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More "Self-will" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... during the first year of your mellifluous union, scenes more or less delightful, pleasantries uttered in good taste, pretty purses and caresses might accompany and might decorate the handing over of this monthly gift; but the time will come when the self-will of your wife or some unforeseen expenditure will compel her to ask a loan of the Chamber; I presume that you will always grant her the bill of indemnity, as our unfaithful deputies never fail to do. They pay, but they grumble; you must pay and at the same time compliment ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... judges. "Simeon and Levi are brethren, their shepherds' staves are weapons of slaughter; O my soul, come not thou into their assembly! mine honour, be thou far from their band! for they slew men in their anger, and in their self-will they houghed oxen; cursed be their anger—so fierce! and their wrath—so cruel! I will divide them in Jacob and scatter them over Israel!" (Genesis xlix.5-7). The offence of Simeon and Levi here rebuked cannot have been committed against Israelites, for in such ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... also a number of large pictures of the battles in which the Russians have been victorious. They are not fond of keeping up a remembrance of their defeats. There was a good picture of the late Emperor, with his haughty brow, fierce eyes, and determined lips, the very impersonification of self-will and human pride, now brought down to the very dust; but, haughty as was that brow, the expression of the countenance gave no sign of talent or true genius. It was indeed wanting. He had the sense to take advantage of the ideas of others, and the determination ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... his descendants, gladly told it to my mother; rejoicing in that tumult of the senses wherein the world forgetteth Thee its Creator, and becometh enamoured of Thy creature, instead of Thyself, through the fumes of that invisible wine of its self-will, turning aside and bowing down to the very basest things. But in my mother's breast Thou hadst already begun Thy temple, and the foundation of Thy holy habitation, whereas my father was as yet but a Catechumen, and that but recently. She then was startled with a holy fear and trembling; ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... may be caused by the levity and self-will of a beautiful woman! From the time of Helen of Troy up to the present moment, the world has known this well; but, alas! this was but the beginning of that tragedy which Sidonia played in Pomerania, as that other wanton ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold
... grave archons actually granted his request. But the strangest thing he did was to cut off the tail of his beautiful dog, that, as he said, the Athenians might have something to talk about. In truth he made everything give way to his freaks and self-will; and he was a harsh and unkind husband, and insolent to his father-in-law; and, as time went on, he offended a great many persons by his pride and rudeness and selfishness, so that his brilliancy did ...
— Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Greek History • Charlotte M. Yonge
... gentleman of great estate fell desperately in love with a great beauty of very high quality, but as ill-natured as long flattery and an habitual self-will could make her. However, my young spark ventures upon her like a man of quality, without being acquainted with her, or having ever saluted her, until it was a crime to kiss any woman else. Beauty is a thing which palls with possession, and the charms of this lady soon wanted the support ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... in Jesus Christ. "It pleased God to reveal His Son in me" (Gal. i. 15, 16). The man had seen his Saviour with his whole soul. And because of—not the man who saw but—the Saviour who was seen, behold, the life is lifted off the pivot of self-will and transferred to that of "the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ." The same "revealing" grace can lift us also. We are not St Pauls; but the Jesus Christ of St Paul is absolutely the same, in Himself, for us. We will, ...
— Philippian Studies - Lessons in Faith and Love from St. Paul's Epistle to the Philippians • Handley C. G. Moule
... so!" thought he, "if my name can excite any to devotedness, or give to any the pleasure of being grateful. If my name live, the goodness of those who name it will be its life; for my true self-will not be in it. No one will the more know the real Toussaint. The weakness that was in me when I felt most strong, the reluctance when I appeared most ready, the acts of sin from which I was saved by accident alone, the divine constraint of circumstances ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... would not be repressed any longer. There must be some truth in it, or how could they have taunted him like that? And he must know the truth; he had a right to know it now. His figure grew taller. Self-will and defiance engraved deep, firm lines round his mouth. And even if it were ever so terrible, he must know it. But was it terrible? The lines round his lips became softer. "Here have we no continuing ...
— The Son of His Mother • Clara Viebig
... brethren ... into their assembly be not thou united: in their self-will they digged down ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... twenty-two years of age, a prince (if we are to believe La Tremouille) little of body but great of heart; a child (if we are to believe Commines) only now making his first flight from the nest, destitute of both sense and money, feeble in person, full of self-will, and consorting rather with fools than with the wise; lastly, if we are to believe Guicciardini, who was an Italian, might well have brought a somewhat partial judgment to bear upon the subject, a young man of ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... smile was haughty, though so sweet; Her very nod was not an inclination; There was a self-will even in her small feet, As though they were quite conscious of her station— They trod as upon necks; and to complete Her state (it is the custom of her nation), A poniard decked her girdle, as the sign She was a Sultan's bride ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... revelation and communication of holiness must be gradual, as man is prepared to receive it. God's sanctifying work with each of us, as with the race, needs time. The time it needs and seeks is the life of daily, hourly obedience. All that is spent in self-will, and not in the living relation to the Lord, is lost. But when the heart seeks day by day to hearken to the voice and to obey it, the Holy One Himself watches over His words to fulfil them: 'Ye shall be unto me an holy nation.' In a way of which the soul ...
— Holy in Christ - Thoughts on the Calling of God's Children to be Holy as He is Holy • Andrew Murray
... sources of faults inherent, in his own sensitive nature, he added also many of those which a long indulgence of self-will generates,—the least compatible, of all others, (if not softened down, as they were in him, by good nature,) with that system of mutual concession and sacrifice by which the balance of domestic peace is maintained. When ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... spiritual powers and influences that withhold the eyes of the seekers from seeing, until they are ready for the revelation. When man, in his search for Truth, has given up all selfish striving after unworthy things, and has ceased to use his self-will in conflict with the greater Will of the Whole, he is ready for the revelation of his oneness with the Infinite. Yielding implicitly to the Will of the Whole may seem, to the unillumined, an act of weakness, yet it is the entrance to a ...
— Within You is the Power • Henry Thomas Hamblin
... Stuart Mill, "are brought up from their very earliest years in the belief that their ideal character is the very opposite to that of man; not self-will and self-government by self-control, but submission and yielding to the control of others.... What is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing,—the result of forced repression in some directions, ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent
... youth was at home, their sparring, to call it by a mild name, went on from morning to night, and sometimes almost from night to morning. Primarily, of course, the fault lay with the mother; and things would have gone far worse, had not the youth, along with the self-will of his mother, inherited his father's good nature. At school he was a great favorite, and mostly had his own way, both with boys and masters, for, although a fool, he was a pleasant fool, clever, fond of popularity, and complaisant with everybody—except always his mother, the merest word from ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... he grew. There he stood, his proud, dark eye fixed on a picture on the wall, his lip curled with a sort of disdain, and an expression in his whole motionless figure that, had his cause but been good, would have been resolution, whereas it now was only indomitable self-will and pride. ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... The paradox, probably nowhere else discussed, of man's thinking and willing to all appearance all by himself, and of the fact that volition and thought come to him from beyond him, receives a similar, cumulative answer. The tension between the divine will and human self-will is a subject that pervades the book; to that subject the profoundest insights into the hidden activity of providence and into human nature are brought. On the question, "Is providence only general or also detailed?" the emphatic ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... cause not only of all things, events, and appearances, but likewise of all our thoughts, sensations, impulses and actions. Obedience to nature is the only virtue: the gratification of the passions and appetites her only dictate: each individual's self-will the sole organ through which nature ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... kissed me. "We will both pray, my dear heart, to be kept out of temptation; but let us watch likewise that we slip not therein. They be safe kept that God keepeth; and seeing that not our self-will nor folly, but His providence, brought us to this place, I reckon we have a right to ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... tenacity; cussedness [U. S.]; perseverance &c. 604a; immovability; old school; inflexibility &c. (hardness) 323; obduracy, obduration[obs3]; dogged resolution; resolution &c. 604; ruling passion; blind side. self-will, contumacy, perversity; pervicacy|, pervicacity[obs3]; indocility[obs3]. bigotry, intolerance, dogmatism; opiniatry|, opiniativeness; fixed idea &c. (prejudgment) 481; fanaticism, zealotry, infatuation, monomania; opinionatedness opinionativeness[obs3]. mule; opinionist|, opinionatist[obs3], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... folly on her part, and something worse on that of her brother; and she therefore wrote with every effort to make the whole appear her own voluntary act—though the very effort made her doubly conscious that the sole cause for her passive acquiescence was, that her past self-will in trifles had left her no power to contend for her own opinion in greater matters—the common retribution on an opinionative ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... enough, dear," said Faith at last, "and much better than you deserve to look, after leading me such a dance by your self-will. But one thing must be settled before we go back—are we to speak of this matter, ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... an object beyond the finding food, be it mental or bodily, for the present moment or the present life—it matters little which—or beyond ministering to the desires, under whatever modification they may appear, of self-will and self-love? When I look to the standard of habit and principle adopted in the world at large, and then divert my eyes for a moment from that spectacle to the standard fixed and the picture delineated in the book ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... with an affectation of coyness that was irresistibly amusing. Dorothy laughed merrily, and Rhoda resisted doing the same only by an enormous effort of self-will. She succeeded, however, in looking sulky and bad-tempered, and went downstairs feeling quite pleased with herself for resisting an ...
— Tom and Some Other Girls - A Public School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... know the child's affections could not but be weaned from us; and secondly, because the next year will be the most important of his life with reference to managing his will; and in this I cannot but distrust you. I know, my darling mother, you could not wage war with his self-will so resolutely as to subdue it. And then my child would be ruined, for he must ...
— Catherine Booth - A Sketch • Colonel Mildred Duff
... are the works of self? I might mention many, but let us take the simplest words that we are continually using,—self-will, self-confidence, self-exaltation. Self-will, pleasing self, is the great sin of man, and it is at the root of all that compromising with the world which is the ruin of so many. Men can not understand why they should not ...
— The Master's Indwelling • Andrew Murray
... good. That the obstinacy of a young and untamed girl, possessed of none of the attractions of her sex, and neither supported by bodily nor mental strength, must soon yield to the still rougher and more capricious but assumed self-will of a man: such a lesson can only be taught on the stage with all the ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... sakes, so must we empty ourselves of all self-seeking. "When the creature claimeth for its own anything good, such as life, knowledge, or power, and in short whatever we commonly call good, as if it were that, or possessed that—it goeth astray." Sin is nothing else but self-assertion, self-will. "Be assured," says the "Theologia Germanica," "that he who helpeth a man to his own will, helpeth him to the worst that he can." He, therefore, who is "simply and wholly bereft of self" is delivered from sin, and God alone reigns in his inmost soul. Concerning ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... dependence; his age was bitter,(33) like that of a great genius that had fought the battle and nearly won it, and lost it, and thought of it afterwards writhing in a lonely exile. A man may attribute to the gods, if he likes, what is caused by his own fury, or disappointment, or self-will. What public man—what statesman projecting a coup—what king determined on an invasion of his neighbour—what satirist meditating an onslaught on society or an individual, can't give a pretext for his move? There was a French ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... sixteenth century is still heavy upon 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 ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... was over, and summer and hope were dead. Tears trembled in the mother's eyes. Poor little Virginia, so young, so inexperienced, and, in spite of her self-will and recklessness, so sweet ...
— The Princess Virginia • C. N. Williamson
... Him, and it excluded neither firmness in decision, nor courage and resolution in difficulty, nor promptitude and energy in action. Her nature was so placid and docile, that we never hear, even in her childhood, of the least of those ebullitions of anger or manifestations of self-will, usual in ordinary children. It was so enduring and forgiving, that while inoffensive herself, she was incapable of taking offence, and absolutely inaccessible to resentment. It was so kind and tender, that sympathy for the troubles of others, especially the poor, was among the very first of ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"
... receive the devoted attentions of the stranger prince, and to hear every day and every hour repeated the earnest solicitations of her father that she should school herself to regard the stranger as her future husband, her little fairy heart was quite broken with its ceaseless struggles. Her pride and self-will were entirely vanquished, and she felt herself truly the most miserable of fairy maidens. Suicide is of course a thing strictly prohibited among immortals; but had it been otherwise, I sadly fear that one of the lady Dewbell's spider-web silk hose would ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... the great chief had plenty of self-will and temper. There could be no doubt of that. She sprang upon her mustang with a quick, impatient bound, and Rita followed, clinging to her prizes, wondering what would be the decision of Many Bears and his councillors as to the ...
— The Talking Leaves - An Indian Story • William O. Stoddard
... rules of public opinion are to be collected with great difficulty, and to be applied with equal uncertainty as to the effect, what better can a king of England do, than to employ such men as he finds to have views and inclinations most conformable to his own; who are least infected with pride and self-will; and who are least moved by such popular humors as are perpetually traversing his designs, and disturbing his service; trusting that, when he means no ill to his people, he will be supported in his appointments, whether he chooses to keep or to change, as his private judgment ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... slightest softness in their natures. Their narrow minds, which found real pleasure in worrying the poor child, passed insensibly from outward kindness to extreme severity. This severity was necessitated, they believed, by what they called the self-will of the child, which had not been broken when young and was very obstinate. Her masters were ignorant how to give to their instructions a form suited to the intelligence of the pupil,—a thing, by the bye, which marks the difference ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... Church had power in ceremonies more than in doctrines, or that the Parliament was the Church, since it is the Parliament that enacts all these things;—or if they admitted the authority lawful and the ceremonies only, in their mind, inexpedient, good God! can self-will more plainly put on the cracked mask of tender conscience than by refusal of obedience? What intolerable presumption, to disqualify as ungodly and reduce to null the majority of the country, who preferred the Liturgy, in order to force the long winded vanities of bustling God-orators ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... often carried them, as they did their abstinence, to an extravagant pitch. But it must be remembered, in fairness, that if they obeyed their supposed superiors, they had first chosen their superiors themselves; that as the becoming a monk at all was an assertion of self-will and independence, whether for good or evil, so their reverence for their abbots was a voluntary loyalty to one who they fancied had a right to rule them, because he was wiser and better than they; a feeling which ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... and scientific, he had not the business capacity of the elder, whose rebukes led to a sharp quarrel between them; and they parted in bitter estrangement—never to meet again as it turned out, owing to the dogged obstinacy and self-will of the younger man. He, after this, seemed to lose his moral ballast altogether, and after some eccentric doings he was reduced to a state of poverty, and took lodgings in a court in a back street of a town we will call Geneva, considerably in doubt as to what steps ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... difficulty was, that I had inherited a high-strung, passionate temper from my mother, and a strong self-will from my father, which made a combination hard to subdue. In my later days I have come to realize that I must have tantalized and pestered my mother beyond all reason, and too often, no doubt, at times when ...
— Twenty Years of Hus'ling • J. P. Johnston
... more despicable in our eyes than the decided villain. There are the irretrievably wretched education, and the unquenchably manly instincts, both contending in the confirmed roue, which melt us to the tenderest pity. There is the selfishness and self-will which the possessor of great wealth and fawning relations can hardly avoid. There is the vanity and fear of the world, which assist mysteriously with pious principles in keeping a man respectable; there are combinations of this kind of every imaginable human form and colour, redeemed ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... are a faithful servant, and I envy you," said Baron von Stein, "for your services are gratefully accepted; you are not treated with contumely, and your zeal is not regarded as malice and self-will. You may assist your country with your head, your arm, and your heart. You are not doomed to step aside, and idly dream away your days instead of seeking relief in useful activity. Oh, I repeat again, I envy you!" While he was speaking, his pale cheeks had assumed some color, and his voice, ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... of his three sisters, and prompted the words of blessing from the failing tongue. Then as Bertha rose, he sank on his knees in her place, 'Bless me, bless me, too, mother; bless me, and pardon my many acts of self-will.' ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... from his ambitious family stock, which, in and around him, had wakened to the vigor of a previous century; but it was so different from Vesta's nature that, while it but made nobler her soul of tranquil piety and ease of ladyhood, Vesta was interested in Rhoda's self-will and business coquetry. ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... more scrutinisingly than he had ever done before, and for the first time he told himself that the beautifully moulded mouth was hard and unloving, and that the chin spoke of self-will and an amount of resolution unusual in such a ...
— If Only etc. • Francis Clement Philips and Augustus Harris
... Duchess did not know to be the token of heart complaint. He was confined to his room, and it was kneeling by his bedside that Eutacie poured out her thankfulness for her child's preservation, and her own repentance for the passing fit of self-will and petulance. The thought of Rayonette's safety seemed absolutely to extinguish the fresh anxiety that had arisen since it had become evident that her enemies no longer supposed her dead, but were probably upon ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... times happier, be it ten for one; Ten times thy self were happier than thou art, If ten of thine ten times refigur'd thee: Then what could death do if thou shouldst depart, Leaving thee living in posterity? Be not self-will'd, for thou art much too fair To be death's conquest ...
— Shakespeare's Sonnets • William Shakespeare
... The fretted splendour of each nook and niche. Between the tree-stems, marbled plain at first, Came jasper pannels; then, anon, there burst Forth creeping imagery of slighter trees, 140 And with the larger wove in small intricacies. Approving all, she faded at self-will, And shut the chamber up, close, hush'd and still, Complete and ready for the revels rude, When dreadful guests would come to spoil ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... kingdom of heaven." "Except ye become as this little child, ye cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven." This is based upon proper principles. The heart of the child is purely devotional and confidential. It is a helpless dependent upon the parent. It abdicates its self-will with joy; silently do the laws of home control it; its reverence and love are the melody of its being; its life is an exchange of obedience for protection. Its path is chosen for it by the lamp of parental experience, and the calm ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... the foolish wince. Let us be grateful for the social and humanizing influences of Mirth. Amid the sorrow, disappointment, agony, and anguish of the world,—over dark thoughts and tempestuous passions, the gloomy exaggerations of self-will, the enfeebling illusions of melancholy,—Wit and Humor, light and lightning, shed their soft radiance, or dart their electric flash. See how life is warmed and illumined by Mirth! See how the beings of the mind, with which it has peopled our imaginations, ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... Single. Faith, and Moral Courage needed. Marrying to gratify friends. "Match makers." Self-will. To leave an Unpleasant Home. To obtain a Home. Practices in Mexico and France. Marrying for Wealth. Offer in Texas. Personal Beauty. A noble example. Fancy. Influence of Novels, and impure Poetry. Flattery. Passion. Personal Bravery. ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... I to suggest a pilgrimage, a fast, or scourgings even, the fair sex would undertake the remedy at once, for they like some eclat about their smallest doings. All I want them to do is to correct their little spirit of self-will ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... unbelief often, too often, interrupt these frames, and lay me low before God in tears of sorrow. I often think what a happiness it would be if his love were so fixed in my heart that I might willingly obey him with alacrity and delight, and gradually mortify the power of self-will, passion, and pride. This can only arise from a good hope through grace that we are washed in that precious blood which cleanses us from every sinful stain, and makes us new creatures in Christ. Oh that we may be the happy witnesses ...
— The Annals of the Poor • Legh Richmond
... what my soul pants 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 ...
— The Power of Faith - Exemplified In The Life And Writings Of The Late Mrs. Isabella Graham. • Isabella Graham
... sought - The codes and the creeds that ye cherished were shadows of clouds in the wind, (And ye can not recall for their counsel lost leaders ye dallied behind!) Ye shall stand in that hour and discover by agony's guttering flame How the fruits of self-will, and the lees of ambition and bitterness all are the same, Until, stripped of desire, ye shall know that was death. Then the proof that ye live Shall be knowledge new-born that the naked—the fools ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... characters. Not but that many precious children of God suffered in much patience and charity. But those who suffered with very much of a different spirit, found no pastor to discountenance their self-will and false zeal: a sure sign that the true spirit of martyrdom was less pure than it had formerly been. Moreover the prevalence of superstition on the one hand, and the decay of evangelical knowledge on the other, are equally apparent. Christ crucified, justification ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... oft thy stiff-neck'd self-will hath To bitter need reduc'd thee! When heart and mind deluded, death To take for life, seduc'd thee! And had the Lord thy work and deed Along the path allow'd proceed That thou thyself had'st taken, Lost wert ...
— Paul Gerhardt's Spiritual Songs - Translated by John Kelly • Paul Gerhardt
... little can we know of this great wicked world, and of the reasons which our superiors give for their conduct! It is ours humbly to obey, without a question or a doubt. Holy Mother, may I not sin through a vain curiosity or self-will! May I ever say, as thou didst, 'Behold the handmaid of the Lord! be it unto me according ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... prodigal was pierced to the core by the great mercy shown by his parents, and the brilliancy of his own original good heart was enticed back to him. The sunlight came forth, and what became of all the clouds of self-will and selfishness? The clouds were all dispelled, and from the bottom of his soul there sprang the desire to thank his parents for their goodness. We all know the story of the rush-cutter who saw the ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... are. What you wish to be you shall be. There will be no pent-up energies here to burst out into disaster for yourself and others. You shall be trained to self-control—that is, if you ever develop self-will, dear child—every faculty shall be educated, every school of life you desire knowledge through shall be opened to you. You shall become that finest flower of civilization, a woman who knows how to use ...
— The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories • Gertrude Atherton
... dissatisfied, and so ready to take responsibilities upon themselves. It is a temptation of Providence to send such calamities as the one we are suffering from. You will know more about life when you are forced to work for yourself, and do not set about it out of pure presumption and self-will, with a good home to fall back upon when you are ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... equanimity which enter so largely into the virtues for the statesman. He had never learned how essential it is for any one who undertakes public business, and desires to deal with mankind, to avoid above all things that self-will, which, as Plato says, belongs to the family of solitude; and to pursue, above all things, that capacity so generally ridiculed, of submission to ill-treatment. Marcius, straightforward and direct, stand together, and come in to their assistance. The assembly met, ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... caution you to be on your guard to-day against any exhibition of self-will and ill temper, if your wishes are overruled by those older and ...
— Elsie's Kith and Kin • Martha Finley
... moral trial. Many of those who had been ready to applaud her were found equally ready to criticise her. Her mother's natural pangs at settling down into their new relationship were maliciously interpreted as consequences of the Queen's coldness and self-will. It was said that she 'began to exhibit slight signs ...
— Queen Victoria • Anonymous
... not one wanting to dominate the other, neither is it that one prefers to be dominated. But this was precisely, however, what these young revolutionaries thought, and insisted upon, with a curious sort of self-will. They snubbed Clerambault, on the principle that intelligence should be at the service of the proletariat ... "Dienen, dienen ..." which was the last word even of the proud Wagner. More than one lofty spirit brought low has said the same; if they ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... seemed so much sincerity of repentance, that it painfully affected me. I could not but reflect that I, too, had shortened the life of a good, tender father by my bad conduct and obstinate self-will. I was, indeed, so surprised with what he had told me, that I thought, instead of my going about to teach and instruct him, the man was made a teacher and instructor to me in ...
— The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... requesting her father to send three hundred dollars as her ransom. The letter was despatched by the shepherd. When he was gone, the chief turned sternly to me: "You have set an example," said he, "of mutiny and self-will, which if indulged would be ruinous to the troop. Had I treated you as our laws require, this bullet would have been driven through your brain. But you are an old friend; I have borne patiently with your fury and your folly; I have even protected you from a foolish passion that ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... and grace, and inspiration,—to attack them, not in the name of Ormuzd, nor of any other deity, but in the name of mere brute force and lust of conquest. The old Persian spirit was gone out of them. They were the symbols now of nothing save despotism and self-will, wealth and self-indulgence. They, once the children of Ormuzd or light, had become the children of Ahriman or darkness; and therefore it was, as I believe, that Xerxes' 1,000 ships, and the two million (or, as some have it, five million) human beings availed naught ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... over-indulgence, by their anxiety to pamper the child by yielding to all his caprices and artificially protecting him from the natural results of those caprices, so that instead of learning freedom, he has merely acquired self-will. These parents do not indeed tyrannise over their children but they do worse; they train their children to be tyrants. Against these two tendencies of our century Ellen Key declares her own Alpha and Omega of the art of education. Try to leave the child in peace; live your own life beautifully, ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... the greatest difficulty in steering her partner through the maze, on account of his self-will, and when at last they reached the bottom of the long line, she was breathless with her hard labour.. Resting here, she watched Nic and his lady; and, though she had decidedly cooled off in these ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... thought, in soothing and refining it, but in bracing it. He was the preacher and example of manly hardness, simplicity, purpose in the religious character. It may be that his hatred of evil—of hollowness, impurity, self-will, conceit, ostentation—was greater than was always his perception of various and mingled good, or his comprehension of those middle things and states which are so much before us now. But the service cannot be overrated, to all parties, of the protest ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... to whose commands, Alas! I've nothing to reply withal; Nor is there man more wretched than myself. For Clinia here (though he, I must confess, Has cares enough) has got a mistress, modest, Well-bred, and stranger to all harlot arts: Mine is a self-will'd, wanton, haughty madam, Gay, and extravagant; and let her ask Whate'er she will, she must not be denied; Since poverty I durst not make my plea. This is a plague I have but newly found, Nor is my father yet ...
— The Comedies of Terence • Publius Terentius Afer
... particularly noticeable on account of a pair of dark gray eyes, cold and calculating, and which had at times a steel-like glitter. Though an attractive face, it was not altogether pleasing; it was too sensuous, and indicated stubbornness and self-will ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... and Mary Leighton, Charlotte, and Henrietta drove away with Kilian quite jauntily, at half-past seven o'clock. But before she went, Charlotte, who was really good-natured with all her sharpness and self-will, went into the library to speak to Mr. Langenau, and to show she did not resent the noonday slight, whatever that had been. But presently she came back looking rather anxious, and said to Sophie, ignoring me (whom she always ...
— Richard Vandermarck • Miriam Coles Harris
... has ever yet been able to appreciate literature, he would have discovered that it is the unruliness not of the democracy but of the aristocracy against which Ulysses—or, if you prefer it, Shakespeare—inveighs in this speech. The speech is aimed at the self-will and factiousness of Achilles and his disloyalty to Agamemnon. If there are any moderns who come under the noble lash of Ulysses, they must be sought for not among either French or Russian revolutionists, but in the persons of such sound Tories as Sir Edward Carson and such sound ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... feeling came when this proud self-reliance was forced to give way, and she was obliged to leave herself helpless in the hands of others. 'God requires that I should give up my last form of self-will,' she said; 'now I have resigned this, perhaps he will ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... whims complied with by those around her, that she seemed to expect she should even be saved the trouble of forming them; and so totally unacquainted with contradiction, that she did not even use the tone of self-will, since to breathe a wish was to have it fulfilled. She made no ceremony of ridding herself of Duncan as soon as the evening approached; but complimented him out of the house under pretext of fatigue, with the ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... little as to what this announcement might be followed up by, in the way of special naughtiness. But her fears were misplaced. Hoodie was perfectly good and gentle all day—almost too much so indeed; Lucy would have liked to see a touch of her old self-will and petulance, for she could not help fearing she was to blame for the strange depression of Hoodie's spirits. She was very kind and good to the little girl, and did her utmost to amuse her, but it was a strange, sad time. The house, lately so cheerful with children's ...
— Hoodie • Mary Louisa Stewart Molesworth
... evil! But Byron's devil is a spirit, yet a mortal too—the traducer, because he has suffered for his sins; the deceiver, because he is self-deceived; the hoper against hope that there is a ransom for the soul in perfect self-will and not in perfect self-sacrifice. Byron did not uphold Lucifer, but he "had passed that way," and could imagine a spiritual warfare not only against the Deus of the Mysteries or of the Book of Genesis, but ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... ideal was the purification of the soul, but when translated into definite, concrete terms, the immediate aim of the monk was to live a life of poverty, celibacy and obedience. Riches, marriage and self-will were regarded as forms of sinful gratification, which every holy man should abandon. The true Christian, according to monasticism, is poor, celibate and obedient. The three fundamental monastic vows should therefore receive ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... Government in St. Petersburg with rage. The persistent reluctance of human beings to be parted almost for life from those near and dear to them, or to see their little ones carried off to an early grave or to the baptismal font, was regarded as a manifestation of criminal self-will. Accordingly, the former measures of "cutting short" and "curbing" this self-will were improved upon by new ones. In December, 1850, the Tzar gave orders that for every missing Jewish recruit in a given community three men of the minimum ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... within him which would impel him to slay his own brother; and the experience of the first mother has been repeated, though in different forms, in all lands and in all ages. Isaac's heart was rent by the deceit of Jacob, and by the self-will of Esau. Jacob lived to see his own sin repeated in his sons, and he who deceived his father when he was old and blind, suffered for years an agony of grief because he had been falsely told that Joseph, his favourite ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... unbought; To him the venerable priest, Our frequent and familiar guest, Whose life and manners well could paint Alike the student and the saint; Alas! whose speech too oft I broke With gambol rude and timeless joke; For I was wayward, bold, and wild, A self-will'd imp, a grandame's child; But, half a plague and half a jest, Was still endured, ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... seas that distresses me; it is not the hardships he must undergo; it is not the dread of never seeing him more in this world: it is because I cannot discern the fulfilment of the promise in him. I discern not the new birth nor its fruits, but every symptom of captivity to Satan, the world, and self-will. This, O this is what distresses me: and in connection with this, his being shut out from ordinances, at a distance from Christians; and shut up with those who forget God, profane his name, ...
— The Power of Faith - Exemplified In The Life And Writings Of The Late Mrs. Isabella Graham. • Isabella Graham
... a little i, and over every one of us there is a little dot of self-importance, self-will, self-interest, self-confidence, self-complacency, or something to which we cling and for which we contend, which just as surely reveals self-life as if it were a mountain of ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson
... call to join the dance, or by the presentation of the stimulating cordial, and my remorse and my hopeless desires would be drowned for the time being. Once, in utter disgust, I made a resolution to abstain from such amusements; but it was made in self-will, and did not stand long, though I was so earnest that I gave away much of my finery. I cannot look back to those years without a blush of shame, a feeling of anguish at the utter perversion of the ends of my being. But for my tutelary god, my idolized brother, my young, passionate ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney
... he said. "Stay one moment, and you shall know what your pride and self-will have ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... evil with good—a kind of glorious self-will for goodness, for doing a thing the higher and nobler way and making it work, the spirit of successful implacably efficient righteousness is the last and most modern interpretation of the New Testament, the crowd's latest cry to its God. Crowds will always crucify and crosses ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... brute: but worse, a fiend. There is a deep and true philosophy in that. As long as he was what he was meant to be—the servant of God—he was an archangel and more; the fairest of all the sons of the morning. When he rebelled; when in pride and self-will he tore himself—his person—away from that God in whom he lived and moved and had his being: the personality remained; he could still, like Medea, fall back, even when he knew that he had rebelled against his Creator, on his indomitable self, and reign a ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... dress, by no means improved the colour of a light silk one. 'Misfortunes never come alone,' it is said; and though I am not myself a firm believer in this proverb, it certainly proved true with regard to Mabel Ellis, though these misfortunes were entirely the results of her pride and self-will, so she does not deserve ...
— Aunt Mary • Mrs. Perring
... thee into their care, my son. Be prudent, do not risk your life heedlessly, but remember that it is no longer only your own. Exercise the gentleness of a father towards the rebels; they did not rise in mere self-will, but to gain their freedom, the most precious possession of mankind. Remember, too, that to shew mercy is better than to shed blood; the sword killeth, but the favor of the ruler bringeth joy and happiness. Conclude the war as speedily as possible, for war is a perversion of nature; in peace ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... by nature, worse by art, discipline, [1633]custom, education, and a perverse will of their own, they follow on, wheresoever their unbridled affections will transport them, and do more out of custom, self-will, than out of reason. Contumax voluntas, as Melancthon calls it, malum facit: this stubborn will of ours perverts judgment, which sees and knows what should and ought to be done, and yet will not do it. Mancipia gulae, slaves to their several ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... of later scholarship on the matters of origins and interpretations. Its bibliographies and extended commentaries make it invaluable. The story of Phaethon is usually thought of as a warning against presumption, conceit, whim, self-will. It was probably invented in the first place to account for the extremely hot ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... tempted to commit it,—conscience will speak out, and for the first time at least it will be listened to. But if this warning be neglected, and the sin be committed, the conscience will be proportionally weakened, and the self-will of the individual will acquire additional strength. When the temptation again presents itself, it is with redoubled power, and it meets with less resistance. It will invariably be found in such cases, that the person felt much more ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... storm Lower'd at safe distance. When the clouds frown'd darker, Fear'd for yourself and left them to their fate. Oh, I have mark'd thee long, and through the veil Seen thy foul projects. Yes, ambitious man, 100 Self-will'd dictator o'er the realm of France, The vengeance thou hast plann'd for patriots Falls on thy head. Look how thy brother's deeds Dishonour thine! He the firm patriot, Thou the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... British monarchy. The forms have changed, the living substance is the same. Americans know at least as well as Englishmen what the most intelligent of French Republicans apparently have still to learn, that liberty is impossible without loyalty to something higher than self-interest and self-will. ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... an anticlimax. Even Nero, nerveless in his latter days, when self-will and debauchery had pouched his eyes and stomach, had possessed the Roman gift of standing like a god. Vespasian and Titus, each in turn, was Mars personified. Aurelius had typified a gentler phase of Rome, a subtler dignity, but even he, whose ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy
... have attended to her. It was a fit of self-will in managing myself,' said Guy, murmuring low, as if trying to find the real indictment; 'yet I thought it a positive duty; ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... thought is insisted on from the first, obedience will come easily to the child; but woe be to both mother and child if egotism, self-will and selfishness secure a fast ...
— Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training • Mosiah Hall
... Dion, who never indulged himself in any youthful pleasure or diversion. And so his very virtues were the matter of their calumnies, and were represented under one or other plausible name as vices; they called his gravity pride, his plain-dealing self-will, the good advice he gave was all construed into reprimand, and he was censured for neglecting and scorning those in whose misdemeanors he declined to participate. And to say the truth, there was in his natural character something stately, austere, reserved, and ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... almost destroyed for ever by the interference of Ferdinand Lopez. But Mrs. Lopez never for a moment forgot that she had done the mischief,—and that the black enduring cloud had been created solely by her own perversity and self-will. Though she would still defend her late husband if any attack were made upon his memory, not the less did she feel that hers had been the fault, though the punishment had come ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... forty-two, a typical English sportsman of the out-door, cold-tub-in-the-morning genus, he had a square-jawed, rather ugly face, roofed with a crop of brown hair a trifle sunburnt at its tips as a consequence of long days spent in the open. His mouth indicated a certain amount of self-will, the inborn imperiousness of a man who has met with obedient services as a matter of course, and whose forebears, from one generation to another, have always been masters of men. And, it might be added, masters of their women-kind as well, in the good, ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... momentary, intense, as if each was the present moment. And in each of these scenes I saw what I had never seen before. I saw where I had taken the wrong instead of the right step, in what wantonness, with what self-will it had been done; how God (I shuddered at the name) had spoken and called me, and even entreated, and I had withstood and refused. All the evil I had done came back, and spread itself out before my eyes; and I loathed it, yet knew that I had chosen it, and ...
— The Little Pilgrim: Further Experiences. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... mothers, entirely from anxious solicitude about a son, who, in spite of all admonition and remonstrance, had allowed the growth and practice of disobedience for several years to embitter his kind parents' lives; and whose headstrong violence and self-will at last brought the being whom he most loved on earth to a ...
— The Eskdale Herd-boy • Mrs Blackford
... to conduct certain fervent souls through extraordinary paths, in which others would find only dangers of illusion, vanity, and self-will, which we cannot sufficiently guard ourselves against. We should notwithstanding consider, that the sanctity of these fervent souls does not consist in such wonderful actions, or miracles, but in the perfection of their unfeigned charity, patience, and humility; ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... from corner to corner diagonally. "Such was the chamber of Lord Chatham's grand-daughter! Diogenes himself could not have found fault with its appointments!" But the thoughtful observer will regret the indulged self-will and the exaggerated egotism which placed in such a position a woman whose powerful intellect might have been applied to the benefit of the community. It is impossible not to see and feel that ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... 'all that' she felt she was not ready. One corner for self-will and doing her own pleasure she wanted somewhere; and wanted so obstinately, that she felt, as it were, a mountain of strong unwillingness rise up between God's requirements and her; an iron lock upon the door of her ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... he labored to sully with blame The white bust of Penn, in the niche of his fame! Self-will is self-wounding, perversity blind On himself fell the stain for ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... worshipper should forget himself, should renounce his particular inclinations, should abandon himself and long to do not his own will but that of God. But before self can be consciously abandoned, the consciousness of self must be realised. Before self-will can be surrendered, its existence must be realised. And self-consciousness, the recognition of the existence of the will and the reality of the self, comes relatively late both in the history of the community and in the personal history of the individual. At first the existence of the individual ...
— The Idea of God in Early Religions • F. B. Jevons
... can see a mote within my eye, And with a cassock blind your own defects, I'll teach you this: 'tis better to do ill, That's never known to us, than of self-will. Stand these[439], all these, in thy seducing eye, As scorning life, make ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... advice. Bee tried to follow it by doing her lessons as usual, and giving the same attention to them. But Rosy, with some of her old self-will, would not leave off talking about the promised treat. She was tiresome and careless at her lessons, and Miss Pink was not firm enough to check her. Morning, noon, and night, Rosy went on about ...
— Rosy • Mrs. Molesworth
... triumphant party: so far he bears a gallant show of magnanimity; but his gallantry is hardly of the right stamp: it wants principle. For though he is not servile or mercenary, he is the victim of self-will. He must pull down and pull in pieces: it is not in his disposition to do otherwise. It is a pity; for with his great talents he might do great things, if he would go right forward to any useful object, make thorough-stitch ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... meantime the new castellan was exercising his power with unsparing and immoderate severity. Oliver de Wortshorn was almost heartbroken; the old man suddenly found himself reduced to the condition of a mere dependant on the self-will and caprice of this petty tyrant, his authority having been usurped, and his office wrested from him, by the hand of a stranger. Adam de Dutton[51] was the name of this new functionary, and he rode it out bravely over the necks of ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... from on high Knows better what to do than I. I'm not mine own: should I repine If he dispose of what's not mine? Purge but thy soul of blind self-will, Thou straight shall see God doth no ill. The world he fills with the bright rays Of his free goodness. He displays Himself throughout. Like common air That spirit of life through all doth fare, Sucked in by them as vital breath ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... had seen how ministers and parties ruled in England (S534), resolved that her son should have the control. Her constant injunction to the young Prince was, "Be King, George, be King!" so that when he came to power George was determined to be King if self-will could make him one.[2] ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... of Heaven is not at that hour when the eye grows dim and the sound of friendly voices becomes silent in death, but at that hour when God draws near and the eyes of the spiritual understanding are opened, and the soul sees how beautiful Christ is, how hateful sin is; the hour when self-will is crucified, and the God-will is born in the resolutions of a new heart." Then Heaven has begun, the Heaven that will continue after ...
— The Gospel of the Hereafter • J. Paterson-Smyth
... there was little amusement, there was, on the other hand, great devotion; the Princess, as a child, had that peculiar combination of self-will and warm-heartedness which is apt to win for a child a special love from its elders. The Princess Feodore wrote to the ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria
... say, it appears to depend upon the liking of the individuals for one another's company. The tendency of individuals to over self-assertion is kept down by fighting. Even in these rudimentary forms of society, love and fear come into play, and enforce a greater or less renunciation of self-will. To this extent the general cosmic process begins to be checked by a rudimentary ethical process, which is, strictly speaking, part of the former, just as the "governor" in a steam-engine is part of the mechanism of ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... courageous citizen in the time of his independence and then reward him in the day of his submission; and the authorities would thus demonstrate to all the people that the one way to political preferment lay through the annihilation of self-will and the submergence of national loyalty in priestly devotion. Such a candidacy was a sufficient shame to the state; but there was also a United States Senatorship to be bestowed; and it was deliberately bargained for, between the Church ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
... are shades and modifications, wisdom and unwisdom; apparently, though, thank God, only 'apparently,' conflicting duties, whose rival claims it is not always easy to measure. And it is not till some stages later in our journey that we come to see how our own prejudices or shortsightedness or self-will are really at the root of the perplexity. For God demands no impossibilities. As has been quaintly said, 'He neither expects us to be in two places at once, nor to put twenty-five ...
— Robin Redbreast - A Story for Girls • Mary Louisa Molesworth
... Choughs," glorifying himself in the thought that now, at any rate, he had shown Hardy that he wasn't to be dragooned into doing or not doing anything. He had had a bad time of it all day, and his good angel had fought hard for victory; but self-will was too strong for the time. When he stayed behind the rest, it was more out of bravado than from any defined purpose of pursuing what he tried to persuade himself was an innocent flirtation. When he left the house some hours after he was deeper in the toils than ever, and dark clouds were ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... self-examination at all; and none employ the power of self-inspection with that carefulness and sedulity with which they ought. Hence men generally, and unrenewed men always, are unacquainted with much that goes on within their own minds and hearts. Though it is sin and self-will, though it is thought and feeling and purpose and desire, that is going on and taking place during all these years of religious indifference, yet the agent himself, so far as a sober reflection upon the moral character of the process, and a distinct perception of the dreadful issue of ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... display of considerable self-will on the part of your children. It is the correlative of that diminished coerciveness so conspicuous in modern education. The greater tendency to assert freedom of action on the one side, corresponds to the smaller tendency to tyrannise ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... between man and man, is possible, is blessed, is joyful and strong when it is required by, and rendered to, Jesus Christ. We are His slaves if we have any living relationship to Him at all. Where, then, in the Christian life, is there a place for self-will; where a place for self-indulgence; where for murmuring or reluctance; where for the assertion of any rights of my own as against that Master? We owe absolute obedience ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... law to these people: fancying myself infallible, as if God were not as near to them as He is to me—certainly nearer than to any book on my shelves—offending their little prejudices, little superstitions, in my own cruel self-conceit and self-will! And now, the first time that I forget my own rules; the first time that I forget almost that I am a priest, even a Christian at all! that moment they acknowledge me as a priest, as a Christian. The moment ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... A few days before his self-will brought him to his death-bed, we saw him ride through the St. Petersburg streets with no pomp and no attendants, yet in as great pride as ever Despotism gave a man. At his approach, nobles uncovered and looked docile, soldiers faced about and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... zeal of Nelson got him into disfavour with his superiors in the service. And yet his whole conduct was regulated by the strictest sense of duty, and his letters—even those in which he shows most independence—never give the slightest occasion to suspect that his actions arose from self-will and disobedience. On this ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... unsolvable world of little and great, of domineering and incompetent wills, of the powerful rich struggling blindly to dominate and the weak poor struggling blindly to keep their lives: the vast web of petty greeds and blind efforts. He should return, but humbly, with the crude dross of his self-will burnt out. They had rebelled together; they had had their wills to themselves; and that was ended. It could not have been otherwise. They could never have known each other in the world; they had to withdraw themselves apart. ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... the good of the community." During a temporary absence of the mistress, a ray of kindliness seemed to touch the woman O'Kin. She pointed to the square of some six feet, to the rings fastened in the rafters. "Don't carry self-will to extremes. Here you are to be stripped, hauled up to those rings, and beaten until the bow breaks. Look at it and take warning. Kin is no weakling." She shoved back her sleeve, showing an arm as hard and brawny as that of a stevedore. With disapproval she observed O'Iwa. The latter ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... life in monasteries. These gather in multitudes in one spot, and range themselves under one superior and president, the best of their number, slaying all self-will with the sword of obedience. Of their own free choice they consider themselves as slaves bought at a price, and no longer live for themselves, but for him, to whom, for Christ his sake, they have become obedient; or rather, to speak more ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... a great sorrow risen. We perceive the first small cracks of incurable divisions in the royal household; the breaking out of fountains of bitterness, which by and by spread wide enough. A young sprightly, capricions and vivacious Boy, inclined to self-will, had it been permitted; developing himself into foreign tastes, into French airs and ways; very ill seen by the ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... parents, that they may have regard to the souls of their children, so that the poor children be not deceived by their false, fleshly love, as if they had rightly honored their parents when they are not angry with them, or are obedient in worldly matters, by which their self-will is strengthened; although the Commandment places the parents in honor for the very purpose that the self-will of the children may be broken, and that the children ...
— A Treatise on Good Works • Dr. Martin Luther
... wishes, careless of my comfort, and indifferent to my society. Still I felt by no means inclined to give him up; was by no means disposed to let him have his own way. It was clear to my mind that I had rights as well as he had; and I possessed resolution enough to be ready to maintain them. His self-will and indifference to my wishes roused in me a bitter and contentious spirit; and, in an evil hour, I determined that I would make a struggle for the mastery. An opportunity was not long delayed. The Philharmonic Society had announced one of its splendid concerts. A lady friend, who had ...
— Married Life; Its Shadows and Sunshine • T. S. Arthur
... man of very few ideas, he cherished those he had Self-will, self-pride, and self-righteousness were big in him Tyranny of the little ...
— Quotations From Gilbert Parker • David Widger
... and action; hence all carnal choices are immature and premature, and all carnal courses are mistaken and unspiritual. God is often moved to delay that we may be led to pray, and even the answers to prayer are deferred that the natural and carnal spirit may be kept in check and self-will may bow before ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... those days of early summer, had he wavered in his determination to make this lady his wife. Pride was at the root of his being,—pride and a deep self-will; though because they were so sunken, and because poisonous roots can flower most deceivingly, he neither called himself nor was called of others a proud and willful man. He wished Evelyn for his wife; nay, more, though on May Day he had shown her that he loved her not, though in June he had offered ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... gently—"What of Father Aloysius? He is 'but man' as you say!—a poor priest having nothing in common with your wealth or your self-will, my child!—one whose soul admits no other instruction than that of the Great Intelligence ruling the universe, and from whose ordinance comes forth joy or sorrow, wisdom or ignorance. We are but dust on the wind before this mighty power!—even you, with all your study and attainment ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... obedience, and neglected the plain task laid upon him. That fear of proselytism, that humble dread of his own influence, which had once determined his whole attitude towards those about him, began now to seem to him mere wretched cowardice and self-will—the caprice of the servant who tries to ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... self-will! The Fathers of the Church have answered the question satisfactorily. But how did ...
— The Light Shines in Darkness • Leo Tolstoy
... find this very religion of theirs in ancient times, whether in friend or foe, Jew or Pagan, Montanist or Novatian; though I find surely enough, and in plenty, the general characteristics, which are conspicuous in their philosophy, of self-will, eccentricity, and ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... and summer and hope were dead. Tears trembled in the mother's eyes. Poor little Virginia, so young, so inexperienced, and, in spite of her self-will and recklessness, ...
— The Princess Virginia • C. N. Williamson
... knows; I was almost shipwrecked; yet I will still say to the last that what I loved in him was a better self,—something really noble and good, however concealed and perverted by pride, ambition, and self-will. Though all the world reject him, I still have faith in this better nature, and prayers that he may be led right at last. There is at least one heart that will always ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... the richest people in the world naturally heightened their pride and arrogance. The long and eventful religious wars of Charles V. and Philip II. gave employment and distinction to thousands of families whose vanity was nursed by the royal favor, and whose ferocious self-will was fed and pampered by the blood of heretics and ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... chains confin'd; No selfishness and no self-will are nigh, For at her advent they ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... our peculiar tempers and circumstances. In youth, he allures us by pleasure, and bright hopes of worldly prosperity. In manhood, he seeks to bury up our hearts in the cares of life. In old age, he persuades to the indulgence of self-will and obstinacy. In prosperity, he puffs up the heart with pride, and persuades to self-confidence and forgetfulness of God. In poverty and affliction, he excites feelings of discontent, distrust, and repining. If we are of a melancholy temperament, he seeks to sour our tempers, and promote ...
— A Practical Directory for Young Christian Females - Being a Series of Letters from a Brother to a Younger Sister • Harvey Newcomb
... reflects all the results of later scholarship on the matters of origins and interpretations. Its bibliographies and extended commentaries make it invaluable. The story of Phaethon is usually thought of as a warning against presumption, conceit, whim, self-will. It was probably invented in the first place to account for the extremely hot weather of the ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... waspish, and petty nature. His form too faithfully reflected his character. He was never, from the beginning to the close of his life, a great, broad, genial being. There was an unhealthy taint which partly enfeebled and partly corrupted him. His self-will, his ambition, his Pariah position, as belonging to the Roman Catholic faith, the feebleness of his constitution, the uncertainty of his real creed, and one or two other circumstances we do not choose to name, ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... impression of it. For Diana's face had come curiously near the expression on the face of her own little child. Innocent, tender, pure,—something like that. Grave, but with no clouds at all; strong and purposeful, yet with an utter absence of self-will or self-consciousness. It had always been, to a certain degree, innocent and pure, but that was negative; and this was positive,—the refined gold that had been through the fire. And no baby's face is sweeter than Diana's was now, all blossoming ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... priest, Our frequent and familiar guest, Whose life and manners well could paint Alike the student and the saint; Alas! whose speech too oft I broke With gambol rude and timeless joke; For I was wayward, bold, and wild, A self-will'd imp, a grandame's child; But, half a plague and half a jest, Was still ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... less open waters of domestic strife. While what it shows of human nature in general is the most important thing, what is shown of Russian life is of great interest. The position of the countess, and the habit of her mind with its over-bearing self-will and ingenious self-approval, are studies possible, of course, anywhere, but pretty sure to be found especially in a land like Russia, where the habit of command was until recently so strongly fostered by the existence of serfdom. The condition of those who are exposed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... story the two young people, after some years of estrangement, brought about by an unfortunate misunderstanding on his part, pride and self-will on hers, had reached the delightfully unsettling stage of exchanging photographs, the sequel of which took place under the most romantic circumstances, not to be related ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt
... contrast!) chord and song Of raptur'd angels drowns In self-will's peal of blasphemies, And ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... same. Americans know at least as well as Englishmen what the most intelligent of French Republicans apparently have still to learn, that liberty is impossible without loyalty to something higher than self-interest and self-will. ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... pride cannot understand the beauty of humility, and the spirit of self-will cannot understand the beauty of obedience; and, therefore, it is reasonable to suppose the devil could not understand our Lord. If He be the Son of God, so might Satan argue, He has all the more reason ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... felt she was not ready. One corner for self-will and doing her own pleasure she wanted somewhere; and wanted so obstinately, that she felt, as it were, a mountain of strong unwillingness rise up between God's requirements and her; an iron lock upon the door of her heart, the key of which she could not turn, shutting and ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... had tasted the triumph of defeat. But in all her exaltation she knew—though for the moment the knowledge could not hurt her—that her heart would be broken by Christopher's death. Through the long night of her ignorance and self-will and unsatisfied idealism she had wrestled with the angel that she might behold the Best, and had prayed that it might be granted unto her to see the Vision Beautiful. At last she had prevailed; and the day for which she had so longed was breaking, and transfiguring the common world with its ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... position of the observer,—were those contrarieties and changes not less startling, which his character so often exhibited, as compared with itself. He who, at one moment, was seen intrenched in the most absolute self-will, would, at the very next, be found all that was docile and amenable. To-day, storming the world in its strong-holds, as a misanthrope and satirist—to-morrow, learning, with implicit obedience, to fold a shawl, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... to a more refined apprehension. Her eyes appeared more deliberately conscious of their depth and gleam; her lips, less responsive to the flying thought, grew to an habitual expression—not of discontent, but something akin unto it; not of self-will, but something that spoke a spirit ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... shod with silver and with a sceptre in his hand and a crown on his head. The oath of fidelity to his people, usual on such occasions, was not taken, and in fact Charles had no thought of being faithful to anything but his own ambitious designs and his obstinate self-will. ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 9 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. Scandinavian. • Charles Morris
... the word "body" includes more than outward, sensual vices and crimes, as gluttony, fornication, murder; it includes everything not of the new spiritual birth but belonging to the old Adam nature, even its best and noblest faculties, outer and inner; the deep depravity of self-will, for instance, and arrogance, human wisdom and reason, reliance on our own good works, on our own spiritual life and on the gifts wherewith God ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. II - Epiphany, Easter and Pentecost • Martin Luther
... Mrs. Leigh. "Such self-conceit—and Heaven knows we have the root of it in ourselves also—is the very daughter of self-will, and of that loud crying out about I, and me, and mine, which is the very bird-call for all devils, and the broad road which leads ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... speak of them with sharp impatience and seeming disesteem sometimes. He did that too, now and then,—for he was human like the rest of us! But mark you this, my brothers, for, in an age which, under one figment or another, whether of more ancient or more modern license, is an age of much self-will,—we shall do well to remember it,—his was a life of orderly and consistent obedience to rule. He kept to the Church's plain and stately ways: kept to them and ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... yard, holding the poor dog in his arms, he felt wretched indeed. At that moment all the sulkiness and self-will were crushed out of his little heart. It seemed to him that never, never had there lived upon the earth another ...
— Captain Horace • Sophie May
... number of large pictures of the battles in which the Russians have been victorious. They are not fond of keeping up a remembrance of their defeats. There was a good picture of the late Emperor, with his haughty brow, fierce eyes, and determined lips, the very impersonification of self-will and human pride, now brought down to the very dust; but, haughty as was that brow, the expression of the countenance gave no sign of talent or true genius. It was indeed wanting. He had the sense to take advantage of ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... visit to her father's grave should not be spent in fruitless dreams of him or of his presence, alluring because involving neither self-reproach nor resolution; but in thoughts which might lead to action, to humility, and to the yielding up of self-will. ...
— Henrietta's Wish • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Ireland, Richard solemnly promised him that he would himself put to sea in six days; and the Earl, whose conduct is marked by devoted zeal and fidelity in the cause of his unfortunate master, acted upon that pledge. But whether misled by the treacherous suggestions of Albemarle, or following his own self-will or imbecility of judgment, Richard allowed eighteen days to pass away before he embarked, every hour of which was pregnant with most momentous consequences to himself and his throne. He landed at length at Milford Haven, and then had with him thirty-two thousand ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... rescued from peril and needs to be healed of a disease. And if you do not know and feel that that is you, then you have not learned the first letters of the alphabet which are necessary to spell 'salvation.' You, I, every man, we are all sick unto death, because the poison of self-will and sin is running hot through all our veins, and we are all in deadly peril because of that poison-peril of death, peril arising from the weight of guilt that presses upon us, peril from our inevitable ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... the origins of the doctrine of the Fall. Right through Christian history the tendency has run to look upon the world as the ruins of a divine plan marred by man's perversity and self-will. It is time we got rid of it, for it has had a blighting, deadening influence upon hopeful endeavour for the good of the race. It is not integral to Christianity, for Jesus never said a word about it and did not even allude to it indirectly. It implies a view ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... he was PHYSICALLY brave to rashness. Nor is this uncommon: scepticism and presumption are often twins. When a man of this character determines upon any action, personal fear never deters him; and for the moral fear, any sophistry suffices to self-will. Almost without analysing himself the mental process by which his nerves hardened themselves and his limbs moved, he traversed the corridor, gained Mejnour's apartment, and opened the forbidden door. All was as he had been accustomed to see ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... youthfulness, he, as already hence anticipating his descendants, gladly told it to my mother; rejoicing in that tumult of the senses wherein the world forgetteth Thee its Creator, and becometh enamoured of Thy creature, instead of Thyself, through the fumes of that invisible wine of its self-will, turning aside and bowing down to the very basest things. But in my mother's breast Thou hadst already begun Thy temple, and the foundation of Thy holy habitation, whereas my father was as yet but a Catechumen, and that but recently. ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... mellifluous union, scenes more or less delightful, pleasantries uttered in good taste, pretty purses and caresses might accompany and might decorate the handing over of this monthly gift; but the time will come when the self-will of your wife or some unforeseen expenditure will compel her to ask a loan of the Chamber; I presume that you will always grant her the bill of indemnity, as our unfaithful deputies never fail to do. They pay, but ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... I must caution you to be on your guard to-day against any exhibition of self-will and ill temper, if your wishes are overruled by those older and ...
— Elsie's Kith and Kin • Martha Finley
... massing of images together into general ideas; on the abstraction of new notions and images from these; till a new world is built up within, full of desires and hates, ambition, envy, longing, speculation, curiosity, self-will, self-interest. ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... to the way of his father, his management of his share in the property to his father's management, it issued but in ruin and misery—in hunger and nakedness and shame. The fact that he was a son was of no avail to him in the "far country," in the place of self-will and self-management. But as soon as he arose, and with true repentance and submission came back to the father's house, willing to serve, and to do his father's will, he found himself restored to his father's heart, ...
— Separation and Service - or Thoughts on Numbers VI, VII. • James Hudson Taylor
... the willing loan; That's for thy self to breed another thee, Or ten times happier, be it ten for one; Ten times thy self were happier than thou art, If ten of thine ten times refigur'd thee: Then what could death do if thou shouldst depart, Leaving thee living in posterity? Be not self-will'd, for thou art much too fair To be death's conquest and make ...
— Shakespeare's Sonnets • William Shakespeare
... obey when they know they ought to obey. And thus the moral offence of a Catholic in denying some recondite doctrine, does not lie merely, and need not lie at all, in the immediate bad effects that such a denial would necessitate; but in the disobedience, the self-will, and the rebellion that must in such a case be both a cause ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... conceit Can comprehend in still imagination! Drunken Desire must vomit his receipt, Ere he can see his own abomination. While Lust is in his pride, no exclamation Can curb his heat or rein his rash desire, Till like a jade Self-will himself doth tire. ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Clark edition]
... in this spirit, Canute, for I have spoken only of the case. But you will look upon it only through your own self-will; now we shall see if your love and upright zeal will endure, when once it is ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors • Various
... the gibes which were being flung at me from every side, and moved by a sudden impulse I stopped, and in the bitterness of my heart spoke to her. 'Mademoiselle,' I said, bowing low—for, as I have stated, she was small, and more like a fairy than a woman, though her face expressed both pride and self-will—'Mademoiselle,' I said sternly, 'such as I am, I have fought for France! Some day you may learn that there are viler things in the world—and have to ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... Nettie went off like a little sprite to put away Freddy's coat, newly completed, along with the other articles of his wardrobe, at which she had been working all day. In that momentary impulse of decision and self-will a few notes of a song came unawares from Nettie's lip, as she glanced, light and rapid as a fairy, up-stairs. She stopped a minute after with a sigh. Were Nettie's singing days over? She had at least come at last to find her ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... somewhat coarsely, but the ground is good. That the obstinacy of a young and untamed girl, possessed of none of the attractions of her sex, and neither supported by bodily nor mental strength, must soon yield to the still rougher and more capricious but assumed self-will of a man: such a lesson can only be taught on the stage with all the ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... was at least expected to be more reverent than other men to those divine beings of whose nature he partook, whose society he might enjoy even here on earth. He might be unfaithful to his own high lineage; he might misuse his gifts by selfishness and self-will; he might, like Ajax, rage with mere jealousy and wounded pride till his rage ended in shameful madness and suicide. He might rebel against the very gods, and all laws of right and wrong, till he perished in his ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... gravity and self-restraint, virtues so necessary for political life. He had never learned how essential it is for one who undertakes to deal with men, and engage in public business, to avoid above all things that self-will which, as Plato says, is of the family of solitude, and to become longsuffering and patient, qualities which some foolish people hold very cheap. Marcius, plain and straightforward, thinking it to be the duty of a brave man to bear down all opposition, and not reflecting that it is rather a ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... and self-will are no traditions,' he said provokingly. 'The submission of the individual to the whole—that's what ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... conceded to a certain class of men,—that of answering one question by asking another. Why then do men ever oppose or neglect their own interests? To my mind, only from want of knowledge, from prejudice or self-will—or some other of the same brood of enemies to man's success in laudable undertakings; and of which ignorance is the chief, and may be regarded as the prolific source of all the others. In this case, ...
— Address delivered by Hon. Henry H. Crapo, Governor of Michigan, before the Central Michigan Agricultural Society, at their Sheep-shearing Exhibition held at the Agricultural College Farm, on Thursday, • Henry Howland Crapo
... men be erroneous who appear to be the leading schismatics, what withholds us but our sloth, our self-will, and distrust in the right cause, that we do not give them gentle meetings and gentle dismissions, that we debate not and examine the matter thoroughly with liberal and frequent audience; if not for their sakes, yet for our own? seeing no man who hath tasted learning, but ...
— Areopagitica - A Speech For The Liberty Of Unlicensed Printing To The - Parliament Of England • John Milton
... earthly feeling came when this proud self-reliance was forced to give way, and she was obliged to leave herself helpless in the hands of others. 'God requires that I should give up my last form of self-will,' she said; 'now I have resigned this, perhaps he will let me ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... very sweet in the absolute surrender of self-will, and Trix, who was the most warm-hearted of mortals, promptly bounded up from her stool and flung her arms ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... the slightest softness in their natures. Their narrow minds, which found real pleasure in worrying the poor child, passed insensibly from outward kindness to extreme severity. This severity was necessitated, they believed, by what they called the self-will of the child, which had not been broken when young and was very obstinate. Her masters were ignorant how to give to their instructions a form suited to the intelligence of the pupil,—a thing, by the bye, which marks the difference between public and private education. ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... her with her hands clasped on the nun's knee, Isabel told her all her struggles; disentangling at last in a way that she had never been able to do before, all the complicated strands of self-will and guidance and blindness that had so knotted and twisted themselves into her life. The nun was amazed at the spiritual instinct of this Puritan child, who ranged her motives so unerringly; dismissing ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... militant, not of the triumphant party: so far he bears a gallant show of magnanimity. But his gallantry is hardly of the right stamp. It wants principle; for though he is not servile or mercenary, he is the victim of self-will. He must pull down and pull in pieces: it is not in his disposition to do otherwise. It is a pity; for with his great talents he might do great things, if he would go right forward to any useful object, make thorough stitch-work of any question, or join hand ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... genius that had fought the battle and nearly won it, and lost it, and thought of it afterwards writhing in a lonely exile. A man may attribute to the gods, if he likes, what is caused by his own fury, or disappointment, or self-will. What public man—what statesman projecting a coup—what king determined on an invasion of his neighbour—what satirist meditating an onslaught on society or an individual, can't give a pretext for his ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... makes of courage boast, Obedience decks the Christian most; For where our great and blessed Lord As a mere servant walked abroad, The fathers, on that holy ground, This famous Order chose to found, That arduous duty to fulfil To overcome one's own self-will! 'Twas idle glory moved thee there: So take thee hence from out my sight! For who the Lord's yoke cannot bear, To wear his cross can ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... before me,—all momentary, intense, as if each was the present moment. And in each of these scenes I saw what I had never seen before. I saw where I had taken the wrong instead of the right step, in what wantonness, with what self-will it had been done; how God (I shuddered at the name) had spoken and called me, and even entreated, and I had withstood and refused. All the evil I had done came back, and spread itself out before my eyes; ...
— The Little Pilgrim: Further Experiences. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... admirers. He has too much of her self-will and dogged pride to pull with her. Do you remember, Agatha, how we used to enjoy their wordy combats? I always thought that at the bottom of all her antagonism to him she really liked him; but she never would ...
— The Carved Cupboard • Amy Le Feuvre
... serious self-examination at all; and none employ the power of self-inspection with that carefulness and sedulity with which they ought. Hence men generally, and unrenewed men always, are unacquainted with much that goes on within their own minds and hearts. Though it is sin and self-will, though it is thought and feeling and purpose and desire, that is going on and taking place during all these years of religious indifference, yet the agent himself, so far as a sober reflection upon the moral character of the process, and a distinct ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... strange that under such circumstances the lonely widower should think of a successor to his lost wife, for Mittie needed a mother's restraining influence and guardian care. Nor is it strange, with her indomitable self-will, she should resist the authority of a stranger. When her father announced his intention of bringing home a lady to preside over his establishment, claiming for her all filial respect and obedience, she flew into a violent passion, and declared she would never own her as a mother, never address ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... dreadful thing would be, if I were to give her to you to wife: this being, this child, that I cannot help loving so dearly, that I fold up with remorse and sorrow in my heart, would go to wreck like others amid the pleasures of the world, in self-will and frivolity, in dissipation and recklessness. You would indulge her out of love in all sorts of follies, and so make her and yourself miserable. No, it cannot be on any terms; and you yourself will thank me hereafter for my reasonable refusal. And now not a word more, ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... interest in public affairs altogether, an election time is to our ministers, beyond any other class of citizens perhaps, a peculiarly trying time. How they are to escape the Scylla of cowardice and the contempt of all free and true men on the one hand, and the Charybdis of pride and self-will and scorn of other men's opinions and wishes on the other, is no easy dilemma to our ministers. Some happily constituted and happily circumstanced ministers manage to get through life, and even through political life, without ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... open the eyes of parents, that they may have regard to the souls of their children, so that the poor children be not deceived by their false, fleshly love, as if they had rightly honored their parents when they are not angry with them, or are obedient in worldly matters, by which their self-will is strengthened; although the Commandment places the parents in honor for the very purpose that the self-will of the children may be broken, and that the children may ...
— A Treatise on Good Works • Dr. Martin Luther
... from a thoroughly modest, teachable, receptive, and at the same time most living, active, and aspiring mind,—a mind full indeed of native boldness, but yet restrained by judgment and good sense from the crudeness and temerity of self-will and eccentric impulse, and not trusting to its own strength till it had better reasons for doing so than the promptings ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... article begins, "whose memoirs are now before us, appears to have possessed good abilities, and originally a good disposition, but, with an overweening conceit of herself, much obstinacy and self-will, and a disposition to run counter to established practices and opinions. Her conduct in the early part of her life was blameless, if not exemplary; but the latter part of it was blemished with actions which must consign her name to posterity (in spite of all palliatives) ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... one who knows the currents, and just when to alter the course. The youngster who steers the University boat has been up and down the river many a time, till he has learned everything he needs to know. Let me ask you, "Who steers?" If SELF-WILL does, ...
— Broken Bread - from an Evangelist's Wallet • Thomas Champness
... had come and settled in Gaza and Ashkelon, and three other very strong cities on the coast, where they worshipped a fish-god, called Dagon. They had no king, but were ruled by lords of their five cities, and made terrible inroads upon all the country round; until at last the Israelites, in their self-will, fancied they could turn them to flight by causing the Ark to be carried out to battle by the two corrupt young priests, sons of Eli, whose doom had already been pronounced—that they should both die in one day. They were slain, ...
— The Chosen People - A Compendium Of Sacred And Church History For School-Children • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... Dorrance not to acquaint you with this. I have always feared lest his indulgence might not be the most salutary method of repressing your self-will and pride of opinion. You, more than any other woman I know, require the tight rein of vigilant discipline. I intimated as much to Dorrance when he asked my consent to your engagement. But this is his lookout, not mine. What I began ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... on the contrary, lack the vivacity of the Bavaro-Austrian stock. On the monotonous heights of the Swabian plateau are developed such brusque individualism, tenacious self-will, peculiar humor inclined to self-depreciation, soaring fantasy, and (withal there is no lack of comprehension for the ideas of domesticity) such a predilection for adventures abroad as we find in the Swabian narrators ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... thou be obstinate, thou self-will'd boy? Nay, then, perforce I'll part ye, since ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... The self-will and determination which marked the character of Handel as a child clung to him through life, and not even the closest ties of friendship prevented his obstinate temper from asserting itself whenever occasion arose. Handel's temper, opposed to Mattheson's vanity, gave rise to a quarrel between the ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... also, leaving him the lion's share of the money. During this time Bob had worked away at Ballawag and earned enough to set up as lawyer on his own account. But because a man cannot play fast and loose with the self-will that God gave him and afterwards expect to do much in the world, he was a moderately unsuccessful man still when the inheritance dropped in. It gave him a fair income for life. When the letter containing the news reached him, he left the office, walked back to his house, and began to think. ...
— The Delectable Duchy • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Lutera's, advantage, was gradually preparing to gracefully resign his position in the younger and more ambitious man's favour. But he was not altogether comfortable in his mind since his last interview with the King. The King had shown unusual signs of self-will and obstinacy. He had presumed to give a command affecting the national policy; and, moreover, he had threatened, if his command were not obeyed, to address Parliament himself on the subject in hand, from the ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... her father's sister, an austere dignified old party who resided most exclusively in her ancestral home on Beacon Street, and lived in a rut worn ages deep by tradition, conviction and self-will. Virginia was, so-to-speak, heiress-presumptive. Not that she was likely to be supplanted by the birth of some one having greater claim to her aunt's fortune. Her possible rivals for the very substantial income which ...
— A Dixie School Girl • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... a faithful servant, and I envy you," said Baron von Stein, "for your services are gratefully accepted; you are not treated with contumely, and your zeal is not regarded as malice and self-will. You may assist your country with your head, your arm, and your heart. You are not doomed to step aside, and idly dream away your days instead of seeking relief in useful activity. Oh, I repeat again, I envy you!" While he was speaking, his pale cheeks ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... (if we are to believe La Tremouille) little of body but great of heart; a child (if we are to believe Commines) only now making his first flight from the nest, destitute of both sense and money, feeble in person, full of self-will, and consorting rather with fools than with the wise; lastly, if we are to believe Guicciardini, who was an Italian, might well have brought a somewhat partial judgment to bear upon the subject, a young man of little wit concerning the actions of men, but carried away by an ardent desire ...
— The Borgias - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... he, "if my name can excite any to devotedness, or give to any the pleasure of being grateful. If my name live, the goodness of those who name it will be its life; for my true self-will not be in it. No one will the more know the real Toussaint. The weakness that was in me when I felt most strong, the reluctance when I appeared most ready, the acts of sin from which I was saved by accident alone, the divine constraint ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... and something worse on that of her brother; and she therefore wrote with every effort to make the whole appear her own voluntary act—though the very effort made her doubly conscious that the sole cause for her passive acquiescence was, that her past self-will in trifles had left her no power to contend for her own opinion in greater matters—the common retribution on an ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... incessantly, sometimes muttering to himself. Every time he came within the circle of lamplight his face was visible to Elizabeth, wrinkled and set, with angry eyes; and she saw him as a person possessed by a stubborn demon of self-will. Once, as he passed her, she heard him say to himself, 'Of course I can write another at once—half a ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... perfect men upon earth, and magnified their chieftain, the Lord Scales, beyond the greatest of their grandees. With all this, it must be said of them that they were marvellous good men in the field, dextrous archers and powerful with the battle-axe. In their great pride and self-will they always sought to press in the advance and take the post of danger, trying to outvie our Spanish chivalry. They did not rush on fiercely to the fight, nor make a brilliant onset like the Moorish and Spanish troops, but they went into the fight deliberately ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... very few ideas, he cherished those he had Self-will, self-pride, and self-righteousness were big in him Tyranny of the little man, given ...
— Quotations From Gilbert Parker • David Widger
... and affected superiority over others, no one, perhaps, was more human, in his fitful moods,—his weakness and his strength, his passion and his purpose,—than that strange man, who had dared, in his dark studies and arrogant self-will, to aspire beyond humanity. ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book IV. • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... never relaxed. A few days before his self-will brought him to his death-bed, we saw him ride through the St. Petersburg streets with no pomp and no attendants, yet in as great pride as ever Despotism gave a man. At his approach, nobles uncovered and looked docile, soldiers faced ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... not love to love; but hated him For making her to love, and so her whim From passion taught misprision to begin; And all this sin Was because love to cast out had no skill Self, which was regent still. Her own self-will made void her own ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... of the great chief had plenty of self-will and temper. There could be no doubt of that. She sprang upon her mustang with a quick, impatient bound, and Rita followed, clinging to her prizes, wondering what would be the decision of Many Bears and his councillors as to the ...
— The Talking Leaves - An Indian Story • William O. Stoddard
... only my second visit, and I have not made much way with her. She is in a state of bodily and mental discomfort very painful to witness. If I am not mistaken, she is driving herself half-crazy with introspection and self-will. You must not give way to this morbid desire to increase her own wretchedness. She needs ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... and sources of faults, inherent in his own sensitive nature, he added also many of those which a long indulgence of self-will generates—the least compatible, of all others, with that system of mutual concession and sacrifice by which the balance of domestic peace is maintained. In him they were softened down by good-nature. When we look back, indeed, to the unbridled career, of which this ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... were but ill-concealed, and Lucy saw the muscular frame before her heaved and convulsed by passions which were more intense and rending because it was only for a few moments that they conquered his self-will and struggled into vent. ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... damnation infinitely more intolerable than others suffer. Christians, then, should be careful to give no occasion for division or discord, but to be diligent, as Paul here admonishes, to preserve unity. And this is not an easy thing to do, for among Christians occasions frequently arise provoking self-will, anger and hatred. The devil is always at hand to stir and blow the flame of discord. Let Christians take heed they do not give place to the promptings of the devil and of the flesh. They must strive against them, submitting to all suffering, and performing ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... Painting: so, if both Poets and Painters should alternately dislike (but I know the majority of them will not), I am not to regard it at all. But Mr. H. approves of my Designs as little as he does of my Poems, and I have been forced to insist on his leaving me, in both, to my own self-will; for I am determined to be no longer pestered with his genteel ignorance and polite disapprobation. I know myself both Poet and Painter, and it is not his affected contempt that can move to anything but a more assiduous pursuit of both arts. Indeed, by my late firmness, I have brought down ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... careless of my comfort, and indifferent to my society. Still I felt by no means inclined to give him up; was by no means disposed to let him have his own way. It was clear to my mind that I had rights as well as he had; and I possessed resolution enough to be ready to maintain them. His self-will and indifference to my wishes roused in me a bitter and contentious spirit; and, in an evil hour, I determined that I would make a struggle for the mastery. An opportunity was not long delayed. The Philharmonic Society ...
— Married Life; Its Shadows and Sunshine • T. S. Arthur
... the girl whose energy keeps things whirling in the Berry Patch. Judge Berry was the great authority on what's what among them, and John Tabor, the school teacher, was the romantic character in the community. All the human excitements of pride and self-will enter into the various ambitions. Even generous impulses were taught restraint in the experiences of various kinds, showing that there is an appropriate time and ...
— Nobody's Girl - (En Famille) • Hector Malot
... had written his panegyric on the Protector and the Protectorate in his Defensio Secunda. Even then he had made his reserves, and had ventured to express them in advices and cautions to Cromwell himself. He can hardly have professed that in those virtues of the avoidance of arbitrariness and self-will, the avoidance of over-legislation and over-restriction, which he had especially recommended to Cromwell, the rule of the Protector through the last three years had quite satisfied his ideal. Many of the so-called "arbitrary" measures, and even the temporary ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... freedom, the freedom of self-will, can turn its back upon its highest realisation, but it cannot cut itself away from it altogether, for then it will lose its own meaning. Our self-will has freedom up to a certain extent; it can know what it is to break ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... Michael. She couldn't make him out. He loved them, and showed that he loved them; but it was by caresses, by beautiful words, by rare, extravagant acts of renunciation, inconsistent with his self-will; not by anything solid and continuous. There was a softness in Michael that distressed and a hardness that perplexed her. You could make an impression on Michael—far too easily—and the impression stayed. You couldn't obliterate ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... growing indignation Rand was still impressed and even startled with the change the few last months had wrought upon her. In place of the silly, fanciful, half-hysterical hoyden whom he had known, a matured woman, strong in passionate self-will, fascinating in a kind of wild, savage beauty, looked up at him as if ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... Bring me, now Have greater weight with me: to whose commands, Alas! I've nothing to reply withal; Nor is there man more wretched than myself. For Clinia here (though he, I must confess, Has cares enough) has got a mistress, modest, Well-bred, and stranger to all harlot arts: Mine is a self-will'd, wanton, haughty madam, Gay, and extravagant; and let her ask Whate'er she will, she must not be denied; Since poverty I durst not make my plea. This is a plague I have but newly found, Nor is my father yet appris'd ...
— The Comedies of Terence • Publius Terentius Afer
... the worse for her journey, her clear brown skin neither sallow nor lined, and the soft brown eyes as bright and sweet as ever; but the father must be learnt over again, and there was awe enough as well as enthusiastic love to make her quail at the thought of her record of self-will. ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... nothing more heterodox than the notion that the poor were to educate themselves. In his scheme, of course the clergy and the gentry were to educate the poor, who were to take down thankfully as much as it was thought proper to give them: and all beyond was 'self-will' and 'private judgment,' the fathers of Dissent and Chartism, Trades'-union strikes, and French ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... which I might, with David, pray the Lord "to put into his bottle," and ask, "are they not in thy book," for I was not yet fully acquainted with the ways of God with His people, and had not yet a heart wholly resigned to all His dealings. Oftentimes self-will, unbelief, and repining at our hard lot, was mixed with our complaints and cries unto Him. Do not therefore think them so very pure, and deserving of pity as they may seem. Thus much, however, I can truly say, that amidst it all, our ...
— Letters on the Nicobar islands, their natural productions, and the manners, customs, and superstitions of the natives • John Gottfried Haensel
... her age, especially since she has got her head clearer of fairy-tales and witches and enchantments and ogres and all the rest of it; and even then, there was a good deal of sense and reasonableness below her self-will and impatience. ...
— Peterkin • Mary Louisa Molesworth
... N. obstinateness &c. adj.; obstinacy, tenacity; cussedness [U. S.]; perseverance &c. 604a; immovability; old school; inflexibility &c. (hardness) 323; obduracy, obduration[obs3]; dogged resolution; resolution &c. 604; ruling passion; blind side. self-will, contumacy, perversity; pervicacy|, pervicacity[obs3]; indocility[obs3]. bigotry, intolerance, dogmatism; opiniatry|, opiniativeness; fixed idea &c. (prejudgment) 481; fanaticism, zealotry, infatuation, monomania; opinionatedness opinionativeness[obs3]. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... service the stronger members have to devote themselves. This is the reason why all who purpose to enter the Order have to resolve to make war to the death against their private judgment, and still more against their self-will and self-love. This is why all ought to mortify all their passions and affections, and absolutely to bend their understanding under the yoke of obedience, to live, in short, no longer according to the old man, but entirely according ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... individuals for one another's company. The tendency of individuals to over self-assertion is kept down by fighting. Even in these rudimentary forms of society, love and fear come into play, and enforce a greater or less renunciation of self-will. To this extent the general cosmic process begins to be checked by a rudimentary ethical process, which is, strictly speaking, part of the former, just as the "governor" in a steam-engine is part of the mechanism ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... in this bridge-building! The Projets de Notes, de Conventions, de Protocoles, etc., etc., have proceeded, by the dozen, from the Chancelleries of the different Powers, and one might call the ink wasted on them another Black Sea. But everything has been shipwrecked against the self-will of ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria
... melancholy smile. "If I am prejudiced," said she gently, "it is because of what her misconduct cost my son years ago. Do you think I can ever forget that but for her caprice and self-will you would never have had those years of suffering, Floyd? But we women know each other. It is at times a sad knowledge, and for our prescience the men whom we would serve misjudge us and tell us we hate each other. Georgina is in love this summer. You do not guess what man ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... notwithstanding the threatened excommunication. On every hand men are believing. Things are getting desperate for these leaders. They determine to use all the authority at hand arbitrarily and with a high hand. What strange blindness of stubborn self-will to ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... well, when he said that "Greece could not have borne two Lysanders." We are told by Theophrastus that Archestratus made the same remark about Alkibiades: although in his case it was insolence, luxury and self-will which gave so much offence, whereas Lysander's harsh, merciless disposition was what made his ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... religious subjects, she sought to learn my religious experience, and listened to it with great interest. I told her how I had sat in darkness for two long years, waiting for the light, and in full faith that it would come; how I had kept my soul patient and quiet,—had surrendered self-will to God's will,—had watched and waited till at last His great mercy came in an infinite peace to my soul. Margaret was never weary of asking me concerning this state, and said, 'I would gladly give all my talents and knowledge for such an experience ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... it was on the whole well for him and for mankind, that he should think that he saw them, and tremble before the spiritual and the invisible; confessing a higher law than that of his own ambition and self-will; a higher power than that of his brute ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... He has excellent abilities, and might do much for himself, but is too like the father, but with this difference, Edward was good-natured and careless to a fault; this boy is haughty and petulant, with the unmanageable obstinacy and self-will of old Geoffrey. He is not grateful for the many obligations he owes to me, and gives me frequent cause to regret that I ever ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... love her father—though not nearly so well as her own self-will—and his parting words brought a gush of tears from her eyes. She was half inclined to call to him to come back, and say she ...
— Grandmother Elsie • Martha Finley
... characters, requesting her father to send three hundred dollars as her ransom. The letter was despatched by the shepherd. When he was gone, the chief turned sternly to me: "You have set an example," said he, "of mutiny and self-will, which if indulged would be ruinous to the troop. Had I treated you as our laws require, this bullet would have been driven through your brain. But you are an old friend; I have borne patiently with your fury and your folly; ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... laying down the law to these people: fancying myself infallible, as if God were not as near to them as He is to me—certainly nearer than to any book on my shelves—offending their little prejudices, little superstitions, in my own cruel self-conceit and self-will! And now, the first time that I forget my own rules; the first time that I forget almost that I am a priest, even a Christian at all! that moment they acknowledge me as a priest, as a Christian. The moment I meet them upon the commonest human ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... sad disappointment, just when they had come to Seacove and he seemed so well, and though no one reproached her, Bridget felt that the consequences of her self-will were not to ...
— The Rectory Children • Mrs Molesworth
... capable of conceiving, and such as may flatter the pride of men. Some famous theologians believe that God offers more grace, and in a more favourable way, to those whose resistance he foresees will be less, and that he abandons the rest to their self-will. We may readily suppose that this is often the case, and this expedient, among those which make man distinguishable by anything favourable in his nature, is the farthest removed from Pelagianism. But I would not venture, notwithstanding, ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... abstraction of scorn. He "maketh a mock" alike of good and evil! But Byron's devil is a spirit, yet a mortal too—the traducer, because he has suffered for his sins; the deceiver, because he is self-deceived; the hoper against hope that there is a ransom for the soul in perfect self-will and not in perfect self-sacrifice. Byron did not uphold Lucifer, but he "had passed that way," and could imagine a spiritual warfare not only against the Deus of the Mysteries or of the Book of Genesis, but against what he believed and acknowledged to be the Author and Principle ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... a few moments, and then raised her abashed eyes to Major Van Zandt. A single glance satisfied her that he knew nothing of the imposture that had been practised upon her,—knew nothing of the trap into which her vanity and self-will had led her. ...
— Thankful Blossom • Bret Harte
... is already, in effect, at an end. What secret reasons those patrons may have given for such a return of brotherly love, I shall not inquire: "For, O my soul come not thou into their secret, unto their assembly mine honour be not thou united. For in their anger they slew a man, and in their self-will they digged down a wall. Cursed be their anger, for it was fierce, and their wrath, for it was cruel; I will divide them in Jacob, and scatter ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... conduct of the house of assembly in Lower Canada. He considered their course to be so much the same with that which other popular assemblies had followed in similar circumstances, that instead of an act of self-will, or caprice, or presumption, it seemed to be rather the obligation of a general law which affects all these disputes between a popular assembly on the one hand, and the executive government on the other. The course of these controversies, he said, seemed to impress this general lesson—that ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... become as this little child, ye cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven." This is based upon proper principles. The heart of the child is purely devotional and confidential. It is a helpless dependent upon the parent. It abdicates its self-will with joy; silently do the laws of home control it; its reverence and love are the melody of its being; its life is an exchange of obedience for protection. Its path is chosen for it by the lamp of parental experience, and the calm pure light of a mother's ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... firmness but mine was based on inclination, the result was that Sophie and I were "remainder," and Mary Leighton, Charlotte, and Henrietta drove away with Kilian quite jauntily, at half-past seven o'clock. But before she went, Charlotte, who was really good-natured with all her sharpness and self-will, went into the library to speak to Mr. Langenau, and to show she did not resent the noonday slight, whatever that had been. But presently she came back looking rather anxious, and said to Sophie, ignoring me (whom she always did ...
— Richard Vandermarck • Miriam Coles Harris
... never come alone,' it is said; and though I am not myself a firm believer in this proverb, it certainly proved true with regard to Mabel Ellis, though these misfortunes were entirely the results of her pride and self-will, so she ...
— Aunt Mary • Mrs. Perring
... necessary. Theoretically, he could have forcefully taken possession of the body and mind of any suitable subject, but the mere thought of such a violation was impossibly abhorrent. Respect for the right of the individual to self-will was so deeply ingrained as to make the deliberate unseating of another's reason virtually impossible. On the other hand, free-willed cooeperation and understanding were equally out of reach; to enter the conscious mind of these beings was agony for both ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan
... light. The light He gave and gives through nature, and within every man's breast, has been awfully darkened through refusal and neglect to use it, through stubborn self-will. It is so darkened that ofttimes it seems to have been quite put out. His coming amongst us as one of ourselves, living our life, dying on our behalf to free us from sin, rising again victorious over death, sending His Holy Spirit to make all ...
— Quiet Talks on the Crowned Christ of Revelation • S. D. Gordon
... certain: if these children insist upon sitting up, they shall listen to lectures on self-will and disrespect to superiors, which will ...
— Little Folks Astray • Sophia May (Rebecca Sophia Clarke)
... everywhere,—treat of sin as a fact. It is more than dominion of body over spirit; more than an incident of growth; more than a result of undeveloped judgment, tinged with emotion, and applied to questions of motive and conduct. Sin is the abnormal; sin is a variant from standard; sin is self-will and selfishness throttling duty. Where men accept a God, it is opposition to His law and government.[7] If no personal God be believed in, then sin is willful opposition to the course of nature and to law, ...
— The Things Which Remain - An Address To Young Ministers • Daniel A. Goodsell
... intellect refused to acknowledge the possibility of discomfiture; his soul raged mightily against the hint of bafflement. Humour would not come to his aid; the lighter elements of race were ousted; he was solid insolence, wooden-headed self-will. ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... a black self-will, The sons the father kill, The children chase the mother, and would heal The wounds they give by ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... defile. Simeon and Levi 're brethren. Instruments Of cruelty lodged in their tents. Come not, my soul, their secret councils nigh, My honour, with them have no unity: For in their wrath they caused a man to fall, And in their self-will digged down a wall. Curs'd be their anger, fierce, yea cursed be Their wrath, for it was full of cruelty. In Jacob therefore let their seed be spread, And every where in Israel scattered. Judah shall have his brethren's praise, and they Shall bow before him; ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... autobiography of such a man was more needed than that of any other; but we could not expect an autobiography from Shelley. He felt nothing but pain and sorrow in the retrospect of his life, and, like Byron, shrank from the task of explaining the mixture of self-will, injustice, falsehood, and impetuous defiance that made up the greater part of his history; and when he died, he left everything at sixes and sevens, as regarded his place and acts in the world. Accordingly, until lately, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... his own he cannot keep pure, for he breathes a dust of decayed ideas, wreck of the souls of dead nations, driven by contrary winds. He may stiffen himself (and all the worse for him) into an iron self-will, but if the iron has any magnetism in it, he cannot pass a day without finding himself, at the end of it, instead of sharpened or tempered, covered with a ragged fringe of iron filings. If there be anything better than iron—living wood fiber—in him, ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... that we may be tending towards the like issues. It is possible, perhaps probable, that as the House of Commons becomes more democratic in its composition, and consequently more arrogant in its bearing, it may cast off the shackles which the other powers of the State impose on its self-will, and even utterly abolish them; but I venture to believe that those who last till that day comes, will find that they are living under a very different constitution from that which we now enjoy; that they have traversed the interval which separates a temperate ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
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