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More "Selfishness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... better feeling soon prevailed. "Poor fellow!" he said to himself; "why shouldn't he rest and forget all his troubles for a few hours? It is only selfishness ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... the third proposition—"Without holiness no man may see the Lord"; or, as it is expressed positively in the Sermon on the Mount, "Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God." Sensuality and selfishness are absolute disqualifications for knowing "the things of the Spirit of God." These fundamental doctrines are very clearly laid down in the passage from St. John which I read as the text of this Lecture. The ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... once that a mistake had been made, that some difficult conditions had pushed this troubled creature into his presence, and his interest was enlisted. Here sympathy sprang to the rescue, but it was not unmixed with selfishness. He wanted to win Carrie because he thought her fate mingled with his was better than if it were united with Drouet's. He envied the drummer his conquest as he had never envied any man in all the course of ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... civilization has consisted largely in the raising of what is called "the standard of living," or, in other words, the multiplication of the things deemed necessary for personal comfort, and, as this raising of the standard has always been begun by the few, the many have always fought against it as a sign of selfishness or affectation until they themselves were ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... and you are able to contemplate, with calm emotion, the untold bliss into which the unfettered spirit has entered, do you not feel as if it were cruel selfishness alone that would denude that sainted pilgrim of his glory, and bring him once more back to earth's ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... mind. No intimation at all here of the part which a perverted will may play in the entanglements of life; no intimation of the immense force of the emotional side of life; no intimation here of the immense part which sheer selfishness plays. Mrs. Eddy's sin is far too simple. There is, once more, a sound reason for that. Mrs. Eddy is twice-born, if you will, but the struggle from which she finally emerged with whatever measure of victory she attained was not fought out with conscience ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... this strange appearance of humility, and this contempt for human reason, he ventures into the boldest presumptions. He finds fault with everything. His selfishness is never satisfied; his ingratitude is never at an end. He takes on himself to direct the Almighty what to do, even in the govemment of the universe. He prays dictatorially. When it is sunshine, he prays for rain, and when it is rain, he prays for sunshine. He follows the ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... in this place, I do not see your faces more clearly than I see those of my father and my mother. Her I only knew as a mere babe-child. He was my teacher and my companion. A more guileless soul than he, a more honest one, more free from envy, from jealousy, and from selfishness, I never knew. Though he thought he was great by his theology, everybody else knew he was great by his religion. My mother is to me what the Virgin Mary is to a devout Catholic. She was a woman of great nature, profound as a philosophical thinker, great in argument, with a kind of intellectual ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... believe that God has given to me or to any one else what only a few can have. I do not want anything, I will not have anything that any one cannot have. If there is one thing rather than another that inspiration is for, it is that when I have it I know that any man can have it. It is necessary to my selfishness that he shall have it. If a great wonder of a world like this is given to a man, and he is told to live on it and it is not furnished with men to live with, with men that go with it, what is it all for? If one ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... have testified. Her first experiments had been very serious, with urgent recommendations of hard physical labor; but this proved unsatisfactory. Then she attacked it from an ethical angle and suggested social service as a means of destroying the selfishness which she honestly believed to be one of ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... sensualist, he was perforce an egotist, and the smallest of his desires became the star by which he laid his course. Through stress of appetites, as powerful as they were gross, he had grown sharp to calculate, and quick to see. He was controlled and hurried down by currents of a turbid selfishness; nor would he have stopped at any cruelty, balked at any crime, when prompted of what brute hungers kept his soul awake. He might have wept over failure, never from remorse. And Storri had set ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... letter through to the end, and it is possible (for women are blind in such matters) failed to perceive the selfishness in every line of it. Then, with the message of happiness in her hand, she returned to the chair she had just quitted, with a vague wonder in her mind, and the very human doubt that accompanies all possession, as to whether ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... consists in the eloquence, vividness, and sincerity with which a given problem in human life or character is presented. Human nature is made up of all sorts of traits—selfishness, cupidity, self-sacrifice, courage, loyalty. All life is made up ... of a compromise between elements in the struggle for happiness. These elements make for the story, happiness being the chief factor for which humanity ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... could not vibrate unseen. Hugh was very weak, very nervous, too, and turning his head away so that she could not see his face, he let the hot tears drop upon his pillow; slowly at first they came, but gradually as everything—his embarrassed condition, Rocket's loss, 'Lina's selfishness, and Alice's generosity, came rushing over him—they fell in perfect torrents, and Alice felt a keen pang of pity, as sob after sob smote upon her ear, and she knew the shame it must be to him thus to ...
— Bad Hugh • Mary Jane Holmes
... the two opposite qualities were blended, or who were of a neutral moral tint. The good were those who loved their fellow-creatures, especially their relations, and were kind to them in word and deed. The bad were those who gave pain to others by their brutality and selfishness, by untruthfulness and deceit, and by speaking unkind and ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... ultra-Calvinism is Gospel gentleness and Pauline sobriety compared with Wesley's Arminianism in the outset of his career. But the main and most noticeable difference between Leighton and the modern Methodists is to be found in the uniform selfishness of the latter. Not "Do you wish to love God?" "Do you love your neighbour?" "Do you think, 'O how dear and lovely must Christ be!'"—but—"Are you certain that Christ has saved 'you'; that he died for 'you—you—you —yourself'?" ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... forgetting their relative positions. This runs through society in general: and as no one can well be polite without some good-nature (for politeness, frivolous as it may appear, is a strong check upon those feelings of selfishness too apt to be indulged in), it leads to a general feeling of good-will towards others. This has naturally been practised by Frenchmen wherever they may be; and the consequence is that the slaves are treated with more consideration, and, in return, have warmer feelings of attachment ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... in my cages. No serious strife ever takes place among them, nothing beyond a little rivalry in the matter of food. I hand in a piece of pear. A Grasshopper alights on it at once. Jealously she kicks away any one trying to bite at the delicious morsel. Selfishness reigns everywhere. When she has eaten her fill, she makes way for another, who in her turn becomes intolerant. One after the other, all the inmates of the menagerie come and refresh themselves. After ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... Frances had always been her favourite granddaughter, but she had never been blind, clear-sighted old lady that she was, to the little leaven of easy-going selfishness in the girl's nature. She was pleased to see that Frances had ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1904 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... conscience apart from that of the Community. Every community has its errors in its laws. No human laws, how skilfully soever framed, but give to a national character defects as well as merits, merits as well as defects. Craft, selfishness, cruelty to the subdued, inhospitable frigidity to neighbours, make the defects of the Spartan character. But," added Alcman, with a kind of reluctant anguish in his voice, "the character has its grand virtues, too, or would the Helots not be the masters? Valour indomitable; ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... to inspire you with confidence, extols him as a prudent man who thoroughly understands his own interest, and is so indefatigably active that he lets slip no opportunity of advancing it; lastly, lest you should be afraid of finding a vulgar selfishness in him, praises the good taste with which he lives; not seeking his pleasure in money-making, or in coarse wantonness, but in the enlargement of his knowledge, in instructive intercourse with a select circle, and even in relieving the needy; while as to the ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... and who were consequently not exactly pestered with offers of employment. And a man who could see the difference between doffing his ragged cap to a dissolute squire or parson, and saluting his better on parade, could also see the selfishness of leaving an honest girl to languish for him. Brown could not get a living in England. So he told his girl to get a better man, swung his canvas bag across ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... whispering to Mr. Rupert that he would come back later. He went out on tiptoe, as from the presence of an angel. His selfishness had dropped away from him. The evening wore on, and in the little back room a woman's ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... learning patience, for his life was wrapped up in the person of his girl-wife. She was so infinitely lovable even when least comprehending his man's nature and holding herself aloof. Again, her charm was indescribable when, with adorable grace, she offered compensation, sorry for her uncomprehending selfishness; and he eternally rejoiced that, by the law of marriage, she was irrevocably his till death should them part, a bondage which he endeavoured to make her Eden, ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... security of those who respect and observe them, and that neither wealth, station, nor the power of combinations shall be able to evade their just penalties or to wrest them from a beneficent public purpose to serve the ends of cruelty or selfishness. ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... greatest merit towards you is, that he is not one of those old fools who fancy they are in love in their dotage. I have no such vagary; though I am not sorry that some folks think I am so absurd, since it frets their selfishness. The Mackinsys, Onslows, Miss Pelham, and Madame de Cambis have dined here; and to-morrow I shall have the flamptonians and other Richmondists. I must repeat it; keep in mind that both of you are delicate, and not strong. If you return in ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... case of Renfield grows more interesting the more I get to understand the man. He has certain qualities very largely developed, selfishness, secrecy, and purpose. ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... for harmony, out of fear of fight, out of lassitude, out of family considerations for the salaries of relatives in office, out of speculations on vacancies in the Ministry (Odillon Barrot), or out of that unmitigated selfishness that causes the average bourgeois to be ever inclined to sacrifice the interests of his class to this or that private motive. The Bonapartist Representatives belonged from the start to the party of Order only in the struggle against the revolution. The leader of the Catholic party, Montalembert, ...
— The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte • Karl Marx
... nothing left for which to be a citizen and an owner of lands. Even the old Roman longing (which was also a sacred duty) of leaving an heir to perpetuate his name, and serve the state as his fathers had before him—even that was gone. Nothing was left, with the many, but selfishness, which could rise at best into the desire of saving every man his own soul, and so transform worldliness into other-worldliness. The old empire could do nothing more for man; and knew that it could do nothing; and lay down in the ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... with her brave and honest eyes. "Is this selfishness, Maskull?" she asked, "or are you drawn by ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... upon the ruined remnants of this great plane hanging in its lofty sepulcher and hazard vain guesses and be filled with wonder; but they would never know; and I could not but be glad that they would not know that Tom Billings had sealed their death-warrants by his criminal selfishness. ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... of seminal pleasures and corrupt passions men are always miserable. The influence of the Gospel of Christ is the only remedy for such diseases. It saves men from aggravating selfishness and holds in check their fierce passions until they are extinguished. Virtuous affections are invariably the great sources of human happiness. They are fountains of living waters, which purify ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 7, July, 1880 • Various
... they detested his conduct, thought him "every inch a King." Lord Shaftesbury, noting in his diary for the 19th of May 1849 the attempt of Hamilton upon the Queen's life, writes:—"The profligate George IV. passed through a life of selfishness and sin without a single proved attempt to take it. This mild and virtuous young woman has four times already been ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... be truly said, with regard to those who imbibe the spirit of their Master, "no man liveth to himself." Nothing can be more remote from genuine Christianity, than that selfishness which is characteristic of a worldly disposition, and which with an uniform and undeviating assiduity, seeks its own interests and purposes: while nothing can so fully comport with its nature, and evince ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... unpopular with the mass of the people. At present the disapprobation is confined to the educated classes. We cannot bear to be deprived of the power of speaking or of writing. We cannot bear that the fate of France should depend on the selfishness, or the vanity, or the fears, or the caprice of one man, a foreigner by race and by education, and of a set of military ruffians and of infamous civilians, fit only to have formed the staff and the privy council of Catiline. We cannot ...
— Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Vol. 2 • Alexis de Tocqueville
... undersell the French eight per cent., and it is as certain that the French undersell the English as much—it has been said—eleven per cent."[43] So that although the English manufacturer was unable to compete with the Frenchman abroad, his narrow selfishness would not permit Ireland to do so, although she was in a position to do it with advantage ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... clamor on any subject, braving it more than once by his votes in the legislature. He was evidently willing to take any risk involved in waiting for the sober second thought of the people. He was as free from ordinary ambition as from selfishness: when there was a call from several parts of the State for his nomination as governor, he said quietly, "I prefer work for which I ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... and Chouteau had disgusted him by their trickiness and low selfishness, stealing whatever they could lay hands on and never dividing with their comrades, while no good was to be got out of Lapoulle, the brute, and ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... laying aside thy pride. Struck with these weapons, men always yield up their lives. Indeed, these weapons have other means corresponding with the eight passions, such as lust, wrath, covetousness, vanity, insolence, pride, malice, and selfishness. Struck with them, men are confounded, and move about frantically deprived of their senses. Under their influence, persons always sleep heavily, cut capers, vomit, pass urine and excreta, weep, and laugh incessantly. Indeed, that Arjuna is irresistible in fight, who hath for his friend ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... that displeased me. You are not only a Polish patriot; you are an idealist, a true disciple of Plato, and you do not know how I always have detested this man. In all these sixty years that I have been in this world, I have seen nothing but selfishness, and grasping after self-gratification. Twice during dinner you spoke of an ideal world. What is an ideal world? Where is it situated? You speak of it as of a house whose inhabitants you are well acquainted with, whose key is ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... stood in the wizard's chamber, and glanced round it with a feeling of discomfort rather than sorrow—of annoyance at the trouble of which it had been for him both fountain and storehouse, rather than regret for the agony and contempt which his selfishness had brought upon the woman he loved; then spying the door in the furthest corner, he made for it, and in a moment more, his curiosity, now thoroughly roused, was slowly gyrating down the steps of the old screw stair. But Malcolm had gone to his own room, and ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... certainly will do so, if they can. The same instinct of self-preservation, the same love of accumulation, which tempts individuals to over-reach their neighbors, inclines government to preserve, increase, and consolidate its powers. Therefore, as individual selfishness requires to be held in check by government, so government ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... treatment I had received, I was now to a certain degree hardened to it, and my feelings certainly were not so acute as when, the first time, I had received a lesson of what I might expect through life from the heartlessness and selfishness of the world; but in the present case there was a difficulty which did not exist in the former—I was going away without knowing where I was to go. After a little thought, I determined that I would seek Madame Gironac, and ascertain whether she could not ...
— Valerie • Frederick Marryat
... much to your ladyship, I have been such a pensioner on your bounty ever since I can remember anything, that mere selfishness alone, if no higher motive be allowed me, must always prompt me to feel an interest in the ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 4, April, 1891 • Various
... submit a suggestion to those who are disposed to criticise very closely and to condemn in strong terms the delinquencies of the Negro. Allow the Negro two hundred and fifty years of unselfish contact to offset the two hundred and fifty years of Caucasian selfishness, and be as assiduous in his regeneration as you were ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... shown humanity at the wedding, he was impressed by her curious insensibility. It seemed to him peculiarly feminine to take an interest in such a scene, and most of the women he knew would have looked on with tremulous sympathy. Was this mere instinctive selfishness on her part? If he vaguely condemned her attitude in this matter, he appreciated her father's conduct the more by contrast. Somehow he guessed that the bishop did not altogether like him, but he felt that no matter what the future might bring forth in their relationship, he could never forget ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... Sammy, and his anxious mother, that which the most earnest desire to obey orders would have failed to accomplish was brought about by the native selfishness of poor humanity, for, the first burst of welcome over, Alice began an elaborate account of her Dolly's recent proceedings, which seemed to consist of knocking her head against articles of furniture, punching out her own eyes and ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... one telling the same story: Miss Pomeroy's abilities were good, even above the average, but her disinclination to learning was so great—such was the delicately expressed formula in which they made known to the General Zillah's utter idleness and selfishness—that she (the governess) felt that she was unable to do her justice; that possibly the fault lay in her own method of imparting instruction, and that she therefore begged to resign the position of Miss Pomeroy's ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... let's have it out," she said. "I'm perfectly powerless to do anything, because she detests me, and you've got to help her and help me, and drop your selfishness. Before I came here, she used to run you all, and give you treats like going to her tableaux and listening to her stupid old Moonlight Sonata, and talking seven words of Italian. And then I came along with no earthly intention except to enjoy my holidays, and she got it into ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... Spectator exasperates me with its d—d cold- water cure for all enthusiasm. When I see these beautiful mountain glens, I quite long to build myself a little den in the middle of them, and say good-bye to the world, with all its lies and its selfishness, till other times. I have still one great consolation here, and that is the rage and fury of the sqireens at the poor rates; six and sixpence in the pound with an estate mortgaged right up to high-water ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... steel with which the needle-maker draws his every breath! The sea's work makes a man, and leaves him with his duty nobly done, a man at the last. Courage, loyal obedience, patient endurance, the abnegation of selfishness,—these are the lessons the sea teaches. Why must the shore make such diabolical haste and try such fiendish ingenuity to undo them? The sea is pure and free, the land is firm and stable,—but where they meet, the tide rises and falls, leaving a little belt of sodden ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... and with it new and wonderful sensations that dispelled her sorrows; the ferry, the olive-green river rolling in the morning sun, alive with dodging, hurrying craft, each bent upon its destination with an energy, relentlessness, and selfishness of purpose that fascinated Honora. Each, with its shrill, protesting whistle, seemed to say: "My business is the most important. Make way for me." And yet, through them all, towering, stately, imperturbable, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... cordially, and assured her that he bore her no ill-will; that he fully understood her conduct—and that he had never accused her of selfishness. This was all very well and very gracious; but, nevertheless, Lady Arabella felt that the doctor kept the upper hand in those sweet forgivenesses. Whereas, she had intended to keep the upper hand, ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... metal of a Golden Deed is self-devotion. Selfishness is the dross and alloy that gives the unsound ring to many an act that has been called glorious. And, on the other hand, it is not only the valor, which meets a thousand enemies upon the battlefield, or scales the walls in a forlorn hope, that is of true gold. It may be, but often ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and being unknown there, had been removed to the Princess Mary Cottage Hospital. The dozen beds of the men's ward were full, and he had been placed in the private ward. He lay now on the narrow bed, sleeping heavily, the white, bright light of the spring morning showing mercilessly the havoc selfishness and reckless self-indulgence had wrought upon a once sufficiently handsome face. The emaciation of his long form was plainly seen through the single scarlet blanket which ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... him to be other than himself. By an unconscious process of elimination he had excluded from the world everything of which he did not feel a personal need: had become, as it were, a climate in which only his own requirements survived. This might seem to imply a deliberate selfishness; but there was nothing deliberate about Arment. He was as instinctive as an animal or a child. It was this childish element in his nature which sometimes for a moment unsettled his wife's estimate of him. Was it possible that he was simply ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... doubtless the domesticated animals like the horse, which are now of such service to man, are the result of these experiments in which the men of those days acted in co-operation with the Manu and his ministers. But the co-operation was too soon withdrawn. Selfishness obtained the upper hand, and war and discord brought the Golden Age of the Toltecs to a close. When instead of working loyally for a common end, under the guidance of their Initiate kings, men began to prey ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... ethics are as follows: In sin the love to God created in us has left us and self-love has transgressed its limits; pride has delivered us over to selfishness and misery. Our nature is corrupted, but not beyond redemption. In his actions worthless and depraved, man is seen to be exalted and incomprehensible in his ends; in reality he is worthy of abhorrence, but great ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... aroused; and though she pressed the matter no further (indeed, her father was already seen returning), it by no means left her thoughts. At one moment she simply resented the selfishness of a man who had obtruded his dark looks and passionate language on her joy; for there is nothing that a woman can less easily forgive than the language of a passion which, even if only for the moment, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... we prove that our real nature is none other than the dictate of our highest and most nobly trained reason, and if we can establish the fact that every deed of cruelty, of shame, of lust, or of selfishness, is essentially contrary to our nature—then we may say with Bishop Butler, that the precept to "follow Nature" is "a manner of speaking not loose and undeterminate, but clear and distinct, strictly just and true." But how complete must be the system, ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... the baseness of the mere weighing of such a choice; but he was engulfed in his overmastering egotism; his sense of obligation was dulled by the supreme selfishness of a lifetime, of a lifetime of unbridled temper and appetite, of a swaggering self-esteem which the remorseless operation of fate had ignored, had passed indifferently by, leaving him in complete ignorance of the terrible and grim possibilities ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... feel ourselves alone—as it were abandoned in the immensity of the universe. We live in a world, hard, savage, full of hatred; whose one cruel law is the struggle for existence, and in which we are no more than those natural elements, let loose to war with each other in fierce selfishness, without pity, with no appeal beyond, no hope of final justice. And above us, in place of the good God of our happy youth, nothing, any more! or worse than nothing—a deity, barbarous and ironical, who cares nothing ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... Murat, was the most base and dastardly. To be sure, during the whole of this long and bloody war, carried on by the despots and tyrants of the earth, their conduct was one continued exhibition of treachery, falsehood, selfishness, and deception. This abandoned race of Sovereigns, Kings and Emperors, who assume a divine origin, and set up a claim of divine rights, have, by their acts, unequivocally proclaimed to the whole world that no reliance can be placed in their words, ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... the common gymnasium as an institution of organized selfishness. In its very structure it practically ignores woman. As I have intimated, it provides for young men alone, who of all classes least need a gymnasium. They have most out-door life; the active games and sports are theirs; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... the past there is much to deplore, the blunders of English ministers, the want of judgment on the part of governors, the selfishness of "family compacts," the arrogance of office-holders, the recklessness of Canadian politicians. But the very trials of the crisis through which Canada passed brought out the fact, that if English statesmen had mistaken the spirit of the Canadian ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot
... nothing surprisingly characteristic in any nation. Given its history, everything appears natural; each people's wealth and misery seem in direct proportion to its freedom and its prejudices, and in consequence, in proportion to the self-sacrifice or selfishness of its progenitors." ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... to the matrimonial intentions between the correspondents, but treated only of church services, Sunday-schools, sewing circles and missionary matters, until the young man, famishing for a word of affection, with pardonable selfishness, ...
— Victor's Triumph - Sequel to A Beautiful Fiend • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... any prospect of real advantage, they will attempt to change the application of words. In the case before us, they have actually found, that benevolence is no more than a species of self-love; and would oblige us, if possible, to look out for a new set of names, by which we may distinguish the selfishness of the parent when he takes care of his child, from his selfishness when he only takes care of himself. For, according to this philosophy, as in both cases he only means to gratify a desire of his own, he is in both cases equally selfish. ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... that you must go away—for awhile. It's only selfishness that has blinded me to that all along. I'm killing all the best in you ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... than anybody else Effort to get on common ground with an inferior He buys my poverty and not my will Honest selfishness Intrepid fancy that they had confronted fate Less intrusive than if he had not been there Monologue to which the wives of absent-minded men resign Only one of them was to be desperate at a time Reconciliation ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... counselors, never engage in unnecessary war, but when you are involved in war be strong and brave. Love peace even better than your own personal interests. Remember that the counts of Hapsburg did not attain their heights of reputation and glory by fraud, insolence or selfishness, but by courage and devotion to the public weal. As long as you follow their footsteps, you will not only retain, but augment, the possessions and dignities ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... Catholic, but even so, we will not sit by and see her life ruined, and we have called to assure you that we shall use all our influence, every adroit argument, to bring our parents to a more reasonable frame of mind. They have already risen above the first natural impulse of selfishness, and would consent to the inevitable separation were you only a Catholic. I have also talked with the Governor—we arrived at midnight—and he flew into a terrible temper—the poor man is already ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... with a most abrupt rejection of the compromise offered by the insurgents and with the opening of a war of prosecutions, in which the most passionate defenders of patriotic selfishness, the capitalists, took vengeance on all those who were suspected of having counselled moderation and seasonable concession. On the other hand the tribune Marcus Plautius Silvanus, who entered on his office on the 10th of December ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... visit, a month—isn't it?" I hedged, smiling at the details that seduced me, and ashamed of my man's selfishness, yet knowing that Frances expected it of me. "There are points about it, I admit. If you're set on my going with you, I could manage ...
— The Damned • Algernon Blackwood
... composition, and veracity. Mr. Rees must have been very ignorant of Mr Bradlaugh's writings and intellectual character, or else he was deliberately inventing or trusting to mere hearsay, when he stated that Mr. Bradlaugh was made an Atheist by the bigotry or selfishness of certain Christians. "I think I may almost say" is a strange expression. What is it to "almost say" a thing? Is it almost said when you have said it? And what a jumble of "hims" in the fourth sentence! It would really ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... is a grain of true and genuine friendship in the relation of man to man, though generally, of course, some secret personal interest is at the bottom of them—some one among the many forms that selfishness can take. But in a world where all is imperfect, this grain of true feeling is such an ennobling influence that it gives some warrant for calling those relations by the name of friendship, for they stand far above the ordinary friendships that prevail amongst mankind. ...
— Counsels and Maxims - From The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... death. Then, if a criminal is at peace, is he not to be pitied and brought back to life? Or, are you afraid to do this lest he suffer, trample on your pearls of thought, and turn on you and rend you? [20] Cowardice is selfishness. When one protects himself at his neighbor's cost, let him remember, "Whosoever will save his life shall lose it." He risks nothing who obeys the law of God, and shall find the Life ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... creature of her maker's misogyny. She is a bitter, barren woman of suffragette type, whose marriage and career as a doctor have been alike failures, and who has alienated herself from all, even her mild father, by her selfishness and discontent. It is she who has brought Miss Clare Farquhar into her father's home to render him those services in his pursuit of heraldry and genealogy that were irksome to her, and so she herself is responsible for his dependence on his secretary, which, ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... now the chief anxiety of our farmer, and selfishness formed no part of his character. When he had left home, a short time before, his niece Jean was at work in the dairy, Ramblin' Peter was attending to the cattle, Marion Clark and her comrade, Isabel Scott were busy with domestic affairs, and old Mrs. Mitchell—who never quite recovered ...
— Hunted and Harried • R.M. Ballantyne
... that I could not frame a reply. He left me thinking over what he had said. Whatever was the soundness of his logic or the moral tone of his philosophy, his argument greatly impressed me. I could see, in spite of the absolute selfishness upon which it was based, that there was reason and common sense in it. I began to analyze my own motives, and found that they, too, were very largely mixed with selfishness. Was it more a desire to help those I considered ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... respectability; but let him not be very complacent over the decorous and conventional veneer which masks him from the world. If one imagines that he can corrupt his own soul and make it the abiding-place of foul thoughts, mean impulses, and shrivelling selfishness, and yet go forward very far in God's universe without meeting overwhelming disaster, he ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... Argyle, a nobleman of shining qualifications for the senate and the field, whose character would have been still more illustrious, had not some parts of his conduct subjected him to the suspicion of selfishness and inconstancy. He was succeeded in that title by his brother, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... that did it—diabolical persecution and selfishness. That was the worst day the college ever knew. At the funeral, when the provost read, 'For that it hath pleased Thee to deliver this our sister out of the miseries of this sinful world,' Big Wallington, the wildest chap among the grads, led off with a gulp in his throat, and we all followed. And ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... punishment of this world and awaiting the punishment of the next. Lest some may fancy I do not believe this,—thinking that if I did I could not so have acted,—let me say there is no moral restraining power in fear. Fear is essentially selfish, and selfishness is at the bottom of all crimes, my own among the rest. I leave behind me none who will mourn me, and have but one satisfaction, viz.: the knowledge that I shall be regarded as an artist in crime. I take this occasion to bid the public an adieu not altogether, ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... ago. But never mind about that. I believe in you, my boy. You have not seen the world and grown corrupted; you are still capable of a disinterested attachment; and may it be long before the thoughtlessness of some, and the treachery of others, and the selfishness of all, convince you that there is no such thing as a true friend." And the old drummer gave his mustache a fierce jerk, as if he had some grudge ...
— The Drummer Boy • John Trowbridge
... is one of the most generous-hearted of children. Selfishness is not at all a trait of hers, and she knows the value of making sunshine, not alone in her own heart, but for her neighborhood and ...
— Dorothy Dainty at Glenmore • Amy Brooks
... elderly chaperon of Theresa's had been brought up in a convent, and had come out into the world with an exaggerated estimate of her acquirements and position. But ten or fifteen years' experience of the selfishness and crude egoism of youth had tended to dissipate such sentiments, and she eventually took a situation as a sort of superior companion in an aristocratic family. Slights and humiliations were inevitable in her position, but she bore them in silence, ...
— Captain Mansana and Mother's Hands • Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson
... of the epistle Jude himself gives in explicit terms (verses 3, 4). It is to guard believers against the seductions of false teachers, corrupt in practice as well as doctrine; whose selfishness, sensuality, and avarice; whose vain-glorious, abusive, and schismatic spirit, he describes in vivid language, denouncing upon them at the same time the awful judgment of God. The apostolic portraiture has not yet become antiquated in the history of ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... them by their Christian names, Wingrave and Lumley—shared a somewhat extensive hunting box in Leicestershire. They were both of good family, well off, and fairly popular, Lumley the more so perhaps. He represented the ordinary type of young Englishman, with a stronger dash than usual of selfishness. Wingrave stood for other things. He was reticent and ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... of earnest and devout believers meet together for special intercession and worship, we do not tax them with selfishness if they exclude unbelievers. ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... wherein was the efficacy of grim words about British tenacity? The great new Somme offensive was not succeeding in the North. Was victory possible? Was victory deserved? In his daily labour he was brought into contact with too many instances of official selfishness, folly, ignorance, stupidity, and sloth, French as well as British, not to marvel at times that the conflict had not come to an ignominious end long ago through simple lack of imagination. He knew that he himself had often failed in devotion, in ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... being bloody and barbarous, would have been holy, perfect, artistic, and surely success would have crowned our efforts. But no intelligence would support me, I encountered fear or effeminacy among the enlightened classes, selfishness among the rich, simplicity among the youth, and only in the mountains, in the waste places, among the outcasts, have I found my men. But no matter now! If we can't get a finished statue, rounded out in all its details, of the rough block we work upon ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... that Jack returned to his hut in which Jacob had been invited to take up his quarters. The two warm-hearted sailors had so many qualities in common that they had been especially drawn to each other, though they probably were not aware of the cause. Utter freedom from selfishness was the chief characteristic of them both. No sooner had Jacob Halliburt discovered Harry's love for May than he was ready to sacrifice even his own life if it were necessary for May's sake, to preserve ...
— Won from the Waves • W.H.G. Kingston
... I am old, and know that I have not long to live, that I am so little affected. My grief, however," added he with an air of pride, "is pure and free from all selfishness. The generosity of Count de Mediana has left me enough to pass the remainder of my days in tranquillity. But I should pass them all the more happily if I could only see avenged the ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... the conversational powers of our small society were limited. Very often some selfishness mingled with my sincere compassion for the prostrated sufferings of my Philadelphian friend of the tug-boat; for whenever his weary aching head would allow of the exertion, he could talk on almost any subject, fluently and well. He was returning from a long visit to ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... neither the Catiline nor the Jugurthine war are histories; they are chapters of history, containing two interesting biographies. Scattered through the writings of Tacitus, are to be found numerous caustic and profound observations on human nature, and the increasing vices and selfishness of a corrupted age: but, like the maxims of Rochefoucault, it is to individual, not general, humanity that they refer; and they strike us as so admirably just because they do not describe general causes operating upon society as a body—which often make little ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... before he had set foot upon the pavement that his life was blasted, that his chance of success and Helen's love were gone, forfeited by his own egotism, his insane selfishness; but it was only a half-surrender; something very stark and unyielding rose within him, preventing his return to ask forgiveness. The scorn, the contempt of Hugh's words, and the lines of loathing appearing ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... words and looks of sympathy. This practice she did not even now give up, for it came under the head of her religious duties; but she relaxed it. She often sent to places where she used to go. Until George went she had never thought of herself; and so the selfishness of those she relieved had not struck her. Now it made her bitter to see that none of those she pitied, pitied her. The moment she came into their houses it was, "My poor head, Miss Merton; my old ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... certain points of great importance. In the first place, Gloria had not really the world before her. Her little sphere was closely limited by her father's morose selfishness, which led him to keep her in Rome because he liked the place himself, and to keep away from his countrymen, whom he detested as heartily as Britons living abroad sometimes do. On the other hand, a vague dread lest the story of his marriage ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... according to his own labor."—1 Cor. 3:8. Let this blessed teaching be a comfort to some hearts: the redeemed loved ones who have died are "present with the Lord" which "is far better." Then it is cruel selfishness to wish them back. ...
— God's Plan with Men • T. T. (Thomas Theodore) Martin
... an idle life in the very best clothes. To enable him to do this, the affectionate little dancing-mistress had toiled and laboured and would have toiled and laboured to that hour if her strength had lasted so long. For the mainspring of the story was that in spite of the man's absorbing selfishness, his wife (overpowered by his deportment) had, to the last, believed in him and had, on her death-bed, in the most moving terms, confided him to their son as one who had an inextinguishable claim upon him and whom he could never regard ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... continuous and frequent fits of anger that gather together in the soul by degrees, like a swarm of bees or wasps, are generated within us by selfishness and peevishness, luxury and softness. And so nothing causes us to be mild to our servants and wife and friends so much as easiness and simplicity, and the learning to be content with what we have, and not to ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... Flint and Mary Adams. The character of Mary Adams was admittedly a difficult one to explore; her mother, a cloud of nurses and a company of governesses had been baffled completely by its dark caverns and recesses. One clue, beyond question, was selfishness; but this quality, by the very obviousness of it, may tempt us to believe that that is all. It may account, when we are displeased, for so much. It accounted for a great deal with Mary—but not all. She ...
— The Golden Scarecrow • Hugh Walpole
... say!" he protested. "You don't call this being kind, do you? I assure you it's just pure selfishness. I should have spent my evening alone if we hadn't met—and I hate being alone; I bore myself stiff in five minutes. I'm just—honoured that you should have allowed me to eat my supper with you. If you knew how ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres
... — N. covetousness, ravenousness &c adj.; venality, avidity, cupidity; acquisitiveness (acquisition) 775; desire &c 865. [greed for money or material things] greed, greediness, avarice, avidity, rapacity, extortion. selfishness &c 943; auri sacra fames [Lat.]. grasping, craving, canine appetite, rapacity. V. covet, crave (desire) 865; grasp; exact, extort. Adj. greedy, avaricious, covetous, acquisitive, grasping; rapacious; lickerish^. greedy as a hog; overeager; voracious; ravenous, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... inevitables. The heredity of the internal secretions determines that the offspring of these women are bound to be pituitary unstable, the least desirable of endocrine instabilities because of the concomitant mental effects. Even from the purely selfish point of view, the standpoint of enlightened selfishness, the post-pituitary type must beware of excesses. For disturbances of menstruation, psychic fears, anxieties, states of suspicion and obsession, various pains are among ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... selfishness they tried all they could. But he is too proud to watch. If you and I were hatching treason against him in the dark, and chance had brought him there, he would stop his ears with his fingers. He is all trust, even when he knows that he is being deceived. He is honour ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... steadily, her scornful mouth firm as his own. "I am what you have made me," she said slowly. "Why quarrel with the result? You have brought me up to ignore the restrictions attached to my sex; you now round on me and throw them in my face. All my life you have set me an example of selfishness and obstinacy. Can you wonder that I have profited by it? You have made me as hard as yourself, and you now profess surprise at the determination your training has forced upon me. You are illogical. It is your fault, not mine. There was bound to be a clash some day. It has ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... wasn't meaning just that, but,—why, what am I thinking of! Of course I must materialize him. Oh, Hawkins, selfishness is the bottom trait in human nature; I was only thinking that now, with the usurper's heir out of the way. But you'll forgive that momentary weakness, and forget it. Don't ever remember it against me that Mulberry Sellers was once mean enough to think the thought that I was thinking. I'll materialise ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... by Collie's eyes that had seemed so listless, so indifferent, so weary. She had hoped to cheer him. His indifference affected her more than his actual physical condition, which seemed to be the cause of it. Louise recognized in herself a species of selfishness in feeling as she did. Like most folk of superabundant health she was unable to realize the possibilities of sickness. She longed for his companionship. She had not dared to ask herself whether or not she loved him. She was glad that he should love ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... good that comes to us, somehow, seems to spring from women like yourself, while we give you nothing but trouble in return. Even this last misery, which my selfishness has brought to you, lifts me ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... separates him from men of the stamp of Theodore Parker. For, says Lessing, the appeal to unearthly rewards and punishments is after all an appeal to our lower feelings; other-worldliness is but a refined selfishness; and we are to cherish virtue for its own sake not because it will lead us to heaven. Here is the grand principle of Stoicism. Lessing believed, with Mr. Mill, that the less we think about getting rewarded ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... nature where unity underlies all differences, where soul is bound to soul more than star to star; where if one falters or fails the order of all the rest is changed; the duty of any man who perceives this unity is clear, the call for brotherly action is imperative, selfishness cannot any longer wear the mask of wisdom, for isolation is folly and shuts us out from the ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... United States could know for a surety of the avarice, the selfishness, the cynicism which have marked every step of the negotiations relative to the settlement of the Near Eastern Question, if they were aware of the chicanery and the deceit and the low cunning practised by the European ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... the cars on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad a few evenings ago— for I am not going to say anything of my trip further east— I saw as great an exhibition of selfishness as one often meets in travelling. This was in the rear car, the others being all crowded. The seats were spacious, and had high backs for night travelling. A gentleman entered the car and proposed to sit in a seat in which was only one child, but he was informed by a feminine voice in the rear ...
— Minnesota and Dacotah • C.C. Andrews
... of his expressions, made nearly the same declarations of his resolution, by which his mother had been so much surprised and offended. Lord Clonbrony seemed more embarrassed, but not so much displeased. When Lord Colambre adverted, as delicately as he could, to the selfishness of desiring from him the sacrifice of liberty for life, to say nothing of his affections, merely to enable his family to make a splendid figure in London, Lord Clonbrony exclaimed, "That's all nonsense!—cursed nonsense! That's the way we are obliged to state the thing to ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... which I will try to grow here in my cell, and which will help me to beguile those long weary hours when I cannot see you. I confess to you I have very little hope for the latter one, and I look beforehand on this unfortunate bulb as sacrificed to my selfishness. However, the sun sometimes visits me. I will, besides, try to convert everything into an artificial help, even the heat and the ashes of my pipe, and lastly, we, or rather you, will keep in reserve the third sucker as our last resource, ...
— The Black Tulip • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... secretly Kit had always considered personal ambition a little private form of selfishness. As she ransacked her mind now, trying to find her own ambition and get it safely on a pin for examination like one of Billie's specimens, only her old-time love of forestry ...
— Kit of Greenacre Farm • Izola Forrester
... Every attempt at reform the parent of worse scandals; every mercy begetting fresh cruelties; every persecutor silenced, only to enable others to persecute him in their turn: every devil who is exorcised, returning with seven others worsethan himself; falsehood and selfishness, spite and lust, confusion seven times confounded, Satan casting out Satan everywhere—from the emperor who wantons on his throne, to the slave who blasphemes ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... In our selfishness, we never thought that other people might have a fondness for shellbarks as well as ourselves. So, after a little more pleading on Ned's part, I gave in, and we agreed to meet down at the foot of our orchard, as soon as dinner was over, for Ned lived right across, on the next ...
— The Jungle Fugitives • Edward S. Ellis
... weeks at conscientious introspection. The blow years before at Andover had landed on his personal unpleasantness; the workman of his college days had jarred the snobbishness out of his system, and Marjorie's husband had given a severe jolt to his greedy selfishness. It threw women out of his ken until a year later, when he met his future wife; for the only sort of woman worth while seemed to be the one who could be protected as Marjorie's husband had protected her. Samuel could not imagine his grass- widow, Mrs. De Ferriac, ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... Marchesino's stratagem on the preceding night. Although she was gay and fearless, she was exquisitely sensitive. Peppina's confession had roused her maidenhood to a theoretical knowledge of certain things in life, of certain cruel phases of man's selfishness and lust which, till then, she had never envisaged. The Marchesino's madness had carried her one step further. She had not actually looked into the abyss. But she had felt herself near to something that she hated even more than she ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... nature which might otherwise achieve. To prevent such waste from inner weakness and to "encourage excellence in each individual," to use Doctor Small's fine phrase, we need a childhood saturated with the sense of personal values on the plane of affection. Selfishness may indeed pollute this mainspring of personal power, and selfishness sometimes reaches its acme in motherhood's partiality for its own. The ideal of social solidarity and the claim of all upon each one ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... the personality and the original designs of Cinna than regarding those of any other party leader in the Roman revolution. The reason is, to all appearance, simply that this man, altogether vulgar and guided by the lowest selfishness, had from the first no ulterior political plans whatever. It was asserted at his very first appearance that he had sold himself for a round sum of money to the new burgesses and the coterie of Marius, and the charge looks very credible; but even were it false, it remains nevertheless ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... moments!—frightful! yet worthy to be recalled. How often did I weep in Bendel's bosom, after I recovered from the first inebriety of rapture! how severely did I condemn myself, that I, a shadowless being, should seal, with wily selfishness, the perdition of an angel, whose pure soul I had attached to me by lies and theft! Now I determined to unveil myself to her; now, with solemn oaths, I resolved to tear myself from her, and to fly; then ...
— Peter Schlemihl • Adelbert von Chamisso
... Albert. Please, not them. I'll run out of the house if they come. They've defeated me so often. That terrible wall they erect—out of flesh that bleeds every time I try to climb it. They've killed me with the selfishness of their love, those two. They put me body and soul into Chinese shoes the day I was born. I've never ceased paying up for being their child. Suppose they did sacrifice for me—clothe me—feed me—what does parenthood mean but that? Don't you ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... spirit, to seize on this great political crisis and to mature the offspring of chance to the designs of wisdom. William the Silent devoted himself, a second Brutus, to the great cause of liberty. Superior to a timorous selfishness, he sent in to the throne his resignation of offices which devolved on him objectionable duties, and, magnanimously divesting himself of all his princely dignities, he descended to a state of voluntary poverty, and became but a citizen of the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... again told. If you don't mind me, the bears will come and eat you up, says the petulant nurse or maid-servant. Thus, in one way or another, and at one time or another, every motive—love, fear, selfishness, pleasure, &c.—is appealed to in the education of the young, except that which should be chiefly appealed to—viz., self-approbation, ...
— The Young Woman's Guide • William A. Alcott
... each other, or playing at cards or draughts. Our entrance appeared to excite little attention; after having raised their eyes to indulge their curiosity, they continued their pursuits. I have often thought what a feeling of selfishness appeared to pervade the whole of them. At the time I was shocked, as I expected immediate sympathy and commiseration; but afterwards I was not surprised. Many of these poor fellows had been months in the prison, and a short confinement will produce that indifference to the misfortunes of ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... a large estate, although it was often suggested to me, I never considered myself justified in asking any lady to share—the prospective estate. I think now that the real reason was that I never cared sufficiently for any lady, since otherwise my selfishness would probably have overcome my scruples, as it does to-night. Benita, for I will call you so, if for the first and last ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... Selfishness is a rooted principle of action in nations not less than in single persons. It seems to draw a certain perfume from the virtue of patriotism, which lies upon its borders. It stalks abroad with a semblance ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... "History" say: "The laws affecting woman's civil rights have been greatly improved during the past thirty years, but the political demand has made but questionable progress, though it must be counted as the chief influence in modifying the laws. The selfishness of man was readily enlisted in securing woman's civil rights, while the same element in his character antagonized her demand for political equality." If it was his selfishness that procured woman civil rights and ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... windows; the king held them down. Excited now to a perfect frenzy in the struggle, she began to break out the panes with her fist, while Charles exerted all his force to restrain and confine her, by grasping her wrists and endeavoring to force her away. What a contrast between the low and sordid selfishness and jealousy evinced in such dissensions as these, and the lofty and heroic devotedness and fidelity which this wife afterward evinced for her husband in the harassing cares the stormy voyages, and the martial exposures and fatigues which she endured for ...
— History of King Charles II of England • Jacob Abbott
... his nymphs and shepherds, and ceased to invoke the idyllic muse. In his long portrait gallery there are plenty of virtuous people, and some people intended to be refined; but features indicative of coarse animal passions, brutality, selfishness, and sensuality are drawn to the life, and the development of his stories is generally determined by some of the baser elements of human nature. 'Jesse and Colin' are described in one of the Tales; but they are not the Jesse and Colin of Dresden ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... stream in boats and go to wreck among the rapids? Were they swept into eternity by a freshet? Did they lose their provisions and starve in the desert? Did the Indians revenge themselves for brutality and selfishness by slaying them at night or from an ambush? Were they killed by banditti? Did they sink in the quicksands that led the river into subterranean canals? None will ever know, perhaps; but many years afterward ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... that she believed in the human heart, that she acknowledged no higher law than its own impulses, that she saw love where others see only a cruel struggle for existence, that she found beauty where ordinary visions can detect little besides a selfishness worse than brutal and a squalor more pitiful than death. Everywhere she insists upon the purifying influence of affection, no matter how degraded in its circumstances or how illegal in its manifestation. No writer—not excepting ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... smiled. She understood. Frances had always been her favourite granddaughter, but she had never been blind, clear-sighted old lady that she was, to the little leaven of easy-going selfishness in the girl's nature. She was pleased to see that Frances had ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1904 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... now I think that it would not hurt me. There was a time in which I owned to myself that it would be very bitter, and then I told myself, that I hoped,—that I hoped that you would wait. But now, I have acknowledged to myself the vanity and selfishness of such a wish. If I really love you am I not bound to want what may ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... saw in my walks with him how much he enjoyed the salable treasures and humble diversions of the thoroughfare, as his readers have always perceived. Ingenuous simplicity, freedom from self-consciousness and whitewash, frank selfishness on a plane so humble that it can do little harm,—all this is amusing and restful after long hours with transcendental folk. In regard to the tenets of these, my mother ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... peace abroad, that he might turn his arms against his own subjects. Philip, if equally zealous, was certainly too prudent to exhibit his eagerness so clearly to his opponent. The interests of France had been sacrificed to the bigotry of her monarch and the selfishness of his advisers. When the terms of the agreement were made known, they awakened in every true Frenchman's breast a feeling of shame and disgust.[679] Henry himself manifested embarrassment when attempting ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... own officers, the ruthless Briton would have ridden over the kneeling innocents. This was not the only savage murder of the same description which this wretched people had to endure. But such atrocities were sharp medicines, benefits in disguise, good against cowardice, selfishness, double-dealing, and deficient patriotism. They worked famously upon the natives, while they proved the invader to be as little capable of good policy, as of ordinary humanity. They roused the spirit of the militia, whet their anger ...
— The Life of Francis Marion • William Gilmore Simms
... sickening: even The Spectator exasperates me with its d—d cold- water cure for all enthusiasm. When I see these beautiful mountain glens, I quite long to build myself a little den in the middle of them, and say good-bye to the world, with all its lies and its selfishness, till other times. I have still one great consolation here, and that is the rage and fury of the sqireens at the poor rates; six and sixpence in the pound with an estate mortgaged right up to high-water mark ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... not be a thousand times more unhappy? for then I might, I would have to blame him—whilst now I can find no fault with him, for never having thought of a union which was impossible, because ridiculous. And had he wished it, could I ever have had the selfishness to consent to it? I began to write the first pages of this diary as I began these last, with my heart steeped in bitterness—and as I went on, committing to paper what I could have intrusted to no one, my soul grew calm, till resignation came—Resignation, ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... a politician's meanness, a great man without a great man's vices, a philanthropist without a philanthropist's dreams, a christian without pretensions, a ruler without the pride of place or power, an ambitious man without selfishness, and a successful man without vanity. Humble man of the backwoods, boatman, axman, hired laborer, clerk, surveyor, captain, legislator, lawyer, debater, orator, politician, statesman. President, savior of the republic, emancipator of a race, true ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... religious devotees have a tendency in the matter of payments to keep strictly to the letter of the law. Is this from poverty, or from the selfishness to which their isolation condemns them, thus encouraging the natural inclination of all men to avarice; or is it from a conscientious parsimony which saves all it can for deeds of charity? Each nature will give a ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... time now St. Just allowed the conversation to drop; he was gazing wide-eyed, almost appalled at this impudent display of well-nigh ferocious selfishness and vanity. De Batz, smiling and complacent, was leaning back in his chair, looking at his young friend with perfect contentment expressed in every line of his pock-marked face and in the very attitude of his well-fed body. It was easy enough now to understand the remarkable ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... he had set foot upon the pavement that his life was blasted, that his chance of success and Helen's love were gone, forfeited by his own egotism, his insane selfishness; but it was only a half-surrender; something very stark and unyielding rose within him, preventing his return to ask forgiveness. The scorn, the contempt of Hugh's words, and the lines of loathing appearing for the first ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... what role his wife played in his inner life. He felt the necessity of having her beside him, of talking to her; but he did not understand whether this was mere selfishness, for the sake of the soothing effect her presence produced, or was for the satisfaction of his vanity in seeing how she gave all her ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... for gold, there can be no doubt. Certainly nothing could justify the estimate of him given by Professor Arber, that "he was both fair-minded and friendly toward the Pilgrim Fathers," and he certainly stands alone among writers of reputation in that opinion. Jones's selfishness, ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames
... necessities, and much less to their fond expectations. Rational people could have hoped for little from this their tax in the disguise of a benevolence,—tax weak, ineffective, and unequal,—a tax by which luxury, avarice, and selfishness were screened, and the load thrown upon productive capital, upon integrity, generosity, and public spirit,—a tax of regulation upon virtue. At length the mask is thrown off, and they are now trying means (with little success) of exacting ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... long, to remove them. The conflict between labor and capital is not permanent; it will yield to better knowledge of the true demands of political economy. The indifference or corruption of law makers and dispensers will disappear when men realize that personal selfishness is self-destructive, and that only care for the commonweal can bring about prosperity for the individual. The democracy is still in its swaddling clothes, and its outward aspect is in many ways ugly and unwelcome, and we sigh ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... to be the aim of Providence; while on the other hand, there is just as evidently to be seen the working of an opposing force, viz., human selfishness, human ignorance, individual ambition, ever seeking its own at the expense of others. A selfish, energetic, and ignorant spirit of individualism (as distinguished from an enlightened, large-minded, social individualism, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... more important uses; that the emotions it produces have no tendency to strengthen the intellectual or moral character; that the most melodious sounds that human instruments can make have no power to implant principles, give strength to resist temptation or eradicate selfishness; that the love of music often leads into associations which are corrupting in their character, as is shown by its use in promoting the frivolity of the ball-room, and the dissipation of the drinking-saloon, and especially in exciting the passions and drowning the sensibilities of those engaged ...
— On Singing and Music • Society of Friends
... chair, where he sat speculating on the numerous instances of human cruelty, selfishness, and spite that had fallen to his lot to witness since that day in the jungle four years since that his eyes had first fallen upon a human being other than himself—the sleek, black Kulonga, whose swift spear had that day found the vitals of Kala, the great she-ape, and robbed the youth, ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... even of a coquette there is not necessarily either cruelty or hardness. It cannot be a fine nature, and must be deficient in the tact which appreciates the feelings of another, and the sympathy that shrinks from injuring them. It may be called selfishness, which is another term for thoughtlessness or want of consideration or perception, but it is not deliberate selfishness. This last is often found with fine perceptions and intuitive tact. It is rather a natural obtuseness, a want of thought on the subject. Such persons remember and connect their ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... voice was still in my ears; but the consciousness of danger, the sense of triumph, the selfishness of happiness, out-clamored it! Destined as it was to return in after-years in tones that always seemed more piteous and more laden with pain and bitterness as that miserable night receded further and further back into the darkness of the past, it came upon me the next morning ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... full of green beans and salad, and green corn. Mustapha tried to persuade me not to give physick, for fear those who died should pass for being poisoned, but both Omar and I are sure it is only to excuse his own selfishness. Omar is an excellent assistant. The bishop tried to make money by hinting that if I forbade my patients to fast, I might pay for their indulgence. One poor, peevish little man refused the chicken-broth, and told me that we Europeans ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... association. This singular society is purely French, a creature of French virtues, and possibly of French defects. It cannot be imitated by the English. The roughness, the impatience, the more obvious selfishness, and even the more ardent friendships of the Anglo-Saxon, speedily dismember such a commonwealth. But this random gathering of young French painters, with neither apparatus nor parade of government, yet kept the life of the place upon a certain footing, insensibly imposed their etiquette upon the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... understand, we might as well believe in will-with-a-whisp as in God. But I would fix morality upon a better basis than belief in a Deity. If it has indeed at present no other basis, it is not morality, it is selfishness, it is timidity; it is the hope of reward, it is the dread of punishment. For a great and good man, shew me one who loves virtue because he finds a pleasure in it, who has acquired a taste for that pleasure by considering what and where happiness ...
— Answer to Dr. Priestley's Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever • Matthew Turner
... how he loves himself,' madam," Edith rejoined, with a scornful curl of her lips, "for nothing but the rankest selfishness could ever have led a person to commit an act of such duplicity and sacrilege as that which he and you adopted to secure your own ends. He does not desire to be pardoned. His only desire is that I should relent and yield to him—which I never ...
— The Masked Bridal • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... of phrase is in general commensurate with selfishness of feeling: men old and hackneyed in the ways of the world are ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... numbers of which I have had intimacies and connections, that would render the moment of parting so hideous, that, believe me, it rends to flinders a soul born for another sphere than that in which it has moved, had not the vile selfishness of a lordly fiend ruined all my prospects and all my hopes. Hear me then; for I do not ask your pity: I only ask of you to look to yourself, and behave with womanly prudence, if you deny this day that these goods are yours, there is no ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... features with a small branch. "Park, indeed! It's a howling wilderness. I'm fond of my native land," she went on, digging out my nostrils, so I could breathe, "but I don't calculate to eat it. As for that unfeeling beast of yours, Lizzie, I've never known a horse to show such selfishness. Never." ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... and well-defined move on the part of humanity towards self-preservation, righteousness, at the last, being only a form of common-sense. That greed, selfishness, pomp and folly in all the million forms which idleness can invent, investing itself in the name of religion, will cause certain people to come out and lead lives of truth, sobriety, method, industry and mutual service, is as natural as that cattle should ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... flock. Yet, on the ground that, like her Master, she was sent not to the righteous, but to the lost, she concluded to receive her. Still the father, during his short stay, showed such a spirit of avarice and shameless selfishness,—he even asked for the clothes his daughter had on when she came,—that she rejoiced ...
— Woman And Her Saviour In Persia • A Returned Missionary
... unexperienced peace of mind. For myself I was never happier than I am at present; there's a novel zip added to life by the daily risks and the knowledge that at last you're doing something into which no trace of selfishness enters. One can only die once; the chief concern that matters is how and not when you die. I don't pity the weary men who have attained eternal leisure in the corruption of our shell-furrowed battles; they "went West" in their supreme moment. The men I pity ...
— Carry On • Coningsby Dawson
... engagement being broken off, that he had tried to induce his father to insist upon it, and to drive her to overcome her reluctance by what could be only understood as domestic persecution, and that in short he had allowed his unfeeling selfishness to appear to such a degree, that it had positively revolted his father, whose displeasure had long been excited by the extravagance that had been causing serious inconvenience, and who instantly, while under the influence of his first indignation, resolved ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... attempt even to prove, and on charges which were withdrawn without the accused having ever been confronted with their accusers. Base and daring fabricators of falsehood! Francois Corbeille, an innocent man, the victim only of unjust suspicions, on the one hand, and of diabolical selfishness, on the other, died in consequence of the injury his health received in that prison where tyranny had placed him. But he could issue no proclamation. His voice was not loud enough in the tomb to ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... his influence. To measure the vastness of this detriment is impossible. In sacrificing the Republic to his own aggrandizement, in ruling for a dynasty rather than the people, in subordinating the peace of the world to his own wicked ambition for his boy, he set an example of selfishness, and in proportion to his triumph was mankind corrupted in its judgment of human conduct. Teaching men to seek ascendency at the expense of duty, he demoralized not only France, but the world. Unquestionably part of this evil example was his falsehood ...
— The Duel Between France and Germany • Charles Sumner
... "It is all my selfishness, my unrestrained temper, my pride in my looks, my ambition to be first," she said. "That is what has caused ...
— A Girl Of The Limberlost • Gene Stratton Porter
... longing, haply bred by want of power, From paramount impulse not to be withstood, 240 A timorous capacity from prudence, From circumspection, infinite delay. Humility and modest awe themselves Betray me, serving often for a cloak To a more subtle selfishness; that now 245 Locks every function up in blank reserve, Now dupes me, trusting to an anxious eye That with intrusive restlessness beats off Simplicity and self-presented truth. Ah! better far than this, to stray about 250 Voluptuously through fields and rural walks, And ask no record of the ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... the victory over matter in the end, and Di was better all her days for the tribulations and the triumphs of that time; for she drowned her idle fancies in her wash-tub, made burnt-offerings of selfishness and pride, and learned the worth of self-denial, as she sang with happy voice among the pots and kettles of her ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... which set out in the shape of a half-moon, the convex outline being preserved by a retreating forehead, an aquiline nose, and a chin sloping inward, combined to give him a cold, repulsive countenance, fraught with expressions denoting selfishness and insincerity. The other occupant of the same seat was, on the contrary, a young man of an unassuming demeanor, shapely features, and a mild, pleasing countenance. The remaining two gentlemen of ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... occasion, the moral influence which Gellert might have had upon us. Now it was taken ill of him that he instructed the Danes of distinction and wealth, who were particularly recommended to him, better than the other students, and had a marked solicitude for them; now he was charged with selfishness and nepotism for causing a /table d'hote/ to be established for these young men at his brother's house. This brother, a tall, good-looking, blunt, unceremonious, and somewhat coarse, man, had, it was said, been a fencing-master; and, notwithstanding the too great lenity ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... himself off from the society of mankind to enshroud himself in study and meditation. He who acknowledged a secret tendency to the Epicurean indolence—was he going to live a life of the dilettante and the self-indulgent under cover of holiness? Alone could action save him from selfishness. Others doubtless fulfilled the laws of charity in praying, in mortifying themselves for their brethren. But when, like him, a man has exceptional faculties of persuasion and eloquence, such vigour in dialectics, such widespread culture, such power to bring to ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... what do we learn from such a career? Talfourd has so wisely summed up the whole case for us that I leave the dark tragedy with the recital of this solemn sentence from a paper on the culprit in the "Final Memorials of Charles Lamb": "Wainwright's vanity, nurtured by selfishness and unchecked by religion, became a disease, amounting perhaps to monomania, and yielding one lesson to repay the world for his existence, viz. that there is no state of the soul so dangerous as that in which the vices ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... it matter?" said Pecuchet; "it is time to cease stagnating in selfishness. Let us look out for ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... right. Lilias was not changed. Prosperity did no unkind office for her. Those happy days developed in her no germ of selfishness. Still her first thought was for others, the first desire of her heart still was to know what was right, and to obtain grace and strength to do it. In some respects she might be changed, but in this ...
— The Orphans of Glen Elder • Margaret Murray Robertson
... Statesmen must by this time have learned that the opinion of the world is everywhere wide awake and fully comprehends the issues involved. No representative of any self-governed nation will dare disregard it by attempting any such covenants of selfishness and compromise as were entered into at the Congress of Vienna. The thought of the plain people here and everywhere throughout the world, the people who enjoy no privilege and have very simple and unsophisticated standards of right and wrong, is the air all governments must henceforth ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... sweets as well-earned rest and comfort after labor? What satisfaction to feel the joy all one's own. None assisted in the earning, and consequently none expected a division of reward. It was all my own. If this is selfishness, it is surely ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... while the Christian, tormented by the things divine, cleaves to the comforting doctrine of innate sinfulness. Hence the universal tenet, that man should do good in order to gain by it here or hereafter; the enlightened selfishness, that says, Act well and get compound interest in a future state. The allusion to the Theist-word apparently means that the votaries of a personal Deity must believe in the absolute foreknowledge of the Omniscient in particulars as in generals. ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... the inevitable results of his action. His love, his earnest intention of some day living his own life in his own way, were to cost him more than he, blinded by selfishness and passion in the ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... their sect, and bring the whole world into their way. And when the faithful witnesses whom God will raise up shall openly declare that they have all gone out of the way, that the greatest professors have so much of guile, selfishness and party spirit about them as to be nothing but hypocrites, and that a person must be better than they are or be lost forever; that sects are an abomination to the Lord; denounce eternal death upon every advocate and adherent of men-made establishments; ... I say when such a testimony as this ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... occupation, even though it were not in one of the learned professions. I began to answer advertisements and apply at business offices for something to give me a living, but with no success. I began to feel the selfishness of men. God pity the warm and tender heart of youth when it begins to harden and grow chill, as mine did then; to put away its cheery confidence forever; to make a new estimate of itself and others. Look out for that time, O ye good people! that ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... she answered, indifferently. "I've been all upset because my cook got married—just walked out. I told Acton not to pay her, but of course he did; it's nothing to him if my whole house is upset by the selfishness of somebody else. He and Chris are going off this afternoon with Joe and Denny Page, ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... men, and all men to all women; which they assert to be the state of Nature, and therefore the most perfect state. They call it complex marriage instead of simple, and it is both polygamy and polyandry at the same time. They are enemies of all exclusiveness or selfishness, and hold that there should be no exclusiveness in money or in women or children. Their idea is to be in the most literal sense no respecters of persons. All women and children are the same to all men, and vice versa. A man never knows his ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... of private apotheosis; Byron's theory of life was one of liberty and self-sacrifice, Wordsworth's one of self-restraint and self-improvement; Byron's practice was dictated by a vigorous and voluptuous egoism, Wordsworth's by a benign and lofty selfishness; Byron was the 'passionate and dauntless soldier of a forlorn hope,' Wordsworth a kind of inspired clergyman. Both were influences for good, and both are likely to be influences for good for some time to come. Which is the better and stronger is a question that ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... Spirit inherent in the world. Still fewer can have felt the aesthetic charm of Nature but most vaguely. It was as much as they could boast, if they kept steadily to the rule of their order, and attended to the concerns each of his own soul. A terrible selfishness, if rightly considered; but one which accorded with the delusion that this world is a cave of care, the other world a place of torture or undying bliss, death the prime object of our meditation, and lifelong abandonment of our fellow-men the highest mode of existence. ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... to be hoped there are not many such thoroughgoing tyrants; but selfishness is always ready to make any one into a tyrant, and Mammon is a false god, who manages to make his servants satisfied that ...
— Friarswood Post-Office • Charlotte M. Yonge
... from the narrow selfishness of his wife, but also from the fastidiousness of his younger son, who met with open derision any project involving the accomplishment of a piece of actual architecture. He improvised an ornate and airy edifice of his own, which he allowed them to dedicate to art, ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... is cold reserve; the occupants read when compelled to stay in doors; they grow crabbed and cross and get into a state of habitual dumbness and selfishness. ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... Agatha heeded nothing. These people, these lives, were nothing to them, for a passionate love is the acme of selfishness. ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... are divorced for further lust. Selfishness, even in its form of self-preservation, is an unstable foundation for a home. It costs too much to maintain a home if you measure it by the personal advantages of parents. What hope is there for useful and happy family life if ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... Do then men love dead women better than they do the living? Perhaps. And then a certain writer has said: "To have known a great and exalted love, and have had it flee from your grasp—flee as a shadow before it is sullied by selfishness or misunderstanding—is the highest good. The memory of such a love can not die from out the heart. It affords a ballast 'gainst all the sordid impulses of life, and though it gives an unutterable sadness, it imparts ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... then, it is a fantastic impossibility that any reversionary service to our British expedition, which is held out in prophetic vision as consecrating our French and American friends from all taint of mercenary selfishness, ever can be realised. I am not going to pursue this subject. But a brief application of it to a question at this moment (June 16) urgently appealing to public favour is natural and fair. Canvassers ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... that they lived without object, aim, or principle, they would observe that the maxim which has influenced the delineation of the different Scenes and Characters is, that feeling, unguided and unrestrained, soon becomes mere selfishness; while the simple endeavour to fulfil each immediate claim of duty may lead to the highest ...
— Scenes and Characters • Charlotte M. Yonge
... nobility of the principle of my order," returned the Knight, "inasmuch as it excludes selfishness, save as it is of necessity, connected with the aspiration for salvation; still can I not be mistaken in the admiration of a sentiment which lifts man above all baseness, and prompts him to achieve exploits that shall send his name reverberating through the halls of princes and the cabins ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... beautiful young woman, who has lived all her life to be caressed and waited on, might prove quite a hard mistress in domestic life. Marie never had possessed much capability of affection, or much sensibility, and the little that she had, had been merged into a most intense and unconscious selfishness; a selfishness the more hopeless, from its quiet obtuseness, its utter ignorance of any claims but her own. From her infancy, she had been surrounded with servants, who lived only to study her caprices; the idea that they had either feelings or rights had never dawned upon her, even in distant ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... me to wish to fetter any human being to a lost creature like myself, conscious of having committed a crime for which the Scriptures told me there is no pardon. I had, indeed, a long struggle as to whether I should make the attempt or not—selfishness, however, prevailed. I will not detain your attention with relating all that occurred at this period—suffice it to say that I made my suit and was successful; it is true that the old man, who was ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... accomplish, when the roar of mill machinery begins to reverberate through the hills of the future Joplin, arousing the vast energies and resources of We-all, Pewee and Big Wheat, let us be generous. If there was a sponge, kicker, shirk or drone, let us cover his selfishness with the mantle of charity. Leave him under the beating light of progress to wrestle with whatever remnant of a conscience he may happen to have. If he can stand by and coolly watch us work our gizzards out for the common good, and then reach out to share the fruits ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... a man has a blind notion of stewardship about his property, but very few have it about their knowledge," said Bishop Phillips Brooks, and he added: "One grows tired of seeing cultivated people with all their culture cursed by selfishness." To the true idealist—as distinct from the mere emotionalist with aesthetic tastes—selfishness is an impossible prison. The only spiritual freedom lies in the perpetual sharing of the fuller life. The gift shared is the gift doubled. Art is the spiritual glory ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... conscious of the infirmities of their representatives, and in delegating to them the power of legislation they have fenced them around with checks to guard against the effects of hasty action, of error, of combination, and of possible corruption. Error, selfishness, and faction have often sought to rend asunder this web of checks and subject the Government to the control of fanatic and sinister influences, but these efforts have only satisfied the people of the wisdom of the checks ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Polk - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 4: James Knox Polk • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... was the bond of our friendship? Was it selfishness? Was it frivolity? Was it folly? Was it an earthly, vulgar, or a higher, immortal, celestial bond? Speak! Speak! Oh, a friendship erected like ours might have endured through eternity.... If you or I had died ten times, death should not have filched ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... likelihood not object to cast his eyes around and about him, where proofs of modern priestly selfishness are in wonderful abundance. By way of example may be cited the cases of those right reverend Fathers in God the Bishops of London and Chester, prelates high in the church; disposers of enormous wealth with influence almost incalculable; the former more especially. And how stand they ...
— Superstition Unveiled • Charles Southwell
... sister than mamma, and I hope you will have many years of youth yet. I think I must tell you in return for this letter what Dr. John Brown said, or part of it at least. He said you had the playfulness of a lamb without its selfishness. I think that perfect as far as it goes. Of course my Susie's wise and grave gifts must be told of afterwards. There is no one I know, or have known, so well able as you are to be in a degree what my mother was to me. In this chief way (as well as many other ways) (the puzzlement I have ...
— Hortus Inclusus - Messages from the Wood to the Garden, Sent in Happy Days - to the Sister Ladies of the Thwaite, Coniston • John Ruskin
... Aunt Kezia, turning down the hem of a kerchief. Then, when she came to the end of the hem, she looked up at Cecilia. "My dear, there is a lesson we all have to learn, and the sooner you learn it, the better and happier woman you will be. The end of selfishness is not pleasure, but pain. You don't think so, do you? Ah, but you will find as you go through life, that always you are not only better, but happier, with God's blessing on the thing you don't like, than without ...
— Out in the Forty-Five - Duncan Keith's Vow • Emily Sarah Holt
... Cross Knight did war. For no painted, mincing court dame could the dragon have been slain. Oh, ladies fair, be fair in mind and soul as well as face, so that brave knights may win glory in your service! Oh, woman, throw off your disguising cloaks of selfishness, effrontery, and affectation! Stand forth once more a queen in your royal robe of simple purity. A thousand swords, now rusting in ignoble sloth, shall leap from their scabbards to do battle for your honor against wrong. A thousand Sir Rolands shall lay lance in rest, and Fear, Avarice, ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... conquer, and yet I do not feel relieved by it; but an indifferent person would think me in excellent spirits. "We must forget these things," and have recourse to our old selfish comforts, or rather comfortable selfishness. ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... "he" and "she" are converted into verbs; as "thou" sometimes is, in the writings of Shakspeare, and others: "Is it not an impulse of selfishness or of a depraved nature to he and she inanimate objects?"—Cutler's English Gram., p. 16. Dr. Bullions, who has heretofore published several of the worst definitions of the verb anywhere extant, has now perhaps one of the best: "A VERB is a word used to express ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... women do we make of ourselves? The great question of life is an educational one. We all get an Education; but the kind is the point for us to determine. Some are educated in vice, some in folly, some in selfishness, some in deception, some in sensuality, some in nothing in particular and every thing in general, some in goodness, some in truth and right, some in theology, and some in religion. Our kinds of Education are legion. We can ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... excluded from the vote, and he bluntly asserted that the existing House of Commons did not represent 'the intelligence and the justice of the nation, but the prejudices, the privileges, and the selfishness, of a class'. ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... a season of thick fog and general outward gloom; but he had brought her his customary offering, having known her now long enough to have established a hundred small traditions. It was one of his proofs to himself, the present he made her on her birthday, that he hadn't sunk into real selfishness. It was mostly nothing more than a small trinket, but it was always fine of its kind, and he was regularly careful to pay for it more than he thought he could afford. "Our habit saves you, at least, don't ...
— The Beast in the Jungle • Henry James
... means you to be a noble man, Ranald—a man with the heart and purpose to do some good in the world, to be a blessing to his fellows; and it is a poor thing to be so filled up with selfishness as to have no thought of the honor of God or of the good of men. Louis LeNoir has done you a great wrong, but what is that wrong compared with the wrong you have done to Him who loved you ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... papers and the flight of Celine Leroque had shaken her feeling of security, Cora had been restive and anxious to bring this plot to a climax. She had found it not at all to her taste to have Percy holding over her head a sword, be it ever so slender. And now, as she confronted Madeline, all her selfishness was alarmed. She waited in absolute fear the next words from the lips ...
— Madeline Payne, the Detective's Daughter • Lawrence L. Lynch
... children seem endowed from the beginning. "Help him because he helped you," or "Give her some because she always gives you part of hers," is often effective. Just as in the case of self-control, the child will learn to overcome his innate selfishness "if it pays" to do so. It may seem wrong to encourage any but the highest motive, but a habit of unselfish acts, resting upon a desire to win the approbation of others, is a better foundation upon which to build than no foundation ...
— Vocational Guidance for Girls • Marguerite Stockman Dickson
... and similar devotedness of affection, mingled, in all my boyish dreams of greatness, with visions of curule chairs and ivory cars, marshalled legions and laurelled fasces. Such I have endeavoured to find in the world; and, in their stead, I have met with selfishness, with vanity, with frivolity, with falsehood. The life which you have preserved is a boon less valuable ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... got here, as elsewhere, developed primarily, indeed, and all unconsciously, the first and greatest of requisites in life, whether for dog or man. And if, in some instances, evil characteristics, such as combativeness, selfishness, and the habit of bad language, became accentuated, in spite of the stern discipline of the place, their opposites—good temper, a light and happy disposition, and a civil tongue—received their meed of recognition even from ...
— 'Murphy' - A Message to Dog Lovers • Major Gambier-Parry
... ourselves which impulse that shall be? Even now, in decreeing my own destruction, do I exercise free-will, or am I the sport of hereditary tendencies, of mistaken views of honour, of a seeming self-sacrifice, which, perhaps, is but selfishness in disguise? I blight my unfortunate father's old age; I destroy the last of an ancient house; but I remove from the path of Olive Dunne the shadow that must rest upon the sunshine of what will eventually, I trust, be a happy life, unvexed by memories of one who loved ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... circumstance of his court, and attempt to lead a simple and natural life, in which the interests of the people shall be paramount in his attention. But in this attempt he is thwarted at every step. All the forces of selfishness and prejudice and ignorance combine against him; even the people whom he seeks to benefit are so wedded to their idols that their attitude is one of suspicion rather than of sympathy. He loves a young woman of strong and noble character, and wins her love in return, but she ...
— Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson • William Morton Payne
... crueller than war itself. And Cynthia thought so too, as she clung to Jethro's arm between the carriages and the clanging street-cars, and looked upon the riches and poverty around her. There entered her soul that night a sense of that which is the worst cruelty of all—the cruelty of selfishness. Every man going his own pace, seeking to gratify his own aims and desires, unconscious and heedless of the want with which he rubs elbows. Her natural imagination enhanced by her life among the hills, the girl peopled the place in the street lights with all kinds of strange evil-doers of whose ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... freeman, and not a slave. His tenderness had rendered him ductile in a priest's hands, his affection, his devotedness, his sincere pious enthusiasm blinded his kind eyes sometimes, made him abandon justice to himself to do the work of craft, and serve the ends of selfishness; but these are faults so rare to find, so costly to their owner to indulge, we scarce know whether they will not one day be reckoned ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... great cities begin indeed to have areas of vice and misery not to be surpassed in any of the older cities of the world. But everywhere we have found people who have become forgetful of God, neglectful of every higher duty, and abandoned to one or other form of selfishness. Our work in the United States especially has been confronted with difficulties peculiar to the country, its widespread populations and their cosmopolitan character being not the least of these. Nevertheless, we have now in the States and Canada nearly 4,000 Officers ...
— Regeneration • H. Rider Haggard
... deliberate handling of experience, such a quiet adjustment of memories, is not without its uses. Any view of life that will save a man from whining is worth taking. Any reckoning that will prevent a man from indulging in self-pity—that subtlety of selfishness—is worth making. There is, moreover, something very simple and obvious in this way of thinking and judging. To make one kind of experience deal with another kind, to set the days and the hours in battle array—or shall we say to arrange a tourney where some gaily-caparisoned ...
— The Threshold Grace • Percy C. Ainsworth
... with her sister's selfishness, Daisy cried out that the facts must not be known—that they must be covered up and kept from the world, and that she was going to bring this about. She reminded Millicent of the evident suffering their ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... pleasant house, and I can now almost forgive the landlord for what I shall always consider an act of gross selfishness ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... is the one most intolerably dark thought in the days of darkness. There is a new policy open to the world which it has never yet tried, to work toward the Dominance of Love. Every conceivable form of selfishness has in turn dominated the affairs of nations and men; never yet has love been seriously tried. But there will be no chance of International Friendship, Brotherhood, Love, if the Church, the fellowship of Christians, who are after all set in the world by their own ...
— The War and Unity - Being Lectures Delivered At The Local Lectures Summer - Meeting Of The University Of Cambridge, 1918 • Various
... for a considerable time. Then, becoming conscious of the flatness, staleness and unprofitableness of it all, as far as my elderly selfishness was concerned, I threw my extinct cigar end into the fire, and thanking God that I had come to an age when all this storm and fuss over a creature of the opposite sex was a thing of the past, and yet with an unregenerate pang of ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... gradually imbibed the grave and rather prim ideas which were in vogue when Miss Patty was the reigning belle of her county. Although petted and indulged, she had not been spoiled, and remained singularly free from the selfishness usually developed in the character of an only child, nurtured in the midst of mature relatives. When eighteen years old, Leo, accompanied by her governess, Mrs. Eldridge, had been sent to New York and Boston for educational advantages, which it was supposed that her ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... overwhelmed, and that her parents had nothing to do with her sorrow. She did not listen to me, and I accused her of caprice. I began to laugh at her gently. She dried her tears, and began to reproach me, in hard and wounding terms, for my selfishness and cruelty. ...
— The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... off her spectacles and gasped. Could she have heard aright? He was actually asking for Fanny. She was amazed not so much at his monumental selfishness and impudence as that Fanny herself could have given him the slightest encouragement. She fully realized that times had changed since the days when they lifted their heads proudly in the world, but to sink as low as this ...
— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow
... teaching her abiding belief in his superior capacity to interpret scriptural truths for her has been the means of sacrificing her power of mind, her tender affections, her delicate sensibilities, on the altar of his base selfishness throughout the ages. Orthodoxy recognizes no "inspiration" for woman to-day. She is not "called" save to serve man. Under its teaching her thought has been padlocked in the name of Divinity, and her lips sealed in sacrilegious ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... for a man to have the right spirit and the right motives, unless he does that which is right in itself. Conscience may be warped by malevolence, selfishness, prejudice, or education, until the man is led to do that which is detestable in the sight of God. The time may come when this man will regret his foolishness, and see that he was wrong, like Saul ...
— The Christian Foundation, March, 1880
... was only the beginning; the breach once made, Humanity entered into the gloomy, waste places of his soul; remorse crowded hard upon his wonted arrogance; generosity and the impulse to make amends took the place of selfishness; kindness thrust out the native brutality; the old-time harshness and imperiousness gave way to ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... larger fields. She had ministered to the starved mind as to the stunted body; the idle and dissolute quaked before her. And yet here in her own household, across her hall, lived the epitome of uselessness, indolence, selfishness, and—she was forced to admit it—charm. What corresponded to a sense of humor in her caught at the ...
— A Philanthropist • Josephine Daskam
... of a natural man. "Even the gentlemen of our age," he says,—adding that the story of Pendennis is an attempt to describe one of them, just as he is,—"even those we cannot show as they are with the notorious selfishness of their time and their education. Since the author of Tom Jones was buried, no writer of fiction among us has been permitted to depict to his utmost power a MAN. We must shape him, and give him a certain conventional ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... sacrifices made on the field of battle. Death is popularly considered the maximum of punishment in war, but it is not; reduction to poverty brings prayers for peace more surely and more quickly than does the destruction of human life, as the selfishness of man has demonstrated in more than one ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... (passions) have a right and a wrong development. The right development produces harmony, good, justice, unity. The wrong development produces selfishness, injustice, duplicity." ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... faint And weary for the music of thy feet. The earth is growing old. Two thousand years Have fled since thou and Jesus walked with men. Two thousand years of bitterness of creeds; Two thousand years of selfishness and crime. ...
— Across the Sea and Other Poems. • Thomas S. Chard
... I cried to myself. 'Tell this woman to beware, or leave her to fight her battles alone?' No answer came from my inmost soul. I was appalled by her weakness and my own selfishness, and bowed my head ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... remorse, remembered even the tiniest wrong he had ever done her, for he had been, on the whole, an exemplary husband; his indifference, his absent-mindedness of the previous day, filled him with shame and regret, and in a moment of blankness he realised all the pettishness and selfishness of his science which, he had imagined, was benefiting mankind. But these emotions were short-lived; if you open a door with a spring behind it, it will close again immediately. On the following morning, after he had drawn up an announcement of her death for the papers, he wrote a letter of thanks ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... friend, but selfishness. I was thinking not so much of you, as of Felix Bellievre. I foresee many happy days in store ...
— For The Admiral • W.J. Marx
... believe it." The word "generosity" kept echoing in her mind. Generosity—generosity. How much talk there was about it! Everyone was forever praising himself for his generosity, was reciting acts of the most obvious selfishness in proof. Was there any such thing in the ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... amusingly and simply selfish is ever part of the charm of Montaigne. He adds to his reader's pleasure in life by the keenness with which he relished his own existence, and savoured every little incident as a man relishes the bouquet of wine. Without selfishness, how can this be managed? and without perfect simplicity and the good faith on which he prided himself, how could Montaigne, how could Pepys, have enriched the world as they have done? His essays are among the few works that really and literally make life more opulent with accumulated experience, ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... others. When passions exhibited on the stage quickened the beating of all hearts, or poetry, pulsating in lofty words, brightened faces with enthusiasm, Maryan and the baron laughed inattentively and with contempt; when stupidity, selfishness, or wit called out laughter, or ridicule, they were immovable in cold importance, puffed up and insolent; when the curtain came down at the end, and a deafening, prolonged thunder of applause was heard, their hands rested ostentatiously ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... afterwards to return such a quantity of our goods in exchange to the natives, as we should think adequate to the spoil we had taken. This proposal, which nothing but the most tyrannical principles, and the meanest selfishness could have dictated, was received with the contempt and ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... obey. It seems to me that teacher after teacher has uttered the truth—Hermes, Zoroaster, Buddha, Confucius, Orpheus, Jesus—and that the trouble is not lack of teachers but lack of disciples. In the teachings of Jesus Christ, the world has a model wherewith to mould the old order of hate and selfishness into a new rule of love and brotherhood. The model has never been used; no serious and far-reaching attempt has as yet been made to give Christianity a politico-social trial. Why should a new world-teacher ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... the possibility of near alliance to over-balance of mind—but counter-balancing, antiseptic, salt. There is abundant if not exactly omnipresent common-sense; excellent manners; an almost total absence in that part of the letters which we are now considering of selfishness, and a total absence of ill-nature.[23] It is no business of ours here to embark on the problem, "What was the dram of eale" that ruined all this and more "noble substance" in Cowper? though there is not much doubt about the agency and little about the principal agents that ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... and fervently. God might touch her boy's heart and say, "I want you out here in India to help win my prodigal world back." Oh! she did not mean that! Her boy in far, far off India! Oh, no! Not that!! Yes, what she wanted—that was the whole thought—selfishness; the stream turning in to a dead sea within her own narrow circle; no thought of sympathy with God in His eager outreach for His poor sin-befooled world. The prayer itself in its object is perfectly proper, and rightly offered and answered times without number; but the motive ...
— Quiet Talks on Prayer • S. D. (Samuel Dickey) Gordon
... him the incarnate strength and youth and beauty of her from whom a line of kings was to descend, and in whom were all the greatest and least qualities, virtues and failings of her unborn children—the Lion Heart of Richard, the heartless selfishness of John, the second Edward's grasping hold, Henry the Third's broad justice and wisdom; the doubt of one, the decision of another, the passions of them all in one, coursing in the blood of a young ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... characteristic of which inspires a sense of independence and freedom. A sensation—an intoxication, to be felt, not to be described. Why should men fight in a land such as this? Surely there is room for all! The very animals of the field, ignorant of the selfishness bred of a limited pasturage and restricted space, are docile and free of vice. But with man ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... Nation for Freedom, for Self-Rule, is not a cry of mere selfishness demanding more Rights that it may enjoy more happiness. Even in that there is nothing wrong, for happiness means fulness of life, and to enjoy such fulness is a righteous claim. But the demand for Self-Rule is ...
— The Case For India • Annie Besant
... said many tender and fatherly things to the bereaved family and to the church, one of which was that we who knew of our brother's sufferings, could have had but the one motive of selfishness for detaining him an hour longer than he ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... time of torment and rebellion. There was a sense in which her life, in spite of its frustration, was complete. The love through which her womanhood struggled for victory in defeat had fulfilled itself by gradual growth into something like maternal passion. There was no selfishness in her attitude to him and his devotion. By accepting it she took his best and offered it to God for him. With fragile, dedicated hands she nursed and sheltered the undying votive flame. She seemed a saint who had foregone heaven and remained on earth to ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... of Las Casas encountered all the opposition naturally to be expected from indifference, selfishness, and bigotry. They were also resisted by some persons of just and benevolent views in his audience, who, while they admitted the general correctness of his reasoning, and felt deep sympathy for the wrongs of the natives, yet doubted whether his ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... qualities which seem to promote our health and happiness, and to invent an anthropomorphic figure of God, whom we array upon the side which we wish to prevail. The truth is far darker, far sterner, far more mysterious. The darkness is his not less than the light; selfishness and sin are the work of his hand, as much as unselfishness and holiness. To call this attitude of mind pessimism, and to say that it can only end in acquiescence or despair, is a sin against truth. A creed that does not take this ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... It had been brought to Kaiachououk's notice, and he had lost no time in seeking out the man and taxing him with his remissness. A mixture of traits like the colours in a variegated skein of worsted formed the spectrum of Kalleligak's character; and selfishness, which fortunately is rarer among the Eskimos than among those in keener competition with civilization, was too often the prevailing colour. After the interview, at which he had promised to mend his ways, he apparently always lived in fear that sooner or later Kaiachououk ...
— Labrador Days - Tales of the Sea Toilers • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... less and less, and Philip strengthened himself to tell her the terrible news of Pierre. He knew that in the selfishness of his own joy he had already wasted precious minutes, and very gently he took Jeanne's wet face between his two hands and turned it a little toward ...
— Flower of the North • James Oliver Curwood
... so rudely shocked that day at the selfishness apparent in Barbara's character, that she did not try to hide her opinion. The wonder was, that she ever could have been so completely taken in during the months in Denver, as to declare Barbara to be a splendid girl when one knew her. She now decided that it took ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... down." When the man returned, bringing only one chair on the plea that he could not find another, Cecilia, whose nerve was returning, offered it to Dubois. He accepted it calmly and sat down upon it, waiting to hear what she had to say. At this signal instance of arch selfishness Cecilia felt her heart tighten and her temples grow cold as if fillets of fire had been exchanged for ribbons ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... in the habit of doing, and the result was startling. His cheeks were fallen in to such an extent that the blinking red eyes above looked larger; it was as though the old rascal's crimes of callous selfishness and greed had suddenly ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... on the other hand, apart from all other considerations, there were certain to be sections, local, racial, and political, upon which the national cause could take no very firm hold. That this was so proves no unusual prevalence of selfishness or of stupidity; and the apathy of such sections of the people, like that of smaller sections in our own case, sets in a brighter light the devotion which made so many eager to give their all. Moreover, the general patriotism of the Northern people ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... in the sharp competition of the world where duty calls him, to resist the sly temptations to overreach, to keep keenly alert not to be overreached; and through all to preserve an uncensorious spirit, unhurt by the selfishness of the crowd—tell me, some of you men—will that not take power? Aye, more power than some of us know ...
— Quiet Talks on Power • S.D. Gordon
... window and looked out on the desolate landscape. For the first time he realized the gravity of his offense. His crime against this girl, who had been guilty of nothing but loving him too deeply stood out, stripped of its trappings of sentiment, in all its foul selfishness. He would right the wrong, confess to her; but no, he dare not, she was not the kind of woman ...
— 'Way Down East - A Romance of New England Life • Joseph R. Grismer
... probably take advantage of the Spanish captain's knowledge of the country, and go a little way up with him; but as matters are, with your brig still unfinished, and so much to do, I consider it would be an act of disgraceful selfishness to go away and leave ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn
... conduct of the latter did not strike the former with the same force as it will probably the reader. In truth, while all men act under one common law that is termed nature, the varieties in their dispositions, modes of judging, feelings, and selfishness are infinite. ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... the boys had time to meet before Miss Delacour's arrival. Although that lady was well off, she would not take a motor-car from Edinburgh to the Upper Glen. She believed that her brother-in-law had a motor-car, and thought it the height of selfishness on his part that he did not send it to town to meet her. But she had her pride, as she expressed it, and in consequence did not arrive at The Garden till about four o'clock in the day, having given the ...
— Hollyhock - A Spirit of Mischief • L. T. Meade
... lovelier hue, and is perfectly fertile, whereas the double one is pale and cannot perpetuate itself. And the moral lesson of this parable of nature is not difficult to read. Leanness of soul often accompanies the fulfilment of our earthly desires; and outward abundance often produces selfishness and covetousness. The peculiar evil of prosperity is discontent, dissatisfaction with present gain and a longing for more, and a spirit of repining at the little ills and disappointments of life. Humble, fragrant, useful contentment belongs ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... such an atrocity?" Heyst exclaimed. "He seems a stupid animal. He is stupid. How did he manage to hatch that pretty tale? Have I a particularly vile countenance? Is black selfishness written all over my face? Or is that sort of thing so universally human that it ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... with the selfishness of man, Mrs Iver's sudden appearance wore rather an amusing aspect. It certainly could not spoil his ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... growing, and we feel that we see clearly a better country that we might inhabit. But there are mountains of established law and custom to overcome; a wilderness of prejudice to be subdued; a powerful foe of selfishness and self-interest to overthrow; wild beasts of pride, envy, malice, and hate to destroy. But for the sake of our children and our children's children, we have entered upon the work, hoping and praying that we may be guided by wisdom, sustained ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... down easily." I do not wonder at all that I thus seemed so unkind to a lady, who at that time had never seen me. We were both in trial in our different ways. I am far from denying that I was acting selfishly both towards them and towards others; but it was a religious selfishness. Certainly to myself my own duty seemed clear. They that are whole can heal others; but in my case it was, "Physician, heal thyself." My own soul was my first concern, and it seemed an absurdity to my reason to be converted in partnership. I wished to go to my Lord by ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... be good! be pure! The right only shall endure, All things else are but false pretences. I entreat thee, I implore, Listen no more To the suggestions of an evil spirit, That even now is there, Making the foul seem fair, And selfishness itself ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... creature stifles and dies. As one tells us, "such a death is frightful, it is the asphyxia of the soul!" Then, tenderness is an essential element in the character of a friend. Says Emerson: "Notwithstanding all the selfishness that chills like east winds the world, the whole human family is bathed with an element of love, like a fine ether." With Emerson, we believe that every person carries about with him a certain circle of sympathy within which he, ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... Implicitly we were as good as pledged to stand by each other to the last gasp. Was it not mean and dastardly to run away from the battle because it was dangerous to fight it out? Had friendship no claims superior to personal safety? Was not my decision prompted by sheer selfishness? Could anything be said ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... the rights of the people; and they certainly will do so, if they can. The same instinct of self-preservation, the same love of accumulation, which tempts individuals to over-reach their neighbors, inclines government to preserve, increase, and consolidate its powers. Therefore, as individual selfishness requires to be held in check by government, so government must be restrained ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... know that my course has not conflicted with your judgment of propriety and policy I can only say that I have acted upon my best convictions, without selfishness or malice, and that by the help of God I ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... she do not yield, if she still hugs the toys in her natural selfishness, shall we be educating her if by physical pain we force her to drop them? A single illustration and question of this kind will show how large interests are involved in what is seemingly so simple a matter. The question of how we shall deal ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... which in the aggregate May average on the whole with parturition.— But as to women—who can penetrate The real sufferings of their she condition? Man's very sympathy with their estate Has much of selfishness, and more suspicion. Their love, their virtue, beauty, education, But form good ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... predecessor in binding decisions. Then, too, the development of railroading and the beginning of immigration from Europe on a large scale reawakened the interest of a great part of the nation in keeping intercourse between the States untrammeled by local selfishness; and in 1851 the Court, heeding the spirit of compromise of the day, decisively accepted for the most important category of cases Marshall's principle of the exclusive control of interstate and foreign ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... sacrifice shall be plainly preponderant. And, even then, there is a wide margin between the acts which we praise for their heroism, or generosity, or self-denial, and those which we condemn for their baseness, or meanness, or selfishness. It must never be forgotten, in the treatment of questions of morality, that there is a large number of acts which we neither praise nor blame, and this is emphatically the case where the competition is between a man's own interests and those of his neighbours. ...
— Progressive Morality - An Essay in Ethics • Thomas Fowler
... anything at all! To know a thing, what we can call knowing, a man must first love the thing, sympathise with it: that is, be virtuously related to it. If he have not the justice to put down his own selfishness at every turn, the courage to stand by the dangerous-true at every turn, how shall he know? His virtues, all of them, will lie recorded in his knowledge. Nature, with her truth, remains to the bad, to the selfish and the pusillanimous forever ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... people at large, with indomitable activity, mends, repairs the disasters resulting from the inability and the selfishness of its official chiefs. One day, however, the people will turn its ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... self: maybe there was in that the tempering hand of a beneficent Providence; for when I have at divers times since considered how much the anguish of my inner sufferings exceeded the bodily molestation, I could not but confess, though it was with a humbled sense of my own selfishness, that it was well for me, in such a time, to be so respited from the upbraidings ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... have suffered so much time to pass without paying any acknowledgement. I now, at last, return my thanks; and why I did it not sooner I ought to tell you. I went into Wiltshire as soon as I well could, and was there much employed in palliating my own malady. Disease produces much selfishness. A man in pain is looking after ease; and lets most other things go as chance shall dispose of them. In the mean time I have lost a companion[746], to whom I have had recourse for domestick amusement for thirty years, and whose variety of knowledge never was exhausted; and now ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
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