"Self-seeking" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... passes by, and that is sin in one of its thousand forms. The Lord Jesus does not fill dirty cups. Anything that springs from self, however small it may be, is sin. Self-energy or self-complacency in service is sin. Self-pity in trials or difficulties, self-seeking in business or Christian work, self-indulgence in one's spare time, sensitiveness, touchiness, resentment and self-defence when we are hurt or injured by others, self-consciousness, reserve, worry, fear, all spring from self and all are sin and make our cups unclean.[*] But all ...
— The Calvary Road • Roy Hession
... being terrified with the menaces of the clergy, had some time before gone over to the other party; and he now openly in the church, though invested with the highest civil character in the kingdom, did penance for his obedience to the parliament, which he termed a "carnal self-seeking." He accompanied his penance with so many tears, and such pathetical addresses to the people for their prayers in this his uttermost sorrow and distress, that a universal weeping and lamentation took ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... there was a time to subordinate individual or group selfishness to the national good, that time is now. Disunity at home—bickerings, self-seeking partisanship, stoppages of work, inflation, business as usual, politics as usual, luxury as usual these are the influences which can undermine the morale of the brave men ready to die at the front for ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... against slavery, published in 1733, entitled, "A Testimony against that Anti-Christian Practice of MAKING SLAVES OF MEN.[378] It was well written, and the truth fearlessly told for the conservative, self-seeking period ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... fight Beaton had waged against adversaries how many and multifarious, how murderous, self-seeking, treacherous, and hypocritical, we have seen. He maintained the independence of Scotland against the most recklessly unscrupulous of assailants, though probably he was rather bent on defending the lost cause of a Church entirely and ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... of a family in its earliest stages is essentially an egoistic and ungenerous proceeding. Even Mr. Withers must have been self-seeking once or twice in his life, else had he never had a son to mourn. So, since life in this world is for the living, and his own life was likely to go on many years after Mr. Withers had been gathered to the reward of the righteous, Thane worked himself ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... the secret realized fully that the girl was being endowed with an immense fortune, and that she would inevitably be the quarry of every self-seeking relative whose interest would be served by attacking her rights in the premises. "The lawsuits must be cut out," was Williams' order to the judge. "Mart's brothers are a wolfish lot. We don't want any loose ends for them to ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... "The self-seeking demagogue starts out with the captivating doctrine, the rule of the people, but his end will be the dangerous despotism of one man rule—the rule of himself. Could you or any reasoning man who has followed the demagogues ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... He should have this great virtue; and in spite of many shortcomings (for what man is there who liveth and sinneth not?), naturalists as a class have it to a degree which makes them stand out most honourably in the midst of a self-seeking and mammonite generation, inclined to value everything by its money price, its private utility. The spirit which gives freely, because it knows that it has received freely; which communicates knowledge without ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... to gather from text-books the idea that the policy of the manufacturing party in England has always been liberal, progressive and patriotic; whereas that of the landed interest has been retrograde and selfish. There cannot be a greater delusion. English manufacturers have been just as self-seeking and narrow-minded as other people—no more and no less; they have been quite as ready to sacrifice the interests of others when they believed them to be opposed to their own, as the much-abused landowners. At this time every nation in Europe regarded the outlying portions of the Empire ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous
... as rather odd, that one of the first questions raised, after our separation from the greedy, struggling, self-seeking world, should relate to the possibility of getting the advantage over the outside barbarians in their own field of labor. But, to own the truth, I very soon became sensible that, as regarded society at large, we stood in a position of new hostility, rather than ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... antithesis of "spirit," as the name of the evil principle. Paul indeed uses "the flesh" in no restricted sense of merely sensual sin. With him it equally includes all other forms of wrong, like malevolence and pride and self-seeking. But the nomenclature and the way of thought which it reflected put a stigma on the whole physical nature of man. In that stigma lay the germ of asceticism, hostility to marriage, depreciation of some ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... high culture, of wide experience, of supreme ability, and, strangest of all, with a keen sense of humour—that such an one should voluntarily step down from high social position at the bidding of a vulgar, selfish, self-seeking, and, according to some hints dropped here and there, grossly immoral man, should, at beck of his fat forefinger, go forth to a strange land to live amid sordid circumstances, and with uncongenial company, to work ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, June 20, 1891 • Various
... singularly effective. His addresses were not only free from all ambition as to ornate or attractive language, but also as to original or characteristic thought. There was such an entire absence of all self-seeking about the man, and he so thoroughly identified himself with the people whose interests he pleaded, that, possessing a fair readiness of speech, and aptness for ad captandum argument, he could not fail to secure the favourable attention of earnest men on a subject where ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... not perhaps far-fetched that, as Cardinal Beauchamp had great possessions, he took this occasion to testify how in his heart he slighted them. Or again—for history seems to prove that he was not an entirely scrupulous man, nor entirely untainted by self-seeking—that his tribute to Noble Poverty may have been the assertion, by a spirit netted among the briars of this world's policy, that at least it saw and suspired after the way to Heaven. Video ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... arguments as these are perhaps too much in the air to be convincing. Well, then, let us appeal to experience. Let us see what the systematic cultivation of his natural faculties has done for the child in Utopia. I have already pointed out that the unselfishness of the children—the complete absence of self-seeking and self-assertion—is one of the most noticeable features of the life of their school. Now there is no place for moral teaching on the time-table of the school: and I can say without hesitation that the direct inculcation of morality is wholly foreign ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... of the Sea" in his righteous indignation at the conduct of the greedy, grasping woman; and the moral of the story remained with me, as the story itself did. I think I understood dimly, even then, that mean avarice and self-seeking ambition always find their true level in muddy earth, never ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... and his fellow-men, has commonly no knowledge of human nature in the larger sense, but merely knows from observation how the average man of a certain limited class is likely to act within a narrow prescribed sphere of self-seeking. Town life, then, strongly favours the education of certain shallow forms of intelligence. In actual attainment the townsman is somewhat more advanced than the countryman. But the deterioration of physique which accompanies this gain causes a weakening of mental fibre: the potentiality of intellectual ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... which is but one. I exhort you, brethren, in your comings together, Let all things be done decently, and in order, according to the Scriptures. Let all things be done among you without strife and envy, without self-seeking and vain-glory. Be clothed with humility, and submit to one another in love. Let the gifts of the church be exercised according to order. Let no gift be concealed which is for edification; yet let those gifts be chiefly exercised which are most for the perfecting of ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... the entire College of Cardinals and every official in the service of the Holy See, for the purposes of the expedition against the Muslim, who was in arms against Christianity. Naturally that tax was not popular with luxurious, self-seeking, cinquecento prelates, who in the main cared entirely for their own prosperity and not at all for that of Christianity, and you may realize how, by levying it, Alexander laid himself open ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... demagogue than he was as courtier, lackey, or parliamentary intriguer. Indeed, he is almost certainly less so, for he must at least in some fashion serve, even if only that he may deceive them, those whose servant he should be. At any rate, the purely self-seeking demagogue is certainly a recurrent figure in democratic politics, and of the self-seeking demagogue Aaron Burr ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... to these same Accessions. All this can and does progress, but mostly slowly, intermittently, with short violent paroxysms of excess and long sleepy reactions of defect, with one-sidedness, travesties, and—worst of all—with worldly indifference and self-seeking. The grace and aid of the Simultaneous Richness are here also always necessary; nor can these things ever really progress except through a deep religious sense—all mere scepticism and all levelling down are simply so much waste. Still, we can speak of progress in the Science of Religion ...
— Progress and History • Various
... republic. The son, therefore, is an American patriot, and what though it seem at times overtaxed, his patriotism, unlike that of the individual under our first type, is genuine, for it is not primarily self-seeking. When he speaks of ideals, it is not to say we have no need of religions at all, but rather that we all in America have more or less the same belief only that we choose to express it differently, each according to his ancestral traditions. The three rings, says Nathan der Weise, may ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... myself, Honora, that I'm grieving for! It's those hot-headed, misguided, wayward fellows of mine! They've left the homes I tried to help them win, they've followed a self-seeking, half-mad, wholly vicious agitator, and their lives, that I meant to have flow on so smoothly, will be troubled and wasted. I know so well what will happen! And then, their hate! It hangs over me like a ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... page to the fall of the light. It was a phrenetic indictment, but under the paltry rhetoric of the man there was genuine indignation and pain. There were revolting details of cruelty to the miserable, helpless, and defenceless; there were greed, and self-seeking, stripped naked; but more revolting to see without a mask was that falsehood which had been hiding under the words that for ages had spurred men to noble deeds, to self-sacrifice, to heroism. What was appalling was the sudden perception that all the traditional ideals ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... and most single-minded men who ever entered Canadian public life. From Ireland came Dr. William Warren Baldwin, whose son Robert, born in Canada, was less surpassingly able than the younger Bidwell but equally moderate and equally beyond suspicion of faction or self-seeking. ...
— The Canadian Dominion - A Chronicle of our Northern Neighbor • Oscar D. Skelton
... remembering that his father had called him "son" in a poignancy of sympathy all through the trials of the past, and it hurt to hear it now. It linked that time with this, as Madame Beattie, in her unabashed self-seeking, linked it. Perhaps he was never to escape. A prisoner, that was what he was. They were all prisoners, Madame Beattie to her squalid love of gain, Esther to her elementary love of herself, Lydia—he looked at her as she stood still in the background ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... of shame, of remorse, of tender remembrance, shot across the heart of the decorous, worldly, self-seeking man, who owed all that he now was to the ci-devant vaurien before him. Again he stretched forth his hand, and this time grasped De Mauleon's warmly. "Forgive me," he said, feelingly and hoarsely; "forgive me, I was to blame. By character, and perhaps by the necessities ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... be saints, her priests shining lights, her people stars in her firmament. If she is Divine, her policy must be unerring, her acts all gracious, her lightest movements inspired. There must be no brutality anywhere, no self-seeking, no ambition, no instability. How should there be, ...
— Paradoxes of Catholicism • Robert Hugh Benson
... said good-morning to him—if you only looked at him once, on the street—I don't see how you could possibly imagine.... Why, Cally, he's about the least self-seeking human being that ever lived. He's so absolutely un-self-seeking that he gives away every single thing he's got, to anybody that comes along and wants it. In the first place, he's giving away his life.... Some of his ideas may ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... re-recanted. They were all a dubious lot, I'll admit. That is why I hate to see a girl like Viola Lambert put in their class by a self-seeking fakir ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... of mean purpose and low conception of the sacredness of fact and reality. Who has not observed inferior original power achieving greater results even in the intellectual field itself, where the superior understanding happens to have been unequally yoked with a self-seeking character, over scenting the expedient? If Hume had been in the early productive part of his life the hypocrite which he wished it were in his power to show himself in its latter part, we may be tolerably sure that European philosophy would have missed ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... it only makes room for another. True, "Punch" killed the craze for sunflowers and long necks; but then "Punch" invented it. It was merely made to be destroyed brilliantly, like a Chinese cracker or a Roman candle. Folly is older than "Punch's" jokes, and will survive them. Snobbery and self-seeking, pettiness and stupidity, envy, hate, and all uncharitableness, were no secret to the mummies in the British Museum. "Unto the place whither the rivers go, thither they go again." Are there not a hundred sayings in Ecclesiastes and Menander, in Horace and Moliere, as apt to-day as ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... with the rest of the philosophes. That there were charlatans among them, vain men, pretentious men, profligate men, selfish, self-seeking, and hypocritical men, who doubts? Among what class of men were there not such in those evil days? In what class of men are there not such now, in spite of all social and moral improvement? But nothing but the conviction, among the average, ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley
... the "Great Mystery" was silent, solitary, free from all self-seeking. It was silent, because all speech is of necessity feeble and imperfect; therefore the souls of my ancestors ascended to God in wordless adoration. It was solitary, because they believed that He is nearer to us in solitude, and there were no priests authorized ...
— The Soul of the Indian - An Interpretation • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... their sorrow may turn from self-seeking to God and good deeds. But sorrow may come in a trivial nature from trivial causes; the soul may be plunged into despair because one has been denied a gift or a pleasure. The demonstrativeness of grief or sorrow is not ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... anywhere one with itself. It speaks in diverse tongues. Its processes and objects are variant. It seems but an iridescent dream which lends itself equally to the fancies of the impracticable and the scheming of the self-seeking, breeding visionaries and pretenders. ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... great many useless and expensive court offices. On the 17th of January 1648 he procured the marriage of the tsar with Maria Miloslavshaya, himself marrying her sister, Anna, ten days later. The Miloslavskis were typical self-seeking 17th century boyars, whose extortions made them generally detested. In May 1648 the people of Moscow rose against them, and the young tsar was compelled to dismiss both them and their patron Morozov. The successful issue of the Moscow riots was the occasion of disquieting disturbances all over ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... of the State justly commended Mr. Gaston's conduct in not forcing his own nomination, a course so completely in accord with his character, and his entire devotion to the party welfare. He did not display the least semblance of self-seeking. ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II. No. 5, February, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... if the Hesea's tale be true, I did once lay down my royal rank and dare the dangers of an unsailed sea; O thou whom in ages gone I would have sheltered with my frail body from the sorceries of this cold, self-seeking witch; O thou whom but a little while ago at my own life's risk I drew from death ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... had meditated a murder and not a sacrifice. In our late bloody and lamentable wars, how many drew swords on either side, from the purest and most honourable motives? How many from the culpable suggestions of ambition, self-seeking, and love of plunder? Yet while they marched in the same ranks, and spurred their horses at the same trumpet-sound, the memory of the former is dear to us as patriots or loyalists—that of those who acted on mean or unworthy promptings, ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... enemies, but he early in his career became convinced that no man could accomplish anything of value in this world without running counter either to the opinions of honest men, who were as sincere as he, or to the self-seeking of the dishonest and the unscrupulous. Up to this time he had had mainly to deal with the former class, as in his successful efforts to establish the National Academy of Design on a firm footing; but in the future he was destined to make many and bitter enemies of both classes. In ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... supereminent persons, his passionate abhorrence of democracy, his admiration of strong character, his disposition to work from historical bases rather than from absolute principles, but representing them at once with a prudence of common sense and a prudence of self-seeking and timidity which are alike foreign to his ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... however, that he was able to win Charlotte Bronte in spite of the fact that his predecessors had inspired in her such hearty contempt. 'I think he must be like all the curates I have seen,' she writes of one; 'they seem to me a self-seeking, vain, empty race.' ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... we must have a reformation displeasing to God, or displeasing to men. It is not the right reformation which is not displeasing to a Tobiah, to a Sanballat, to a Demetrius, to the earthly-minded, to the self-seeking politicians, to the carnal and profane; it is but the old enmity between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent (Gen. iii. 15): nay, what if reformation be displeasing to good men, in so far as they are unregenerate, ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... such a good Christian! And yet she had so nobly and so undeniably saved Mr. Keller's life! What right had I to impute self-seeking motives to such a woman as this? Mean! mean! there ...
— Jezebel • Wilkie Collins
... not otherwise express itself, and that was thrown into moulds shaped by habitual refinement and cultivated taste. It was from the first a movement from which, as much by instinct and temper as by deliberate intention, self-seeking in all its forms was excluded. Those whom it influenced looked not for great things for themselves, nor thought of making ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... a depressing sight when an artist in life, even on a small scale, who has grown old in elegant trifles and ostentation and self-seeking, instead of coming to a sudden end in a fight or as he goes home at night from the tavern, must live on to grow melancholy and end as a dabbler in the sentimental reflections which have always been foreign to him. But since life is incontestably a powerful composer, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... another. Some were for Harcourt, some for Morley, some for a leader in the House of Lords. Presently these disputations died down; what logicians call "the process of exhaustion" settled the question, and Campbell-Bannerman—the least self-seeking man in public life—found himself the accepted leader of the Liberal party. The leadership was an uncomfortable inheritance. There was a certain section of the Liberal party which was anxious that Lord Rosebery should return on his own ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... that it is not the grosser passions and forms of vice alone that darken the understanding and alienate the heart from the truth. Pride, vanity, ambition, avarice—in a word, the spirit of self-seeking and self-exaltation in every form—will effectually hinder the man in whose bosom they bear sway from coming to the knowledge of the truth; for they will incline him to seek a religion which flatters him and promises him impunity ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... the opinions and character of the men who are to succeed this generation: that they maybe suited to that blessed work, one, whose public course is ended, invokes them to draw their creed from the fountains of our political history, rather than from the lower stream, polluted as it has been by self-seeking place-hunters and ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... of sacrifice; with that maternal compassion which is a vital element in woman's love for man. Sublimated beyond passion and self-seeking, and asking only the right to give, she poured out the treasure of her soul at his feet, though her pride demanded that he ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed
... service: it was the most natural thing in the world for people to think as they did. Yet not a human being ever accused Hetty of flirting; her manner was always as open, friendly, and cordial as an honest boy's, and with no more trace of self-seeking or self-consciousness about it. She was as full of fun and mischief, too, as any boy could be. She had slid down hill with the wildest of them, till even her father ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Anonymous
... answered; "but he teaches more than that. I knew a girl in Paris who studied with him. She was quite intricate and self-seeking when she began. And in six months he had changed her whole nature. She became elemental and direct, and," she put her hands together and threw them apart with the gesture which he knew so well, "and splendid! Like ...
— Katrine • Elinor Macartney Lane
... qualities required is such as would hardly be found for centuries together. The most fine and sensitive tact of piety would be essential. With it must go absolute sincerity and singleness of purpose. Any dash of mere conventionalism or self-seeking would spoil the whole. There must be that clear illuminated insight that is only given to those who are in a more than ordinary sense 'pure in heart.' And on the other hand, along with these unique spiritual qualities must go a sound and exact scientific training, a just ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... yet—especially Mr. Flaxman, who guessed, as she was quite sure, what had happened to her? He must despise her to have imagined it. His outburst had filled her with the oddest and most petulant resentment. Were all men self-seeking? Did all men think women shallow and fickle? Could a man and a woman never be honestly and simply friends? If he had made love to her, he could not possibly—and there was the sting of it—feel towards her maiden dignity that romantic respect ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and in that way stood the feet of the pioneer. His way led directly, unerringly, to the land of freedom. All other ways, and especially the Liberty party way, twisted, doubled upon themselves, branched into labyrinths of folly and self-seeking. "Ho! all ye that desire the freedom of the slave, who would labor for liberty, follow me and I will show you the only true way," was the tone which the editor of the Liberator held to men, who were battering with might and ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... of his character as an agent do not desert him when he emerges from the naive communal culture where the dominant note of life is the unanalysed and undifferentiated solidarity of the individual with the group with which his life is bound up. When he enters upon the predatory stage, where self-seeking in the narrower sense becomes the dominant note, this propensity goes with him still, as the pervasive trait that shapes his scheme of life. The propensity for achievement and the repugnance to futility remain the underlying economic motive. The propensity changes only in the form of its ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... a very long period. But as time went on negligence and self-seeking crept in. Those whose duty it was to superintend, threw more and more responsibility on their inferiors in office, and in time it became rare for the rulers to interfere or to interest themselves in any of the operations. This was the ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... thing of sinister aspect, as more or less immoral. Man is required to have no passions. Passion, it is true, is not quite the suitable word for what I wish to express. I mean here nothing more than human activity as resulting from private interests, special, or if you will, self-seeking designs—with this qualification, that the whole energy of will and character is devoted to their attainment, and that other interests (which would in themselves constitute attractive aims), or, rather, all things else, are ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... eve in the garden of the soul, calling it to a happiness which affrights it. And the timid and self-seeking soul strives to hide itself under the stars, under the clouds of heaven, under human love, under the distractions of work and pleasure and study, offers itself as a wistful servitor to child and man ...
— The Hound of Heaven • Francis Thompson
... any Mr. Jones as for the Duke of Omnium; but were he to do it, it would be said of him that it had been done because the man was Duke of Omnium. There are positions exalted beyond the reach of benevolence, because benevolence would seem to be self-seeking. "Your father, if he were here," said he, "would know ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... a little mad in order to prophesy and to enjoy poetic ecstasies; and in the case of Schlatter the flower of altruism which often blossoms in the hearts of such "madmen" was manifested in his complete lack of self-seeking and in his compassion for the poor and suffering which drew crowds around him. As to his miracles, we may—without attempting to explain them—state decisively that they do not differ from those accomplished by means ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... his mode of creating a product, there is no equilibrium within the subgroup. The more efficient user of labor and capital is able to draw away labor and capital from the less efficient one, and the self-seeking impulse which is at the basis of competition impels him to do it. The producer who works at the greater advantage is foreordained to underbid and supplant the one who works under more unfavorable conditions. That a static state may exist and that the movements of labor and capital ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... missed, of failure, of limitation, evoked another, as solemn, but sweeter and more touching, of human lives irrevocably dependent on his, of the pathetic unalterable claim of marriage, the poverty and hopelessness of all self-seeking, the essential wealth, rich and making rich, of all self-spending. As he thought of his wife and son a deep tenderness flooded the man's whole nature. With a long sigh, it was as though he took them ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... nature, and feel His presence within them as the very life of their life, so that in proportion as they come to themselves they come to Him. They tell us that what separates us from Him and from happiness is, first, self-seeking in all its forms; and, secondly, sensuality in all its forms; that these are the ways of darkness and death, which hide from us the face of God; while the path of the just is like a shining light, which shineth more and more unto the perfect day. As they have toiled up the narrow way, the Spirit ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... of the court reading the New Testament instead of pagan poetry, or heard their voices chanting godly psalms rather than the old love-ballads. She did not object openly to the pious form of speech which was known as the "language of Canaan." She was a passionless woman, self-seeking but not revengeful, and adopted a certain degree of tolerance, no doubt, from her patriotic counsellor, L'Hopital, who resembled the Prince of Orange ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... Democracy. All had thus their fair share. Under Responsible Government, with all power in the hands of the Legislative Assembly, the balance would be overthrown and the democracy would be supreme. To Haliburton, control by the democracy meant control by the crafty, self-seeking professional politician, as he saw him, or thought he saw him, in the neighbouring United States. The people, well meaning, but ignorant and greedy, were at the mercy of the appeals to prejudice and pocket of these ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant
... maintains that the original motive in all living things was self-preservation for self-realisation; and that this elementary law was in itself necessary and good, the essential condition of progress. But just as we to-day know well how hard it is to draw the line which distinguishes a right self-seeking from the wrong, so it has been from the outset. The distinction is a fine one, and the balance is easily upset. We have but to suppose that this perversion of the right and lawful happened at an early stage, to see that nothing more would have been required ...
— God and the World - A Survey of Thought • Arthur W. Robinson
... looking as from a distance at me in my attitude of protest and restraint. If I loved him enough, I could forego love itself for him. Somewhere there is a fault, it would seem, somewhere in my abandon is restraint, in my love, self-seeking. Remorse overcame me just as he was about to leave, and I schooled myself to think that there had been no affront, that it honours a woman to be wanted no matter for what end, that every use is a noble use, that we die the same, ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... us, and this heritage is one of jealousy and hate, not of charity and toleration. It is an heritage of legalism and technicalities, of self-will and individualism, of shibboleths that have become a dead letter, of prejudices that are fostered on distorted history and the propaganda of the self-seeking and the vain. The spirit of Christ is not in it, but the malice of Satan working upon the better natures of men and justifying in the name of conscience and principle what are frequently the workings of self-will and ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... could never do. This reaching-out of feeble human hands, this new compelling force which is going to bind us all together, this deep desire for cohesion which swells in our hearts and casts out all smallness and all self-seeking—this is what we mean when we speak of the Next of Kin. It is not a physical relationship, but the great spiritual bond which unites all those whose hearts have grown more tender by sorrow, and whose spiritual eyes are not dimmed, but washed ...
— The Next of Kin - Those who Wait and Wonder • Nellie L. McClung
... said March, "that there was a great deal of mixed motive in the men who went into the war as well as in those who kept out of it. We canonized all that died or suffered in it, but some of them must have been self-seeking and low-minded, like men in other vocations." He found himself saying this in Dryfoos's behalf; the old man looked at him gratefully at first, he ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Lady Maulevrier believed that the end would sanctify the means. Lesbia, once married to a worthy man, such a man as Lord Hartfield, for instance, would soon rise to a higher level than that Belgravian swamp over which the malarian vapours of falsehood, and slander, and self-seeking, and prurient imaginings hang dense and thick. She would rise to the loftier table-land of that really great world which governs and admonishes the ruck of mankind by examples of noble deeds and noble thoughts; the world of statesmen, and soldiers, and thinkers, and reformers; ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... brief reign of Edward VI., Sir Henry Sidney had been nicknamed "the only odd man and paragon of the court." The same stanch virtues that made him "odd" in Edward's time rendered him a man apart at the fawning, flattering, self-seeking court of Queen Elizabeth. ...
— With Spurs of Gold - Heroes of Chivalry and their Deeds • Frances Nimmo Greene
... and stirring, Miserable sinners! 'Mong ignorant and erring, Miserable sinners! Sloth and self-seeking from us cast, Believing this the fittest fast, For of all prayers prayed 'neath the sun There is no prayer like work ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... temperance man. He was a practical, as well as an ardent, advocate of temperance, and the organization of the so-called "Third party" prohibitionists, excited, at once, his indignation and contempt. He was one of the first prohibitionists of Kansas to distrust St. John, and to denounce him as a self-seeking, ambitious demagogue. He had no use for any man who was not entirely sincere, or who was not willing to subordinate his own personal interest ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... Christian has to resort anew to the place of the penitent, and to come to Christ, as he did at first for pardon. It is a solemn thought that years of obedience and heroisms of self-surrender, may be so annihilated by some act of self-seeking distrust that the whole career has, as it were, to be begun anew from the very starting-point. It is a blessed thought that, however far and long we may have wandered, we can always return to the place where ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... for these men, all of whom she knew. Caius Nepos, selfish and callous; Ancyrus, the elder, avaricious and self-seeking; young Escanes whom she knew to be unscrupulous; Philippus Decius whose ostentation and lavishness she despised. She vaguely wondered why my lord ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... on whose faithful devotion she had built as on a rock, was no less self-seeking and fickle than other men. She thought of him every day and every hour; and as soon as a vessel from the north cast anchor within sight, she watched the voyagers as they disembarked to detect him among them. She longed for ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... this fair country if the brood of corrupt, self-seeking, unscrupulous, unprincipled politicians" (here she named one of the two rival parties in the State) "continue to infest and poison our local councils and undermine our Parliamentary representation; if they continue to snatch votes ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... world in these last months was fit to cast a gloom upon my character. I had met many men, some of them leaders in Israel, whether by their birth or talents; and who among them all had shown clean hands? As for the Browns and Millers, I had seen their self-seeking, I could never again respect them. Prestongrange was the best yet; he had saved me, had spared me rather, when others had it in their minds to murder me outright; but the blood of James lay at his door; and I thought ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... developing, emancipating himself from the State and the group-system of society; but he was developing in a wrong direction. The importance of self, when realised in high and low alike, was becoming self-seeking, indifference to all but self. We have now to see whether philosophy could do anything to relieve this destitution of the Romans in regard ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... of tastes, suitability of character; these are the only bonds between my companions and myself; among them I would be a man, not a person of wealth; the charm of their society should never be embittered by self-seeking. If my wealth had not robbed me of all humanity, I would scatter my benefits and my services broadcast, but I should want companions about me, not courtiers, friends, not proteges; I should wish my friends ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... the Sabbath—the Jews' one last protection against the outer world, the one last dyke against the waves of heathendom. Nor did his complacency diminish when his intuition proved correct, and the preacher thundered against the self-will—ay, and the self-seeking—that undermined Israel's last fortification. What did they seek under the wall? Did they think their delving spades would come upon a hidden store of gold, upon an ancient treasure-chest? Nay, it was a coffin they would strike—a coffin of dead ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... know that you are vain and self-seeking, and look forward contentedly to the time when your father will transfer his ownership of your physical attractions to that nobleman who offers the ...
— The Jewel Merchants - A Comedy In One Act • James Branch Cabell
... regard for the other, nor concerns himself for another's need? How can that prayer be of help, good, acceptable and a common prayer, or a work of the Holy Day and of the assembled congregation, which they make who make their own petty prayers, one for this, the other for that, and have nothing but self-seeking, selfish ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... Wharton's son-in-law. Situated as he was, of course he must run some risk. And then, too, he had spoken of himself with a grain of truth when he had told the Duchess that he was not marrying for money. Ferdinand Lopez was not an honest man or a good man. He was a self-seeking, intriguing adventurer, who did not know honesty from dishonesty when he saw them together. But he had at any rate this good about him, that he did love the girl whom he was about to marry. He was willing to cheat all the world,—so that he might succeed, and make a ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... not wholly ignoble, the marriage market. To understand the game of life is to be prepared, and women like Doris Fletcher were not entirely self-seeking when they presented their best to what they believed should be the best. Nancy was worthy, as Martin often said, to carry on the truest American tradition of womanhood, so it became a reverent concern to help this matter personally, and nationally, ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... They are self-seeking. They "feed themselves," but they "feed not the flock." They take up religion for what they can make out of it! It is a carnal ambition, not a holy service. It is used for getting, not for giving, for self-glorification ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... sufficient atonement. But he cared little, for his nature was not a courtier's, and even then the English Normans were colder and graver men than those of France, and more overbearing in arms, but less self-seeking, one against another, ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... thrones for themselves. Hence James and John try to secure the foremost places, and hence the others' anger at what they thought an unfair attempt to push in front of them. What a contrast between Jesus, striding on ahead with 'set' face, and the Twelve unsympathetic and self-seeking, lagging behind to squabble about pre-eminence! We have in this incident two parts: the request and its answer, the indignation of the Ten and its rebuke. The one sets forth the qualifications for the highest ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... or a self-seeking politician? Give evidence. How could he justify the means that he used to win Brutus? In what respect did he surpass Brutus? What case did he make against Caesar? How far was he right? What weakness and what strength does he show in ...
— Teachers' Outlines for Studies in English - Based on the Requirements for Admission to College • Gilbert Sykes Blakely
... is plain and clear of what the State must one day mean and what the work of the world must be, when once more the devil of self-seeking and greed flees to his own place, and each man knows that his life is his own only as he gives it to high service, and to loving thought for every weaker soul. The co-operative commonwealth must come; and when it has come, ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell
... in which a man loses the world but remains captain of his soul; actually he ends his life rather than exhibit himself as motley to the multitude. As a foil for the idealist Hetman—who is a sort of inverted Nietzsche; also a self-portrait in part of the dramatist—there is the self-seeking scamp Launhart who succeeds with the very ideas which Hetman couldn't make viable, ideas in fact which brought about his disaster. They are two finely contrasted portraits, and what a grimace of disgust ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... tears that freely fell were not of grief, but tears of yearning love, of sympathy, of solemn joy and gratitude to God for such a life in its rounded completeness, such an example and testimony, such fidelity to conscience, such recoil from all self-seeking, such unswerving devotion to duty, come what might of peril ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney
... intelligence of this 'Lord Chancellor of nature?' Grant that you do so—and what guarantee have you for the virtue and the happiness which you assume as the concomitants of the gift? See Bacon himself; what black ingratitude! what miserable self-seeking! what truckling servility! what abject and pitiful spirit! So far from intellectual knowledge, in its highest form and type, insuring virtue and bliss, it is by no means uncommon to find great mental cultivation combined with great moral corruption." (Aside ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... the best society, she might have given herself without reserve to the rapture of her idyl; but her circumstances were peculiar. Rosie was obliged to be practical, to look ahead. A fairy prince was not only a romantic dream in her dreary life, but an agency to be utilized. The least self-seeking of drowning maids might expect the hero on the bank to pull her out of the water. The very fact that she recognized in Claude a tendency to dally with her on the brink instead of landing her in a place of safety compelled her to be the ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... and Burgundy, King Chilperic reigning over Austrasia; King Sigebert over Neustria. But the power behind the throne lay in the wives of these kings, with whom alone we have to do. Contrasted characters they were,—Fredegonde wicked, faithless, self-seeking; Brunehild patriotic and devoted to the good of her country; yet in the end wickedness triumphed, and honesty died a violent and frightful death. With this preliminary we may proceed with ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... of the eighteenth century was fond of dwelling upon the loneliness of the princely station. Standing above all other men, occupied habitually with weighty matters of state, surrounded by self-seeking flatterers and schemers, how was a ruler ever to hear the truth or to know the blessedness of disinterested friendship? Awful fate to be thus cut off from tender human affection and compelled to tread ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... The Rivals, "it hurts his conscience to be found out." There is no honesty or sincerity in the man. His covert gibes are the spiteful emanation of personal disappointment; his lofty morality is a cloak for unscrupulous self-seeking. He has always shown himself ready to say anything or do anything that may serve his own interests. In the general election of 1885 he made frantic efforts to get into Parliament as a member of the Irish Party. He ghosted every member of the party whose influence ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (2 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... are a self-seeking and a resolute, but a shy, race; swift to act, when swiftness is needed, but seldom knowing quite what to say. The MacQuern, with native reluctance to give something for nothing, had determined to have the pleasure of knowing the young lady for whom he was to lay down ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... not stand for this sort of thing any more, he told himself. And as he thought his mind wandered back to Jennie and her peculiar "Oh no, no!" There was someone that appealed to him. That was a type of womanhood worth while. Not sophisticated, not self-seeking, not watched over and set like a man-trap in the path of men, but a sweet little girl—sweet as a flower, who was without anybody, apparently, to watch over her. That night in his room he composed a letter, ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... with human progress as something immediate in life, something to be immediately attacked by political parties and groups pointing primarily to that end. I now began to see that just as in my own being there was the rather shallow, rather vulgar, self-seeking careerist, who wore an admirable silk hat and bustled self-consciously through the lobby, and a much greater and indefinitely growing unpublished personality behind him—my hinterland, I have called it—so in human affairs generally the permanent reality is also ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... confident than his opponents, he was not afraid. The effects of his "Union, it-must-be-preserved" speech were becoming evident; he gradually came to stand for the budding nationality among the self-seeking groups who would have their way or break up the Confederation. With the large majority of the up-country of the Middle States and South in favor of a tariff, even a high tariff, he promptly accepted the proposed revision. Already nominated ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... read the first part of the letter he laughed hastily, and said, "The abbot hath no such lily." But when he had finished it, he said, "GOD rid my soul of self-seeking! The common children shall have them, ...
— Last Words - A Final Collection of Stories • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... and still very young and untaught of life, she could not be expected to take these large views, or to guess at the Hand of Mercy which holds the cup of human woes. She saw her mother fading away because of her father's obstinacy and self-seeking, and it was inconceivable to her that such an unnecessary thing could be allowed by a gentle and loving Providence. Therefore, she turned her back on Providence, as many a strong soul has done before her, rejecting it for the reason that she could ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... full-face portraits began to be common. The earliest striking achievement of this sort, Mantegna's head of Cardinal Scarampo (now in Berlin), was not the kind to find favour in Venice. The full-face likeness of this wolf in sheep's clothing brought out the workings of the self-seeking, cynical spirit within too clearly not to have revolted the Venetians, who looked upon all such qualities as impious in the individual because they were the strict monopoly of the State. In the portraits of Doges which decorated the frieze of its great Council Hall, Venice ...
— The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance - Third Edition • Bernhard Berenson
... self-seeking. He owed his rise in the Church wholly to the intellectual power and substantial worth of character that inspired strong friendship. Seeing how little he sought worldly advancement for himself, while others were pressing and scrambling, Butler's friends used their ...
— Human Nature - and Other Sermons • Joseph Butler
... self-seeking Bill, who would stop at nothing, probably thought his brother had a screw loose, as the saying is, and perhaps that is what ...
— Tom Slade on a Transport • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... with me to the gate. I was much affected by what seemed to me the dramatically fitting outcome of my old kinswoman's Quixotism. I saw Cousin Tryphena picturesquely as the Happy Fool of old folk-lore, the character who, through his very lack of worldly wisdom, attains without effort all that self-seeking folks try for in vain. The happy ending of her adventure filled me with a cheerful wonder at the ways of Providence, which I tried to pass on to her in the exclamation, "Why, Cousin Tryphena, it's like a story-book? You're going to enjoy having those people. The woman is as nice ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... unless the child learned by example and precept the great principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, he was going to remain what by nature we all are,—imperious, demanding, and self-seeking. The whole scheme must fail if his education failed. It is not too much to say that the success of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution depended, in the minds of certain early Democrats, upon the woman. The doctrines ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... Empire, not a Republic of republics. It's a difficult thing for men to govern themselves, though they can do it better than anyone else has ever done it for them. We are making this wonderful experiment here in the new world. The fate of unborn millions hangs on its success. You're done with self and self-seeking. Ambition is a dream that is passed. Good! Lay your life in unselfish sacrifice on the altar of your country. Only the man who has given up ambition is fit for great leadership. He alone dares to seek and know ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... against those who speak of infusing into it a more Christian spirit. For him the whole body of our industrialism is rotten with selfishness and covetousness, the high note of service entirely absent from it, the one energy which informs it the energy of aggressive self-seeking. Such a system cannot be patched. It is anti-Christian. It ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... moment, as she remembered her wavering, crossed her hands on her breast, and ejaculated, 'May He deal mercifully with me! Yet it may be at an exceeding cost—at that of all my cherished schemes, of all that was pride and self-seeking. Alice, look not so terrified. Nothing can be done immediately, or with violence, in this first mourning for the King; and I trust to make use of the time to disguise me, and escape to England, where I may keep my vow as anchoress, or as ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... during his whole life, absorbed in lofty contemplations, all from love of truth itself and to benefit the world, could not have had a mean or sordid soul. "As a man thinketh, so is he." We admit that he was a man of the world, politic, self-seeking, extravagant, careless about his debts and how he raised money to pay them; but we deny that he was a bad judge on the whole, or was unpatriotic, or immoral in his private life, or mean in his ordinary dealings, or more cruel and harsh in his judicial ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... they were to concentrate their resources, to make a successful bid for victory. 60,000 men might march into Maryland and threaten Washington. But while he was anxious that these views should be laid before the President, he would earnestly disclaim the charge of self-seeking. He wished to follow, and not to lead. He was willing to follow anyone—Lee, or Ewell, or anyone who would fight." "Why do you not urge your views," asked Mr. Boteler, "on General Lee?" "I have done so," replied Jackson. ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... wrong at first, but both have been wrong ever since Sedan, so at least I think, but it is too long a matter to discuss in a letter. If the new Emperor [81] does not grant most honourable terms to Paris, I shall give him up altogether as a self-seeking, hard-hearted old man of fire and sword. I dare say you have not heard as many sad stories as we have of the losses and disasters and unspeakable sorrows of people in Paris, known to other people we have seen. I won't ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... it was in a note in the "Christian Year," and Babie looked out the reference, and found that it was Jeremiah's rebuke to Baruch for self-seeking amid the ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Show me that though the body—dear home and vehicle of love—may die, yet love in its essence remains everlastingly conscious, faithful and complete. Bend my will to harmony with Thine, O Lord, and cleanse me of self-seeking. Ah! but still let me see his face once again, once again, oh, my God—and I will rebel no more. Let me look on him, once again, if only for a moment, and I shall be content. Hear me, I am greatly troubled, ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... Albigenses, was made seneschal. His English estates ensured some measure of fidelity, and his energy and experience were guarantees of his competence, though, as a younger member of the great house of Thouars, he belonged by birth to the inner circle of the Poitevin nobility, whose treachery, levity, and self-seeking were proverbial. The powerful Viscounts of Thouars were constantly kept in check by their traditional enemies the Counts of La Marche, whose representative, Hugh of Lusignan, was by far the strongest of the local barons. His cousin, and sometime betrothed, Isabella, Countess of Angouleme, the ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... shall not linger in my Court. Such lives have no place here. Get you back to my Isle of Jersey, where ye may live in peace. Here all is noise, self-seeking and time-service. If ye twain are not happy I will say the world should never have ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... creed, he fretted in bonds from which he could never get wholly free. Intrepid, independent, steadfast, frugal, prudent, dauntless, he trampled on the pride of kings with the pride of Lucifer. He was clannish to excess, painfully jealous of proximate rivals, self-centred if not self-seeking, fired by zeal and inflamed by almost mean emulations, resenting benefits as debts, ungenerous—with one exception, that of Goethe,—to his intellectual creditors; and, with reference to men and manners around him at variance with himself, violently intolerant. He bore a strange relation ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... Jerusalem entered on a bitterer stage when Agrippa died in 44 C.E. Influenced by his self-seeking band of freedmen-counselors, who saw in office in Palestine a golden opportunity for spoliation, Claudius placed the vacant kingdom again under the direct administration of Roman procurators, and appointed to the office a string of the ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... chapter. It is sufficient testimony to his worth, however, that he was able to win Charlotte Bronte in spite of the fact that his predecessors had inspired in her such hearty contempt. 'I think he must be like all the curates I have seen,' she writes of one; 'they seem to me a self-seeking, vain, ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... pamphlet itself Winstanley attempts to prove that the coming reign of Righteousness, and the overthrow of the Covetous, Self-Seeking Power, are entirely in accordance with the prophesies of the Scriptures, more especially with Revelation and John. In its final pages he vehemently protests against the continued union of Church and State, or rather against the continued ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... be said that he was less self-seeking than those who were with him in Virginia, making glory his aim rather than gain always; that he had a superior conception of what a colony should be, and how it should establish itself, and that his judgment of what was best was nearly always vindicated by the event. He was not the founder of ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... hard as those who win them, but deliberately adopt a line which makes the winning of them impossible, must be judged to have an aim in life other than personal advancement; whatever admixture of self-seeking may enter into the detail of their lives, their fundamental motive must be outside Self. The pioneers of Socialism, Anarchism, and Syndicalism have, for the most part, experienced prison, exile, and poverty, deliberately incurred because ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... love of Jesus and His brethren be not purely the motive of your gifts. Alas! you might not give your superfluities, but "bestow all your goods to feed the poor;" you might even "give your body to be burned" for them, and yet be utterly destitute of charity, if self-seeking, self-pleasing or self-ends guide you; and guide you they must, until the love of God be by the Holy Ghost shed abroad ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... He had saved the state in war and he remained in peace-time its principal mainstay. With his value as measured by these priceless services he compared the low estimate put upon him by those who continued to identify themselves with the state—the over-fed, lazy, self-seeking money-getters who reserved to themselves the fruits of ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... early years, Leopold's interest in the Congo was unselfish may or may not be granted, but, knowing him, as we now know him, as one of the shrewdest and, of speculators, the most unscrupulous, at the time of the Berlin Conference, his self-seeking may safely be accepted. Quietly, unostentatiously, he presented himself to its individual members as a candidate for the post of ...
— The Congo and Coasts of Africa • Richard Harding Davis
... sure, Sir Gilbert had his qualms of conscience, too, over having thus sent off Guy Waring, as he believed, to his grave in Cape Colony. He was not at heart a bad man, though he was pushing, and selfish, and self-seeking, and to a certain extent even—of late—unscrupulous. He had his bad half-hours every now and again with his own moral consciousness. But he had learnt to stifle his doubts and to keep down his terrors. After all, he had told Guy no more than the truth; and if Guy in his panic-terror chose to run ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... Vest was ever a firm and watchful guardian of the Yellowstone National Park, showing in this matter, as in many others, "the highest patriotism and statesmanship." For many years, from 1882 to 1894, Senator Vest remained the chief defender of a National possession that self-seeking persons in many parts of the country were trying to use for their ...
— The Discovery of Yellowstone Park • Nathaniel Pitt Langford
... that an aroused and passionate spirit could kindle in them. She saw what she had never beheld before indeed, but the meaning of which no woman ever yet mistook. It was her work—the assurance of her disgrace—the offspring of her self-seeking and unwomanly behavior; and yet, as she looked, the blood rose gradually to her pale cheeks, and stained them with a deeper and yet deeper spot of red; her glance caught a spark from his, and her fragile and drooping figure seemed to dilate and grow stately, as if inspired by some burst ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... would not serve. They had to piece it out with subordinate machinery, cumbrous, difficult to manage, ill-adapted to the original structure. Each limb of this subordinate machinery, moreover, was a point d'appui for insidious and self-seeking party leaders. ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... Lord's character forbids that we should think of him for a moment as devoted to the gathering of worldly wealth. He came to minister unto, not to serve himself. Self-seeking was foreign to his nature. A great truth was spoken by the scoffers. "He saved others, himself ...
— Usury - A Scriptural, Ethical and Economic View • Calvin Elliott
... virtue only of the petty people: there it is said "like and like," and "hand washeth hand":—they have neither the right nor the power for YOUR self-seeking! ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... a large class of our wealthy and cultivated people, that to go into public life is to descend to duties beneath them. They judge the men who occupy such positions with insulting severity, classing them in their minds as corrupt and self-seeking, than which nothing can be more childish or more imbecile. Any observer who has lived in the different grades of society will quickly renounce the puerile idea that sporting or intellectual pursuits are alone worthy of a gentleman's attention. This very political life, ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... tests that a youth must pass before he can get a degree, I found that they have no class lists, and discourage anything like competition among the students; this, indeed, they regard as self-seeking and unneighbourly. The examinations are conducted by way of papers written by the candidate on set subjects, some of which are known to him beforehand, while others are devised with a view of testing his general capacity ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... he had a passion for success. Whether it was breaking a horse, or reclaiming land, or fighting Indians, or saving a state, whatever he set his hand to, that he carried through to the end. With him there never was any shadow of turning back. When, without any self-seeking, he was placed at the head of the Revolution, he made up his mind that he would carry it through everything to victory, if victory were possible. Death or a prison could stop him, but neither defeat nor neglect, and still less the forces of ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... sagacity knew that if these untutored fishermen were to light up Europe and Asia with the torch of the gospel they must have an experience themselves which would transform them from self-seeking, cowardly men to giants ...
— The Heart-Cry of Jesus • Byron J. Rees
... out his penance. Softened and exalted, he little realised that the penance was unnecessary and self-imposed, that the mood which now took on the heroic tone of self-sacrifice was still a mood of self-seeking, that his love for Lena was selfish now as it had always been, and utterly unworthy of the devotion he received. It was true that he loved her, but he loved himself and his ambitions and revenges more. Her forgiveness was but permission to indulge them to the end. Nevertheless, when he found Felicity ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... the public economy of a people are the workings of self-interest so apparent as in the determination of prices. When the price of a commodity is once fixed by the conflict of opposing interests,(601) the self-seeking of every individual dictates that he should thereby gain as much as possible of the goods of others, and lose as little as possible of his own. In this struggle, the victory is generally to the stronger, and the price is higher or lower, according to the superiority of ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... for England and France. As for Germany, the prospects of the Netherlands were not flattering. The Reforming spirit had grown languid, from various causes. The self-seeking motives of many Protestant princes had disgusted the nobles. Was that the object of the bloody wars of religion, that a few potentates should be enabled to enrich themselves by confiscating the broad lands and accumulated treasures of the Church? Had the creed of Luther been ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... wandered among the ways of men. They saw poverty and misery and pain, which came of the evil which man had done upon the earth, and were his punishment, and could be cured by nothing but by the return of each to his Father, and the giving up of all self-worship and self-seeking and sin. But amid all the confusion and among those who had fallen the lowest they found not one who was forsaken, whose name the Father had forgotten, or who was not made to pause in his appointed moment, and to sit upon his throne and hear the pleadings before him of the great advocates ...
— The Little Pilgrim: Further Experiences. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... BROOKE, of an enthusiastic, impulsive, unselfish and almost Quixotic disposition, who wore his heart on his sleeve and let his opinions of men and their actions be freely known, could not but have incurred the enmity of many meaner, self-seeking minds. The Commission, after hearing all that could be brought against him, found that there was nothing proved, but it was not deemed advisable that Sir JAMES should continue to act as the British representative in Borneo ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... fleeting impressions, in one picture—and failed. He had made himself very agreeable, the single time she had met him; but.... There was Richard's opinion of him: Richard did not like him or trust him; he thought him unscrupulous in business, cold and self-seeking. Poor, poor little Agnes! That such a misfortune should befall just her! Stranger still that she, Polly, should be mixed up ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... high As love which Heaven with single eye Considers. Equal and entire, Therein benevolence, desire, Elsewhere ill-join'd or found apart, Become the pulses of one heart, Which now contracts, and now dilates, And, both to the height exalting, mates Self-seeking to self-sacrifice. Nay, in its subtle paradise (When purest) this one love unites All modes of these two opposites, All balanced in accord so rich Who may determine which is which? Chiefly God's Love does in it live, And nowhere else so sensitive; For each is all that the other's ...
— The Victories of Love - and Other Poems • Coventry Patmore
... how little people see or think of it. They just live and forget that beneath them lie their fathers' bones. They forget that in some few days—perhaps more, perhaps less—other unknown creatures will be standing above their forgotten bones, as blind, as self-seeking, as puffed up with the pride of the brief moment, and filled with the despair of their failure, the glory of their success, as they ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... the earnest, sincere inquirer there was authority enough. In His acts, an open-minded doctor of the law could read the stamp of God's approval. The ear open to learn, not waxed up by self-seeking plans, or filled with gold dust, heard the voice of divine approval out of the clouds, or in His presence ...
— Quiet Talks about Jesus • S. D. Gordon
... dressed in a sailor suit, when you went hunting pictures. Yet, for all the damnability of what I now witness, I was never quieter in my heart. To have surrendered to an imperative self-denial brings a peace which self-seeking ...
— Carry On • Coningsby Dawson
... in 1872.) The Fatality of Self-Seeking in Editors and Authors. (Printed with the "Miscellanies" in the "Recollections ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... between private and public ownership, it seems to me, is mainly in the natural selection of those most competent to foresee the future and to direct labor into the most productive channels, and the greater poignancy of the illusion of self-seeking under which the private owner works. The real problem, under socialism as well as under individualism, is to ascertain, under the external economic and inevitable conditions, the equilibrium of social ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... table, and these exiles on a foreign shore extend the warmest of welcomes to the stray bird of passage, who will soon leave behind only the shadowy "remembrance of a guest who tarrieth but a day." The idea so familiar to the self-seeking spirit, that "it is not worth while" to trouble about a passing acquaintance, finds no echo in this hospitable coterie. To the visitor, the bright hours of that afternoon, ten thousand miles away from England, remain as an evergreen memory of genuine human sympathy, the ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings |
