate his own personal interest ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... Christian has to resort anew to the place of the penitent, and to come to Christ, as he did at first for pardon. It is a solemn thought that years of obedience and heroisms of self-surrender, may be so annihilated by some act of self-seeking distrust that the whole career has, as it were, to be begun anew from the very starting-point. It is a blessed thought that, however far and long we may have wandered, we can always return to the place where ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... on whose faithful devotion she had built as on a rock, was no less self-seeking and fickle than other men. She thought of him every day and every hour; and as soon as a vessel from the north cast anchor within sight, she watched the voyagers as they disembarked to detect him among them. She longed for ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... this fair country if the brood of corrupt, self-seeking, unscrupulous, unprincipled politicians" (here she named one of the two rival parties in the State) "continue to infest and poison our local councils and undermine our Parliamentary representation; if they continue to snatch votes ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... world in these last months was fit to cast a gloom upon my character. I had met many men, some of them leaders in Israel, whether by their birth or talents; and who among them all had shown clean hands? As for the Browns and Millers, I had seen their self-seeking, I could never again respect them. Prestongrange was the best yet; he had saved me, had spared me rather, when others had it in their minds to murder me outright; but the blood of James lay at his door; and I thought ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... developing, emancipating himself from the State and the group-system of society; but he was developing in a wrong direction. The importance of self, when realised in high and low alike, was becoming self-seeking, indifference to all but self. We have now to see whether philosophy could do anything to relieve this destitution of the Romans in regard ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... of tastes, suitability of character; these are the only bonds between my companions and myself; among them I would be a man, not a person of wealth; the charm of their society should never be embittered by self-seeking. If my wealth had not robbed me of all humanity, I would scatter my benefits and my services broadcast, but I should want companions about me, not courtiers, friends, not proteges; I should wish my friends ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... the Sabbath—the Jews' one last protection against the outer world, the one last dyke against the waves of heathendom. Nor did his complacency diminish when his intuition proved correct, and the preacher thundered against the self-will—ay, and the self-seeking—that undermined Israel's last fortification. What did they seek under the wall? Did they think their delving spades would come upon a hidden store of gold, upon an ancient treasure-chest? Nay, it was a coffin they would strike—a coffin of dead ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... know that you are vain and self-seeking, and look forward contentedly to the time when your father will transfer his ownership of your physical attractions to that nobleman who offers the ...
— The Jewel Merchants - A Comedy In One Act • James Branch Cabell
... regard for the other, nor concerns himself for another's need? How can that prayer be of help, good, acceptable and a common prayer, or a work of the Holy Day and of the assembled congregation, which they make who make their own petty prayers, one for this, the other for that, and have nothing but self-seeking, selfish ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... Wharton's son-in-law. Situated as he was, of course he must run some risk. And then, too, he had spoken of himself with a grain of truth when he had told the Duchess that he was not marrying for money. Ferdinand Lopez was not an honest man or a good man. He was a self-seeking, intriguing adventurer, who did not know honesty from dishonesty when he saw them together. But he had at any rate this good about him, that he did love the girl whom he was about to marry. He was willing to cheat all the world,—so that he might succeed, and make a ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... They are self-seeking. They "feed themselves," but they "feed not the flock." They take up religion for what they can make out of it! It is a carnal ambition, not a holy service. It is used for getting, not for giving, for self-glorification ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... sufficient atonement. But he cared little, for his nature was not a courtier's, and even then the English Normans were colder and graver men than those of France, and more overbearing in arms, but less self-seeking, one against another, ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... thrones for themselves. Hence James and John try to secure the foremost places, and hence the others' anger at what they thought an unfair attempt to push in front of them. What a contrast between Jesus, striding on ahead with 'set' face, and the Twelve unsympathetic and self-seeking, lagging behind to squabble about pre-eminence! We have in this incident two parts: the request and its answer, the indignation of the Ten and its rebuke. The one sets forth the qualifications for the highest ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... or a self-seeking politician? Give evidence. How could he justify the means that he used to win Brutus? In what respect did he surpass Brutus? What case did he make against Caesar? How far was he right? What weakness and what strength does he show in ...
— Teachers' Outlines for Studies in English - Based on the Requirements for Admission to College • Gilbert Sykes Blakely
... is plain and clear of what the State must one day mean and what the work of the world must be, when once more the devil of self-seeking and greed flees to his own place, and each man knows that his life is his own only as he gives it to high service, and to loving thought for every weaker soul. The co-operative commonwealth must come; and when it has come, ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell
... tears that freely fell were not of grief, but tears of yearning love, of sympathy, of solemn joy and gratitude to God for such a life in its rounded completeness, such an example and testimony, such fidelity to conscience, such recoil from all self-seeking, such unswerving devotion to duty, come what might of peril ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney
... the best society, she might have given herself without reserve to the rapture of her idyl; but her circumstances were peculiar. Rosie was obliged to be practical, to look ahead. A fairy prince was not only a romantic dream in her dreary life, but an agency to be utilized. The least self-seeking of drowning maids might expect the hero on the bank to pull her out of the water. The very fact that she recognized in Claude a tendency to dally with her on the brink instead of landing her in a place of safety compelled her to be the ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... and Burgundy, King Chilperic reigning over Austrasia; King Sigebert over Neustria. But the power behind the throne lay in the wives of these kings, with whom alone we have to do. Contrasted characters they were,—Fredegonde wicked, faithless, self-seeking; Brunehild patriotic and devoted to the good of her country; yet in the end wickedness triumphed, and honesty died a violent and frightful death. With this preliminary we may proceed with ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... of the eighteenth century was fond of dwelling upon the loneliness of the princely station. Standing above all other men, occupied habitually with weighty matters of state, surrounded by self-seeking flatterers and schemers, how was a ruler ever to hear the truth or to know the blessedness of disinterested friendship? Awful fate to be thus cut off from tender human affection and compelled to tread ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... The Rivals, "it hurts his conscience to be found out." There is no honesty or sincerity in the man. His covert gibes are the spiteful emanation of personal disappointment; his lofty morality is a cloak for unscrupulous self-seeking. He has always shown himself ready to say anything or do anything that may serve his own interests. In the general election of 1885 he made frantic efforts to get into Parliament as a member of the Irish Party. He ghosted every member of the party whose influence ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (2 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... are a self-seeking and a resolute, but a shy, race; swift to act, when swiftness is needed, but seldom knowing quite what to say. The MacQuern, with native reluctance to give something for nothing, had determined to have the pleasure of knowing the young lady for whom he was to lay down ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... not stand for this sort of thing any more, he told himself. And as he thought his mind wandered back to Jennie and her peculiar "Oh no, no!" There was someone that appealed to him. That was a type of womanhood worth while. Not sophisticated, not self-seeking, not watched over and set like a man-trap in the path of men, but a sweet little girl—sweet as a flower, who was without anybody, apparently, to watch over her. That night in his room he composed a letter, ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... with human progress as something immediate in life, something to be immediately attacked by political parties and groups pointing primarily to that end. I now began to see that just as in my own being there was the rather shallow, rather vulgar, self-seeking careerist, who wore an admirable silk hat and bustled self-consciously through the lobby, and a much greater and indefinitely growing unpublished personality behind him—my hinterland, I have called it—so in human affairs generally the permanent reality is also ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... confident than his opponents, he was not afraid. The effects of his "Union, it-must-be-preserved" speech were becoming evident; he gradually came to stand for the budding nationality among the self-seeking groups who would have their way or break up the Confederation. With the large majority of the up-country of the Middle States and South in favor of a tariff, even a high tariff, he promptly accepted the proposed revision. Already nominated ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... read the first part of the letter he laughed hastily, and said, "The abbot hath no such lily." But when he had finished it, he said, "GOD rid my soul of self-seeking! The common children shall have them, ...
— Last Words - A Final Collection of Stories • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... and still very young and untaught of life, she could not be expected to take these large views, or to guess at the Hand of Mercy which holds the cup of human woes. She saw her mother fading away because of her father's obstinacy and self-seeking, and it was inconceivable to her that such an unnecessary thing could be allowed by a gentle and loving Providence. Therefore, she turned her back on Providence, as many a strong soul has done before her, rejecting it for the reason that she could ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... full-face portraits began to be common. The earliest striking achievement of this sort, Mantegna's head of Cardinal Scarampo (now in Berlin), was not the kind to find favour in Venice. The full-face likeness of this wolf in sheep's clothing brought out the workings of the self-seeking, cynical spirit within too clearly not to have revolted the Venetians, who looked upon all such qualities as impious in the individual because they were the strict monopoly of the State. In the portraits of Doges which decorated the frieze of its great Council Hall, Venice ...
— The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance - Third Edition • Bernhard Berenson
... with me to the gate. I was much affected by what seemed to me the dramatically fitting outcome of my old kinswoman's Quixotism. I saw Cousin Tryphena picturesquely as the Happy Fool of old folk-lore, the character who, through his very lack of worldly wisdom, attains without effort all that self-seeking folks try for in vain. The happy ending of her adventure filled me with a cheerful wonder at the ways of Providence, which I tried to pass on to her in the exclamation, "Why, Cousin Tryphena, it's like a story-book? You're going to enjoy having those people. The woman is as nice ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... unless the child learned by example and precept the great principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, he was going to remain what by nature we all are,—imperious, demanding, and self-seeking. The whole scheme must fail if his education failed. It is not too much to say that the success of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution depended, in the minds of certain early Democrats, upon the woman. The doctrines ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... Empire, not a Republic of republics. It's a difficult thing for men to govern themselves, though they can do it better than anyone else has ever done it for them. We are making this wonderful experiment here in the new world. The fate of unborn millions hangs on its success. You're done with self and self-seeking. Ambition is a dream that is passed. Good! Lay your life in unselfish sacrifice on the altar of your country. Only the man who has given up ambition is fit for great leadership. He alone dares to seek and know ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... against those who speak of infusing into it a more Christian spirit. For him the whole body of our industrialism is rotten with selfishness and covetousness, the high note of service entirely absent from it, the one energy which informs it the energy of aggressive self-seeking. Such a system cannot be patched. It is anti-Christian. It ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... moment, as she remembered her wavering, crossed her hands on her breast, and ejaculated, 'May He deal mercifully with me! Yet it may be at an exceeding cost—at that of all my cherished schemes, of all that was pride and self-seeking. Alice, look not so terrified. Nothing can be done immediately, or with violence, in this first mourning for the King; and I trust to make use of the time to disguise me, and escape to England, where I may keep my vow as anchoress, or as ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... during his whole life, absorbed in lofty contemplations, all from love of truth itself and to benefit the world, could not have had a mean or sordid soul. "As a man thinketh, so is he." We admit that he was a man of the world, politic, self-seeking, extravagant, careless about his debts and how he raised money to pay them; but we deny that he was a bad judge on the whole, or was unpatriotic, or immoral in his private life, or mean in his ordinary dealings, or more cruel and harsh in his judicial ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... they were to concentrate their resources, to make a successful bid for victory. 60,000 men might march into Maryland and threaten Washington. But while he was anxious that these views should be laid before the President, he would earnestly disclaim the charge of self-seeking. He wished to follow, and not to lead. He was willing to follow anyone—Lee, or Ewell, or anyone who would fight." "Why do you not urge your views," asked Mr. Boteler, "on General Lee?" "I have done so," replied Jackson. ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... wrong at first, but both have been wrong ever since Sedan, so at least I think, but it is too long a matter to discuss in a letter. If the new Emperor [81] does not grant most honourable terms to Paris, I shall give him up altogether as a self-seeking, hard-hearted old man of fire and sword. I dare say you have not heard as many sad stories as we have of the losses and disasters and unspeakable sorrows of people in Paris, known to other people we have seen. I won't ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... it was in a note in the "Christian Year," and Babie looked out the reference, and found that it was Jeremiah's rebuke to Baruch for self-seeking amid the ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Show me that though the body—dear home and vehicle of love—may die, yet love in its essence remains everlastingly conscious, faithful and complete. Bend my will to harmony with Thine, O Lord, and cleanse me of self-seeking. Ah! but still let me see his face once again, once again, oh, my God—and I will rebel no more. Let me look on him, once again, if only for a moment, and I shall be content. Hear me, I am greatly troubled, ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... Albigenses, was made seneschal. His English estates ensured some measure of fidelity, and his energy and experience were guarantees of his competence, though, as a younger member of the great house of Thouars, he belonged by birth to the inner circle of the Poitevin nobility, whose treachery, levity, and self-seeking were proverbial. The powerful Viscounts of Thouars were constantly kept in check by their traditional enemies the Counts of La Marche, whose representative, Hugh of Lusignan, was by far the strongest of the local barons. His cousin, and sometime betrothed, Isabella, Countess of Angouleme, the ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... shall not linger in my Court. Such lives have no place here. Get you back to my Isle of Jersey, where ye may live in peace. Here all is noise, self-seeking and time-service. If ye twain are not happy I will say the world should never have ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... creed, he fretted in bonds from which he could never get wholly free. Intrepid, independent, steadfast, frugal, prudent, dauntless, he trampled on the pride of kings with the pride of Lucifer. He was clannish to excess, painfully jealous of proximate rivals, self-centred if not self-seeking, fired by zeal and inflamed by almost mean emulations, resenting benefits as debts, ungenerous—with one exception, that of Goethe,—to his intellectual creditors; and, with reference to men and manners around him at variance with himself, violently intolerant. He bore a strange relation ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... Jerusalem entered on a bitterer stage when Agrippa died in 44 C.E. Influenced by his self-seeking band of freedmen-counselors, who saw in office in Palestine a golden opportunity for spoliation, Claudius placed the vacant kingdom again under the direct administration of Roman procurators, and appointed to the office a string of the ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... chapter. It is sufficient testimony to his worth, however, that he was able to win Charlotte Bronte in spite of the fact that his predecessors had inspired in her such hearty contempt. 'I think he must be like all the curates I have seen,' she writes of one; 'they seem to me a self-seeking, vain, ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... pamphlet itself Winstanley attempts to prove that the coming reign of Righteousness, and the overthrow of the Covetous, Self-Seeking Power, are entirely in accordance with the prophesies of the Scriptures, more especially with Revelation and John. In its final pages he vehemently protests against the continued union of Church and State, or rather against the continued ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... be said that he was less self-seeking than those who were with him in Virginia, making glory his aim rather than gain always; that he had a superior conception of what a colony should be, and how it should establish itself, and that his judgment of what was best was nearly always vindicated by the event. He was not the founder of ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... hard as those who win them, but deliberately adopt a line which makes the winning of them impossible, must be judged to have an aim in life other than personal advancement; whatever admixture of self-seeking may enter into the detail of their lives, their fundamental motive must be outside Self. The pioneers of Socialism, Anarchism, and Syndicalism have, for the most part, experienced prison, exile, and poverty, deliberately incurred because ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... love of Jesus and His brethren be not purely the motive of your gifts. Alas! you might not give your superfluities, but "bestow all your goods to feed the poor;" you might even "give your body to be burned" for them, and yet be utterly destitute of charity, if self-seeking, self-pleasing or self-ends guide you; and guide you they must, until the love of God be by the Holy Ghost shed abroad ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... He had saved the state in war and he remained in peace-time its principal mainstay. With his value as measured by these priceless services he compared the low estimate put upon him by those who continued to identify themselves with the state—the over-fed, lazy, self-seeking money-getters who reserved to themselves the fruits of ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... early years, Leopold's interest in the Congo was unselfish may or may not be granted, but, knowing him, as we now know him, as one of the shrewdest and, of speculators, the most unscrupulous, at the time of the Berlin Conference, his self-seeking may safely be accepted. Quietly, unostentatiously, he presented himself to its individual members as a candidate for the post of ...
— The Congo and Coasts of Africa • Richard Harding Davis
... sure, Sir Gilbert had his qualms of conscience, too, over having thus sent off Guy Waring, as he believed, to his grave in Cape Colony. He was not at heart a bad man, though he was pushing, and selfish, and self-seeking, and to a certain extent even—of late—unscrupulous. He had his bad half-hours every now and again with his own moral consciousness. But he had learnt to stifle his doubts and to keep down his terrors. After all, he had told Guy no more than the truth; and if Guy in his panic-terror chose to run ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... Vest was ever a firm and watchful guardian of the Yellowstone National Park, showing in this matter, as in many others, "the highest patriotism and statesmanship." For many years, from 1882 to 1894, Senator Vest remained the chief defender of a National possession that self-seeking persons in many parts of the country were trying to use for their ...
— The Discovery of Yellowstone Park • Nathaniel Pitt Langford
... that an aroused and passionate spirit could kindle in them. She saw what she had never beheld before indeed, but the meaning of which no woman ever yet mistook. It was her work—the assurance of her disgrace—the offspring of her self-seeking and unwomanly behavior; and yet, as she looked, the blood rose gradually to her pale cheeks, and stained them with a deeper and yet deeper spot of red; her glance caught a spark from his, and her fragile and drooping figure seemed to dilate and grow stately, as if inspired by some burst ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... would not serve. They had to piece it out with subordinate machinery, cumbrous, difficult to manage, ill-adapted to the original structure. Each limb of this subordinate machinery, moreover, was a point d'appui for insidious and self-seeking party leaders. ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... Lord's character forbids that we should think of him for a moment as devoted to the gathering of worldly wealth. He came to minister unto, not to serve himself. Self-seeking was foreign to his nature. A great truth was spoken by the scoffers. "He saved others, himself ...
— Usury - A Scriptural, Ethical and Economic View • Calvin Elliott
... virtue only of the petty people: there it is said "like and like," and "hand washeth hand":—they have neither the right nor the power for YOUR self-seeking! ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... a large class of our wealthy and cultivated people, that to go into public life is to descend to duties beneath them. They judge the men who occupy such positions with insulting severity, classing them in their minds as corrupt and self-seeking, than which nothing can be more childish or more imbecile. Any observer who has lived in the different grades of society will quickly renounce the puerile idea that sporting or intellectual pursuits are alone worthy of a gentleman's attention. This very political life, ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... tests that a youth must pass before he can get a degree, I found that they have no class lists, and discourage anything like competition among the students; this, indeed, they regard as self-seeking and unneighbourly. The examinations are conducted by way of papers written by the candidate on set subjects, some of which are known to him beforehand, while others are devised with a view of testing his general capacity ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... he had a passion for success. Whether it was breaking a horse, or reclaiming land, or fighting Indians, or saving a state, whatever he set his hand to, that he carried through to the end. With him there never was any shadow of turning back. When, without any self-seeking, he was placed at the head of the Revolution, he made up his mind that he would carry it through everything to victory, if victory were possible. Death or a prison could stop him, but neither defeat nor neglect, and still less the forces of ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... sagacity knew that if these untutored fishermen were to light up Europe and Asia with the torch of the gospel they must have an experience themselves which would transform them from self-seeking, cowardly men to giants ...
