"Self-assertion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... lowered—for her ear; there was deference in his smile. But somehow Lydia was conscious of a note of stormy self-assertion in him, which was new to her; something strong and stubborn, which refused to ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of the plains and the wild crags and peaks that rear their heads heavenward, above which the eagles soar. Nature beckoned with widespread arms to her child to come—the manhood within him cried for release, for the recognition of the individual's right to self-assertion. ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... everything, is a woman of high rank and certainly an old lady, before whose gray hairs Scripture commands us to rise, something hovered around her lips—they are ripe for kisses—something which it is not easy to find exactly the right words to describe: a blending of repugnance, self-assertion, and resistance. She suffered it to remain on her beautiful face only a few minutes, but it gave me reason enough to urge you to sound a warning if his Majesty's late love should render him more yielding ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... work of government. It had always existed in one form or another, extending back continuously to the "witenagemot" of the Anglo-Saxons. During the reign of Henry the name "Parliament" was coming to be more regularly applied to it, its meetings were more frequent and its self-assertion more vigorous. But most important of all, a new class of members was added to it. In 1265, in addition to the nobles and great prelates, the sheriffs were ordered to see that two knights were selected from each of their shires, and two citizens from each of a long list of the larger towns, to attend ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney
... I quite agree with you about everything except about Silberbach. That is what I cannot get over. You have not enough self-assertion, my dear. I am certain Silberbach is some freak of Herr von Walden's—most unpractical man. Why, I really am not at all sure that you will get anything ...
— Four Ghost Stories • Mrs. Molesworth
... gratitude. She had found an object in life, had splendidly emerged from her old sensations of incompleteness and inferiority. No longer that morbid humility struggling in vain to transform itself into a violent self-assertion. Not since she had become the virtual creatrix of beauty, even ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... end as part of the old regime which appears to them an elaborate unreality V It is exceedingly difficult to do so, at school especially, as in many cases their whole family consents to regard them as extinct, and only when startled at the over-growth of their girls' unmannerly roughness and self-assertion they send them to school "to have their manners attended to"; but then it is too late. The only way to form manners is to teach them from the beginning as a part of religion, as indeed they are. Devotion ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... be supposed that the commoner sort of dreamers are never jealous of these figments of their fancy. They are often so, and rouse themselves to self-assertion as frequently as our Better Element flings off the yoke of Tammany. At a fair, open to any who would pay, for some forgotten good object, such as is always engaging the energies of society, I saw moving among the paying guests the tall form of a nobleman who ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... proportion. There should have been a remedy for that sort of thing. And yet there is no remedy. Behind this minute instance of life's hazards Heyst sees the power of blind destiny. Besides, Heyst in his fine detachment had lost the habit of asserting himself. I don't mean the courage of self-assertion, either moral or physical, but the mere way of it, the trick of the thing, the readiness of mind and the turn of the hand that come without reflection and lead the man to excellence in life, in art, in crime, in virtue and for the matter ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... infinite possibilities of beauty and joy. Your life is, as ever, a sacrifice; all life is, as ever, a sacrifice; but it is a sacrifice to man—a sacrifice to the best. Once your task was self-abnegation, and that was easy; now it is self-assertion, and that is hard. Knowing what you are, you will dare to live, not for your own sake, but that strength and beauty may be in the world. Knowing what you might be, you choose infinite toil for your portion, ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... long-forgotten Smilash, she had been astonished, and had not known what to do. So, to avoid doing anything improper, she had stood stilly silent and done nothing, as the custom of English ladies in such cases is. Subsequently, his unconscious self-assertion had wrought with her as with the others, and her intention of snubbing him had faded into the limbo of projects abandoned without trial. Erskine alone was free from the influence of the intruder. He wished himself elsewhere; but beside Gertrude the presence or absence ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... written a book that teaches, of all others, self-renunciation, but the way they taught it was self-assertion. The Bible begins with a meek Moses who teaches by saying "The Lord said unto Moses," and it comes to its climax in a lowly and radiant man who dies on a cross to say "I and the Father are one." The ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... Julius, "that generous forbearance, patience, fortitude, and self-renunciation, belong almost naturally to the true wife and mother, and are her great glory; but would she not be stripped of them by self-assertion as the ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... names of their commanders, by order from the War Department. This peculiar affectation was but one form in which the temper of the Southern people was manifested—a temper which revolted against complete loss of individuality, and was prone to self-assertion. It is a temper which ought to be characteristic of a free and high spirited people, which, while for prudential reasons it will consent to severe restraints, seeks to mark the fact that the restraint is self-imposed. Few will doubt, upon reflection, that this feeling could have been ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... Hafiz. It gives him the opportunity of the most playful self-assertion, always gracefully, sometimes almost in the fun of Falstaff, sometimes with feminine delicacy. He tells us, "The angels in heaven were lately learning his last pieces." He says, "The fishes shed their pearls, out of ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Salaman and Absal • Omar Khayyam and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... and hustled about by such men as Jack Wentworth. The wages of sin had long been bitter enough, though he had neither any hope of freeing himself, nor any wish to do so; but he took up a grumbling tone of self-assertion as soon as he had an opening. "The parson treats me like a gentleman—like what I used to be," he repeated, coming into the light, and drawing a chair towards the table. "My name is Wodehouse—it's my own name that I have signed after all, ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... door passed unheard, or translated itself into the remembrance of far-off woodpeckers. When at last it asserted itself more distinctly, she started up with a flushed cheek and opened the door. On the threshold stood a woman the self-assertion and audacity of whose dress were in singular contrast to ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... Whistler, in my opinion, was the most important; Whistler taught him that men of genius stand apart and are laws unto themselves; showed him, too, that all qualities—singularity of appearance, wit, rudeness even, count doubly in a democracy. But neither his own talent nor the bold self-assertion learned from Whistler helped him to earn money; the conquest of London seemed further off and more improbable than ever. Where Whistler had missed the laurel how could he or indeed anyone be sure ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... lecture on the duty of loyalty and the sinfulness of contention with the powers that be. His way of putting the matter neither irritated Hyacinth, like the flamboyant Imperialism of the Trinity students, nor drove him into self-assertion, like Dr. Henry's contemptuous reasonableness. Still, he felt bound to make some sort of defence of the opinions which ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... I beg your Worship's pardon. We do not always get punished for disobeying the laws of nature. Nature's strongest force is self-assertion, and excessive self-assertion is vanity, ...
— Duty, and other Irish Comedies • Seumas O'Brien
... generals had with Mr. Lincoln. I was rather young in appearance —looking even under than over thirty-three years—but five feet five inches in height, and thin almost to emaciation, weighing only one hundred and fifteen pounds. If I had ever possessed any self-assertion in manner or speech, it certainly vanished in the presence of the imperious Secretary, whose name at the time was the synonym of all that was cold and formal. I never learned what Mr. Stanton's first impressions of me were, and his guarded and rather calculating manner gave at this time no intimation ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein." The new heart, and the right spirit,—the change, not in the mere external behavior but, in the very disposition and inclination of the soul,—excludes every jot and tittle of self-assertion, every particle of ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... the method was fundamentally artificial. A sentimentalism arose, which is in art what the metaphysical method is in philosophy. Yet a literature was born of it, whose freshness, force, elevation, and, above all, a self-assertion and peculiar aspiring freedom that have never been surpassed, still exert an irresistible attraction, even over minds that are furthest removed from the moral storm and disorder, and the confused intellectual ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 3: Byron • John Morley
... own; possibly also to wait for others' deeds before her own doing. In her small, delicate mouth, which had perhaps hardly settled down to its matured curves, there was a gentleness that might hinder sufficient self-assertion for her own good. She had well-formed eyebrows which, had her portrait been painted, would probably have been done in Prout's or ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... that some of these ebullitions have bordered closely on what we may be forgiven for describing as indecorum. But the motive was undoubtedly a generous instinct of self-assertion. Ever since the days of CAIN, the first great self-expressionist, there have always been richly-organised natures to whom even fratricide is preferable to the dull routine of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, June 9, 1920 • Various
... subjected. The part which Lincoln played, at their head, I have endeavored to depict in his life. The manner in which he controlled without commanding, his rare combination of confidence in his own judgment with entire absence of self-assertion, his instinctive appreciation of the meaning and bearing of facts, his capacity to recognize the precise time until which action should be postponed and then to know that action must be taken, suggesting the ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... except his basal ideas, he was pliable to a degree. He could be talked into almost any concession of interest. He once told Herndon he thanked God that he had not been born a woman because he found it so hard to refuse any request made of him. His outer easiness, his lack of self-assertion,—as most people understand self-assertion,—persist in an amusing group of anecdotes of the circuit. Though he was a favorite with the company at every tavern, those little demagogues, the tavern-keepers, quickly found out that ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... of the drama of human life is the necessity, laid upon every man who comes into the world, of discovering the mean between self-assertion and self-restraint suited to his character and his circumstances. And the eternally tragic aspect of the drama lies in this: that the problem set before us is one the elements of which can be but imperfectly known, and of which even an approximately right solution ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... York; and the aggressively dressed and too abundantly jewelled female companions of these men, heavily built, heavy browed, with faces marked in hard lines, and with aggressive eyes schooled to look out upon the world with a necessarily emphatic self-assertion, were of a type that, without special knowledge of American ways, was entirely recognizable. Albeit Miss Lee, having spent much time in the mixed society of various European watering-places, was not ...
— The Uncle Of An Angel - 1891 • Thomas A. Janvier
... character is probably derived in its germ from the Gothic blood of their ancestors. Their intense self-assertion has been, in the Northern races, modified by the progress of intelligence and the restraints of municipal law into a spirit of sturdy self-respect and a disinclination to submit to wrong. The Goths of Spain ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... two hostesses and their humbler though proud dependent. The social evolution of Mrs. Bradley and Louise Macy from some previous Minty was neither remote nor complete; the self-sufficient independence, ease, and quiet self-assertion were alike in each. The superior position was still too recent and accidental for either to resent or criticise qualities that were common to both. At least, this was what he thought when not abandoning himself to the gratification of ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte
... years ago, perhaps, when its nails were not rust, and really held it tight—instead of, as now, merely countenancing its wish to remain from old habit? It may have been so frightened in its timid youth; but if so, surely the robust self-assertion of its straight start for Gattrell's had in it something of contempt for the poor old board, coupled with its well-known intention of turning to the left and going slap through the wood the minute you (or it) got there. It may even have twitted that board with its ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... theatre where the decaying Latin system is falling, under Anglo-Saxon self-assertion, the stern logic of events teaches Don Miguel better lessons. His wild riders may as well sheathe their useless swords as ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... minute, when the little mirror that sloped forward from the wall, showed him a passing portrait of his grand wig and toggery. And it was pleasant to observe how the old fellows unconsciously deferred to this temporary self-assertion, and would call him, not Tom, nor Toole, but 'doctor,' or 'Doctor Toole,' when the fit ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... admit the existence of these questions or else asserts that, as insoluble, they are also negligible problems. To all such stupid moralizing it prefers the click of the castanets! The law, then, of this naturalism always and everywhere is the law of rebellion, of ruthless self-assertion, of whim and impulse, ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... between these two passionate aspiring spirits, who never attained to Goethe's serenity. Both were melancholy, and fled from their fellows; both strove for perfect liberty and unlimited self-assertion; both felt with the wild and uproarious side of Nature, and found idyllic scenes marred by ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... under the trees into a man-made edifice. It may have a deep indigo background or a dull red—like the shades of moss or like last year's fallen leaves—but over it all is abundantly sprinkled dainty bluebells, anemones, daisies, all the spring beauties in joyous self-assertion and happy mingling. With such flowery guides to mark the way the path to slumberland is followed. Once within the bedroom, the poppies of the hangings spread drowsy influence, and the happy sleeper passes into unconsciousness, passes ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... of mist, driven and dispersed by day's last flash of self-assertion, lay heaped and tumbled in the valleys, and the mountains stood knee-deep in an opalescent sea of foam. It was as though Nature, in a mood of capricious kindliness, had rent the veil, that mortals might share in the ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... head and gave Pere Beret a look of frank welcome, which at the same time shot a beam of willful self-assertion. ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... a desire to lessen the pain of the world. All her egotism, her self-assertion, her formless ambitions had got up, or down, to that,—to comfort the comfortless, to keep evil away from little children, to let those who were in any sort of a prison go free. Yet she knew very well that all of this would lack its perfect meaning unless there was some one ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... encouraged, but there should be no attempt to drive it. "Above all things, respect the public," he said to his subordinates. Nothing so much stimulates the disapprobation of the unbiassed as extravagant applause. Reaction certainly ensues; men begin to hiss by way of self-assertion, and out of self-respect. They resent an attempt to coerce their opinion, and to compel a favourable verdict in spite of themselves. The attempt to encore the prologue to "Mr. H." was most unwise. It was a strong ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... upon technical questions of railway-building and finance, which made demands upon all their resources and knowledge. In that conference he gave especial attention to the snub-souled financier who had sneered at his love of Nature. He tied his critic up in knots of self-assertion and bad logic which presently he deftly, deliberately and skilfully untied, to the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... defiant, and from pride, perhaps, rather than principle, she scorned no baseness so heartily as duplicity. Therefore she hesitated now and changed colour, looking guilty and confused, but taking refuge, as usual, in self-assertion. ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... there was room for it. You have described a callow fool, a self-sufficient ass, a mere human tumble-bug.... imagining that he is remodeling the world and is entirely capable of doing it right. Ignorance, intolerance, egotism, self-assertion, opaque perception, dense and pitiful chuckle-headedness—and an almost pathetic unconsciousness of it all. That is what I was at 19 and 20; and that is what the average Southerner is at 60 today. Northerners, too, of a certain grade. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Nell, Wells-Brown, and Douglass, a new period of self-assertion and self-development dawned. To be sure, ultimate freedom and assimilation was the ideal before the leaders, but the assertion of the manhood rights of the Negro by himself was the main reliance, and John Brown's raid was the extreme of its logic. After the war and ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... brilliant talker; he was admittedly more a talker than a conversationalist. But this quality had nothing in common with self-assertion or love of display. He had too much respect for the acquirements of other men to wish to impose silence on those who were competent to speak; and he had great pleasure in listening to a discussion on any subject in which he was interested, ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... is the specific expression of the general consciousness which takes experience as mine. The function of the ego is therefore called abhimana (self-assertion). From this again come the five cognitive senses of vision, touch, smell, taste, and hearing, the five cognitive senses of speech, handling, foot-movement, the ejective sense and the generative sense; the pra@nas ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... inclosed these lines, Lady Janet addressed it, as usual, to "Miss Grace Roseberry." She was just rising to ring the bell, when the maid appeared with a message from the boudoir. The woman's tones and looks showed plainly that she had been made the object of Grace's insolent self-assertion ...
— The New Magdalen • Wilkie Collins
... see a man trample upon opinions and feelings as easily and carelessly as he would upon the grass, and go on his way undisturbed, but it is more painful to see faltering, trembling incapacity for self-assertion, especially before subordinates. Mr. Furze could not have suffered more than two or three days' inconvenience if Orkid Jim had been discharged, but a vague terror haunted him of something which might possibly happen. Partly this distressing ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... she spoke and led the way to the dining-room alone. Dr. Maclure absently offered his arm to Miss Petterick. He was puzzled to know what this sudden fit of self-assertion, combined with an unaccountable burst of high spirits on Beth's part, might portend. To conceal a certain uneasiness, he became extra facetious, not to say coarse. There was a public ball coming off in ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... though it was no fault of his. He seemed to be busy with prize competitions, and I saw less and less of him as the weeks went by and the earth cracked and grew ripe to spring, and the buds swelled in their sheaths. He did not care to read or talk of what he had read, and there was a new ring of self-assertion in his voice. I hardly cared to remind him of the galley when we met; but Charlie alluded to it on every occasion, always as a story from which money ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... Wordsworth, "stern daughter of the voice of God," has two aspects, on each of which he dwells with a persistent iteration. The first is Surrender to something higher and wider than ourselves. That he has nowhere laid the line between this abnegation and the self-assertion which in his heroes he commends, partly means that correct theories of our complex life are impossible; but Matthew Arnold's criticism, that his Ethics "are made paradoxical by his attack on Happiness, which ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... own thought barbs it. [1] It is our pride that makes another's criticism rankle, our self-will that makes another's deed offensive, our egotism that feels hurt by another's self-assertion. Well may we feel wounded by our own faults; but we can hardly afford [5] to be miserable for the ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... Alden and with herself. Why couldn't the man go to sleep? It must be past midnight, now, and she would walk, if she wanted to. Defiantly and in a triumph of self-assertion, she went to the open window and peered out into the stillness, illumined by neither moon nor stars. The night had the suffocating quality of hangings ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... with which the question was enforced deprived her of the last vestige of dignity and self-assertion. She relapsed into the mental condition of a juvenile culprit undergoing correction. Now that she was caught, she no longer thought of her offense as venial. The grasp of her captor seemed to put an end to all possible hairsplitting on that point, and ...
— Hooking Watermelons - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... clasped hands; there was a faint suggestion of antagonism in his attitude, which was quite devoid of servility. Christian, however, remained seated, raising his keen grey eyes to the Provincial's face with a quiet self-assertion which the Jesuit ignored. ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... schoolmistress,—and, upon my word, her tones were so very musical, that I almost wished I had said three voices instead of two, and not made the unpatriotic remark above reported.—Oh, I said, it had so much WOMAN in it,— MULIEBRITY, as well as FEMINEITY;—no self-assertion, such as free suffrage introduces into every word and movement; large, vigorous nature, running back to those huge-limbed Germans of Tacitus, but subdued by the reverential training and tuned by the kindly culture of fifty generations. Sharp business habits, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... to manners the transition is obvious and direct. Be the explanation what it may, the whole atmosphere of this school is evidently fatal to selfishness and self-assertion; and in such an atmosphere good manners will spring up spontaneously among the children, and will scarcely need to be inculcated, for the essence of courtesy is forgetfulness of self and consideration of others in the smaller affairs of social life. The general ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... strange gentleness. He told me, in that manner of his, that he would take only a minute of my time, and while I sat perfectly tongue-tied before him, as if I were a schoolgirl, this is what he said, without any passionate declaration, or any self-assertion. ...
— At Plattsburg • Allen French
... other member of the party of whom we will make mention just now, because she appears again somewhat prominently in our tale. This was a little elderly female who seemed utterly destitute of the very common human attribute of self-assertion, and in whose amiable, almost comical, countenance, one expression seemed to overbear and obliterate all others, namely that of gushing good-will to man and beast! Those who did not know Reni-Mamba thought her an amiable imbecile. Those who knew ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne
... nest buzzing about your ears," exclaimed Mary Wilson, disregarding all the rules of Parliamentary law which Dr. Kitchell tried to teach them. She was on her feet, moving to the front, talking as she went. "I really haven't the self-assertion to walk up to strange students and tell them the error of their ways. To me, that course of action savors too much of conceit of our own virtues. The best we can do is to be perfectly honorable about the examinations. ...
— Elizabeth Hobart at Exeter Hall • Jean K. Baird
... the feeling of self-assertion that rises against the self-complacency of the English," said the Warden. "Nothing else; for what else have you become the subject of this noble weakness of patriotism? You cannot love anything beyond the soil of your own estate; or in your case, if your heart ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... poor child, she had never seen such a man. He had, or seemed to have, all the high-bred grace of Frank, and yet he was cast in a manlier mould; he had just enough of his nation's proud self-assertion to make a woman bow before him as before a superior, and yet tact enough to let it very seldom degenerate into that boastfulness of which the Spaniards were then so often and so justly accused. He had marvels to tell by flood and field as many ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... and his duties leaves but little room for individualism or insolent self-assertion. No one can divorce himself from his fellow-men and their interests without lowering and debasing his own vocation in life, and becoming enfeebled and stunted in his own development. "The supreme object of the college," says President M. E. Gates, "is to give an education for power ...
— Colleges in America • John Marshall Barker
... protest against the proceedings used towards him: it was a continued colloquy with that divine purity with which he sought complete reunion; it was the outpouring of self-abasement; it was one long cry for inward renovation. No lingering echoes of the old vehement self-assertion, "Look at my work, for it is good, and those who set their faces against it are the children of the devil!" The voice of Sadness tells him, "God placed thee in the midst of the people even as if thou hadst ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... bright neckcloth, or the high pickardil—which may vary with the time or the individual, you will ever find clearly displayed to your eyes the obvious and unmistakable spiritual reason for and cause of the dandy—and it is always self-assertion pushed beyond ...
— The Story of a New York House • Henry Cuyler Bunner
... might be wedded in very earnest. He was masterful and possessed self-assurance; but what man can lead and control without these qualities? His self-assurance was less than his self-control, and his instinct for self-assertion had nearly always been counted by a kind heart. It seemed to her that she had never known a man who balanced reason and feeling more judicially, or better ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... must stress this—is not a virtue of youth; it is not one of the virtues which ripen quickly, but is of slow development and delayed maturity. Modesty we should expect in a maiden, and lack of self-assertion; and perhaps obedience of a sort. But those do not constitute the virtue of humility. We are humble when we have lost self; and Mary's wondering answer reveals the fact that she is not thinking ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... of self-assertion was Clare, so prompt at the call of whoever needed him, so quiet yet so quick, so silent in his sympathetic ministrations, so studious and so capable, that, after two years, Miss Tempest began to feel she ought ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... world as a great man's wife—and a good and beautiful woman—was always conceded to her with due honor, even by the most impertinent among the highly placed of her own sex, without any necessity for self-assertion on her part whatever—without assumption ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... is always a grand sensation to me; it is like cutting through the isthmus and letting the two oceans swim into each other's laps. The trouble is, it is so difficult to let out the whole American nature without its self-assertion seeming to take a personal character. But I never enjoy the Englishman so much as when he talks of church and king like Manco Capac among the Peruvians. Then you get the real British flavor, which the cosmopolite ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... which nations defend their rights, as distinct from their interest. The American people, then poor, and habituated to colonial dependence, failed to create for themselves in due time the power necessary to self-assertion; nor did they as a nation realize, what men like John Adams and Gouverneur Morris saw and preached, that in the complicated tangle of warring interests which constitutes every contemporary situation, the influence ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... answer; and Matilda's eyes were all glittering, while her little head took its inexpressible air of self-assertion. ...
— The House in Town • Susan Warner
... not, because you're older," said Moppet, disgusted at this superfluous self-assertion on her sister's part. "I am always good at parties—ain't I, Uncle Tom?" turning an ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... be content with sour bread or a soiled table-cloth; never again will they mistake arrogant self-assertion for good-breeding, or a dull, half-furnished "living-room" for a cheerful parlor. They have all been taught the virtue which lies in mother earth, and the fragrance she gives to her flowers; they know the health and power given by the labor ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... Estes Park. There is no trail, and horses have never been across. We started from camp at ten, and spent four hours in searching for the trail. Chalmers tried gulch after gulch again, his self-assertion giving way a little after each failure; sometimes going east when we should have gone west, always being brought up by a precipice or other impossibility. At last he went off by himself, and returned rejoicing, saying he had found the trail; and soon, sure enough, we were on a well-defined old ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... observe children. It is fascinating to watch the individuality in them struggling for self-assertion. I could see that the other children's things had tremendous charm for the red-haired boy, especially a toy theatre, in which he was so anxious to take a part that he resolved to fawn upon the other children. He smiled and began to play with them. His one and only apple he handed over ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... whose pen has already been powerful in exposing its absurdity. "In our general literature," says Bayne, "the principle we have enunciated undergoes modification, and, for the most part, is by no means expressed as pantheism. We refer to that spirit of self-assertion, which lies so deep in what may be called the religion of literature, to that wide-spread tendency to regard all reform of the individual man as being an evolution of some hidden nobleness, or an appeal to a perfect internal light or ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... to Mary. His sullen, black selfishness, stretching out hands like talons in eagerness to get, makes more radiant, and is itself made darker by, her shining deed of love. Goodness always rouses evil to self-assertion, and the other Evangelists connect Mary's action with Judas's final treachery as part of its impelling cause. They also show that his specious objection, by its apparent common sense and charitableness, found assent in the disciples. Three hundred pence worth of good ointment wasted ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... mention, however, of the names of a few mutual acquaintances, of unexceptional 'blue blood,' and the fact that both ladies had visited Europe, establishing topics of conversation, they presently warmed into cordiality. I found them well informed and agreeable, less demonstrative in their self-assertion than their Northern sisterhood, but latently wilful, and assumptive of a superior elevation hardly justified by their general air of languid refinement. It reminded me, on the whole, of what I had heard complacently eulogized in Charleston as a tendency toward 'Orientalism' on the part of the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... own life clogged his feet; to act was like wading in treacle. He had an impulse of utter wild rebellion, of ferocious self-assertion. Then: ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... case inevitable, becomes a peril to every community where the rival assemblies can appeal to nationalist sentiment. The sore gets poisoned. What under happier conditions might be no more than a passing storm of rhetoric, forgotten as soon as ended, will gather strength with time. The appetite for self-assertion, inherent in every assembly, and not likely to be absent from one composed of orators so brilliantly gifted as the Irish, will take the menacing form of an international quarrel. The appeal will no longer be to precedents and ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... deprecating and timid were the tones, that almost without an effort of the imagination she could picture the little man's blushes and his half-sidling method of delivery. At this supreme moment his littleness and lack of self-assertion jarred on her mood. "What're you doin' there? Thought ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White
... than Lopez. Every word and every act, every look and every touch, had been loving. Had she known the world better she might have felt, perhaps, that something was expected where so much was given. Perhaps a rougher manner, with some little touch of marital self-assertion, might be a safer commencement of married life,—safer to the wife as coming from her husband. Arthur Fletcher by this time would have asked her to bring him his slippers, taking infinite pride in having his little behests obeyed by so sweet ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... storekeeper, already disgraced in the eyes of respectable citizens because of his desertion from the British army and his reckless disregard for the rights of his creditors; for then the debtor was not allowed to retain his respectability, if he failed dishonestly. Furthermore, his self-assertion was recognized as too often a display of arrogance and vanity. Brown's sister Elizabeth had married Oliver Arnold, attorney-general of Rhode Island, a cousin of Benedict, and it is reasonable to suppose that he was well informed of Arnold's ...
— Colonel John Brown, of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, the Brave Accuser of Benedict Arnold • Archibald Murray Howe
... of his power was that of a despot. He was doing great things for ministers, and took care that they should know it. He was proud of his self-assertion, proud of being rude. Great men, and great ladies too, who wished for his acquaintance, had to make the first advances. He caused Lady Burlington to burst into tears by rudely ordering her to sing. ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... as my diligent revision can give it, "Hide And Seek" now appeals, after an interval of seven years, for another hearing. I cannot think it becoming—especially in this age of universal self-assertion—to state the grounds on which I believe my book to be worthy of gaining more attention than it obtained, through accidental circumstances, when it was first published. Neither can I consent to shelter myself under the favorable opinions which many of my brother writers—and notably, the ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... their restraint on Buckley Simmons, her present companion. His immobile face, with its heavy, good features and slow-kindling comprehension, was at all times expressive of loud self-assertion, insatiable curiosity, facile confidence; from his clean shaven lips fell always satisfied comment, pronouncement, impatient opinion. If Hollidew was the richest man in Greenstream Valentine Simmons was a close second. Indeed, one might be found ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... at Rome, where there is so much self-assertion, such unbridled freedom, so much licence allowed to all men;—where there are so many courts of appeal open, so many means of help, where the people have so much power and the Senate so much authority; how grateful beyond ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins
... defend himself against the attacks of other dogs. He seemed to have forgotten how to bite. He has been known to let a smaller dog draw blood from him without making the least attempt to use his own teeth in retaliation. He appeared to have lost the instinct of self-assertion, and walked abroad protected solely, but sufficiently, by his ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... Colored Citizens of the World, but in Particular and very Expressly to those of the United States of America. Written in Boston, State of Massachusetts, September 28, 1820. Second edition. (Boston, 1830.) Walker was a Negro who hoped to arouse his race to self-assertion. ...
— The Education Of The Negro Prior To 1861 • Carter Godwin Woodson
... ancestry of Gen. LEE were conspicuous. He inherited from his great father a disposition that was frank, manly, and chivalrous. Although with these distinguished surroundings, Gen. LEE had no undue pride, reserve, or self-assertion. His nature, on the contrary, was eminently amiable, generous, and sympathetic, and at the same time he was dignified, ...
— Memorial Addresses on the Life and Character of William H. F. Lee (A Representative from Virginia) • Various
... strongest contrast to the knight. He fills up, as it were, by his gentleness and self-sacrifice, what is wanting in the manhood of the knight, the slave too often of his own fierceness and self-assertion. The hermit rebukes him when he sins, heals him when he is wounded, stays his hand in some mad murderous duel, such as was too common in days when any two armed horsemen meeting on road or lawn ran blindly at each other in the mere lust of fighting, as boars or stags might run. Sometimes ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... said, she and Gertrude had bitter words and a parting. Now the same thing stared her in the face again. This lover was too obtuse to be stung by the fine arts of coquetry that lengthened practice had brought to perfection. In all the bravery of self-assertion, he did not know when he was beaten; and so he fought against the intangible spear-points with which Miss Lawrence ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... expected that sooner or later he would join in the conversation. He would have had a place in our minds. We may assume that in the minds of the company around Johnson he had no place. He sat forgotten, overlooked; so that his self-assertion startled every one just as on Boswell's page it startles us. In Johnson's massive and magnetic presence only some very remarkable man, such as Mr. Burke, was sharply distinguishable from the rest. Others might, if they had something in them, stand out ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... Hand in hand with this rationalizing tendency, indeed only another phase of the same phenomenon, is the striving for self-assertion of the individual, which is the mark of all progress towards higher civilization. The contrapuntal mass or motet expressed the commonwealth of the Church, where the individual disappears, absorbed in the community. The ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... yearning that came from some deep part of her, that was selfless and exalted, Thea had a hard kind of cockiness, a determination to get ahead. Well, there are passages in life when that fierce, stubborn self-assertion will stand its ground after the nobler feeling is overwhelmed and ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... 1876 contains better work than these pieces of self-assertion. The two love-lyrics Natural Magic and Magical Nature have each of them a surprise of beauty; the one tells of the fairy-tale of love, the other of its inward glow and gem-like stability. Bifurcation is characteristic of the writer; the woman who chooses ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... in the old man's frank, dignified tone of grave reproof that at once impressed Ebbo with a sense of the true superiority of that wise and venerable old age to his own petulant baronial self-assertion. He had both head and heart to feel the burgher's victory, and with a deep blush, though not without dignity, he answered, "Truly, sir, my mother has ever taught us to look up to you as her ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... sacred plant which God had planted, and which no rage of man could trample out—let us believe, I say, that that sight taught at last to the buccaneers of the old world that there was a purer manliness, a loftier heroism, than the ferocious self-assertion of the Berserker, even the heroism of humility, gentleness, self-restraint, self-sacrifice. That there was a strength which was made perfect in weakness; a glory, not of the sword but of the cross. ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... favourable for women. As I have again and again affirmed, the collective motive was more considered by the mothers, and must be sought in the organisation of the maternal clan. But since individual desires can never be wholly subdued, and the male nature is ever directed towards self-assertion, the clan, organised on the rights of the mothers, had always to contend with an opposing force. At one stage the clan was able to absorb the family, but only under exceptional conditions could such ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... head walked on the other side of him, while Mr. Thorold led me on in this fashion. I do not know how far. I do not know what he said or what I answered, except in bits. I know that he made me answer him. I was not capable of the least self-assertion. What startled me at last out of this abstraction, was the sudden fear that we might be observed. I looked up and said something about it. Only to my confusion; for Thorold laughed at me, softly, but how he laughed - at me. ...
— Daisy in the Field • Elizabeth Wetherell
... a politic thing in the Government to seek to brand the Indian, in perpetuity, as a minor in the eye of the law? Repressing in him anything like self-assertion, is not, to hold him such, fatal to his self-respect? Does it not make him doubt his manhood entirely? Does it really, save in the single respect of the restraining of his drinking, conserve his ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... the suffering sage. "Of course...it arises from...a volcanic eruption! ... and the mystery of the red river.. is.. solved!" Here an irrepressible moan of anguish broke through his heroic effort at equanimity;—"It is NOT a phenomenon!".. and a gleam of obstinate self-assertion lit up his poor glazing eyes, "Nothing is phenonmenal! ... only I am not able...to explain. ... I have no time...no time...to analyze.. my ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... Jack could not honestly dissent; Mr. Sawyer's looks were not, in a sense, in his favour. It was not so much that he was downright ugly—perhaps that would have mattered less—but he was poor looking. He had no presence, no self-assertion, and his very anxiety to conciliate gave his manner a nervous indecision, in which the boys saw nothing but cause for ridicule. He did not understand his pupils, and still less did they understand him. But all the same he was a capital ...
— Grandmother Dear - A Book for Boys and Girls • Mrs. Molesworth
... frightened. This sort of thing was new to her, too. She shuffled her packages on to a seat and followed the footman to the luggage. Sir Nigel continued rating the coachman. Any form of violent self-assertion was welcome to him at any time, and when he was irritated he found it a distinct luxury to kick a dog or throw a boot at a cat. The springs of the omnibus, he argued, had no right to be broken when it was known that he was coming ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... courts and ceremonies, and her mother said that the first presentation in the family would be of Allen's wife when he was a member of parliament. But Janet was no longer at war with Kenminster. She laughed good-humouredly, and was not always struggling for self-assertion, since the humiliations of going about as the poor, plain cousin of the pretty Miss Brownlow were over. Now that she was the rich Miss Brownlow, she was not likely to feel that she was the ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... less of artistic tea-drinking, esthetic posing, and soulful talk; and more opportunity for that loneliness out of which great art comes. The atmosphere of these mountains and deserts and seas inspires to a self-assertion, rather than to a clinging fast to the traditions and culture of others—and what, after all, is a great artist, but one who ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... tremendous boom, and drawing the shingle back with them with an equally tremendous rattle, so impolite and noisy, bent only on showing their strength, reckless, rude, self-willed, and inconsiderate! This purposeless display of force, and this incessant waste of power, and the noisy self-assertion in ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... you understand them," he said, with a sudden self-assertion which startled her. The weakest man is, after all, a man—so far as ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman
... Inez, also, is her intense egoism and her abundant self-assertion under all circumstances. It often seemed to us as if for her the world revolved, with passing show, around a pivot from which she regarded it as existing only for what it meant for her career. These qualities have led to her statements, and perhaps to the actual feelings, that ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... the hope to Germany that her methods of self-assertion be such as will not hinder mutual discussions by arousing ...
— Secret Armies - The New Technique of Nazi Warfare • John L. Spivak
... the majority. There is a comparatively small number who are as much impressed with the perfection of everything American as the most ardent patriotism could desire. These people go to Europe cased in a triple armor of self-assertion, prepared to poohpooh everything and everybody that may come under their notice, and above all to vindicate under all circumstances their independence as free-born American citizens by giving the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... full share of the local thirst for knowledge, and the determination to get it in one way or another. So with the self-assertion without which a Scot ceases to be a Scot, he had fastened upon those winter months with Julian Wemyss to fill in the lacunes of Dominie McAll's instruction. A good good deal of classics, daily readings in the French and German tongues, ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... imagined from the foregoing that hardihood, self-assertion, and other unpleasant characteristics would be indicated in the manner and personality of this lover of freedom and rebel against restraint. Not at all. She was a most lovable and clinging person, when ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... a desire to make others happy (especially when it does not incommode you to do so), swings through a much larger arc in American society than in English. One can be surer of one's self, without either an overweening self-conceit or the assumption of brassy self-assertion. ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... may degenerate into a vice is shown by the invention of a name for the vice: chauvinism. It is a name for boastful and truculent group self-assertion. It overrules personal judgment and character, and puts the whole group at the mercy of the clique which is ruling at the moment. It produces the dominance of watchwords and phrases which take the place of reason and conscience in determining conduct. The patriotic bias is ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... careers of the human race—this is the affair of science and philosophy; rules of conduct, individual and communal, grow up through men's association with one another in society, their basis being certain primary instincts of self-assertion and sympathy; art is the product of the universal sense of beauty. All these lines of growth stand side by side and coalesce in unitary ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... any such thing as luck? Is the Golden Rule practicable in the modern business world? Is modesty rather than self-assertion regarding his own merits and abilities the better policy for an employee? Are substantial, home-keeping girls or girls rather fast and frivolous the more likely to obtain good husbands? Is it desirable for ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... features and which in a number of recorded cases causes sudden death at its acme, from the strain it imposes upon the system. Its cause is always some form of thwarting wish or will or of reduction of self-feeling, as anger is the acme of self-assertion. The German criminalist, Friedrich, says that probably every man might be caused to commit murder if provocation were sufficient, and that those of us who have never committed this crime owe it to circumstances and ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... paid his expenses, and made him an allowance; but either Silas had grown lazy, or he understood his position better than poor Austin, or he distrusted his powers, or possibly he really is in ill-health; but he objected his religious scruples. Your poor papa thought self-assertion possible, where an injured man has right to rely upon, but he had been very long out of the world, and the theory won't do. Nothing is harder than to get a person who has once been effectually slurred, received again. Silas, I think, was right. ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... his clerk, who, instead of being overwhelmed with awe and shame at his unexpected appearance, was haughty and even defiant. One of the strongest impulses of this man was to crush out of those in his employ a spirit of independence and individual self-assertion. The idea of a part of his business machinery making such a jarring tumult in his own house! He proposed to instantly cast away the cause of friction, and insert a more stolid ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... "Yehonala is not at all beautiful, though she has a sad, gentle face. She is rather stooped, extremely thin, her face long and sallow, and her teeth very much decayed. Gentle in disposition, she is without self-assertion, and if at any of the audiences we were to greet her she would return the greeting, but would never venture a remark. At the audiences given to the ladies she was always present, but never in the immediate vicinity of either the Empress Dowager ...
— Court Life in China • Isaac Taylor Headland
... to his art which caused his rare acts of self-assertion, and it was this same devotion, no less than his natural kindliness, that made him ever helpful to younger artists who showed any promise of future worth. Even in his last days of unspeakable suffering he would summon what was left of his old strength ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... the universe, as Hobbes' natural state of war suggested painful theories as to human nature. War is evidently immoral, we think; and a doctrine which makes the whole process of evolution a process of war must be radically immoral too. The struggle, it is said, demands "ruthless self-assertion" and the hunting down of all competitors; and such phrases certainly have an unpleasant sound. But in the first place, the use of the epithets implies an anthropomorphism to which we have no right so long as we are dealing with the inferior species. We are then in a region to ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... habitual garbler of facts and constitutionally reckless of the truth. But, before I come to details, let me say one word more about Freeman's qualifications for the task which he so lightly and eagerly undertook. Freeman, with all his self-assertion, was not incapable of candour. He was staunch in friendship, and spoke openly to his friends. To one of them, the excellent Dean Hook, famous for his Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury, he wrote, on the 27th of April, 1857 [1867?], ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... sharply enough—a 'judgment' by which the wise will profit and be preserved, while the fools only will be destroyed. And meanwhile, what if in these Saturnalia (as in Rome of old) the new sense of independence manifests itself in somewhat of self-assertion and rudeness, often in insolence, especially disagreeable, because deliberate? What if 'You call me black fellow? I mash you white face in,' were the first words one heard at St. Thomas's from a Negro, on being asked, civilly ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... the master over his slaves; the domination of the slave-holding class over the local communities, and the expulsion of their opponents; the control of the government by a united South over a divided North,—these things had bred a self-confidence and self-assertion which would stop at nothing. The slave-holding principle, in full flower, was a principle which recked nothing of legal majorities or governments. Its basis was force, and it would use whatever force ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... it cannot be doubted, Milton committed the exposition of his own views, after hearing this confession, frowns, and administers a tart reproof. He describes Eve, somewhat grudgingly, as "an outside—fair, no doubt," and peremptorily teaches Adam the duties of self-appreciation and self-assertion:— ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... is not worth while to write. The girl did have the grace to keep reasonably quiet, though occasionally she would feel that this silence was not doing herself justice, and would break into the cheerful conversation of the others with a boldness and self-assertion that made Amy stare. ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond
... this was self-assertion. She had not the assurance to intrude, and she contented herself with keeping Cherry on thorns by threatening to go in, and declaring that the whole must be untrue, since ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... fundamental marks of a social group, such as a common impulse to get together, common sentiments, ideas, and beliefs, reciprocal service. From the discovery of habitual planes of interest (self-maintenance, self-perpetuation, self-assertion, self-subordination, etc.) it is a simple step to show diagrammatically how each interest impels an activity, which tends to precipitate itself into ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... to find fault with me," cried Katherine, stung to self-assertion. "I did well and generously by your children and yourself, Ada (I must say so, as you seem to forget it). There is more cause to sympathize with me in the reverse that has befallen me than to throw the blame of ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander |
