"Self-improvement" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... at about thirteen years of age, but they make a very great mistake if they leave off learning at that age. Time might be roughly divided off into four parts—necessary work, work for others, self-improvement, and recreation. A man's education is never completed. A man is never too old to learn. Whilst you are a boy and lad you need to be taught; afterwards you can to a great extent learn for yourself. You should never be content to remain just ...
— Boys - their Work and Influence • Anonymous
... for these safeguards, the woman of society must bid good-by to all opportunities for solitude, self-improvement, or the fulfillment ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... the father of the child ignored it. For some years the boy "just growed," after the manner of Topsy. Nobody helped him. But the boy differed in one way from his thoughtless little playmates. There was a mysterious something in him that drove him eagerly to avail himself of any opportunity for self-improvement that came along. If the opportunity, as generally happened, failed to "come along," he went after it with all his might ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... combine a didactic aim with artistic excellence is among the most difficult of literary experiments. If the lesson or principle to be inculcated be given too much prominence, the reader who opens the book for entertainment will shut it very soon in spite of any prospective self-improvement. If narrative interest or artistic beauty be the most striking feature of the work, its serious aim will be unnoticed. The safest plan for the writer of the novel of purpose to pursue, is to openly acknowledge his object, and to place that object before ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... above all mercenary anxieties, I gave my attention entirely to the self-improvement necessary to my appearance before his highness as a representative character on whom the eyes of all Sprucehill were fixed. I would say the world—only for the modest consciousness that comes over me when I think of ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... self-civilization? Unaided by the arts, sciences, and refinements of the Romans, he might have been, at this very day, squatted on his naked haunches in the woods of Ecclefechan, painting his weather-hardened epidermis in the sun like his Piet ancestors. Where, in fact, can we look for unaided self-improvement and spontaneous internal development, to any considerable extent, on the part of any nation or people? From people to people the original God- given impulse towards civilization and perfection has been transmitted, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... punishment of its abstract principle of equality, which dispenses the ignorant man from the necessity of self-training, the foolish man from that of self-judgment, and tells the child that there is no need for him to become a man, and the good-for-nothing that self-improvement is of no account. Public law, founded upon virtual equality, will destroy itself by its consequences. It will not recognize the inequalities of worth, of merit, and of experience; in a word, it ignores individual labor, and it will end in the triumph of platitude and the ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... entreat thee to take my advice: forsake these idle pursuits, which must end in shame and misery; whilst every effort made towards self-improvement will be crowned with the blessings and esteem of a worthy parent, and the approval of ...
— The Little Quaker - or, the Triumph of Virtue. A Tale for the Instruction of Youth • Susan Moodie
... who until then had no rival, was distracted with rage and jealousy, which the sweet-tempered Billington treated with a careless smile. Though her success had been so brilliant, she relaxed no effort in self-improvement, and studied assiduously both vocalism and the piano. Indeed, Salomon, Haydn's impressario, said of her with enthusiasm, "Sar, she sing equally well wid her troat and her fingers." At the close of this season, which was the opening of a great career, ...
— Great Singers, First Series - Faustina Bordoni To Henrietta Sontag • George T. Ferris
... were intensely attractive to me, as being a kind of sublimation of the wild northern landscape that I had already loved in my native Lancashire; but the Highlands were not well chosen as a field for self-improvement in the art of painting. A student ought not to choose the most changeful of landscapes, but the least changeful; not the Highlands or the English Lake District, but the dullest landscape he can find in the south or the east of England. Norfolk would have been a better country for me, as ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... about cultivation!" Billy, who had been apparently deep in his book, looked up to snap angrily. Any allusion to his efforts at self-improvement always touched him in ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... purpose. Their children go to the public schools. There are four Ruthenian weeklies and one monthly published in this country, and some books. Education is prompted by reading circles, lectures, and societies for self-improvement. The race has a fine physique, with great physical endurance. Individuality is more marked in it than in many Slavonic races, and assimilation is comparatively rapid. In this country they rapidly wake up to a new life and ...
— Aliens or Americans? • Howard B. Grose
... Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, has said: "The workers want more wages; more of the comforts of life; more leisure; more chance for self-improvement as men, as trade-unionists, as citizens. These were the wants of yesterday; they are the wants of today; they will be the wants of tomorrow, and of tomorrow's morrow. The struggle may assume new forms, but ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... all ties, produces a most agonising mental state and afflicts the poor wretch with untold horrors. He is made to drag out an existence under most unnatural conditions, conditions in which every effort he makes towards self-improvement is a useless one, every aspiration is routed, the natural affections crave in vain for an object to fasten upon, and where an artificial atavistic process is set in motion so powerful as to defy the resistance of all in time. This is no imaginary picture, a man is ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll
... the final encouragement of woman to constant self-improvement. In the sequestered paths of home, having hours and days, in which the needle is her quiet employer, how may she meditate on the touching and lofty themes of human concern. Why should she wander from the ways of truth, integrity, and purity? ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... charge at Little Cumbrae he steps before us what he remained until the end, a man of the most zealous industry, greedy of occupation, greedy of knowledge, a stern husband of time, a reader, a writer, unflagging in his task of self-improvement. Thenceforward his summers were spent directing works and ruling workmen, now in uninhabited, now in half-savage islands; his winters were set apart, first at the Andersonian Institution, then at the University ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... years of existence. The gifted and versatile associate editor, Mr. Roy W. Nixon, shows marked talent in three distinct departments of literature; essay-writing, fiction, and verse. "Writing as a Means of Self-Improvement" is a pure, dignified and graceful bit of prose whose thought is as commendable as its structure. "A Bottle of Carbolic Acid" is a gruesome but clever short story of the Poe type, exhibiting considerable comprehension ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... word Finis with the same sensation of triumph as an Indian feels who strings a fresh scalp to his girdle. They are not happy unless they mark by some definite performance each step in the weary path of self-improvement. To begin a volume and not to finish it would be to deprive themselves of this satisfaction; it would be to lose all the reward of their earlier self-denial by a lapse from virtue at the end. To skip, according ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... occupy only a side, or more commonly the extreme rear, of the second balcony; a house of ill fame might flourish next to his own little home; and from public libraries he was shut out altogether, except where a little branch was sometimes provided. Every opportunity for such self-improvement as a city might be expected to afford him was either denied him, or given on such terms as his self-respect forced ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... elsewhere, and still bearing the front of humanity in their begrimed features, but harrowing the spectator with painful recollections of their moral abandonment. One of the groups is a chain gang at work—breaking stones for the road—or, a last effort at self-improvement, by mending the ways of others. How different would these worthies appear in a rabble rout at a London fire, or in all the sleekness of civilization, as exhibited in the sundry avocations of picking a pocket, in easing a country gentleman of his uncrumpled or bright dividend, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction No. 485 - Vol. 17, No. 485, Saturday, April 16, 1831 • Various
... occupied with the large class of Indian boys during the day, and then, until a late hour every night, with the more enthusiastic coloured pupils of his own people. At the same time, he was pursuing his own studies for self-improvement with characteristic ardour. Probably neither the good General Armstrong nor this chief officer of his staff as yet thought the arrangements at the Institute, which were found to work so ...
— From Slave to College President - Being the Life Story of Booker T. Washington • Godfrey Holden Pike
... affirmed, the New Testament touches but lightly upon the duties of self-regard. To be occupied constantly with the thought of one's self is a symptom of morbid egoism rather than of healthy personality. The avidity of self-improvement and even zeal for religion may become a refined form of selfishness. We must be willing at times to renounce our personal comfort, to restrain our zest for intellectual and aesthetic enjoyment, to be content to be less cultured and scholarly, less complete ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... question with which we began, we may safely say that birds sing, sometimes to gratify an innate love for sweet sounds; sometimes to win a mate, or to tell their love to a mate already won; sometimes as practice, with a view to self-improvement; and sometimes for no better reason than the poet's,—"I do but sing because I must." In general, they sing for joy; and their joy, ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... society that is still imperfect and consequently selfish, is performed only in the hope of remuneration, would never be done at all; every man would have to provide for the whole of his necessities; no one could find time for self-improvement or for flinging himself entirely into those divers branches of activity which, if personal interest were absent, would make life infinitely better and progress extremely rapid. The partisans of this theory rely on diversity of tastes to fill the diversity of functions that are necessary in ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... intellect. There are fine passages in his essay, but it is intellectualized, bloodless, heedless of the trifling oddities of human intercourse that make friendship so satisfying. He seems to insist upon a sterile ceremony of mutual self-improvement, a kind of religious ritual, a profound interchange of doctrines between soul and soul. His friends (one gathers) are to be antisepticated, all the poisons and pestilence of their faulty humours are to be drained away before they ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... almost impossible to rear a well nurtured, much less a well educated and well dressed family, and, moreover, the hours of labor in some branches of business were so long as to shorten the lives of operatives and make self-improvement impossible. The natural progress of civilizing influence did much to abate many of these evils, but the organization of labor removed sores that had not and perhaps could not have been reached in other ways. Having then an ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 623, December 10, 1887 • Various
... essays on "How to be Irresistible in Love," and a sentimental pugilist indulged in reminiscences (per a hired pen from the cheap magazine field) upon "The Influence of my Mother on my Career." An imitator of Banneker developed a daily half-column of self-improvement and inspiration upon moral topics, achieving his effects by capitalizing all the words which otherwise would have been too feeble or banal to attract notice, thereby giving an air of sublimated importance to the mildly incomprehensible. Nine tenths of The Patriot's ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... all human gifts. Like the Apollo, whom the Greek worshipped as its type, even Arcady is its exile, not its home. Soon weary of the dalliance of Tempe, it ascends to its mission—the archer of the silver bow, the guide of the car of light. Speaking more plainly, genius is the enthusiasm for self-improvement; it ceases or sleeps the moment it desists from seeking some object which it believes of value, and by that object it insensibly connects its self-improvement with the positive advance of the world. At present Lenny's genius had no bias ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various |