— The Heart-Cry of Jesus • Byron J. Rees
... out his penance. Softened and exalted, he little realised that the penance was unnecessary and self-imposed, that the mood which now took on the heroic tone of self-sacrifice was still a mood of self-seeking, that his love for Lena was selfish now as it had always been, and utterly unworthy of the devotion he received. It was true that he loved her, but he loved himself and his ambitions and revenges more. Her forgiveness was but permission to indulge them to the end. Nevertheless, when he found Felicity ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... for England and France. As for Germany, the prospects of the Netherlands were not flattering. The Reforming spirit had grown languid, from various causes. The self-seeking motives of many Protestant princes had disgusted the nobles. Was that the object of the bloody wars of religion, that a few potentates should be enabled to enrich themselves by confiscating the broad lands and accumulated treasures of the Church? Had the creed of Luther been ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... wandered among the ways of men. They saw poverty and misery and pain, which came of the evil which man had done upon the earth, and were his punishment, and could be cured by nothing but by the return of each to his Father, and the giving up of all self-worship and self-seeking and sin. But amid all the confusion and among those who had fallen the lowest they found not one who was forsaken, whose name the Father had forgotten, or who was not made to pause in his appointed moment, and to sit upon his throne and hear the pleadings before him of the great advocates ...
— The Little Pilgrim: Further Experiences. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... BROOKE, of an enthusiastic, impulsive, unselfish and almost Quixotic disposition, who wore his heart on his sleeve and let his opinions of men and their actions be freely known, could not but have incurred the enmity of many meaner, self-seeking minds. The Commission, after hearing all that could be brought against him, found that there was nothing proved, but it was not deemed advisable that Sir JAMES should continue to act as the British representative in Borneo ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... fleeting impressions, in one picture—and failed. He had made himself very agreeable, the single time she had met him; but.... There was Richard's opinion of him: Richard did not like him or trust him; he thought him unscrupulous in business, cold and self-seeking. Poor, poor little Agnes! That such a misfortune should befall just her! Stranger still that she, Polly, should be mixed up ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... high As love which Heaven with single eye Considers. Equal and entire, Therein benevolence, desire, Elsewhere ill-join'd or found apart, Become the pulses of one heart, Which now contracts, and now dilates, And, both to the height exalting, mates Self-seeking to self-sacrifice. Nay, in its subtle paradise (When purest) this one love unites All modes of these two opposites, All balanced in accord so rich Who may determine which is which? Chiefly God's Love does in it live, And nowhere else so sensitive; For each is all that the other's ...
— The Victories of Love - and Other Poems • Coventry Patmore
... how little people see or think of it. They just live and forget that beneath them lie their fathers' bones. They forget that in some few days—perhaps more, perhaps less—other unknown creatures will be standing above their forgotten bones, as blind, as self-seeking, as puffed up with the pride of the brief moment, and filled with the despair of their failure, the glory of their success, as they ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... the earnest, sincere inquirer there was authority enough. In His acts, an open-minded doctor of the law could read the stamp of God's approval. The ear open to learn, not waxed up by self-seeking plans, or filled with gold dust, heard the voice of divine approval out of the clouds, or in His presence ...
— Quiet Talks about Jesus • S. D. Gordon
... dressed in a sailor suit, when you went hunting pictures. Yet, for all the damnability of what I now witness, I was never quieter in my heart. To have surrendered to an imperative self-denial brings a peace which self-seeking ...
— Carry On • Coningsby Dawson
... in 1872.) The Fatality of Self-Seeking in Editors and Authors. (Printed with the "Miscellanies" in the "Recollections ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... between private and public ownership, it seems to me, is mainly in the natural selection of those most competent to foresee the future and to direct labor into the most productive channels, and the greater poignancy of the illusion of self-seeking under which the private owner works. The real problem, under socialism as well as under individualism, is to ascertain, under the external economic and inevitable conditions, the equilibrium of social ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... table, and these exiles on a foreign shore extend the warmest of welcomes to the stray bird of passage, who will soon leave behind only the shadowy "remembrance of a guest who tarrieth but a day." The idea so familiar to the self-seeking spirit, that "it is not worth while" to trouble about a passing acquaintance, finds no echo in this hospitable coterie. To the visitor, the bright hours of that afternoon, ten thousand miles away from England, remain as an evergreen memory of genuine human sympathy, the ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... of nature in holy reverence; and while there live sensualists, despots, and men who are wholly self-seeking, I cannot bear to have these sincere workers held up in the least degree to reproach. And let us have truth, even if the truth be the awful denial of the good God. We must face the light and not bury our heads in the earth. I am hopeful that scientific investigation, pushed on and on, will ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... existing institutions, but for all that his work was profoundly revolutionary. They who call on those who have left their first love to return to it are seldom obeyed, but their voice is often welcomed by the corrupt and self-seeking crowd which is eager, after the fashion of birds of prey, to tear the carcase from which life has departed. A large party was formed in England, especially amongst the greater barons, which was anxious to strip the clergy of ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... assuredly! And what a contempt I have for the virtuous indignation of men who, overmoral themselves, judge haughtily of others; yet, if you look into their souls you discover that they are heartless and self-seeking villains. ...
— The Buddha - A Drama in Five Acts and Four Interludes • Paul Carus
... devil do you suppose that Texans want with a two- faced little icicle like yourself in the United States Senate? What taxpayer has asked you to become a candidate? Despite all your wire-pulling, your trading and self-seeking, and the further fact that you are employing the state machinery to strengthen your pull, you really stand no more show of succeeding Roger Q. Mills than you do of succeeding the Czar of Russia. You have managed to get thus far, not on your own merits, but solely because you are ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... rather odd, that one of the first questions raised, after our separation from the greedy, struggling, self-seeking world, should relate to the possibility of getting the advantage over the outside barbarians in their own field of labor. But, to own the truth, I very soon became sensible that, as regarded society at large, we stood in a position ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... his back to the mantel-piece, and looked down upon her. He thought of the great, wide world: its thorny ways, its deserts, its bitter waters, its unrighteousness, its self-seeking greeds, its weaknesses, its under and over reaching, its unfaithfulness; and then again of this—child, thrust all at once a thousand miles into it, with never—so far as he could see—an implement, a weapon, a sense of danger, or a ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... Roman history. It begins in Egypt with a picture of Antony fascinated by the Egyptian queen. The urgent needs of the divided Roman world call him away to Italy. Here, once free of Cleopatra's presence, he becomes his old self, a reveler, yet diplomatic and self-seeking. From motives of policy he marries Octavia, sister of Octavius Caesar, and for a brief space seems assured of a brilliant future. But the old spell draws him back. He returns to Cleopatra, and Octavius in revenge ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... the spark that kindled in many minds ambition, cruelty, bloodthirstiness, self-seeking and jealousy—producing the morale, in a word, of the Spain of sixty years ago. Some sided with the Queen Regent Christina, and rallied round the child-queen because they saw that that way lay glory and promotion. Others flocked ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... organized body of knowledge to which all its servants contribute and in which they share, so Socialism insists upon its ideal of an organized social order which every man serves and by which every man benefits. Their common enemy is the secret-thinking, self-seeking man. Secrecy, subterfuge and the private gain; these are the enemies of Socialism and the adversaries of Science. At times, I will admit, both Socialist and scientific man forget this essential ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... average," she said, coolly. "Nearly all men and women are alike—worldly, selfish, self-seeking. Look at my father," she went on, as coolly as before. "He thinks of nothing but money; he has spent his life fighting, scrambling, struggling for it; and ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... Hampshire. I heard of it—deserved to be shot, by heaven! You think you have got hold of the Duke, and you throw me over. You imagine, I dare say, that I will allow my wife to be talked about to further your interests—you self-seeking young dog! As long as he lent the Company his name, I permitted a great many things. Do you think me a blind idiot, sir? But now she must learn to be satisfied with people who 've got no titles, or carriages, and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... me to the second great danger to our modern civilisation, and that is War. We have over-developed war. While we have left our peace organisation to the niggling, slow, self-seeking methods of private enterprise; while we have left the breeding of our peoples to chance, their minds to the halfpenny press and their wealth to the drug manufacturer, we have pushed forward the art of war on severely scientific and Socialist ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... air to be convincing. Well, then, let us appeal to experience. Let us see what the systematic cultivation of his natural faculties has done for the child in Utopia. I have already pointed out that the unselfishness of the children—the complete absence of self-seeking and self-assertion—is one of the most noticeable features of the life of their school. Now there is no place for moral teaching on the time-table of the school: and I can say without hesitation that the direct inculcation of morality is wholly foreign ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... Lord implicitly taught. Nay, the suggestion is not perhaps far-fetched that, as Cardinal Beauchamp had great possessions, he took this occasion to testify how in his heart he slighted them. Or again—for history seems to prove that he was not an entirely scrupulous man, nor entirely untainted by self-seeking—that his tribute to Noble Poverty may have been the assertion, by a spirit netted among the briars of this world's policy, that at least it saw and suspired after the way to ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... and France. As for Germany, the prospects of the Netherlands were not flattering. The Reforming spirit had grown languid, from various causes. The self-seeking motives of many Protestant princes had disgusted the nobles. Was that the object of the bloody wars of religion, that a few potentates should be enabled to enrich themselves by confiscating the broad lands and accumulated treasures ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... comprehend nor measure yet. But there was an instinct of bravery in her which threw her into blind defence, defence even of George Flack, though it was a part of her consternation that on her too he should have practised a surprise—it would appear to be some self-seeking deception. ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... these ideals of service from which every taint of self-seeking and commercialism have been eliminated—do you think that these are mere figments of the impractical imagination? Go ask Perry Holden out in Iowa. Go ask Luther Burbank out in California. Go to any agricultural college in this broad land and ask the scientists who are ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... administration. This was naturally in Pulteney's power. But Pulteney suddenly remembered having said long ago that he would accept no office, and he declared that he would positively hold to his word. At a moment of excitement, it would seem, and stung by some imputation of self-seeking, Pulteney had adopted the high Roman fashion, and announced that he would prove his political disinterestedness by refusing to accept any office in any administration. The King consulted Walpole during all these arrangements, and Walpole strongly ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... betrayed the joyless spirit, the broken heart. At these times, when they were alone together, waiting Stephen Whitelaw's coming home to tea, Mrs. Tadman's heart, not entirely hardened by long years of self-seeking, yearned towards her kinsman's wife; and the secret animosity with which she had at first regarded her changed to a silent pity, a compassion she would fain have expressed in some form or other, ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... burdens by limiting the privileges of foreign traders and abolishing a great many useless and expensive court offices. On the 17th of January 1648 he procured the marriage of the tsar with Maria Miloslavshaya, himself marrying her sister, Anna, ten days later. The Miloslavskis were typical self-seeking 17th century boyars, whose extortions made them generally detested. In May 1648 the people of Moscow rose against them, and the young tsar was compelled to dismiss both them and their patron Morozov. The successful issue of the Moscow riots was the occasion of disquieting disturbances ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... to cast a gloom upon my character. I had met many men, some of them leaders in Israel, whether by their birth or talents; and who among them all had shown clean hands? As for the Browns and Millers, I had seen their self-seeking, I could never again respect them. Prestongrange was the best yet; he had saved me, had spared me rather, when others had it in their minds to murder me outright; but the blood of James lay at his door; and I thought his present dissimulation with myself a thing below pardon. That ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was certainly inopportune; but it is almost needless to add—now that it is possible to review his whole career, as well as all the circumstances which marked this crisis in it—that he was not actuated by a self-seeking spirit. Looking back in after life, Lord John frankly admitted that he had committed an error in resigning office under Lord Aberdeen at the time and in the manner in which he did it. He qualified this confession, however, by declaring that he had committed a much greater error in agreeing to ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... murdered in that very fortress, outside the Porto a Faenza, which he had counseled Alessandro to construct for the intimidation of the Florentines.[1] The historians with the exception of Nerli agree in describing him as a pleasure-loving and self-seeking man, whose many changes of policy were due, not to conviction, but to the desire of gaining the utmost license of disorderly living. At the same time we cannot deny him the fame of brilliant mental qualities, a princely bearing, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... secure the foremost places, and hence the others' anger at what they thought an unfair attempt to push in front of them. What a contrast between Jesus, striding on ahead with 'set' face, and the Twelve unsympathetic and self-seeking, lagging behind to squabble about pre-eminence! We have in this incident two parts: the request and its answer, the indignation of the Ten and its rebuke. The one sets forth the qualifications for the highest place ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... exhorted to remember that "leaders qualified to hold their own in the sharp competition of professional life are a great, if not the greatest, need of the coloured race in this country. Over wide areas most of their clergy are illiterate, immoral, self-seeking, bitter sectarians, and the most determined opponents of every kind of improvement. So, too, the lack of lawyers, editors and physicians of sufficiently broad and thorough training to be able to defend their weaker ...
— From Slave to College President - Being the Life Story of Booker T. Washington • Godfrey Holden Pike
... useful country life. The passionate and reckless self-consciousness of Catullus is succeeded in the next generation by the calm sweet hopefulness of Virgil; in passing from the one poet to the other, we feel that we are leaving behind us an age of over-sensitive self-seeking and entering on one in which duty and honour, labour on the land and hard work for the State, may be reckoned as things more likely to make life worth living than all the accumulated ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... three years. Throughout the existence of the Bureau its chief commissioner was General O.O. Howard. While the principal officers were undoubtedly men of noble purpose, many of the minor officials were just as undoubtedly corrupt and self-seeking. In the winter of 1865-6 one-third of its aid was given to the white people of the South. For Negro pupils the Bureau established altogether 4,239 schools, and these had 9,307 teachers and 247,333 students. Its real achievement has been thus ably summed up: "The greatest success ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... of mark, sagacious bishops, experienced generals, magistrates learned in the law: he held it to be his duty and his interest to hear their advice. And they were not without influence: one or two were noted as able to restrain his self-seeking will. But the main affairs he kept in his own hands. All that he undertook he conducted with great foresight and as a rule he carried it through. Foreigners regarded him as cunning and deceitful; to his own people his successful prudence seemed to have something supernatural about it. If ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... question of how far they will prove able to get out of the habits and traditions of their former social state, how far they will be able to take generous views and make sacrifices and unselfish efforts, and how far they will go in self-seeking or class selfishness regardless of the common welfare. This is a question we have to ask separately of each great nation, and of the Central Powers as a whole, and of the Allies as a whole, before we can begin to estimate the posture of the peoples ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... might have given herself without reserve to the rapture of her idyl; but her circumstances were peculiar. Rosie was obliged to be practical, to look ahead. A fairy prince was not only a romantic dream in her dreary life, but an agency to be utilized. The least self-seeking of drowning maids might expect the hero on the bank to pull her out of the water. The very fact that she recognized in Claude a tendency to dally with her on the brink instead of landing her in a place of safety compelled her to ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... Diderot has said, it is sometimes only necessary to be a little mad in order to prophesy and to enjoy poetic ecstasies; and in the case of Schlatter the flower of altruism which often blossoms in the hearts of such "madmen" was manifested in his complete lack of self-seeking and in his compassion for the poor and suffering which drew crowds around him. As to his miracles, we may—without attempting to explain them—state decisively that they do not differ from those accomplished by means of suggestion. The cases of blindness ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... volume, the reader acquire a more just idea of the grammar which is displayed in English grammars, he will discover at least one reason for the title which has been bestowed upon the work. Such as the book is, I present it to the public, without pride, without self-seeking, and without anxiety: knowing that most of my readers will be interested in estimating it justly; that no true service, freely rendered to learning, can fail of its end; and that no achievement merits aught with Him who graciously supplies all ability. The opinions expressed in ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... thee with their tales of dire intent. Francos: (striking his breast): Fear not, they soon shall feel how vain it were To seek to trick one who, in halls of state, Hath met the wiles of shrewd, self-seeking men, But to ward off attack with virtue's shield. Captain and Seldonskip approach. Captain: Most noble potentate, as I my rounds Of observation make, it pleasures me Most mightily, to make obeisance to The one so honored by his ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... friendship. Their characters were in fact profoundly antipathetic. Rousseau we know,—sensuous, impulsive, extravagant, with little sense of the difference between reality and dreams. Grimm was exactly the opposite; judicious, collected, self-seeking, coldly upright. He was a German (born at Ratisbon), and in Paris was first a reader to the Duke of Saxe Gotha, with very scanty salary. He made his way, partly through the friendship of Rousseau, into the society ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... look of sorrow worn. The tears that freely fell were not of grief, but tears of yearning love, of sympathy, of solemn joy and gratitude to God for such a life in its rounded completeness, such an example and testimony, such fidelity to conscience, such recoil from all self-seeking, such unswerving devotion to duty, come what might of peril or ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney
... character forbids that we should think of him for a moment as devoted to the gathering of worldly wealth. He came to minister unto, not to serve himself. Self-seeking was foreign to his nature. A great truth was spoken by the scoffers. "He saved others, himself he ...
— Usury - A Scriptural, Ethical and Economic View • Calvin Elliott
... for whom, if the Hesea's tale be true, I did once lay down my royal rank and dare the dangers of an unsailed sea; O thou whom in ages gone I would have sheltered with my frail body from the sorceries of this cold, self-seeking witch; O thou whom but a little while ago at my own life's risk I drew from death in ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... caustic descriptions of the habits of the nobility when freed from the moral atmosphere of Rome. With extreme ingenuity he worked into the description of the habits of his own official life a scathing indictment, expressed in the frankest terms, of the self-seeking, the luxury, the unnatural vices, the rampant robbery of the average provincial despot. His auditors learnt the details of a commander's environment—the elaborate cooking apparatus, the throng ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... Austrasia, Neustria, and Burgundy, King Chilperic reigning over Austrasia; King Sigebert over Neustria. But the power behind the throne lay in the wives of these kings, with whom alone we have to do. Contrasted characters they were,—Fredegonde wicked, faithless, self-seeking; Brunehild patriotic and devoted to the good of her country; yet in the end wickedness triumphed, and honesty died a violent and frightful death. With this preliminary we ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... Congress assigned to Russia. Indeed he did everything possible, short of a grant of absolute independence, which at that time would have been absurd, to conciliate public opinion in the Grand-Duchy of Warsaw. Unfortunately the experiment proved a complete failure, largely owing to the factious and self-seeking Polish nobility who have always been the worst enemy of their country. Alexander after a time lost patience, and in 1820 he felt compelled to withdraw some of the liberties which he had conferred in 1815. After this the breach ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... the limitation and inversion of the spiritual man, all his faculties and powers are inversions of the powers of the spiritual man. In a single phrase, his self seeking is the inversion of the Self-seeking which is the very being of the spiritual man: the ceaseless search after the divine and august Self of all beings. This inversion is corrected by keeping the Commandments and Rules, and gradually, as the inversion is overcome, the spiritual ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... knowledge the teacher must have abandoned worldly ambition, the love of wealth, and the applause of men. All motives of time-serving and self-seeking must assail him in vain. He becomes the almoner of the treasure-house of Light and Knowledge. He must exemplify what he teaches. If he can impart his knowledge, or assist an aspiring and worthy brother, it must be in the way he has himself received it, "without money and without price," ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... that's quite just, darling, there are a great many politicians who are very much looked up to—all the bishops, for instance, and others whom nobody could suspect of self-seeking." ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... its decline surrounded me with a beneficent, a calming influence; I felt it in the silence of the shady lane, in the pure air, in the blue sky. It is difficult to retain the memory of the conflicts, miseries, temptations and crimes of men's self-seeking existence when one is alone with the charming serenity of the unconscious nature. Breathing the dreamless peace around the picturesque cottage I was approaching, it seemed to me that it must reign everywhere, over all the globe of water and land and in the hearts of ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... of uncleanliness and dishonesty, which solidify into circumstances of foulness and beggary: hateful and condemnatory thoughts crystallize into habits of accusation and violence, which solidify into circumstances of injury and persecution: selfish thoughts of all kinds crystallize into habits of self-seeking, which solidify into circumstances more or less distressing. On the other hand, beautiful thoughts of all kinds crystallize into habits of grace and kindliness, which solidify into genial and sunny circumstances: pure thoughts crystallize ...
— As a Man Thinketh • James Allen
... crisis. Not merely was Hienfung dying, but it had become known to Prince Kung and his friends that he had left the governing authority during the minority of his son, a child of less than six years of age, to a board of regency composed of eight of the least intelligent and most arrogant and self-seeking members of the imperial family, with Prince Tsai at their head. The emperor died on August 22. A few hours later the imperial decree notifying the last wishes of the ruler as to the mode of government was promulgated. The board of regency assumed the ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... from me my heart's blood, because he bound up my arm when it was bruised? Because he helped me some steps on earth, is he to imprison me afterwards in hell? Good! No, he is not good in wishing so to destroy us. He is bad, greedy, covetous, self-seeking, a very dog, and by the living God he shall die like a dog unless you will free me from his fangs. You have not answered me. Will you tell me that you will discard him as a suitor for your hand? If you will say so, he ...
— Lady Anna • Anthony Trollope
... heroical than you or I. Indeed, neither Florian nor Adhelmar was at strict pains to act as common-sense dictated, and Falstaff is scarcely describable as immaculate: Villon thieved, Kit Marlowe left a wake of emptied bottles, and Will Sommers was notoriously a fool; Matthiette was vain, and Adelais self-seeking, and the tenth Marquis of Falmouth, if you press me, rather a stupid and pompous ass: and yet to each in turn it was granted to love greatly, to know at least one hour of magnanimity when each was young in the world's ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... President Wilson did much to maintain the idealism that jostled national self-seeking in the final drafting of the treaties. Though he lacked the political brilliance of Lloyd George and had not the suppressed but irresistible vehemence that characterized Clemenceau, his very simplicity of argument availed much. He was not destined to carry ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... some revealing, sealing word, but the presence of the mother restrained him. Helen, recognizing the returning tide of his love, to which she related no self-seeking, ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... so fought the fight and kept the faith of a working man of letters. It is rendered to the most distinguished poet, of his country and generation, still remaining with us and still in full voice. It is rendered to the comrade—to the man who, with his modesty and fortitude and the absence of self-seeking—with the quips and quirks that cover his gravest moods, with his attachment for the city which has given him that which Lamb so loved, "the sweet security of streets"—it is rendered, I say, to the man who best preserves ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... truly made, hold good even in that mysterious world beyond the grave. Show me that though the body—dear home and vehicle of love—may die, yet love in its essence remains everlastingly conscious, faithful and complete. Bend my will to harmony with Thine, O Lord, and cleanse me of self-seeking. Ah! but still let me see his face once again, once again, oh, my God—and I will rebel no more. Let me look on him, once again, if only for a moment, and I shall be content. Hear me, I am greatly troubled, ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... and eloquently while all men listened, for he reminded them of mighty warriors of old who had not won such glorious fame, and warned them against pride and lack of generosity and self-seeking; and then, ending with thanks and fresh gifts to Beowulf, he bade the feast continue with increased jubilation. The tumultuous rejoicing lasted till darkness settled on the land, and when it ended all retired to ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... organs and incorporations special to these same Accessions. All this can and does progress, but mostly slowly, intermittently, with short violent paroxysms of excess and long sleepy reactions of defect, with one-sidedness, travesties, and—worst of all—with worldly indifference and self-seeking. The grace and aid of the Simultaneous Richness are here also always necessary; nor can these things ever really progress except through a deep religious sense—all mere scepticism and all levelling down are ...
— Progress and History • Various
... t'other. I dare say, now, that your experience is much the same?' I did not answer this and after a pause he went on, still staring out of window, 'I believed in the Lord's Anointed, for my part: but allowing, for argument's sake, the right's on that side, there's enough villainy and self-seeking mixed up with it to poison an honest man. . . . I shouldn't wonder now that there's something to ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... succeeding generation, which shall prepare still more capably for still better generations to follow. We are passing as a race out of a state of affairs when the unconscious building of the future was attained by individualistic self-seeking (altogether unenlightened or enlightened only by the indirect moralizing influence of the patriotic instinct and religion) into a clear consciousness of our co-operative share in that process. That is the essential idea my New Republic would personify and embody. In the past ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... He had not the temperament which, when once possessed with an idea, rests neither night nor day in pursuit of it and spares neither others' labour nor its own to carry the conception into effect. There was an element of inertia in his nature, and of the ordinary self-seeking motives which impel men not a trace. Ambition he had none—none, at all events, in the last ten or fifteen years, during which I have known him. As for vanity, I never saw a man so entirely devoid of it. His modesty amounted to a defect, in that he always underestimated ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... commit a certain act, though to do so would be easy and advantageous, and detection not to be feared? Why should the moral consciousness of the higher races accept the principle which places self-sacrifice above self-seeking? There is only one explanation for this paradoxical phenomenon: it is that, as men rise in the moral scale, there dawns on them the sense of a law that is not of this world, an Ought-to-be, which speaks with a strange authority, and will not be denied; and when this authority is properly ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... faith in the heart's renewed fruitfulness is itself among the autumn blossomings, the hidden compensations. Young folk, and those who never outgrow youth's headlong and blind self-seeking, cannot conceive such truths. For youth has no experience of change; and what it calls the Future is but the present longing or present dread projected forward. Hence youth lacks the resignation which comes of knowing that our aims, our loves, ourselves, will alter; and that we shall not eternally ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... house of Leopold Travers, his thoughts turned with much kindliness towards his young kinsman. "Mivers and Kenelm," quoth he to himself, "gave me an unfavourable impression of this lad; they represent him as worldly, self-seeking, and so forth. But Mivers takes such cynical views of character, and Kenelm is too eccentric to judge fairly of a sensible man of the world. At all events, it is not like an egotist to put himself out of his way to be so civil to an old fellow like me. A young man about town must have ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... people of France from the autocratic tyranny of the Bourbons, saw the power go from their clean hands to the grimy ones of lustful demagogues, who knew no law save their own passions of bitter hatred against all classes that were not as self-seeking, as ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... eyes were fixed upon the mission alcove. She knew, only too well, that Althea's invitation to dinner had not been disinterested. She had learned to know that Althea was not only snobbish, but self-seeking as well. For whatever she gave she demanded value received. Evelyn had been in the living-room when Grace and Elfreda returned from their shopping. She had heard them discussing the dinner, and had lost no time in slipping on her wraps and carrying ...
— Grace Harlowe's Return to Overton Campus • Jessie Graham Flower
... the sacredness of fact and reality. Who has not observed inferior original power achieving greater results even in the intellectual field itself, where the superior understanding happens to have been unequally yoked with a self-seeking character, over scenting the expedient? If Hume had been in the early productive part of his life the hypocrite which he wished it were in his power to show himself in its latter part, we may be tolerably sure that European ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... for the remainder of his life Bacon devoted himself to science, rejecting every suggestion toward a renewal of his political activity. The moral laxity of the times throws a mitigating light over his fault; but he cannot be aquitted of self-seeking, love of money and of display, and excessive ambition. As Macaulay says in his famous essay, he was neither malignant nor tyrannical, but he lacked warmth of affection and elevation of sentiment; there ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... opened to the almost universal corruption about him. Enlightened by the shrewd comments of the old sergeant, the quiet penetration of his father's glance, which saw everything, he soon realized that fraud and self-seeking were become the ruling impulse in Beausejour. "Like master, like man" was a proverb which he saw daily fulfilled. Vergor thought more of robbing than of serving his country, and from him his subordinates took their ...
— The Raid From Beausejour; And How The Carter Boys Lifted The Mortgage • Charles G. D. Roberts
... of the few go to church to be made better men, and not by fine writing, but by significant ideas, which may come in a homely garb, so they be only pervaded with affectionate piety, but which can come to us only from one who has laid all ambitious self-seeking on the altar of God. There is a power of persuasion in every minister who follows God as a dear child, and who walks in love, as Christ loved us, which the hardest heart cannot long resist,—which will win the congregation, however ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... her conscience to offer Maxwell reparation for the wrong she thought she had done him when she had once decided that he was too self-seeking and self-centred, and had potentially rejected him on that ground. The first thing she did after they became engaged was to confess the wrong, and give him a chance to cast her off if he wished; but this never seemed quite reparation enough, perhaps because he laughed and said that ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... plebianism,—a dangerous factor in any republic. It means the mixing of ignoble blood with good, a gradual lowering of ideals until a general level of sordidness, individualism in its most selfish and self-seeking form, and political corruption, are the inevitable results. You, your Excellency, are an autocrat. It is odd that your principles should coincide so closely with ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... more mischievous as demagogue than he was as courtier, lackey, or parliamentary intriguer. Indeed, he is almost certainly less so, for he must at least in some fashion serve, even if only that he may deceive them, those whose servant he should be. At any rate, the purely self-seeking demagogue is certainly a recurrent figure in democratic politics, and of the self-seeking demagogue Aaron Burr was ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... fall and ruin were still more precipitate. Scarcely was he installed in his threefold authority when his troubles commenced. He had never been heartily accepted by his nobles, many of whom were ambitious and self-seeking, and considered him in the light of a usurper. The nation itself was composed of antagonistic races, Szeklers, Saxons, Hungarians, &c., and where he pleased one race he displeased the other. The Poles, too, were only watching ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... from inactivity and degeneration, and this, even at the immediate cost of most heavy loss in material comfort and ease to the individuals composing it. The male labour movement is, directly and in the first place, material; and, or at least superficially, more or less self-seeking, though its ultimate reaction on society by saving the poorer members from degradation and dependency and want is undoubtedly wholly social and absolutely essential for the health and continued development of the human race. In the Woman's Labour Movement ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... creed was the real cause of the civil strife. "Take from the Catholic army," said he, "all those actuated by pure zeal for the church or for the king and country, and you will not have enough men left to form one company." It is strange that beneath the evil passions and self-seeking of the champions of each party he could not see the fierce flame of popular heroism and fanaticism; but that he, and thousands of men like him, could not do so, and could not enter, even by imagination, into the causes {233} which, but a half century earlier, had ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... a patriot or a self-seeking politician? Give evidence. How could he justify the means that he used to win Brutus? In what respect did he surpass Brutus? What case did he make against Caesar? How far was he right? What weakness and what strength does ...
— Teachers' Outlines for Studies in English - Based on the Requirements for Admission to College • Gilbert Sykes Blakely
... Mr. Chamberlain. At one time he was regarded by some of his opponents as a political fire-eater—a democratic despot who would have decapitated kings and queens without a tinge of remorse, and slain wicked Tories with the sword. He was, however, never the ungenial, self-seeking, aggressive person some of his foes may have fancied him. He was always an affable, pleasant, agreeable man, who could be civil and even polite to his adversaries, especially when political fighting was ...
— A Tale of One City: The New Birmingham - Papers Reprinted from the "Midland Counties Herald" • Thomas Anderton
... forehead, and Jeff put a hand on his shoulder. He couldn't help remembering that his father had called him "son" in a poignancy of sympathy all through the trials of the past, and it hurt to hear it now. It linked that time with this, as Madame Beattie, in her unabashed self-seeking, linked it. Perhaps he was never to escape. A prisoner, that was what he was. They were all prisoners, Madame Beattie to her squalid love of gain, Esther to her elementary love of herself, Lydia—he looked at her as she stood still in the background like a handmaid ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... somewhere about 1840 down to to-day, a great many worthy people who have been afraid of the Pope and the influence of Catholicism in this country, and have been exceedingly jealous of the influence of foreigners, especially of those of the Roman Catholic Church. Self-seeking political adventurers and demagogues have not been slow to take advantage of this feeling for their own purposes. They have, for some reason, always preferred to make their political movement in secret societies. The Catholic vote had generally been cast for the Democrats, ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... he said, with that queer courage which never deserted him, even if it were based entirely upon self-seeking and self-interest. He threw his head back with the characteristic action with which he always swallowed his medicine, and went ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... advice to his protege are worldly wise in their way, and suggestive of honour as befitting the creed of a gentleman, they are not such as much influence a shrewd reasoner like Randal, whom the example of the playground at Eton had not served to correct of the arid self-seeking, which looked to knowledge for no object but power. A man tempted by passions like Audley, or seduced into fraud by a cold, subtle spirit like Leslie, will find poor defence in the elegant precept, 'Remember to act as a gentleman.' Such ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Majesty has done them the favor of appointing Don Pedro de Acuna as governor and captain-general, and president of the royal Audiencia, this has greatly pleased and satisfied them, on account of the good reputation which he has of being an excellent soldier, and not at all self-seeking. Therefore his arrival is desired, because it is very necessary for all and [illegible in MS.] for the matters of war, in which many mistakes have been made up to the present time—which I will not mention, however, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume XI, 1599-1602 • Various
... daughter; Amelius had taken the girl to her dying mother's bedside. With his idiotic Socialist notions, he would be perfectly capable of owning the truth, if inquiries were made. The unblemished reputation which John Farnaby had built up by the self-seeking hypocrisy of a lifetime was at the mercy of a visionary young fool, who believed that rich men were created for the benefit of the poor, and who proposed to regenerate society by reviving the obsolete morality of the Primitive Christians. Was it possible for him to come to terms with ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... only makes room for another. True, "Punch" killed the craze for sunflowers and long necks; but then "Punch" invented it. It was merely made to be destroyed brilliantly, like a Chinese cracker or a Roman candle. Folly is older than "Punch's" jokes, and will survive them. Snobbery and self-seeking, pettiness and stupidity, envy, hate, and all uncharitableness, were no secret to the mummies in the British Museum. "Unto the place whither the rivers go, thither they go again." Are there not a hundred sayings in Ecclesiastes and Menander, in Horace and Moliere, ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... been in financial straits. The source of its power is to be sought elsewhere. Financially bankrupt and numerically unstable, the I.W.W. relies upon the brazen cupidity of its stratagems and the habitual timorousness of society for its power. It is this self-seeking disregard of constituted authority that has given a handful of bold and crafty leaders such prominence in the recent literature of fear. And the members of this industrial Ku Klux Klan, these American Bolsheviki, assume to be the ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... was a time to subordinate individual or group selfishness to the national good, that time is now. Disunity at home—bickerings, self-seeking partisanship, stoppages of work, inflation, business as usual, politics as usual, luxury as usual these are the influences which can undermine the morale of the brave men ready to die at ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... never see God or heaven. But He is teaching you better. As long as you follow His gentle leadings, and the pure impulses of your own heart, all will be well. But as soon as you begin to take counsel of the world and its self-seeking spirit, you will find yourself in trouble. If we wish to prosper and be happy in God's world, we must do His will. This is good, sound common sense, which the experience of every age has borne out. It often seems ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... and needy could turn; and so long as the rules of the Orders were observed in the spirit and in the letter, they were a genuine help towards a life of self-devotion, of self-abnegation whereof the ultimate motive was not always a subtle form of self-seeking. But as time passed, the monasteries became the recipients of the bounty of pious benefactors. Their inhabitants, in spite of ascetic regulations, found that life was none so hard—at least in comparison with that of serfdom or villeinage; luxuries were not less available than to the laity. ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... self and self-seeking she lifted up her head into the sunlight of a perfect love, a love that suffereth long and is kind, vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, seeketh not its own, believeth all things, endureth ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... fixed and limited, and only built upon their foundation. But how should this be the meaning? For this seems a needless exhortation; what church would not readily yield an especial honor to apostles and evangelists above pastors and teachers? This would savor too much of self-seeking in the apostle, and providing for his own honor. This implies that the text hath reference to apostles and evangelists, whereas it evidently speaks only of ordinary ...
— The Divine Right of Church Government • Sundry Ministers Of Christ Within The City Of London
... is always abundant material for an indictment on the ground of bad character. The Americans of the revolutionary war, together with much fortitude, integrity, and public spirit, showed without doubt a good deal of levity, self-seeking, vindictiveness, and incompetence; and whoever chooses to amass, magnify, and isolate evidences of their guilt can demonstrate their unfitness for self-government just as well as he can demonstrate the same proposition in the case ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... anything against it, my dear, for my Alan says it must be done, and there is no use in trying to turn him. It is the right method for peace of conscience, as the good Mr. Baxter said, and that must be my apology, though I am sure you will not think it was nothing but sinful self-seeking that made ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... therefore, the heavy war arrow was used, and this is to be taken as the effective range for fighting purposes of the old archery.[70] No measures could have been invented more effective than this vigorous arming to repress the self-seeking tendencies in the mercantile classes which I have mentioned as beginning to show themselves. Capital supported by force may make its own terms with labour; but capital lying between a king on one side resolved ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... relations with Korea, so far as it has been carried above—namely, to the close of the Empress Kogyoku's reign (A.D. 645)—discloses in the Korean people a race prone to self-seeking feuds, never reluctant to import foreign aid into domestic quarrels, and careless of the obligations of good faith. In the Japanese we see a nation magnanimous and trustful but ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... but the beginning. Under the cloak of religion British administration continued to display its hate against our people and nationality, and to conceal its self-seeking aims under cover of the most exalted principles. The aid of religion was invoked to reinforce the policy of oppression in order to deal a deeper and more fatal blow to our self-respect. Emissaries of the London Missionary Society slandered the ...
— A Century of Wrong • F. W. Reitz
... upon any less ground than faith and humble obedience to a divine commandment, he had meditated a murder and not a sacrifice. In our late bloody and lamentable wars, how many drew swords on either side, from the purest and most honourable motives? How many from the culpable suggestions of ambition, self-seeking, and love of plunder? Yet while they marched in the same ranks, and spurred their horses at the same trumpet-sound, the memory of the former is dear to us as patriots or loyalists—that of those who acted on mean or unworthy promptings, is either execrated ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... motive of the seer, the more lucid will be the visions accorded. No reliable vision can be obtained by one whose nature is not inherently truthful. Any selfish desire dominanting the mind in regard to any thing or person will distort the visions and render them misleading, while a persistent self-seeking spirit will effectually shut the doors upon all visions whatsoever. Therefore, above all things it is essential for the investigator to have an unflinching love of truth, to be resigned to the will of Heaven, to accept the revelations accorded in a spirit of grateful confidence, ...
— How to Read the Crystal - or, Crystal and Seer • Sepharial
... have been taken as a model by Samuel Smiles). One thinks of him sometimes as a sort of Deacon Brodie, sometimes as the most innocent sinner who ever lived. For, though he was brutal and snobbish and self-seeking and simian, he had a pious and a merry and a grateful heart. He felt that God had created the world for the pleasure of Samuel Pepys, and had no doubt that ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... mysterious warning of her presence in my waking moments (as in Shetland)? Always at the time when my heart opened most tenderly toward her and toward others—when my mind was most free from the bitter doubts, the self-seeking aspirations, which degrade the divinity within us. Then, and then only, my sympathy with her was the perfect sympathy which holds its fidelity unassailable by the chances and changes, the delusions ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... States, and at the same time on the ruins of the Mexican Republic setting up a mock Empire. In similar spirit has he conspired against German Unity, whose just strength promised to be a wall against his unprincipled self-seeking. ...
— The Duel Between France and Germany • Charles Sumner
... what men would think out of his weak and evil mind, both before, and during, but more especially after his preaching. And that poisoned and corrupted and filled the pulpit with death to Rutherford, in a way and to a degree that nobody but a self-seeking preacher will believe or understand. Rutherford often wondered that he had not been eaten up of worms in his pulpit like King Herod on his throne, and that for the very same ...
— Samuel Rutherford - and some of his correspondents • Alexander Whyte
... life. From Ireland came Dr. William Warren Baldwin, whose son Robert, born in Canada, was less surpassingly able than the younger Bidwell but equally moderate and equally beyond suspicion of faction or self-seeking. ...
— The Canadian Dominion - A Chronicle of our Northern Neighbor • Oscar D. Skelton
... in its earliest stages is essentially an egoistic and ungenerous proceeding. Even Mr. Withers must have been self-seeking once or twice in his life, else had he never had a son to mourn. So, since life in this world is for the living, and his own life was likely to go on many years after Mr. Withers had been gathered to the reward of ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... stooping somewhat, absent occasionally, going about with his chin stuck out before him, as though he were seeking something,—he knew not what. A more generous fellow, who delighted more in giving, hesitated more in asking, more averse to begging though a friend of beggars, less self-arrogant, or self-seeking, or more devoted to his profession, never lived. He was a man with prejudices,—kindly, gentlemanlike, amiable prejudices. He thought that a clergyman should be a graduate from one of the three universities,—including Trinity, Dublin; and he thought, also, that a clergyman ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... Cornwall, Oswald on the other. These characters are in various degrees individualised, most of them completely so; but still in each group there is a quality common to all the members, or one spirit breathing through them all. Here we have unselfish and devoted love, there hard self-seeking. On both sides, further, the common quality takes an extreme form; the love is incapable of being chilled by injury, the selfishness of being softened by pity; and, it may be added, this tendency to extremes is found again in the characters of Lear and Gloster, ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... friendship maintained to the end between these two leaders of thought—free as their intercourse was from any smallest trace of self-seeking or jealousy. When in 1874 I spent some time with Lyell in his Forfarshire home, a communication from Darwin was always an event which made a "red-letter day," as Lyell used to say; and he gave me many indications in his conversation of how strongly ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... gentleman on the one hand, and the united members of a too often and too long disunited art upon the other, be you the witnesses. Do you attest of everything that is liberal and free in spirit, that is "so nominated in the bond;" and of everything that is grudging, self-seeking, unjust, or unfair, that it is by no sophistry ever to be found there. I beg to move the resolution which I have already had ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... empiricism. The capable business man who is said to understand the "world" and his fellow-men, has commonly no knowledge of human nature in the larger sense, but merely knows from observation how the average man of a certain limited class is likely to act within a narrow prescribed sphere of self-seeking. Town life, then, strongly favours the education of certain shallow forms of intelligence. In actual attainment the townsman is somewhat more advanced than the countryman. But the deterioration of physique which accompanies this gain ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... of Friends, wrote a book against slavery, published in 1733, entitled, "A Testimony against that Anti-Christian Practice of MAKING SLAVES OF MEN.[378] It was well written, and the truth fearlessly told for the conservative, self-seeking period he ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... the psychological side, the further assumption of a general selfishness or self-seeking as the principal motive of the individual in the economic sphere. Oddly enough this assumption—the most warrantable of the lot—was the earliest to fall under disrepute. The plain assertion that every man looks out for himself ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... apart. That moment was over, and now he had bidden his wife good-by and was riding through the cold gray mist to do his weary, hopeless best for an obstinate, foolish, impracticable king, and to put some heart, if it were possible, into a dwindling handful of unprincipled, self-seeking, double-minded men. The day was full of omens, and they were all against him. Twice a hare ran across the road, and Grimond muttered to himself as he rode behind his master, "The ill-faured beast." As they passed through Glenfarg, a raven followed them for a mile, croaking weirdly. ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... rest of the philosophes. That there were charlatans among them, vain men, pretentious men, profligate men, selfish, self-seeking, and hypocritical men, who doubts? Among what class of men were there not such in those evil days? In what class of men are there not such now, in spite of all social and moral improvement? But nothing but the conviction, among the average, that ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley
... an experience that would have been nothing to most men beyond its relief, but to Peter Simon it was a word from the eternal heart, which, in every true and quiet mood, speaks into the hearts of men. When we cease listening to the cries of self-seeking and self-care, then the voice that was there all the time enters into our ears. It is the voice of the Father speaking to his child, never known for what it is until the child begins to obey it. To him who ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... admire the heroism that led this brave soldier in gray so utterly to forget himself for the sake of doing a deed of mercy to his enemies. There is more grandeur in five minutes of such self-renunciation than in a whole lifetime of self-interest and self-seeking. There is something Christly in it. How poor, paltry, and mean, alongside the records of such deeds, appear men's selfish strivings, self-interests' ...
— Making the Most of Life • J. R. Miller
... often it is that the dearest friends fall out about money! This has been so often noticed that it has become a common saying, "Have no money dealings with your friend." Even near relations become bitter, and are estranged, over some provision in a will. All this arises from self-seeking. Each cares for himself, and not ...
— The Village Pulpit, Volume II. Trinity to Advent • S. Baring-Gould
... for a very long period. But as time went on negligence and self-seeking crept in. Those whose duty it was to superintend, threw more and more responsibility on their inferiors in office, and in time it became rare for the rulers to interfere or to interest themselves in any of the operations. This was the beginning of the evil days. The members ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... the spirit realm. If you and I wish to have business transactions in this upper world of spirit-life we must be governed by this same law. To have power in our lives over sin and selfishness, and passion, and appetite; over tongue, and temper, and self-seeking ambition; to have power in prayer, and in winning others over from sin to Jesus Christ, one must first lay down ...
— Quiet Talks on Power • S.D. Gordon
... of the most melancholy chapters in the history of human thought. Nowhere else has knowledge, supposedly impartial, consciously or unconsciously placed itself so unscrupulously at the service of ambitious and self-seeking politicians. Indeed, it might almost be said that the various theories of race have never been put forward save with the object of advancing some claim or other. The writings of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, an Anglo-German, afford perhaps the most repulsive ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... one, without rousing his neighbor or seeking companionship, set out again on his way, with that selfishness which made our rout one of the most horrible dramas of self-seeking, melancholy, and horror which ever was enacted under heaven. Nevertheless, at about seven or eight hundred paces from our shelter we, most of us, met again and walked on together, like geese led in flocks by a child's wilful tyranny. ...
— Another Study of Woman • Honore de Balzac
... the only entirely unselfish person whose name has a place in profane history. No vestige or suggestion of self-seeking can be found in any word or deed of hers. When she had rescued her King from his vagabondage, and set his crown upon his head, she was offered rewards and honors, but she refused them all, and would take nothing. All she would take for herself—if the King would grant it—was leave ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... saw poverty and misery and pain, which came of the evil which man had done upon the earth, and were his punishment, and could be cured by nothing but by the return of each to his Father, and the giving up of all self-worship and self-seeking and sin. But amid all the confusion and among those who had fallen the lowest they found not one who was forsaken, whose name the Father had forgotten, or who was not made to pause in his appointed moment, ...
— The Little Pilgrim: Further Experiences. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... worth, however, that he was able to win Charlotte Bronte in spite of the fact that his predecessors had inspired in her such hearty contempt. 'I think he must be like all the curates I have seen,' she writes of one; 'they seem to me a self-seeking, vain, empty race.' ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... fears and hates—the opposites of faith and hope and love—arise from our lower nature and hide from us the face of our Father in heaven; but He has not changed. He is always ready to bless us when we turn again to Him—turn in truth and love, children, not in terror and self-seeking. So, dear ones, when clouds and storms darken the atmosphere, think of the sun that is shining above them; and when doubts and fears and sorrows and temptations come, think of the love and wisdom and power of our Father in heaven, and ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... concerns himself for another's need? How can that prayer be of help, good, acceptable and a common prayer, or a work of the Holy Day and of the assembled congregation, which they make who make their own petty prayers, one for this, the other for that, and have nothing but self-seeking, selfish prayers, which ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... earliest striking achievement of this sort, Mantegna's head of Cardinal Scarampo (now in Berlin), was not the kind to find favour in Venice. The full-face likeness of this wolf in sheep's clothing brought out the workings of the self-seeking, cynical spirit within too clearly not to have revolted the Venetians, who looked upon all such qualities as impious in the individual because they were the strict monopoly of the State. In the portraits of Doges which decorated ...
— The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance - Third Edition • Bernhard Berenson
... longer; but she was enabled without dismay or complaint to prepare for death. She was a humble, believing Christian. Her life had been passed in the performance of home duties, and the cultivation of domestic affections, without any self-seeking or craving after applause. She had always sought, as it were by instinct, to promote the happiness of all who came within her influence, and doubtless she had her reward in the peace of mind which was ...
— Memoir of Jane Austen • James Edward Austen-Leigh
... though not so high As love which Heaven with single eye Considers. Equal and entire, Therein benevolence, desire, Elsewhere ill-join'd or found apart, Become the pulses of one heart, Which now contracts, and now dilates, And, both to the height exalting, mates Self-seeking to self-sacrifice. Nay, in its subtle paradise (When purest) this one love unites All modes of these two opposites, All balanced in accord so rich Who may determine which is which? Chiefly God's Love does in it live, And nowhere ...
— The Victories of Love - and Other Poems • Coventry Patmore
... this evil, and more than we have described, is often glossed over with such an evangelical phraseology, that what is of the earth earthy is made to appear as if it were heavenly; and the coarsest product of the coarsest and most vulgar vanity, self-seeking, and pride is so painted and misrepresented as to look like love of principle or love of truth. What will put an end to the proud antagonism, the Popery, the Church idolatry of Protestantism? Can it ever be that we shall carry one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of ...
— Parish Papers • Norman Macleod
... There were problems enough even had he received loyal support from the crown and the company. With the English and Dutch in full rivalry, he saw that an aggressive policy of expansion and settlement became each year more imperative. Instead, he was called on to withstand the cabals of self-seeking traders who shirked their obligations, and to endure the apathy of a government which was preoccupied with ...
— The Founder of New France - A Chronicle of Champlain • Charles W. Colby
... range—the appointment of the judiciary, the superintendence of the administration of the business affairs of the nation, the guidance of our international affairs. Therefore the President must be a keen judge of men capable of distinguishing the honest, efficient servant of the nation from the self-seeking politician; he must resist political pressure; he must be national in his patriotism and breadth of vision; he must know our foreign relations intimately, that the continuity of policies may not be broken and the efficiency of our foreign service weakened thereby. He must ...
— History of the United States, Volume 6 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... "Great Mystery" was silent, solitary, free from all self-seeking. It was silent, because all speech is of necessity feeble and imperfect; therefore the souls of my ancestors ascended to God in wordless adoration. It was solitary, because they believed that He is nearer to us in solitude, and there were no priests authorized to come between a man and his Maker. ...
— The Soul of the Indian - An Interpretation • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... leave the secession issue in doubt almost to the last moment of a four years' contest, as it is now well known it was. Probably the one saving fact in all those years was that the young soldiers of the republic—and they were nearly all young then—knew little and cared less about the wrangling of self-seeking politicians and visionary doctrinaires in the rear, but fought steadily on to the end, never doubting for a moment the final triumph. I have never been able to recall a single instance of doubt manifested by any soldier in the field, though I did know a very ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... have been put back twenty-five years, there could have been no Russo-Japanese war, and China, instead of being, as she now is, a third-rate Power, might have held the premier position in Asia, as Japan so splendidly and skilfully does now. But, as so often happens, greed and dishonesty, self-seeking and cowardice on the part of high officials, nullified the efforts of the brave seamen who unavailingly gave their lives ...
— A Chinese Command - A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas • Harry Collingwood
... with their phylacteries; Scribes, with their sceptical notions; Samaritans, with their vaunted traditions: but He always went right beyond the outward show. The Samaritan was good and kind, though he got no credit for piety; the Pharisee was corrupt and self-seeking, though he got no credit for piety; the Publican was a child of God, though no one would speak to him. Christ reversed the judgment of men on those people whom they thought they knew so well, but did not know at all. So it shall be at the last; we shall be judged ...
— Life and Conduct • J. Cameron Lees
... of an impartial umpire, with an expert's appreciation of their logical fencing and some humorous glances at the heated combatants. Mill was an austere Puritan, who would fell the Tory like an ox and would trample upon the cunning self-seeking Whig. The Edinburgh Reviewers were a set of brilliant young men who represented intellectual Liberalism; but 'they were men who meant to become judges, members of Parliament, or even bishops, and nothing ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... additional scope for individual ambitions and personal gains. And as this process of growth and increasing productive efficiency went on, the control exercised by neighborly surveillance, through the sentiment of the common good as against the self-seeking pursuits of individuals and sub-groups, would gradually slacken; until by progressive disuse it would fall into a degree of abeyance; to be called into exercise and incite to concerted action only in the face of unusual exigencies touching the common fortunes of the group at large, ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... Brother Benedict read the first part of the letter he laughed hastily, and said, "The abbot hath no such lily." But when he had finished it, he said, "GOD rid my soul of self-seeking! The common children shall have ...
— Last Words - A Final Collection of Stories • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... necessary that the present generation, how quietly reaping the fruit of your heroic endurance, should see eye to eye with you in respect to all your testimonies and beliefs, in order to recognize your claim to gratitude and admiration. For, in an age of hypocritical hollowness and mean self-seeking, when, with noble exceptions, the very Puritans of Cromwell's Reign of the Saints were taking profane lessons from their old enemies, and putting on an outside show of conformity, for the sake of place or pardon, ye maintained the austere dignity of virtue, and, with King and Church ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... whom my husband honours—wife to the man whom you would honour—to take a part in changing the ancient custom which has been held in honour for all the thousand years, which is the glory of Blue Mountain womanhood. What an example such would be in an age when self-seeking women of other nations seek to forget their womanhood in the struggle to vie in equality with men! Men of the Blue Mountains, I speak for our women when I say that we hold of greatest price the glory of our men. To be their companions is our happiness; ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... more capable of living out of that atmosphere of assurance than a tadpole is of living out of water. His mental existence may be conditional on that. Deprived of it he may become incapable of sustained social life. He may become frantically self-seeking—incoherent... a stampede.... Human ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... outgrown the stage of political tutelage, should be accorded some measure of emancipation therefrom. And thereby we—White, Black, Mulatto, and all other inhabitants and tax-payers—shall be able to protect ourselves against the self-seeking and bold indifference to our interests which seem to be the most cherished expression of our rulers' official existence. It may be possible (for he has attempted it), that our new instructor in Colonial ethics and politics, under the impulsion of skin-superiority, ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... the place in form. It would have been cheaper, no doubt, to pay the demands of the garrison in full, and allow them to depart. But Maurice considered his honour at stake. His letters of summons, in which he spoke of the rebellious commandant and his garrison as self-seeking foreigners and mercenaries, were taken in very ill part. Wingfield resented the statement in very insolent language, and offered to prove its falsehood with his sword against any man and in any place whatever. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... these prizes, and who work at least as hard as those who win them, but deliberately adopt a line which makes the winning of them impossible, must be judged to have an aim in life other than personal advancement; whatever admixture of self-seeking may enter into the detail of their lives, their fundamental motive must be outside Self. The pioneers of Socialism, Anarchism, and Syndicalism have, for the most part, experienced prison, exile, and poverty, deliberately incurred because they would not abandon their propaganda; and by this conduct ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... would hardly be found for centuries together. The most fine and sensitive tact of piety would be essential. With it must go absolute sincerity and singleness of purpose. Any dash of mere conventionalism or self-seeking would spoil the whole. There must be that clear illuminated insight that is only given to those who are in a more than ordinary sense 'pure in heart.' And on the other hand, along with these unique spiritual qualities must go a sound and exact scientific training, a just perception ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... in the medley of man's composition, deeper far than his superficial working delusion that he is a separated self-seeking individual, an instinct for cooperation and obedience. Every natural sane man wants, though he may want it unwittingly, kingly guidance, a definite direction for his own partial life. At the bottom of his heart he feels, even if he does ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... following eyes on board those ships—Dutch, English, with a sprinkling of Americans and a German or two—who had all hoisted their flags at eight o'clock as if in honour of our arrival. It would have been a fine performance if it had come off, but it did not. Through a touch of self-seeking that modest artist of solid merit became untrue to his temperament. It was not with him art for art's sake: it was art for his own sake; and a dismal failure was the penalty he paid for that greatest of sins. It ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... right in the very point where it was most liable to be drawn astray. Gervinus regards this idea as being the soul of the piece. He thinks the Poet's leading purpose here was to teach that plain-thoughted, guileless honesty is a natural overmatch for studied cunning; and to show how self-seeking craft and intricacy are apt to be caught in the snares they have laid for others, while unselfish truth and simplicity are protected against them by those instinctive moral warnings of nature which crafty men despise. And he rightly observes that ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... Leopold's interest in the Congo was unselfish may or may not be granted, but, knowing him, as we now know him, as one of the shrewdest and, of speculators, the most unscrupulous, at the time of the Berlin Conference, his self-seeking may safely be accepted. Quietly, unostentatiously, he presented himself to its individual members as a candidate for the post of ...
— The Congo and Coasts of Africa • Richard Harding Davis
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