"Self-seeking" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... The uncouth, misshapen figure on the central divan, however, paid scant heed to his Minister. Right into the fierce, cruel, passionate heart of Sultan Mahomet that strange silence was piercing: piercing as no words could have done, through the crust formed by years of self-seeking and sin, piercing, until it found, until it ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... Englishman had given some grave offence for which even his brave action was not a 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
... only necessary to be 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 of suggestion. The cases of blindness treated by Schlatter have a remarkable ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... have been self-seeking and made the most of my position, as was afterwards urged against me. I may have been extortionate and venal, and I may have taken regal bribes to expedite affairs. But always was I loyal and devoted to the King. Never once ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... and deep solemnity was suddenly diffused upon the assembly of world-worn people, to most of whom the things that mattered were those which gave them diversion. They were wont to swim with the tide of indolence, extravagance, self-seeking, and sordid pleasure now flowing through the hardy isles, from which had come much of the strength of the Old World and the vision and spirit of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... born in man, and become a governing conviction, that he must under no circumstances commit a certain act, though to do so would be easy and advantageous, and detection not to be feared? Why should the moral consciousness of the higher races accept the principle which places self-sacrifice above self-seeking? There is only one explanation for this paradoxical phenomenon: it is that, as men rise in the moral scale, there dawns on them the sense of a law that is not of this world, an Ought-to-be, which speaks with a strange authority, and will not be denied; and ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... except in the business of getting-on (in which he might well have been taken as a model by Samuel Smiles). One thinks of him sometimes as a sort of Deacon Brodie, sometimes as the most innocent sinner who ever lived. For, though he was brutal and snobbish and self-seeking and simian, he had a pious and a merry and a grateful heart. He felt that God had created the world for the pleasure of Samuel Pepys, and had no ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... it Broadmead, after the name of their home in England. Love for the old country was still alive in Colonel Barrington, and it was only after grave deliberation that he had drawn the sword, convinced that he drew it for the right. Doubtless there were some in this great conflict who were self-seeking, but this was certainly not the case with Henry Barrington. He had much to lose, nothing personal to win which seemed to him of any consequence. Broadmead he loved. He had been born there. In due time he had brought home to it his beautiful young wife, daughter of a French family in Louisiana, and ...
— The Light That Lures • Percy Brebner
... 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 expression ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... even death, perhaps, might be evaded by the skill of a new science. Who could tell? Franklin had suggested this, half in jest, years before; Condorcet believed and asserted it now. Ignorance and misery, at all events, should come to an end. When kings and a wicked self-seeking aristocracy should be swept away, the divine sense of right, which God had implanted in the people, would rule; there could be no wars; armies and fleets would become useless; taxes would amount to nothing. All the nations would form one grand republic, with a universal convention sitting at ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... individual ambitions and personal gains. And as this process of growth and increasing productive efficiency went on, the control exercised by neighborly surveillance, through the sentiment of the common good as against the self-seeking pursuits of individuals and sub-groups, would gradually slacken; until by progressive disuse it would fall into a degree of abeyance; to be called into exercise and incite to concerted action only in the face of unusual ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... like a sharp, quick blow, or that the stroke of his pen was sometimes like a thunderbolt. It was not the time for hesitation, or doubt, or even argument. He meant his imperiled country should be saved, and whatever by half-loyalty or self-seeking seemed to stand in the way only attracted ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... sooner have an Englishman at our side than any other man. Men and country—'dear souls and dear, dear land'—these are the elements which make up the real thing called patriotism and which, in spite of all our curses and all our self-seeking, lead us in millions to work or die for our country, and will, while life lasts, bring ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... 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 that I could ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... what used to be common civility, and we are sinking into perfect barbarism.... The spirit of anarchy which prevails in Boston is more than I am able to cope with." The instigators of the mob, it was well known, were certain artful and self-seeking demagogues, of whom the chief had formerly been dames Otis; but in late years Mr. Otis, "with his mob-high eloquence," had given way to an abler man, Samuel Adams, than whom, Mr. Hutchinson thought, there was not "a greater incendiary in the King's dominion, or a man of greater malignity ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... of Japan's relations with Korea, so far as it has been carried above—namely, to the close of the Empress Kogyoku's reign (A.D. 645)—discloses in the Korean people a race prone to self-seeking feuds, never reluctant to import foreign aid into domestic quarrels, and careless of the obligations of good faith. In the Japanese we see a nation magnanimous and trustful ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... the final blow. Petit-Claud was a double-dealer of the profoundly cautious stamp that is never caught by the bait of a present satisfaction, nor entangled by a personal attachment, after his first initiation into the strategy of self-seeking and the instability of the human heart. So, from the very first, he had put little trust in Cointet. He foresaw that his marriage negotiations might very easily be broken off, saw also that in that case he could not accuse Cointet of bad faith, and he had taken his measures accordingly. ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... Knight, parented in fairy-far Avilion, the Fortunate Youth, the Awakener of England. Now he was but a base-born young man who had attained a high position by false pretences; an ordinary adventurer with a glib tongue; a self-educated, self-seeking, commonplace fellow. At least, so he saw himself in his Princess's eyes. And he had meant that she should thus behold him. No longer was he entering lists to fight for her. For what hopeless purpose ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... by the Virginia Companies and Council for New England, as the representative of the Adventurers, he has only been recently generally reckoned a chief man of the Adventurers. A Protean friend of the Pilgrims, never reliable, ever pretentious, always self-seeking, and of no help. He was finally ruined by the disasters to his ship, the PARAGON, which cost him all his interests. Having attempted treacherously to secure to himself the Patent granted in the Colony's interest, he was compelled by the Council to ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames
... is unquestionably egoism. The man who accepts such a doctrine and consistently walks in the light must be set down as self-seeking. But self-seeking, as understood by different men, appears to take on different aspects. Shall we class all those who frankly accept it as man's only ultimate motive with ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... crowd now has all there is. The difference 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 desires. The ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... selflessness which is the saint's gift. Those who ask nothing for themselves, whose whole strength is spent on affections that are their life, and on ideals at one with their affections, are not easily popular, like the self-seeking, parti-colored folk who make up the rest of us; who flatter, caress, and court, that we in our turn may be flattered and courted. Their gentleness masks the indomitable soul within; and so their fellows are often unaware of ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... hard and repellant. But men who, like Thackeray, have seen life and tasted its bitterness and felt its hollowness, know how to prize it. Thackeray does not merely expose the cant, the emptiness, the self-seeking, the false pretenses, flunkeyism, and snobbery—the "mean admiration of mean things"—in the great world of London society: his keen, unsparing vision detects the base alloy in the purest natures. There are no "heroes" in his ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... Colonel House is that he has been possessed all his life, almost passionately, with that instinct which makes boys run to fires. His fastening upon the favorably placed, whether it was Morton in his youth, or Wilson in his maturity, was not ordinary self-seeking, not having for its object riches or power or influence. It was merely desire to see for the pure ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... that kindled in many minds ambition, cruelty, bloodthirstiness, self-seeking and jealousy—producing the morale, in a word, of the Spain of sixty years ago. Some sided with the Queen Regent Christina, and rallied round the child-queen because they saw that that way lay glory and promotion. Others flocked to the standard of ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... two or three at her 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 ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Anonymous
... many tricks in politics—and, God help me, I'm back in politics!" returned the General. He looked them over there in the room, from face to face and eye to eye. "You cannot accuse me of vanity, self-seeking, or ambition at my age, gentlemen. I've been Governor of this State once. I didn't enjoy the experience. I'm going into this thing again simply because I believe that I can put some honesty into public affairs. This State ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... trade union movement, as a whole in the United States, has not yet shown a thorough comprehension of the economic system of which it is a part; it has, therefore, often erred in its efforts to end an evil or injustice. Particular unions and leaders have often pursued mean, short-sighted and self-seeking policies—which have reflected upon the whole movement. Much like other economic groups, when their own interest has not coincided with the general interest, they have frequently put their own ...
— The Settlement of Wage Disputes • Herbert Feis
... will not take the trouble to use them, unless prompted by her own interests. Selfishness is too short-sighted, however, to secure lasting benefits. Usually, nothing is more fatal than the success of mere self-seeking. While Madge pressed unwaveringly toward the goal of her hopes, she did not do so in thoughtless or callous indifference toward those who had true claims upon her. With her sister she soon saw that all was well—that she was, as before, absorbed and content with the routine of her life. ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... over-crowed. When the woman that a man loves laughs at his moral enthusiasms, it is like a black frost on the delicate tips of budding trees. It is up-hill work, as we all know, to battle with indolence and selfishness, and self-seeking and hard-hearted worldliness. Then the highest and holiest part of our nature has a bashfulness of its own. It is a heavenly stranger, and easily shamed. A nimble-tongued, skilful woman can so easily show the ridiculous side of what seemed heroism; and what is called common-sense, ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... you give me a notion of the cost? Of course, when I come, you will let me enjoy your own company in peace, and not drag me out a-visiting. I have no desire at all to see your curate. I think he must be like all the other curates I have seen; and they seem to me a self-seeking, vain, empty race. At this blessed moment, we have no less than three of them in Haworth parish—and there is not one to mend another. The other day, they all three, accompanied by Mr. S., dropped, or rather rushed, in unexpectedly ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... I, Yuan Shih-kai, have admired the example of the Emperors Yao and Shun, who treated the empire as a public trust, and considered that the record of a dynasty in history for good or ill is inseparably bound up with the public spirit or self-seeking by which it has been animated. On attaining middle age I grew more familiar with foreign affairs, was struck by the admirable republican system in France and America, and felt that they were a true embodiment of the democratic ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... high answer. "I thought you a great people, and I used my strength, my wealth and influence to further your power. But you are not worthy. Who are you that dare to assume authority over millions—you who can not rule yourselves, you who idle away your lives in folly and self-seeking? Well may you crown yourselves with the laurels which your fathers won! You have none of your own—and see to it that those faded emblems from a high past are not snatched from your palsied fingers. I at least have flung from me a yoke which I despise. ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... the rainbow. Nor is the doctrine of perfectability 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 ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... Friends, wrote a book 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 he ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... 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 ...
— With Spurs of Gold - Heroes of Chivalry and their Deeds • Frances Nimmo Greene
... his. No, there was but one right way, 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 main to breach the ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... won his victories in China by sheer personal gallantry, and nothing else, have taken a very shallow view of the case, and not condescended to study the details. In his general conception of the best way to overcome the Taepings he was necessarily hampered by the views, wishes, jealousies, and self-seeking purposes of his Chinese colleagues. But for them, his strategy would have been of a very different character, as he himself often said. He had to adjust his means to the best attainable end, and it must be allowed that he did this with remarkable tact and patience—the very qualities in which ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume I • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... l'Hopital, wearing his crimson robe lined and edged with ermine, and his cap on his head according to the privilege of his office. This courageous man, seeing that his benefactors were traitorous and self-seeking, held firmly to the cause of the kings, represented by the queen-mother; at the risk of losing his head, he had gone to Rouen to consult with the Connetable de Montmorency. No one ventured to draw him from the reverie in which he was plunged. Robertet, the secretary of ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... been put back twenty-five years, there could have been no Russo-Japanese war, and China, instead of being, as she now is, a third-rate Power, might have held the premier position in Asia, as Japan so splendidly and skilfully does now. But, as so often happens, greed and dishonesty, self-seeking and cowardice on the part of high officials, nullified the efforts of the brave seamen who unavailingly gave their ...
— A Chinese Command - A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas • Harry Collingwood
... there! About this time next year may I be there or there-abouts! With so many young bloods in the heyday of youth and strength beyond my own I feel there will be a most difficult task in making choice towards the end and a most keen competition—and a universal lack of selfishness and self-seeking with a complete absence of any jealous feeling in any single one of the comparatively large number who at present stand a chance of being on the last piece ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... creditors, who were individually maltreated by the crowd before the very eyes of the consul. In addition, the dread of the Sabine war spread, and when a levy was decreed, nobody gave in his name: Appius was enraged, and bitterly inveighed against the self-seeking conduct of his colleague, in that he, by the inactivity he displayed to win the favour of the people, was betraying the republic, and, besides not having enforced justice in the matter of debt, likewise neglected even to hold a levy, in obedience to the decree of the senate. ...
— Roman History, Books I-III • Titus Livius
... no false sentiment here; there is no self-seeking. The guards are down. The soul of the man stands forth as it is. In the Valley of the Shadow his own simple declaration of his sincerity, his own revelation of the unselfish quality of his devotion to the ...
— The Attempted Assassination of ex-President Theodore Roosevelt • Oliver Remey
... seemed to pass into a greater peace than she had known for years; the last faint hope of happiness was gone; it would, perhaps, be more accurate to say, of the bright happiness she had planned for herself in her early youth. Unconsciously, she was being weaned from self-seeking in any shape, and her daily life became, if possible, more innocent and pure and holy. One of the canons used to laugh at her for her constant attendance at all the services, and for her devotion to good works, and call her always the reverend sister. Miss Monro ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell
... himself a man of cold, clear-sighted, self-seeking temperament. In almost all English histories dealing with this period his steadiness and solid unshowy qualities are contrasted with Essex's flightiness and failure, to the natural disadvantage of the latter. This, however, is not perhaps quite the last word upon the matter, and it is only fair ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... rose, turned his back to the mantel-piece, and looked down upon her. He thought of the great, wide world: its thorny ways, its deserts, its bitter waters, its unrighteousness, its self-seeking greeds, its weaknesses, its under and over reaching, its unfaithfulness; and then again of this—child, thrust all at once a thousand miles into it, with never—so far as he could see—an implement, a weapon, a sense of danger, or a refuge; well ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... consciousness, and tends to limit it within the boundaries of our personal self. It is this Avidya, this ignorance, this limiting of consciousness that creates the hard separateness of the ego, and thus becomes the source of all pride and greed and cruelty incidental to self-seeking. When a man sleeps he is shut up within the narrow activities of his physical life. He lives, but he knows not the varied relations of his life to his surroundings,—therefore he knows not himself. So when a man lives the life of Avidya he is confined within his self. It ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... had stood out against taxation without representation because of his own business interests, now stood firmly for American Independence for the good of the majority, with little left of the self-seeking spirit which had animated his earlier efforts. Occupied as he now was with the many duties incident on a public life, it is said he was never too busy to redress a wrong, and never unwilling to give lavishly where ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... don't deny that: nothing makes a man so selfish as work. But I was not self-seeking: it seemed to me that I had put justice above self. I tell you life meant something to me then. Do you see that dirty little ...
— Captain Brassbound's Conversion • George Bernard Shaw
... had become known to Prince Kung and his friends that he had left the governing authority during the minority of his son, a child of less than six years of age, to a board of regency composed of eight of the least intelligent and most arrogant and self-seeking members of the imperial family, with Prince Tsai at their head. The emperor died on August 22. A few hours later the imperial decree notifying the last wishes of the ruler as to the mode of government was promulgated. ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... their own in the sharp competition of professional life are a great, if not the greatest, need of the coloured race in this country. Over wide areas most of their clergy are illiterate, immoral, self-seeking, bitter sectarians, and the most determined opponents of every kind of improvement. So, too, the lack of lawyers, editors and physicians of sufficiently broad and thorough training to be able to defend their weaker brethren against designers or incapable advisers ...
— From Slave to College President - Being the Life Story of Booker T. Washington • Godfrey Holden Pike
... after such an evening as this, to you; to see your dear eyes brighten at the recital of all I have seen and all I have heard; to hear your beloved voice inspiring me to more exertion and more patience. After sitting through so many party debates, so much transparent self-seeking, and so much ungenerous opposition as I cannot help seeing in Parliament, how refreshing to see, among such men as I have met to-day, the pure, genuine public spirit which Jane first showed me the example of in the midst of her hardest trials. This reform does not bring personal ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... comfort from his loyal heart, and wait in hopes that at least a musket may be put into his hands with which to trust him against the foe. These are very simple variations; they turn upon the proportion of selfish feeling which the men possess. A self-seeking man will turn villain under the encroachment of other people's egotism. The sight of too many trophies will convert a friend into a covert enemy, who, without being treacherous, will nevertheless betray a great cause by his jealousy of its great supporter. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... 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 ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... 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 his present dissimulation with myself ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Rachel, "I shall do nothing without inquiry. I will find out all about him, but I cannot see any opening for distrust. Schemes of charity are not compatible with self-seeking and dishonesty." ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... been caused by a few self-seeking men. For instance, a man may secure through political influence a license to trade among the Indians. By his unprincipled practices, often in defiance of treaty agreements, such as gross overcharging and the use of liquor to debauch the natives, he accumulates ...
— The Indian Today - The Past and Future of the First American • Charles A. Eastman
... things than ye are slaves: and higher Than them or ye would be so, did they not Prefer an independency of torture To the smooth agonies of adulation, In hymns and harpings, and self-seeking prayers, To that which is omnipotent, because It is omnipotent, and not from love, But terror ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... history appreciate, has overtaken European history in all its bearings, there are but two things that have retained their vigor and their propagating force in the midst of all that shriveling blight of self-seeking that pervades European life. These two things are science and the people, science and the workingman. And the union of these two is alone capable of invigorating European culture ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... which the afflicted and needy could turn; and so long as the rules of the Orders were observed in the spirit and in the letter, they were a genuine help towards a life of self-devotion, of self-abnegation whereof the ultimate motive was not always a subtle form of self-seeking. But as time passed, the monasteries became the recipients of the bounty of pious benefactors. Their inhabitants, in spite of ascetic regulations, found that life was none so hard—at least in comparison with that of serfdom or villeinage; luxuries were not less available than to the laity. The ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... degrees individualised, most of them completely so; but still in each group there is a quality common to all the members, or one spirit breathing through them all. Here we have unselfish and devoted love, there hard self-seeking. On both sides, further, the common quality takes an extreme form; the love is incapable of being chilled by injury, the selfishness of being softened by pity; and, it may be added, this tendency to extremes is found again in the characters of Lear and Gloster, and ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... and selfish and unquiet cares, brings to it an unspeakable peace and freedom; this is true simplicity. This state of entire resignation and perpetual acquiescence produces true liberty; and this liberty brings perfect simplicity. The soul which knows no self-seeking, no interested ends, is thoroughly candid; it goes straight forward without hindrance; its path opens daily more and more to "perfect day," in proportion as its self-renunciation and its self-forgetfulness increase; and its peace, amid whatever troubles ...
— Daily Strength for Daily Needs • Mary W. Tileston
... 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 of them were put into ...
— The Calvary Road • Roy Hession
... who become the unknown fathers of great men. And so, on a salary that would have meant penury to a man of self-seeking tastes, he managed to save always the major part of his earning. At the bank he was a modest but regular visitor to the receiving-teller, and almost a total stranger to ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... 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 prayers, which ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... of the spirit; the external clothing of the being, in which Character ultimates itself. If the Character be simple and sincere, the Manners will be at one with it; will be the natural outbirth of its traits and peculiarities. If it be complex and self-seeking, the Manners will be artificial, affected, or insincere. Some persons make up, put on, take off, alter, or patch their Manners to suit times and seasons, with as much facility, and as little apparent consciousness of duplicity, as if they were treating their clothes ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... 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 ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... use of "flesh," the 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 vital ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... voyage. Wesley, mourning the man who had been his stanch friend, was guiltily conscious of his thwarted ambition. "There goes my city church," he thought, and flung the thought back at himself in anger at his own self-seeking. He was forced into accepting the first opportunity which offered. His mother had an annuity, which he himself had insisted upon for her greater comfort. When she died, the son was nearly penniless, except for the house, which was old and ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... in thy presence must offend— That, set aside some few caprices wild, Those humorous clouds that flit o'er brightest days, In all my threadings of this worldly maze, (And I have watched thee almost from a child), Free from self-seeking, envy, low design, I have not found a whiter ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... creatures that suited that sort of thing; but for a man who wrote his letters from Brookes's, and whose dinner invitations included all that was great in town, to stoop to such an alliance was as bold a defiance as one could throw at a world of self-seeking and conventionality. ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... Sympathy of the individual mind. If such sympathies exist, and if nothing is done to uproot or paralyze them, they will urge men to do good to others, irrespective of all theories. Good done from any other source or motive is necessarily self-seeking. It is a common remark, with reference to the sanctions of a future life, that they create purely self-regarding motives. Any proposal to increase disinterested action by moral obligation contains a self-contradiction; it is suicidal. The rich may be made ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... throughout his entire life, he also accepted human nature as it is, and worked with keen, practical good sense to achieve results with the instruments at hand. It is impossible to conceive of a man farther removed from baseness, farther removed from corruption, from mere self-seeking; but it is also impossible to conceive of a man of more sane and healthy mind—a man less under the influence of that fantastic and diseased morality (so fantastic and diseased as to be in reality profoundly immoral) which makes ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... she had seen some monster. It never occurred to her that she was possibly unjust to Ida, who was, after all, as she was made, a being on a very simple and primitive plan, with an acute perception of her own welfare and the means whereby to achieve it. Ida was in reality as innocently self-seeking as a butterfly or a honey-bee. She had never really seen anybody in the world except herself. She had been born humanity blind, and it was possibly no more her fault than if she had been born ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... Benedict 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 ...
— Last Words - A Final Collection of Stories • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... so of the little innocent babe, who may be God's messenger to lead her back to Him. Think again of her first words—the burst of nature from her heart! Did she not turn to God, and enter into a covenant with Him—'I will be so good?' Why, it draws her out of herself! If her life has hitherto been self-seeking, and wickedly thoughtless, here is the very instrument to make her forget herself, and be thoughtful for another. Teach her (and God will teach her, if man does not come between) to reverence her child; and this reverence will shut out ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... 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." ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... as though he were seeking something,—he knew not what. A more generous fellow, who delighted more in giving, hesitated more in asking, more averse to begging though a friend of beggars, less self-arrogant, or self-seeking, or more devoted to his profession, never lived. He was a man with prejudices,—kindly, gentlemanlike, amiable prejudices. He thought that a clergyman should be a graduate from one of the three ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... they dimly saw 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 place in the kingdom; ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... if there could be such a thing as our search to-night! Hollow places, hidden away for evil cause, do not go with it at all! There is the story of gracious invention and glorious gift; here the story of greedy gathering and self-seeking, ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... 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
... 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 Hortensius Martius ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... 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
... match in modern history. Save in a few large cities, every American community lies under a sacerdotal despotism whose devices are disingenuous and dishonourable, and whose power was magnificently displayed in the campaign for Prohibition—a despotism exercised by a body of ignorant, superstitious, self-seeking and thoroughly dishonest men. One may, without prejudice, reasonably defend the Catholic clergy. They are men who, at worst, pursue an intelligible ideal and dignify it with a real sacrifice. But in the presence of the Methodist clergy it is difficult ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan
... self-seeking and cruel as lawless times had made such men, they were not devoid of all better feelings; and although, had there been no interposition on his behalf, Paul might have been a victim to their irritation at being thus duped, as it was his life ...
— In the Wars of the Roses - A Story for the Young • Evelyn Everett-Green
... as anything with these people was their loneliness. Parvenus are not always pushing and self-seeking, nor do they invariably throw down the ladder by which they have climbed. The Grossenstecks would have been so well content to keep their old friends, but poverty hides its head from the glare of wealth and takes ...
— Love, The Fiddler • Lloyd Osbourne
... afterwards recanted and 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 like Clarke." ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... wonder," she said; "when they would come home to Fontenoy and say, 'Lewis Rand spoke to-day,' I used to wonder if I should ever hear you speak! And when they blamed you I said to my aching heart, 'They need not tell me! He's not ambitious, self-seeking, a leveller, a demagogue and Jacobin!-he is the man I met beneath the apple tree!' And I was right—I ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... could you impute to me such preposterous self-seeking? To solicit out of hand, for my private behoof, an hundred dollars from a perfect stranger? I am not mad, ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... 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 to regard ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... 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 ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... wider of the mark than the notion that a system of political education would increase the number of self-seeking, power-hunting "politicians." Such men are the product, not of political education, but of the lack of it. What is the present situation? To the ordinary boy, politics, when it first obtrudes itself on ...
— The School and the World • Victor Gollancz and David Somervell
... in a House of half a hundred or fewer leading men, with the rest of the Parliament driven sheep. But the whole mischief of the present system is that the obscure members of Parliament are not sheep; they are a crowd of little-minded, second-rate men just as greedy and eager and self-seeking as any of us. They vote straight indeed on all the main party questions, they obey their Whips like sheep then; but there is a great bulk of business in Parliament outside the main party questions, and obedience is ...
— In The Fourth Year - Anticipations of a World Peace (1918) • H.G. Wells
... increasing. No recent census had been taken when I was at Tiberias, but I know that the congregation of fleas which attended at my church alone must have been something enormous. It was a carnal, self-seeking congregation, wholly inattentive to the service which was going on, and devoted to the one object of having my blood. The fleas of all nations were there. The smug, steady, importunate flea from Holywell Street; the pert, jumping puce from hungry France, the wary, watchful ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... 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 Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... neighbour," is the 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
... expect that a man of his character will avoid all mistakes. It was a time when feeling ran high on religious questions, and he was a declared partisan; but at least we may say that the public good, judged from the highest point, was his objective; there was no room for self-seeking in his heart. Nor did this wide extension of his activity mean neglect of his earlier crusades. On the contrary, he continued to work for the good of the classes to whom his Factory Bills had been so beneficial. Not content with prohibiting ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... 7. So that either 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, carnal, earthly, proud, unmortified ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... but for her able cooperation. She thinks she cannot talk but we know that she can work. She has done the drudgery of this association for more than twenty years and I hope the woman who will be chosen in her place, whoever she may be, will be as consecrated and free from all self-seeking." ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... exercising in nature's own way the activity bestowed upon women, and yet impelled to spend it in some way or other, Mademoiselle Gamard had acquired the habit of using it in petty intrigues, provincial cabals, and those self-seeking schemes which occupy, sooner or later, the lives of all old maids. Birotteau, unhappily, had developed in Sophie Gamard the only sentiments which it was possible for that poor creature to feel,—those of hatred; a passion hitherto latent under the calmness and monotony of provincial life, but which ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... 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 the ...
— Tom Slade on a Transport • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... 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 of these great instruments would be worked out according to the ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... dissatisfied with Brougham's speech, and, indeed, would have been dissatisfied with anything short of a complete logical application of his whole system. He held Brougham to be 'insincere,'[40] a trimmer and popularity-hunter, but a useful instrument. Brougham's astonishing vanity and self-seeking prompted and perverted his amazing activity. He represents the process, perhaps necessary, by which a philosopher's ideas have to be modified before they can be applied to practical application. Brougham, however, could speak generously of men no longer in ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... 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 wily knaves. Government should be the affair ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant
... them as their vocation to diffuse the knowledge of God in Israel,—the knowledge that He seeks truthfulness and love, justice and considerateness, and no gifts; but they, on the contrary, in a spirit of base self-seeking, foster the tendency of the nation towards cultus, in their superstitions over-estimate of which lies their sin and their ruin. "My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge; ye yourselves (ye priests!) reject knowledge, and I too will reject ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... the ecstasy 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 must ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed
... 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... personal character, which prevailed in Germany, obtained by a process of elimination and misunderstanding, is represented by this critic when he records without modifying his statement: "Various times Yorick shows himself as the most genuine foe of self-seeking, of immoral double entendre, and particularly of assumed seriousness, and he scourges them emphatically." The review of the third and fourth parts contains a similar and perhaps even more significant passage illustrating the view ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... 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 which she herself cherished towards it. For ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... owes much indeed to the opportunities of the American 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 ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... child. I have washed my robes in the tears of repentance; I can come before the altar whither my guardian angel, my beloved Calyste, has led me. With what tender comfort I give you that name, which the step I now take sanctifies. I love you without self-seeking, as a mother loves her son, as the Church loves her children. I can pray for you and for yours without one thought or wish except for your happiness. Ah! if you only knew the sublime tranquillity in which I live, now that I have risen in thought above all petty earthly ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... morning, noon and 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 and nature, if they will but afford it a refuge from the persistent and gentle accents of pursuivant ...
— The Hound of Heaven • Francis Thompson
... about money! This has been so often noticed that it has become a common saying, "Have no money dealings with your friend." Even near relations become bitter, and are estranged, over some provision in a will. All this arises from self-seeking. Each cares for ...
— The Village Pulpit, Volume II. Trinity to Advent • S. Baring-Gould
... lower Manas during earth-life has been strongly attached to material objects and to intellectual pursuits directed by a self-seeking motive, the desire body may have acquired a very considerable automatism of an intellectual character, and may give forth responses of considerable intellectual merit. But still the mark of non-originality will be present: the apparent intellectuality will only give out reproductions, and ...
— Death—and After? • Annie Besant
... melt in rain-drops, met his, which were alight with all the fire 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 of ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... his colleagues on the Bond of Association, his future bride, had showed themselves fatiguing, perhaps worthless, certainly disheartening and independent accessories to his life. Here, at last, was some one brilliant, stimulating, by no means self-seeking, ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... have written upon the bland, complacent face all the cynicism of his nature. Triumph makes cynicism arrogant, so the man is losing his mask. His nature is leering out of his eyes, snarling out of his mouth, and where the little, lean lines have pared away the flesh from his nose, a greedy, self-seeking pride is peering from behind a great masterful nose. Thomas Van Dorn should be in the adolescence of maturity; but he is in the old age of adolescence. His skin has no longer the soft olive texture of youth; it is brown and mottled and leathery. His ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... was offered the nomination for Governor of Illinois, and declined the honor. Mrs. Lincoln, who had supreme confidence in her husband's ability, tried to make him more self-seeking in his political efforts. He visited his old home in Indiana, making several speeches in that part of the State. It was fourteen years after he and all the family had removed to Illinois. One of ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple
... the heritage of their disappointments without any heritage of hope. From early childhood parents and friends are hypnotizing the child into beliefs and unbeliefs, and too often they are exiling all nobility out of life, all confidence, all trust, all hope; they are insinuating a mean self-seeking, a self-mistrust, a vulgar spirit which laughs at every high ideal, until at last the hypnotized child is blinded to the presence of any beauty or nobility in life. No country can ever hope to rise beyond a vulgar mediocrity where there is not unbounded confidence in what ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... working, keeping before him as his lode-star—"Our Father, hallowed be Thy name; Thy kingdom come; Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven;" and asking even for his daily bread for that purpose and no other, would find selfishness and self-seeking die out of him, and active benevolence grow up in him. He would find past sorrows and falls turned unexpectedly to practical use for his own and other's good; and discover to his delight, that his Father ...
— Out of the Deep - Words for the Sorrowful • Charles Kingsley
... the simple student of nature in holy reverence; and while there live sensualists, despots, and men who are wholly self-seeking, I cannot bear to have these sincere workers held up in the least degree to reproach. And let us have truth, even if the truth be the awful denial of the good God. We must face the light and not bury ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... should this be the meaning? For this seems a needless exhortation; what church would not readily yield an especial honor to apostles and evangelists above pastors and teachers? This would savor too much of self-seeking in the apostle, and providing for his own honor. This implies that the text hath reference to apostles and evangelists, whereas it evidently speaks only of ordinary ruling and ...
— The Divine Right of Church Government • Sundry Ministers Of Christ Within The City Of London
... I have been little else but self-seeking," he said, half aloud. "For I gave not to the man, but to myself. I clutched at a personal reward, if not of spoken gratitude yet of subjective content. It has not come. I suppose I ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... independence of the Slave States, and at the same time on the ruins of the Mexican Republic setting up a mock Empire. In similar spirit has he conspired against German Unity, whose just strength promised to be a wall against his unprincipled self-seeking. ...
— The Duel Between France and Germany • Charles Sumner
... acting on behalf not merely of their interests, but of an absolute democratic principle. Their angry resentment becomes transformed in their own minds into righteous indignation; and there may be turned loose upon the community a horde of self-seeking fanatics—like unto those soldiers in the religious wars who robbed and slaughtered their opponents in the ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... her 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 ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... assuredly be limited, and if limited it would be most prejudicial to the race, as I have pointed out in Hereditary Genius, but may be permitted to do so again. The doctrine would only be followed by the prudent and self-denying; it would be neglected by the impulsive and self-seeking. Those whose race we especially want to have, would leave few descendants, while those whose race we especially want to be quit of, would crowd the vacant space with their progeny, and the strain of population would ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... imagine of goodness, truth, and beauty; that they can see His footprints everywhere in 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 ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... in the city tenant as compared with the sentiments and status of home-ownership in the village, the mobility of the urban dweller in his necessary routine of work and his restless quest for pleasure, the sophistication, the front, the self-seeking of the individual emancipated from the controls of the primary group—all ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... there went, on the psychological side, the further assumption of a general selfishness or self-seeking as the principal motive of the individual in the economic sphere. Oddly enough this assumption—the most warrantable of the lot—was the earliest to fall under disrepute. The plain assertion that every man looks ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... looking back either through the history of England to much earlier generations or to the legislation and administrations of later times, we are justified in saying that many of the evils under which our country now suffers are the consequences of folly, ignorance, neglect, or self-seeking in those who, at different times have wielded the powers of rank, office, and money. But the more bitterly we feel this, the more loudly we utter it, the stronger is the obligation we lay on ourselves to beware, lest ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... realization that he, too, had been unconscious of his own higher self until his love had made him feel the need of it in her. They two, from the depths of self-satisfied power, had gone blindly in their paths of self-seeking—till each had awakened the other. A strange, ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... connection with this case a striking example may be seen of the divine impartiality of the Scriptures. Some persons, with a view to objects of their own, take pleasure in representing ministers of religion as more self-seeking and less generous than those who make no religious profession. The contrast between the Levite and the Samaritan, if this case stood alone, might seem to support their theory. But there is no respect of persons or classes ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... sympathy comes into the student's eye. He is glad to believe that, all those years, Francis could see in his comings and goings the cloister of Clara; and that this sacred gleam of human fellowship,—love purified of all self-seeking,—tender, visionary, celestial affection, ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... whose habits, manners and customs, alone I am personally acquainted; and the lingering traces of whose old forms of life—so gay, kindly, and suggestive—I saw some thirty years ago, just before they sank under the mammonism, commonplace, critical apery, and cold material self-seeking, which have hitherto been the plague of the present generation. We have become more practical and knowing than our forefathers, but not so wise. We are now a "fast people;" but we miss the true goal of life—that is, sober happiness. Fast to smattering; ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... transfigured his face, though he was unconscious of it. A shining face caused by contact with God! Shall not we, to whom the Master has said, "follow Me," get alone with Him and His blessed Word, so habitually, with open or uncovered face, that is, with eyesight unhindered by prejudice or self-seeking, that mirroring the glory of His face we shall more and more come to bear His very likeness upon ...
— Quiet Talks on Prayer • S. D. (Samuel Dickey) Gordon
... sins, and could now depart bravely to work 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 ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... to take up that"; one does not feel for him at any point in his career as one feels for Mr. George Wyndham or even for Lord Randolph Churchill; from its outset until now that career stretches before our eyes in a flat and uneventful plain of successful but inglorious and ineffective self-seeking. ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... conjure up to some imaginations. I mean an earnest direction of attention in all parts of the country to this necessity for a studied and elaborated project of conciliation and social co-operation We cannot afford to leave such things to specialised politicians and self-appointed, self-seeking "experts" any longer. A modern community has to think out its problems as a whole and co-operate as a whole in their solution. We have to bring all our national life into this discussion of the National Plan before us, and not simply newspapers and periodicals and books, ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... in that way was not easy. I was so accustomed to the thought of Nature as a complex of self-seeking cruelties, the strong preying on the weak, and the weak defenceless, that the mere idea of its containing a ruling co-operative principle seemed at times far-fetched. To the common opinion of the day, my own included, the conception of a universe that would come ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... contrast between the ideal of honour and the practice of pecuniary corruption has always been a peculiar feature of Spain and her settlements." If we hear one thing oftener than another said of Spain, it is fault-finding with her public men; the evils of bribery, corruption, and self-seeking amongst what should be her statesmen, and, above all, her Government employees, are pointed out, and by none more than by Spaniards themselves. There is a good deal of truth at the bottom of these charges; they are the melancholy legacy of the years of misrule and of the darkness ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... of popular government, we suffer ourselves to be led about by self-seeking politicians like a blind man by a scurvy poodle; we made partisanship paramount to patriotism—have reserved the ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... in the affirmative, Mr. Lincoln said he "had received a letter from a little girl called Grace Bedell, advising me to wear whiskers, as she thought it would improve my looks." He said the character of the "letter was so unique and so different from the many self-seeking and threatening ones he was daily receiving that it came to him as a relief and a pleasure." When the train reached Westfield, Mr. Lincoln made a short speech from the platform of the car, and in conclusion ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various
... the civilities of social life become, through her influence, something beside an exchange of heartless forms, or of self-seeking attentions? Precisely so soon, and so fast as woman shall determine to reject the empty adulation of fops and simpletons, to be commended only for what deserves praise, and to be entirely sincere and Christian, ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... very desirous of having none but me with him, and told me one day, "If they never spoke to me against you, I should be more easy, and you more happy." In this journey I committed many faults of self-love and self-seeking. I was become like a poor traveler that had lost his way in the night and could find no way, path, or track. My husband, in his return from St. Reine, passed by St. Edm. Having now no children but my first-born son, who ...
— The Autobiography of Madame Guyon • Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon
... had bidden his wife good-by and was riding through the cold gray mist to do his weary, hopeless best for an obstinate, foolish, impracticable king, and to put some heart, if it were possible, into a dwindling handful of unprincipled, self-seeking, double-minded men. The day was full of omens, and they were all against him. Twice a hare ran across the road, and Grimond muttered to himself as he rode behind his master, "The ill-faured beast." As they passed through Glenfarg, a raven ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... more than a moral police department of the State. Saints like Ken and preachers like South are replaced by fashionable prelates like Cornwallis, who made Lambeth Palace an adjunct to Ranelagh Gardens, and self-seeking pluralists like Bishop Watson. The Church could not even perceive the meaning of the Wesleyan revolt; and its charity was the irritating and complacent patronage of the obstrusive Hannah More. Its learning decayed, its intelligence slumbered; and the main function it fulfilled until ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... his integrity. And Jefferson shared these misgivings, though the exigencies of politics made him dissemble his feelings. It is significant, also, that Burr was always surrounded by men of more than doubtful intentions—place-hunters and self-seeking politicians, who ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson |
