"Self-righteous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... wonderful letters. They constitute, indeed, a document of the human soul to which, in my recollection, one other only, Benjamin Constant's Adolphe, can be compared. But in these letters,—hers of grief, humiliation, hopelessness, making her malign her noble self; and his, bitter, self-righteous, crammed with theological moralisings—we see not merely the dual drama of two ill-assorted creatures, but the much more terrible tragedy, superadded by the presence, looming, impassive, as of Cypris in Euripides' Hippolytus, of a third all-powerful and superhuman ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... Elisabeth stayed in England and cherished bitter thoughts in her heart concerning him. That imagination of hers—which was always prone to lead her astray—bore most terribly false witness against Christopher just then. It portrayed him as a hard, self-righteous man, ready to sacrifice the rest of mankind to the Moloch of what he considered to be his own particular duty and spiritual welfare, and utterly indifferent as to how severe was the suffering entailed on the victims of this sacrifice. And, as Christopher was not at hand to refute the ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... need not a physician, but they that are sick," was the significant answer of our Lord to the self-righteous Pharisees who took offence at his companions,—the poor, the degraded, the weak, and the sinful. "Go ye and learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice; for I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... perhaps more the christian to exercise patience, but patience is sometimes tried with the bigotry and nonsense of the self-righteous, self-wise, and self-knowing, who profess the religion of Christ, yet stand tiptoe, like James and John, to call fire from heaven to consume all who do not receive their master. But the true spirit of our religion rebukes such blind zeal and foolish arrogance, by showing that such a disposition ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou
... real nature of that very inability to believe of which you complain so sadly. For that inability does not lie, as you fancy it does, in the impossibility of your performing aright the great act of faith, but of ceasing from all such self-righteous attempts to perform any act, or do any work whatsoever in order to your being saved. So that the real truth is, that you have not yet seen such a sufficiency in the one great work of the Son of God upon the cross, as to lead you utterly to discontinue your mistaken and aimless ...
— God's Plan with Men • T. T. (Thomas Theodore) Martin
... house, his animadversions on violin-playing and liquor-drinking, and Brother Peter Vickers's mild and merciful attitude toward sinners in those un-spiced sermons of his, that held out such affluence of hope to the repentant rather than to the self-righteous. The blood surged unseen into Nehe-miah's face. For shame, for very shame he could not confess himself one with these outcasts. He made a feint of searching in the semi-obscurity for the rickety chair on which he had been seated, and resumed his former attitude ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... business, a corrupt press, crooked politics—grew up within the country, were promoted by American citizens, admired by millions of them, and acquiesced in by almost all of them. Whoever thinks that business corruption is the work of a few inhumanly cunning individuals with monstrous morals is self-righteous without excuse. Capitalists did not violate the public conscience of America; they expressed it. That conscience was inadequate and unintelligent. We are being pinched by the acts it nourished. A great outcry has arisen and a number of perfectly ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... remembered both by friends and neighbours with veneration. She was sensible and intelligent, polite, agreeable, and of unbounded charity; but Miss Burney, who knew her, depicts her as ostentatious in her exertions, and somewhat self-righteous and vainglorious. She was, however, fervently beloved by her daughter, who afterward made several pecuniary sacrifices to ensure her mother's comfort. The earliest years of Lady Georgiana (as she became after her father was created ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... victim, but, for reasons which seem good to him, turns tail, breaks his arranged part, and is very nearly accessory to a murder. At the other end of the story, carrying out his general character of prig-pedant, as selfish as self-righteous, he meets Valjean's rather foolish and fantastic self-sacrifice with illiberal suspicion, and practically kills the poor old creature by separating him from Cosette. When the eclaircissement comes, it appears to me—as ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... was generated from the contradictions between Rodale's self-righteous and sometimes scientifically vague positions and the amused defenses of the smug scientific community. Donald Hopkins' Chemicals, Humus and the Soil is the best, most humane, and emotionally generous defense against the extremism of Rodale. Hopkins ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... more than once is nearer right than the man who refuses to vote at all. The activity of the repeater in the pool of politics may be wholly pernicious but is no worse than the stagnation caused by the inertia of his self-righteous brother. The republic has less to fear from her illiterate and venal voters than from those who, knowing her peril, refuse to come ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... please. I think we really are quite nice girls—I mean we never quarrel, and we are always chummy and affectionate, and we try to do our best. We are not a bit self-righteous or conceited, or anything of that sort; for, you see, when our dear mother was alive she taught us so beautifully. Her rule was such a very simple one. She never punished us; all she ever said was, 'Do it because ...
— A Modern Tomboy - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... only. What is emphasised is the fact that among the crowds were many of both these parties, the religious aristocrats who represented two tendencies of mind bitterly antagonistic, and each unlikely to be drawn to the prophet. Self-righteous pedants who had turned religion into a jumble of petty precepts, and very superior persons who keenly appreciated the good things of this world, and were too enlightened to have much belief in anything, and too comfortable ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... persons in the community who are really happy in their life's work, as they fantastically call it, are those commercial ruffians whose brutal, self-righteous, puritanical countenances one is swamped by—as if by a flood of suffocating mediocrity—in the streets ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... Wilderness. Light, luxury and vice. Such was the summing up of Dr. Bill, and the few who paused in the mad riot for a moment's sober thought. Furthermore Dr. Bill's estimate of the blatant gold city was by no means a self-righteous belief. He had known the place from its birth. He had treated its every ailment at the height of its burning youth. Now, in its maturity, it fell to him to learn much of the inner secrets of its ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... a sprinkling of those unfortunate outcasts of society—tramps and destitute, drunken loafers. If the self-righteous hypocrites who despise these poor wretches had been subjected to the same conditions, the majority of them would inevitably have become the same ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... aware," replied the General softly; "even in the last chapter we encountered one, the self-righteous David Hume, who goes so far as to doubt the existence of the newspaper in which our adventures are now appearing; but it would neither become my cloth, nor do credit to my great experience, were I to meddle with these dangerous opinions. My alarm for you is not ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Diane imagined that Catherine might rest content with what she had accomplished, but the grim, hard-featured woman still continued to exhibit the same self-righteous disapproval towards her brother's wife ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... formal obedience to the vision you have. In one's own estimation, there may seem to be a knowledge of what is right, and a self-satisfied doing of it. There may be a painstaking attention to the forms of obedience, and a self-righteous content in doing the required things. Is this the underlying thought in Peter's self-complacent remark, "Lo, we have left all and followed Thee.[102] We're so much better than this rich young ruler who couldn't stand the test you ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... been a follower of strange gods, and a lover of this world and its vanities. I was self-righteous, and thought I had religion of my own which was better than that of the Bible. I did not know God, and did not serve him. Prayer was forgotten, public worship neglected; and worldly morality was the tree which brought forth ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... self-righteous evil. It was easy to see that never in his tenure of office had he ever encountered a criminal as hardened and as vicious as I. Nor one who admitted to his turpitude so blandly. I felt it coming, ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... right,' he said. 'I was afraid that with this success he'd want to stick it out. These idealists are so infernally self-righteous.' ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... is indisposed. Sumner is in poor health. Douglas, the little giant, is losing strength. What a curious people, aged and young, corrupt and idealistic, candid and hypocritical, religious and materialistic, hoarders and spenders, self-righteous, licentious, Puritanical." "Like all others," ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... always humiliates the bad and makes them feel their degradation. A real pity and sympathy for him tinged her manner, but these qualities are not agreeable to pride. And it must be admitted that she had a little self-righteous satisfaction that she was so much better than this sadly robbed and wounded man suddenly appearing at the wayside of her life. In human strength there is generally a trace of arrogance. Only divine strength and purity can say with perfect love ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... confused morals that has not been permitted to go unapplauded. There are those, of course, in every city who could think fondly and smugly of themselves as doing, in this way, preeminently the will of God; and such deeds not infrequently make men self-righteous. ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... accept the truth he told them. They were a very proud and self-righteous people, and were not willing to be instructed in things they vainly believed they understood better than Jesus did. He called on them to repent of their sins. They denied their being sinners. He told them he was the Son of God, and that he came down from heaven. They ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline |
