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Self-culture   Listen
noun
Self-culture  n.  Culture, training, or education of one's self by one's own efforts.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Self-culture" Quotes from Famous Books



... that neither man nor woman could come between them. They were in no sense refined, nor to be admitted to the outer- door mats of decent folk, because they happened to be private soldiers in Her Majesty's Army; and private soldiers of our service have small time for self-culture. Their duty is to keep themselves and their accoutrements specklessly clean, to refrain from getting drunk more often than is necessary, to obey their superiors, and to pray for a war. All these things my friends accomplished; and of their ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling

... done, and after that she has no time left. The "mother of a young and increasing family," with her "pale, thin face and feeble step," and her "multiplied and wearying cares," is "completely worn down with so many children." She has neither time nor spirit for self-culture, beyond what she may obtain in the nursery. What satisfaction is there in proving that she is far below where she ought to be, if inexorable circumstance prevent her from climbing higher? What use is there in telling her that she will alienate her husband and injure ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various

... so long will there be a prevailing tendency to discontinue it when free from the coercion of parents and masters. And when the acquisition of knowledge has been rendered habitually gratifying, then there will be as prevailing a tendency to continue, without superintendence, that self-culture previously ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various

... time for enjoyment than any other farmer in the world. His hard work ceases with autumn. He has the long winters in which to become acquainted with his family—with his neighbors—in which to read and keep abreast with the advanced thought of his day. He has the time and means for self-culture. He has more time than the mechanic, the merchant or the professional man. If the farmer is not well informed it is his own fault. Books are cheap, and every farmer can have enough to give him the outline of every science, and an ...
— The Ghosts - And Other Lectures • Robert G. Ingersoll

... devise some pursuit to fill your idle hours? Far be it from me to interfere with your liberty; but I confess that it grieves me to see youth, and no doubt some measure of ability, so wasted. Why do you not strive to continue your education? Self-culture is the highest form of improvement. My ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon

... existed in the minds of necessitarians. The latter may have had a stronger sense of the importance of what human beings can do to shape the characters of one another; but the free-will doctrine has, I believe, fostered in its supporters a much stronger spirit of self-culture. ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill

... many forms of it, arising out [229] of the intense, laborious, one-sided development of some special talent. They are the brightest enthusiasms the world has to show: and it is not their part to weigh the claims which this or that alien form of genius makes upon them. But the proper instinct of self-culture cares not so much to reap all that those various forms of genius can give, as to find in them its own strength. The demand of the intellect is to feel itself alive. It must see into the laws, the operation, the intellectual ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater

... that most of the more highly intelligent men and women whose histories I have already briefly recorded have at last slowly and instinctively reached a condition of relative health and peace, both physical and moral. The method of self-restraint and self-culture, without self-repression, seems to be the most rational method of dealing with sexual inversion when that condition is really organic and deeply rooted. It is better that a man should be enabled to make the best of his own strong natural instincts, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... seem so hard as other callings? In 1880 there were 8,562 women engaged in teaching in Massachusetts. Of these, a fourth would probably have done a better work in some other way. Teaching is a noble profession: it has great chances for self-culture and for helpfulness to others. In no profession can one do more good, if one tries with all one's heart. It is one of the highest callings even for this reason: a teacher utterly unable to see any results of her labor, in black and white, at the end of her pupil's course, as the book-maker may ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder

... work was initiated, were, as compared with those of England, almost idyllic. The Lowell workers came from New England farms, many of them for the sake of being near libraries and schools, and thus securing larger opportunities for self-culture. ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell

... many passages in the 'Cortegiano' it is clear that Castiglione is painting the character of an independent gentleman, to whom self-culture in all humane excellence is of far more importance than the acquisition of the art of pleasing. Circumstances made the life of courts the best obtainable; but there is no trace of ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds

... man should determine to devote himself to the service of humanity—including intellectual and moral self-culture under that name; that this should be, in the proper sense of the word, his religion—is not only an intelligible, but, I think, a laudable resolution. And I am greatly disposed to believe that it is the only religion which will prove itself to be ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley

... rally for the defence of slavery in the name of freedom. The book is dedicated, in a very graceful and cordial sonnet, to Mr. E.P. Whipple; and it is seldom that South Carolina sends so pleasant a message to Massachusetts. Mr. Hayne need only persevere in self-culture to be able to produce poems that shall win for him a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various

... money merely," but money, health, delight, and moral profit, all in one. "We must heap up a great pile of doing for a small diameter of being," he says in another place; and then exclaims, "How admirably the artist is made to accomplish his self-culture by devotion to his art!" We may escape uncongenial toil, only to devote ourselves to that which is congenial. It is only to transact some higher business that even Apollo dare play the truant from Admetus. We must all work for the sake ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Tzu is a very dangerous writer, and the publication of his book in English, two thousand years after his death, is obviously premature, and may cause a great deal of pain to many thoroughly respectable and industrious persons. It may be true that the ideal of self-culture and self-development, which is the aim of his scheme of life, and the basis of his scheme of philosophy, is an ideal somewhat needed by an age like ours, in which most people are so anxious to educate their neighbours that ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde

... chief influence is a recollection of the large canvases of Jan and Hubert Van Eyck and Hubert Van der Goes which Duerer had admired in the Netherlands; these had strengthened and directed the bias of his self-culture towards simple masses on a large scale.[74] He may very well have sought to combine what he learnt from them with hints he found in the engravings after Raphael which he obtained in Antwerp. His increasing sickness may probably account for the fact that the white ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore

... general subject is discussed in these lectures as in the "Lecture on Self-Culture," published last winter, there will, of course, be found in them that coincidence of thoughts which always takes place in the writings of a man who has the inculcation of certain great principles ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various

... counting- houses and manufactories, and in the busy haunts of men. This is that finishing instruction as members of society, which Schiller designated "the education of the human race," consisting in action, conduct, self-culture, self-control,—all that tends to discipline a man truly, and fit him for the proper performance of the duties and business of life,—a kind of education not to be learnt from books, or acquired by any amount ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles

... true. Allie Briskow was indeed in training, both physical and mental, and the application, the energy she displayed had surprised not only her parents, who could but dimly understand the necessity of self-culture, but also Mrs. Ring, the instructress. Mrs. Ring, a handsome, middle-aged woman whose specialty was the finishing of wealthy young "ladies," had been induced to accept this position partly by reason of the ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach

... office, but he was a heedless student, and never acquired either a taste for the profession or much knowledge of law. While he sat in the law office, he read literature, and made considerable progress in his self-culture; but he liked rambling and society quite as well as books. In 1798 we find him passing a summer holiday in Westchester County, and exploring with his gun the Sleepy Hollow region which he was afterwards to make an enchanted realm; and in 1800 he made his first voyage up the ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner

... which Brant received was meagre, but he could hardly have put what knowledge he had to better advantage. After he had been relieved from the arduous life of the camp, he began to satisfy again his desires for self-culture. His correspondence towards the close of his life shows a marked improvement in style over that of his earlier years. There is no lack of convincing evidence that Brant had a penetrating and well-balanced intellect; but his chief glory is the constant efforts he put forth for ...
— The War Chief of the Six Nations - A Chronicle of Joseph Brant - Volume 16 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • Louis Aubrey Wood

... that poverty is no evil, I cannot imagine!" she exclaims in the "Wrongs of Woman." She cared nothing for the luxuries and the ease and idleness which wealth gives, but she prized above everything the time and opportunity for self-culture of which the poor, in their struggle for existence, are deprived. The Wollstonecraft fortunes were at low ebb. Her share in them, should she remain at home, would be drudgery and slavery, which would grow greater with every year. Her one hope for the future depended ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell

... work of self-culture one friend can help another by advice and example; but he cannot educate, for education presupposes inequality.—The necessities of human nature produce societies in which equals seek to influence each other in a pedagogical way, since they establish by certain steps of culture different ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz

... virtue and self-culture. With deep meaning he says, "Become that which thou art;" that is, be that which ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers

... The self-culture that there is in the mere habit of faithfulness is in itself a rich reward for all our striving. It is a great thing to train ourselves to do always our best, to do as nearly perfect work as possible. ...
— Making the Most of Life • J. R. Miller

... for want of self-culture that the superstition of Travelling, whose idols are Italy, England, Egypt, retains its fascination for all educated Americans. They who made England, Italy, or Greece venerable in the imagination did so by sticking fast where they ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... his own track, elevating the human being, in the most imperfect states of society, by continual efforts at self-culture, takes as good care of women as of men. His mother, the bold, gay Frau Aja, with such playful freedom of nature; the wise and gentle maiden, known in his youth, over whose sickly solitude "the Holy Ghost ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... without an attempt at self-control, to their supposed natural volatility? If man be constitutionally grave, and life be with him all a serious affair, then should woman supply this want by careful self-culture. I would not frown on the innocent gratifications of the tongue; but I would entreat this sex, instead of seeking their pleasure in discussing the concerns of their neighbors, to pause, consider, and resolve that they ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey

... analysis. His peculiar diathesis enabled him to conserve their freshness on to full maturity, when he gave them literary form. Most lack power to fully utilize their own experience even for practical self-knowledge and guidance, but with Goethe nothing was wasted from which self-culture could be extracted. ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall

... theories about self-culture, etc., would ever have been modified so much, whether I should ever have seen what a necessary failure they lead to, had it not been for this war. Now I feel every day, more and more, that a man has no right to himself at all; that, indeed, he can do ...
— Hero Tales From American History • Henry Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt

... poles, but the distance between us was always diminishing: if I made steps towards some of his opinions, he, during his short life, was constantly approximating more and more to several of mine: and if he had lived, and had health and vigour to prosecute his ever assiduous self-culture, there is no knowing how much further this spontaneous assimilation ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill

... heads: "Porro unum est necessarium"; and here he pursues his controversy with modern Puritanism, which imagines that it has, in its special conception of God and religion, the unum necessarium, which can dispense with Sweetness and Light, self-culture and self-discipline. "The Puritan's great danger is that he imagines himself in possession of a rule telling him the unum necessarium, or one thing needful, and that he then remains satisfied with a very crude conception of what this rule really is and what it tells him, ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell

... like forming character, a matter of self-discipline and self-culture. A good voice is a good habit; distinct articulation is a good habit; graceful and effective gestures are a good habit. Like all good habits, these are formed by a constant exercise of the will. The teacher's part is to get the students ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various

... heart. All that saves his egoism from being hateful is, that, with its immense reaches, it cheats the sense into a feeling of something like sublimity. A patch of sand is unpleasing; a desert has all the awe of ocean. Lessing also felt the duty of self-culture; but it was not so much for the sake of feeding fat this or that faculty as of strengthening character,—the only soil in which real mental power can root itself and find sustenance. His advice to his brother Karl, who was beginning to write for the ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell

... directions for self-culture. A sensible and instructive work, that ought to be in the hands of every one who wishes to be either an agreeable talker ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie

... not very many had opinions worth expressing. The immediate need of women's souls at the beginning of the club movement was for education; the higher education they missed by not going to college, and they formed their clubs with the sole object of self-culture. ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr

... that the period of Goethe's sojourn in Strassburg was the most memorable epoch of his life. During the eighteen months he spent there he received an intellectual stimulus from which we may date his dedication to the unique career before him, in which self-culture, the passion for knowledge, and the impulse to produce were all commensurate ends. Moreover, as has already been said, it was in Strassburg that his genius found its first adequate expression. And, what is worth noting in the case of one who was to range over so many fields, it ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown

... examination of our own nature and its workings, perhaps, that we are most likely to solve the enigma of our being. The word spiritual surely has a meaning; it suggests self-culture not only for the present ...
— No Refuge but in Truth • Goldwin Smith

... their power of attainment, or tortured by aspirations totally disproportionate to their capacity for execution. You may, indeed, confidently hope to become eminent in usefulness and power, but only as you build upon a broad foundation of self-culture; while, as a rule, specialists in ambition as in science are apt to become narrow and one-sided. Darwin was very fond of poetry and music when young, but after devoting his life to science, he was surprised to find Shakespeare tedious. ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden

... naturally all desirous to widen our outlook, and to broaden our views of life; and, believing that the best method of self-culture and of self-development lies in a systematic course of reading and an interchange of opinions regarding the books read, we have decided to ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef

... Etiquette for All Occasions and Forming a Complete Guide to Self-Culture in Conversation, Dress, Deportment, Correspondence, the Care of Children ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke

... draw attention to what I believe to be a fact, namely, that the foundations of all existing education systems are absolutely false in principle; and that teaching itself, as opposed to natural development and self-culture, is the greatest obstacle to human progress that social evolution has ever ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst

... beatific vision, we still find ourselves in a different religious world from ours—religion exoteric for the vulgar, and religion esoteric for the enlightened; religion not for living by, but for a period of retirement; a religion of spiritual self-culture, not of active sonship and brotherhood. Far be it from me to say that at this point the West may not learn as well as teach, for how much thought does the culture of the spirit receive among us? How little! However that may be, this conception of the religious ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison

... tender as His; and if society, country, kindred, friendship, and home were as dear to us as they were to Him, we should be at once relieved of more than half the difficulties and the diseased and painful affections of our lives. Simple obedience to rectitude, instead of self-interest; simple self-culture and self-improvement, instead of constant cultivation of the good opinion of others; single-hearted aims and purposes, instead of improper objects, sought and approached by devious and crooked ways, would free our meditations of many disturbing and ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... with them. The half dozen who made speeches showed a grasp of the political questions of the hour and an ability to put their views before an audience which was an exhibition of a high order of intelligence and self-culture. ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew

... thoroughly educated in relation to her needs as her brothers, and that in so training her we shall not forget that my ideal young person is to marry or not, and, at all events, is to have a good deal of her life in her home with others, and should have some resources for minor or self-culture and occupation besides the larger ones which come of more ...
— Doctor and Patient • S. Weir Mitchell

... a view to the greater satisfaction of all the clans and classes," he again added. "Self-culture for the sake of all—a result that, that would almost put Yau and Shun ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous

... and political dilemma by the straps of his boots. Colored men turned their attention to the education of themselves and their children. Schools were begun, churches organized, and work of general improvement and self-culture entered into with alacrity and enthusiasm. Boston had among its teachers the scholarly Thomas Paul; among its clergymen Leonard A. Grimes and John T. Raymond; among its lawyers Robert Morris and E. G. Walker; among its business men J. B. Smith ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams

... like the muscles of the body. They shrink to nothing if not exercised; they can be exercised symmetrically; or some can be exercised at the expense of the rest. What we want is a school culture, and a self-culture, which shall bring out all our best powers, not one only of them or some few of them. At present our system is all for knowledge. We seek for understanding of facts, but we do not seek for a systematic view of ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker

... however, that Pauline Garcia was self-educated as a vocalist. Her mother's removal to Brussels, her brother's absence in Italy, and the wandering life of Mme. Malibran practically threw her on her own resources. She was admirably fitted for self-culture. Ardent, resolute, industrious, thoroughly grounded in the soundest of art methods, and marvelously gifted in musical intelligence, she applied herself to her vocal studies with abounding enthusiasm, without instruction other than the judicious counsels of her ...
— Great Singers, Second Series - Malibran To Titiens • George T. Ferris

... outside of the soul, in the results of good and evil action, therefore in the nature of things. The method of salvation, therefore, according to Zoroaster, is that of an eternal battle for good against evil; but according to the Buddha, it is that of self-culture and virtuous activity. ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke

... own man, a jewel in his way, is taciturn to a fault. If Fred would be honest with himself, he would acknowledge that the third-hand chatter of anybody's kitchen would often be a delightful relief to his solitude. But then how could he follow up his system of self-culture? That and society are quite incompatible things. However, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various

... and his temper, as well as the society to which he has been accustomed. There is a conventional manner, which is of comparatively little importance; but the natural manner, the outcome of natural gifts, improved by careful self-culture, ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles

... time can be alike wasted, and not the necessary and sacred duties of home, the personal attention and effort which the majority of American women have to give to their household affairs, produce that lack of time that is offered as an excuse for the neglect of the duty of self-culture. This it is which fritters away thought and the taste for higher things, leaving the mind blank and nerveless ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... Buddhism' might be abandoned; surely metaphysicians, too, have religious needs and may have warm hearts. At the same time I will not deny that I prefer the northern variety of Buddhism, because I seem to myself to detect in the southern Buddhism a touch of a highly-refined egoism. Self-culture may or may not be combined with self-sacrifice. In the case of the Buddha it was no doubt so combined, as the following passage, indited ...
— The Reconciliation of Races and Religions • Thomas Kelly Cheyne

... of self-culture, to kill you, I should be taking a long step towards rising in your estimation?" ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne

... alone with the child oftener than she used to be, but in truth this was a relief rather than otherwise. She was accustomed to solitude, and the work of self-culture she had begun filled her spare ...
— That Lass O' Lowrie's - 1877 • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... to tell. She's common, and stupid. One of those who go in for self-culture; and then when the test comes they break down. [With sinister enjoyment] She'll be the ...
— What Every Woman Knows • James M. Barrie

... by his very best efforts thrust aside, whenever he was conscious that his self-contemplation was self- complacency. Still it was in his nature to behold it, and discuss it, and thus to conquer and outgrow the study in time, while leaving many observations upon self-culture and self-training, that will no doubt become deeply valued as the result of the practical experience of one who so truly mastered ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge

... Learning was a protest against this mediaeval attitude, and the protest was vigorous and successful. The Revival of Learning was a clear break with mediaeval traditions and with mediaeval authority. It restored to the world the ideals of earlier education—self-culture, and preparation for usefulness and success in the world here. In Italy, France, Germany, and England the movement, too, met with the most thorough approval from modern men—merchants, court officials, and scholars who were ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY

... figure in the intellectual life of America. His discourses were above all things inspiring. Through them many were induced to strive for a higher self-culture. His influence can be discerned in all the literary movements of the time. He was the central figure of the so-called transcendental school which was so prominent fifty years ago, although he always rather ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... Horticultural Society. For a time, however, they worked together; and often did their mother get up at four o'clock in the depth of winter, light their fire, and return to bed after calling them up to the work of self-culture. Even this did not satisfy their devouring ambition. There was a bed in the workshop, and they obtained permission to sleep there. Then they followed their own plans. The young gardener would sit up till one or two in the morning, and wake his brother, who had gone to bed as soon ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles

... always the home, where woman is the teacher. The manners of society at large are but the reflex of the manners of our collective homes, neither better nor worse. Yet, with all the disadvantages of ungenial homes, men may practice self-culture of manner as of intellect, and learn by good examples to cultivate a graceful and agreeable behavior towards others. Most men are like so many gems in the rough, which need polishing by contact with other and better ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols

... interesting invalid; his complexion would lose all its transparency if it were exposed to the weather; his weak voice would never make itself heard in the hubbub of the bazaar. Sunbeams cannot be extracted from cucumbers, nor can the great manner in literature emanate from a chill self-culture. But Milton inherited the fulness and vigour of the Elizabethans, and so could afford to write an epic poem in a selection of the language really used by men. The grandeur of Paradise Lost or Samson Agonistes could never, ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh

... but go earnestly to work. Let nothing discourage you. If you have no books, borrow them; if you have no teachers, teach yourself; if your early education has been neglected, by the greater diligence repair the defect. Let not a craven heart or a love of ease rob you of the inestimable benefit of self-culture. ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins

... of our fathers was their emphasis of the principle of self-care and self-culture. Finding that he who first made the most of himself was best fitted to make something of others, the teachers of yesterday unceasingly plied men with motives of personal responsibility. Influenced by the former generation, our age has organized the principle of individualism into ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis

... the poor have not time for self-culture? This is one of the greatest mistakes of life. It is not time that we want; it is inclination. Generally, those who have most time profit by it least. An earnest purpose will either find time or make time. Nor is it necessary that much time should be taken. ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen

... laborious, one-sided development of some special talent. They are the brightest enthusiasms the world has to show. It is not their part to weigh the claims which this or that alien form of culture makes upon them. But the pure instinct of self-culture cares not so much to reap all that these forms of culture can give, as to find in them its own strength. The demand of the intellect is to feel itself alive. It must see into the laws, the operation, the intellectual reward of every divided form of culture; but only that it may measure ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater

... They were a presence so securely felt, And so related to her every act,— Their love was still so vigilant, so real, That to do what, and only what, she knew They would approve, was duty paramount; And their approval was the smile of God! Self-culture, work, and needful exercise,— This was her simple summing-up of duties Immediately before her, and to be Fulfilled without more parleying or delay. She found that by the labor of a month In painting flowers ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent

... and health may be supported."—Not another word! Ah, Doctor Franklin, you were very wise in this world's wisdom! Your life was for a young struggling nation a splendid example of probity and thrift and self-culture. And yet we think your countrymen could wish you had used this poor enthusiast's folly as something else than a mere lesson ...
— Benjamin Franklin • Paul Elmer More

... we look on autosuggestion as a remedy we miss its true significance. Primarily it is a means of self-culture, and one far more potent than any we have hitherto possessed. It enables us to develop the mental qualities we lack: efficiency, judgment, creative imagination, all that will help us to bring our life's enterprise to a successful end. Most of us are aware of ...
— The Practice of Autosuggestion • C. Harry Brooks

... The art of self-culture—one learns just that when youth's outward-looking curiosity and passion begin to ebb—is the art of freeing oneself from the influence of books so that one may enjoy what one is destined to enjoy without pedantry or scruple. And yet, by the profound law of the system of things, when ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys

... it forms part of the task of this, our messenger, is to be accomplished by the faithful preaching of such things as the Master has left on record for the learning of His followers, and by calling them to make proof of truth in the exercise of Christian activity, self-denial, sacrifice and self-culture. We believe, notwithstanding all that may be said to the contrary, that the Church and her children long to hear this message and that they will respond to it. Once more we admit that to the preacher, it may not be the easiest kind of ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson

... modified, and carried into practice in Japan. The moral philosophy of the Chutsz school in Japan compared with that of the other two schools was moderate in tone, free from eccentricities, and practical in a rare degree. In the enormous importance it attached to self-culture and what is known in modern terminology as self-realization, the teaching of the Chutsz school of Japanese moralists differed in no material respects from the doctrines of ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi

... also another disadvantage in self-culture. The self-educated man is often only acquainted with the elements of a great many different sciences, but it is seldom that he is thoroughly versed in any single one. There are exceptions to this rule. One is when the student has a decided talent for something, ...
— The Silver Lining - A Guernsey Story • John Roussel

... for those who live in these times to realise the fervour with which the few books then brought within the reach of the people were received by those who were hungry for self-culture. The Queen was an accomplished scholar, and did her best to encourage the spread of literature in the country. But though the tide had set in with an ever-increasing flow, the flood had not as yet reached the women in Mary Forrester's position. Thus, ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall

... the worldly tone of his tales grew out of the calculations of self-culture. It was the infirmity of an admirable scholar, who loved the world out of gratitude; who knew where libraries, galleries, architecture, laboratories, savants, and leisure, were to be had, and who did not quite trust the compensations of poverty and nakedness. Socrates loved Athens; Montaigne, ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... Margaret, whether, she can endure being thwarted in an object on which she has so set her heart, as she has on this? Thee has trained her thyself at home, in her enfeebled childhood, and thee knows how strong her will is, and what she has been able to accomplish in self-culture by the simple force of her determination. She never will be satisfied until she has tried ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner

... stands to-day without a rival. His 'Essais de Psychologie Contemporaine (1883), Nouveaux Essais (1885), and Etudes et Portraits (1888)' are certainly not the work of a week, but rather the outcome of years of self-culture and of protracted determined endeavor upon the sternest lines. In fact, for a long time, Bourget rose at 3 a.m. and elaborated anxiously study after study, and sketch after sketch, well satisfied when he sometimes noticed his articles in the theatrical ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget

... highest expression of spiritual emotion." Thoreau, however, is no cynic, either in character or thought, though in a side glance at himself, he may have held out to be one; a "cynic in independence," possibly because of his rule laid down that "self-culture admits of no compromise." ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives

... action was neither ambition nor curiosity, but what, had it been directed to any recognized end, the world would have called a religious principle. He was never guilty of the shallow wickedness of seeking self-culture as an end; he sought the highest self-culture only as a state of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... Author of a "Precis of English History," a "Continuation of Grecian History," etc., and for many years Editor of Self-Culture Magazine.—The Publishers. ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath

... November, 1858, and was very earnest in fulfilling the duties of his position, taking every opportunity not only of instilling knowledge into the minds of his pupils, but also striving to imbue them with a love of self-culture. He labored hard in his efforts to earn means with which to support himself during the coming summer at the Gouverneur Wesleyan Seminary, and discovered while thus working that teaching was as much of a discipline for himself as ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens

... power of forming mental images can be cultivated so as to improve one's fitness for different kinds of employment. Such self-culture rests upon improvement in the vividness of your sense-perceptions. It suffices for your present purpose to know that to cultivate your power of sense-imagery in any respect you must (1) Keep the ...
— Power of Mental Imagery • Warren Hilton

... interests at stake of vital importance; particularly now that the length of campaigns had become greater and the seasons exempted from military operations shorter. In many minds the spread of culture, and of the ideal of self-culture, had produced a type of individualism indifferent to public concerns, and contemptuous of political and military ambitions. Moreover, the methods of warfare had undergone great improvement; in most branches of the army the trained skill of ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 1 • Demosthenes

... of faithful work and constant effort at self-culture followed. He was now fifteen. His ambition was growing. He must seek a wider field. Another year passed, and then came the longed-for opening. Joyfully the youth set out for his brother's store, in Newburyport, Massachusetts. Here he felt he would have a better chance. But disappointment ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden

... every sort of ill-treatment and contumely, being so starved that he was fain sometimes to devour raw roots to stay his hunger. His constitution must have been of iron to carry him through all that he endured. In the meantime his indomitable mind was engaged in attempts at self-culture; he studied a Euclid which he had brought with him, drawing his diagrams on the sand, and he afterwards managed to teach himself Latin by means of a Horace and a Latin Bible, aided by some slight vestiges of the education which he had received at a grammar school. His conversion ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith

... themselves liable to the dungeon, but who would become filled with angry, revengeful emotions at what they were forced to endure. I would labor to induce these to use what they experienced as a means of self-culture, to leave the acts of others in the hands of God, submit calmly to what they could not avoid, do their own duties faithfully, and in all things keep themselves strictly in the right. Thus I was almost constantly called to speak a word here and a word there to a pacific end, and labored ...
— The Prison Chaplaincy, And Its Experiences • Hosea Quinby

... never raised my finger in the matter. I might have helped to make life a happier, sweeter thing to the nearly one thousand souls in this building; but I went my selfish way, content with my own luxurious home and the ambition for self-culture and the pride of self-accomplishments. Yet there is not a man here to-day who isn't happier than ...
— Robert Hardy's Seven Days - A Dream and Its Consequences • Charles Monroe Sheldon

... make it grow. Nothing admits of culture but that which has a principle of life capable of being expanded. He, therefore, who does what he can to unfold all his powers and capacities, especially his nobler ones, so as to become a well-proportioned, vigorous, excellent, happy being, practices self-culture, and secures a ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.

... carpets, let her eyes wander over the light and dark of rooms where wealth had done the bidding of taste, watched the neat and silent ministering of servants. These things to her meant priceless opportunity, the facilitating of self-culture. Even the little room in which she sat by herself of evenings was daintily furnished; when weary with reading, it eased and delighted her merely to gaze at the soft colours of the wall-paper, the ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing

... effective way—by tracing the continuous effects of ill-done work. Some of them seem to be still hopeful that it will follow as a necessary consequence from week-day services, ecclesiastical decoration, and improved hymn-books; others apparently trust to descanting on self-culture in general, or to raising a general sense of faulty circumstances; and meanwhile lax, make-shift work, from the high conspicuous kind to the average and obscure, is allowed to pass unstamped with the disgrace of immorality, though there ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot

... captains of our own souls. There is an element of absurdity in the thought that the aim and purpose of human life is for each soul to hunt for the sins and imperfections in others. The enjoinment of self-criticism and self-culture seems a simpler and less circumstantial rule of life. Asceticism, abnegation, prayer, remoteness from the passions that rend the worldly, bring peace and content. But they limit experience and give a false ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby

... attention to the education of himself and his children; schools were commenced, churches organized, and a new era of self-culture and general ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various

... to its shade, no college crowned him with its honors; to read, to write, to cipher, these had been his degrees in knowledge. Shakespeare learned little more than reading and writing at school, but by self-culture he made himself the great master among literary men. Burns, too, enjoyed few advantages of education, and his youth was passed in almost ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden

... all the fault we could with this volume, because we sincerely think that the author of it is destined for great things, and that she owes it to the rare gift she has been endowed with to do nothing inconsiderately, and by honest self-culture to raise natural qualities to conscious ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various

... drawing, music, &c., &c., all of which will be open to girls as well as boys, women as well as men. In an island like Guernsey, where from the smallness of the community many of the young people necessarily have to go and seek their fortunes abroad, the advantages for self-culture offered by an Institution like this can scarcely be over-rated. The local facilities afforded for the acquisition of French are particularly marked, while it cannot for a moment be doubted that a young man or woman who can use both French and English with fluency, is much better ...
— Witchcraft and Devil Lore in the Channel Islands • John Linwood Pitts

... that she has no time left. The "mother of a young and increasing family," with her "pale, thin face and feeble step," and her "multiplied and wearying cares," is "completely worn down with so many children." She has neither time nor for self-culture, beyond what she may obtain in the nursery. What satisfaction is there in proving that she is far below where she ought to be, if inexorable circumstance prevent her from climbing higher? What use is there in telling her that she ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton

... advocacy of the noblest reforms, and produced many volumes of sermons that have in an unusual degree the merit of directness, literary grace, suggestiveness, and spiritual warmth and insight. His theological writings have been widely read by Unitarians and those not of that fellowship. His Self-culture has been largely circulated as a manual of practical ethics. His Ten Great Religions and its companion volume opened the way in this country for the recognition of the comparative study of religious developments. Not content with so wide a range of studies, he wrote Thomas ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke

... things considered, could I, under any circumstances, have more opportunities for self-culture and for doing good than I have ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott

... picturing millennial conditions, especially when the pocket is touched. But quite different is it to arouse and sustain interest in a large popular organization whose object is education, whose watchword is self-culture. Of course, it would be but a half-truth to assert that the order places all its emphasis on the sober problems of education. Agitation has had its place; the hope of better things for the farmer, to be achieved through legislation and business co-operation, has been an inspiration to ...
— Chapters in Rural Progress • Kenyon L. Butterfield

... employers find that they can depend upon Jim. Customers soon learn to like and trust him. By diligence, self-culture, good habits, cheerful and kindly conduct, he is laying the foundation of a generous manhood and a ...
— McGuffey's Fourth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey

... the Universe and the laws of their development. We have also taught you how to acquire absolute control over Body and Mind. In these lessons we have striven to point out to you the right "Mental Attitude" towards your daily life, so that while mainly engaged in the task of Self-Culture you might also lend a hand in the great work of strengthening the race. Moreover our convictions, beliefs, and ideals are no mean, are insignificant factors in the determination of our health and environmental conditions. They react on our circumstances as well as on the WHOLE MAN. We have ...
— The Doctrine and Practice of Yoga • A. P. Mukerji

... severity and Christian tenderness; his hatred of wrong and oppression, with love and pity for the wrong-doer; his noble pleas for self-culture, temperance, peace, and purity; and above all, his precept and example of unquestioning obedience to duty and the voice of God in his soul, can never become obsolete. It is very fitting that his memory should be especially cherished with that of Hopkins and Berkeley ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... of Wordsworth, nor the rich and subtle imagination of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats when they were at their best. But he had greater body and motive force than any of them. He is the strongest personality among English poets since Milton, though his strength was wasted by want of restraint and self-culture. In Milton the passion was there, but it was held in check by the will and the artistic conscience, made subordinate to good ends, ripened by long reflection, and finally uttered in forms of perfect and harmonious beauty. Byron's love of Nature was quite ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... From the Greek poets he learned to look at life steadily and as a whole, to direct it toward simple and noble ends, and to preserve in it a balance and perfection of parts. From Goethe he derived the lessons of detachment and self-culture. From Wordsworth he learned to find peace in nature, to pursue an unworldly purpose, and to be content with humble duties. From the Stoics he learned, especially, self-dependence and resignation. In general, he endeavored to follow an ideal of perfection and to distinguish always ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold

... statesmanship: he would probably have been rambling in Italy sketching plans for several dramas, trying prose and finding it too jejune, trying verse and finding it too artificial, beginning to copy "bits" from old pictures, leaving off because they were "no good," and observing that, after all, self-culture was the principal point; while in politics he would have been sympathizing warmly with liberty and progress in general. Our sense of duty must often wait for some work which shall take the place of dilettanteism and make us ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot

... deepened and softened to receive it. It waits for preparedness of nature, for the obedient will, the awakened mind, the receptive heart;—and all these forms of self-discipline are comprehended in any genuine self-culture. ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody

... wrested from life by tackling and mastering its varied experiences, the end, not the beginning, of a great journey. Too often it is that of the modern Uneasy Woman—the attainment of something outside of herself. She visualizes it, as possessions, as ease, a "good time," opportunities for self-culture, the exclusive devotion of the mate to her. Rarely does she understand that happiness in her undertaking depends upon the wisdom and sense with which she conquers a succession of hard places—calling for readjustment of her ideas and sacrifice of ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell

... importance, instead of wasting their breath in meaningless chatter! It stimulated the former to consult the best models of style in composition, and was the real occasion of his adopting a most critical and thorough plan of self-culture. All this the consequence of conversing properly, instead of spending leisure moments in boyish ...
— The Printer Boy. - Or How Benjamin Franklin Made His Mark. An Example for Youth. • William M. Thayer

... interesting conversation took place. Jasmin was asked how it was that he first began to write poetry; for every one likes to know the beginnings of self-culture. He thereupon entered into a brief history of his life; how he had been born poor; how his grandfather had died at the hospital; and how he had been brought up by charity. He described his limited education and his admission to the barber's shop; his reading of Florian; ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles

... by explaining the rationality of self-sacrifice, explained away the whole matter and practically identified it with self-culture? There is plausibility in this view—and it has often been maintained—but not complete truth. For evidently the emotions excited by culture and sacrifice are directly antagonistic. Toward a man pursuing the aim of culture we experience a feeling of approval, ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer

... that the domestic circle is the peculiar province of woman; that "men are what mothers make them." But how can that woman who does not live for self-culture and self-development, who has herself no exalted objects in life, imbue her children with lofty aspirations, or train her sons to a free and glorious manhood? She best can fulfill the duties of wife and mother, who is fitted ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... hymns are chosen with the idea, not of praising the Almighty, who needs no such praises, but of filling our souls with a sense of the unearthly beauty of the moral life, of the life perseveringly devoted to high ideals of self-culture and human service, and thereby lifting our souls to thoughts of that fair world of the Ideal in which such conceptions are eternally realised. Likewise the readings set before us the burning words of first one and then another prophetical soul to deepen in our ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan

... a clever, cultured young woman; the great work of her life had been self-culture. To know and understand, she had spared neither herself nor any one else. To know, and to use her acquired knowledge intellectually as teacher and, perhaps, too, as writer, had been the great aim of her life. Everything that furthered this aim ...
— Ships That Pass In The Night • Beatrice Harraden

... other system of psychology. While it places the intellectual, moral and spiritual faculties at the top as supreme, it is just as vitally interested in the care of the body, education, discipline, self-culture, choice of occupation, matrimonial adaptation, heredity and all the practical affairs of life. How could a person be more healthy, happy and successful than by normally and harmoniously developing all his faculties as phrenology points them ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz

... euaggelion Xristou}. The Fa or Law is the equivalent of dharma comprehending all in the first Basket of the Buddhist teaching,—as Dr. Davids says (Hibbert Lectures, p. 44), "its ethics and philosophy, and its system of self-culture;" with the theory of karma, it seems to me, especially underlying it. It has been pointed out (Cunningham's "Bhilsa Topes," p. 102) that dharma is the keystone of all king Priyadarsi or Asoka's edicts. The whole of them are dedicated to the attainment of one object, "the advancement ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien

... greatest writer of the period. His Autobiography has a value possessed by no other work of the kind. This and his Poor Richard's Almanac have taught generations of Americans the duty of self-culture, self-reliance, thrift, and the value of practical common sense. He was the first of our writers to show a balanced sense of humor and to use it as an agent in impressing truth on unwilling listeners. He is an equally great ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck



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