"Self-sufficient" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... only, and that is enough! Myself by negation, by ugliness, by grimace and irony! Myself, in my caprice, in my independence, in my irresponsible sovereignty; myself, set free by laughter, free as the demons are, and exulting in my freedom; I, master of myself, invincible and self-sufficient, living for this one time yet by and for myself! This is what seems to me at the bottom of this merry-making. One hears in it an echo of Satan, the temptation to make self the center of all things, to be like an Elohim, the worst and last revolt of man. It means ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the government of a colony as distracted as it was important, did not arise from the noble lord's fitness, but from his political interest; and that Earl Grey, the whig colonial minister, had performed his official duties in a way crotchety, self-sufficient, and arrogant—in the spirit of the partizan ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... touched by the honest confession. This did not seem the gay, self-sufficient young man he had met on former occasions. "I cannot pretend to criticise another man's life, knowing my own," he answered humbly. "I am sure I wish you all success in ...
— Duncan Polite - The Watchman of Glenoro • Marian Keith
... his wife's death Simeon Pratt had been but the business-man, large of appetite, pitiless, self-sufficient, and self-absorbed—the type of man often described by amiable critics as "a hard citizen, but good to his family, you know," as if the fact of his not beating his wife were adequate excuse for ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... flashed and hummed to itself, serene and self-sufficient. Barrent couldn't help feeling that the presence of a human in this temple of the ...
— The Status Civilization • Robert Sheckley
... promise, so he was the slackest to perform. And, to speak the truth, though he was a civil-spoken fellow, his master was more afraid of him, with all his professions, than he was of the rest, who protested less. He knew that Parley was vain, credulous, and self-sufficient; and he always apprehended more danger from Parley's impertinence, curiosity, and love of novelty, than even from the stronger vices of some of the other servants. The rest, indeed, seldom got into any scrape of which ...
— Stories for the Young - Or, Cheap Repository Tracts: Entertaining, Moral, and Religious. Vol. VI. • Hannah More
... and future of man, clearly and finally; they have set themselves to legislate and construct on that assumption, and, experiencing the perplexing obduracy and evasions of reality, they have taken to dogma, persecution, training, pruning, secretive education; and all the stupidities of self-sufficient energy. In the passion of their good intentions they have not hesitated to conceal facts, suppress thought, crush disturbing initiatives and apparently detrimental desires. And so it is blunderingly and wastefully, destroying with the making, ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... Syracusan assembly; but the invaders of Syracuse came, made good their landing in Sicily; and if they had promptly attacked the city itself, instead of wasting nearly a year in desultory operations in other parts of Sicily, the Syracusans must have paid the penalty of their self-sufficient carelessness in submission to the Athenian yoke. But, of the three generals who led the Athenian expedition, two only were men of ability, and one was most weak and incompetent. Fortunately for Syracuse, Alcibiades, the most skilful of the three, was soon deposed from his command by a factious and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... ranked among the principal causes which gradually, but effectually, alienated the affections of the people of Massachusetts, first from the persons immediately charged with the government of the province, and finally, from the royal authority and whole English dominion. "With an arrogant and self-sufficient manner, constantly identifying himself with the authority of which he was merely the representative, and constantly indulging in irritating personal allusions, he entirely lost sight of the courtesy and ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... God hath thus ordered it, that we may learn to bear one another's burdens, for no man is without fault; no man but hath his burden; no man is self-sufficient; no man has wisdom enough for himself alone. But we ought to bear with one another, comfort, help, instruct, and ...
— Thistle and Rose - A Story for Girls • Amy Walton
... old gentleman, musing at the change in the attitude of the young man's mind—once so self-sufficient and assertive, now so dependent and inexperienced. "Very few lives are bare and empty enough not to teach one something worth knowing. I know the events of one man's life," he added, after a few moments of thoughtful ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... herself back. So whether she would condescend to do private teaching, particularly here, in Beldover, I don't know. But it would be just the thing. Winifred has got a special nature. And if you can put into her way the means of being self-sufficient, that is the best thing possible. She'll never get on with the ordinary life. You find it difficult enough yourself, and she is several skins thinner than you are. It is awful to think what her life will be like unless she does find a means of expression, some way of fulfilment. You can see ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... very famous books, profound even to unintelligibility, but can never be a philosopher. Therefore reject Hegel, "that merely thinking, on a barren heath speculating, self-sufficient, self-satisfied little EGO;"[E] and consider Kant as weighed in the balance and found wanting on his own showing: for if that critical portal of pure reason had indeed been sufficient, as it gave itself out to be, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... of the synonyms of this word is Aja. Now, Aja literally means that which has no birth, and is applied to the Eternal Brahma in certain portions of the Upanishads. So, the first sign is intended to represent Parabrahma, the self-existent, eternal, self-sufficient cause ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... view of the fact that you are quite well able to take care of your matters of that sort yourself and are not in need of any one's help. No, a volunteer could not make such a venture. It would be too immodest. Also too gratuitously generous. And a shade too self-sufficient. No, he could not venture it. It would look too much like anxiety to get in at a feast where no plate had been provided for him. In fact he could not get in at all, except by the back way, and with a false key; that is to say, a pretext—a ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the Division composed of all arms and self-sufficient. Several divisions may be grouped into a field army, to which are attached field army troops. These are organized into a brigade for purpose of supply and administration when ...
— Military Instructors Manual • James P. Cole and Oliver Schoonmaker
... vision, that deafens while it opens stopped ears, that exalts while it plunges into new gulfs of consciousness. Here, then, was the other formulated answer to the problem of life. The two Cities of Augustine lay for him to choose. The one was that of a world self-originated, self-organised and self-sufficient, interpreted by such men as Marx and Herve, socialists, materialists, and, in the end, hedonists, summed up at last in Felsenburgh. The other lay displayed in the sight he saw before him, telling of a Creator and of a creation, of a Divine purpose, a redemption, ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... anxiously and with so much suffering, and for the sake of whom they have exposed their lives a hundred times perhaps, in vain. Zashue was right, the fugitives had turned south from the Bocas; and had Hayoue been less self-sufficient they would have ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... (lucky man if not) been vex'd, Worn, fretted, and perplex'd, By a pert, busy, would-be-clever knave, A forward, empty, self-sufficient slave? ...
— Broad Grins • George Colman, the Younger
... bedside and gazed with a solemn earnestness at the immobile, helpless form stretched out before her as though ready for burial. Her heart swelled with suppressed emotion,—she thought with anguish of the brilliant brain, the strong, self-sufficient nature brought to such ruin through too great an estimate of human capability. Tears rushed to ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... starch), oil, amino acids, and proteins that have been removed from the leaves and wood of the tree. These materials are stored for future use of the embryo in the nut to sustain respiration, to permit germination, and to maintain the seedling until it has produced enough leaf area to become self-sufficient. ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Incorporated 39th Annual Report - at Norris, Tenn. September 13-15 1948 • Various
... off. Miss Carmichael was a woman about six-and-twenty—and had been a woman, like too many Scotch girls, long before she was out of her teens—a human flower cut and dried—an unpleasant specimen, and by no means valuable from its scarcity. Self-sufficient, assured, with scarce shyness enough for modesty, handsome and hard, she was essentially a self-glorious Philistine; nor would she be anything better till something was sent to humble her, though what spiritual engine might ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... to keep him at it. I was wanting to gain time for a little argument of my own. It was a case of should I keep what I had found to myself, or should I share it with Weems? Common sense said, "Don't be a fool. If Providence has chucked a good thing in your way, stick it in your own pocket. That self-sufficient idiot will be none the wiser." But the plague one calls Honour kept shoving in all manner of objections. By Jove, how a rational-minded cad would ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... up and down, "Peter, you are a fool, sir, a hot-headed, self-sufficient, pragmatical young ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... wonder if I could! Don't tell Vic, will you? I'd like to take him by surprise. Boys are so conceited and self-sufficient! You'd think Vic was my grandfather, the way he lords it over me. First of all, what is the right way to get on a horse? I wish you'd ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... had his good points. He was brave as a lion; strictly honourable; and though very ignorant, and very self-sufficient, had that sort of dogged good sense which one very often finds in men of stern hearts, who, if they have many prejudices, ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... This is the first effort at a detailed treatment of the movement of the Negroes from the South to the North. It has such interesting chapters as the causes of the migration, stimulation of the movement, the call of the self-sufficient North, the draining of the black belt, efforts to check the movement, the effect of the migration on the South, the situation in the congested districts in the North and West, and remedies for relief. Persons who have an interest in this conspicuous event of our internal history will find it ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... an irrepressible "he-ar, he-ar!" from the toady, which was not only tolerated by the meeting, but echoed by the wag in the distance, who, though his words that day had been few, had done the shareholders good service nevertheless, inasmuch as he had quelled, to some extent the propensities of a self-sufficient "bore." ...
— The Iron Horse • R.M. Ballantyne
... in 1881, Mr. a Beckett was enabled to revive the humours of his father's "Mr. Briefless," by the filial creation of the happily-named "A. BRIEFLESS, Junior." The "Papers from Pump Handle Court" from this self-sufficient, inflated, and utterly hopeless Junior, have been a feature in Punch for years past, and by them the author has—so says an expert—"charmingly illuminated the legal profession by his queer fancy." One of the best papers in the collection is an account of a visit to the studio of a well-known ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... found in so many of the institutions of the United States, and is one so allied to a virtue, that no foreigner has a right to wonder that it is regarded in the light of a virtue by all Americans. There has been an attempt to make the place too perfect. In the desire to have the establishment self-sufficient at all points, more has been attempted than human nature can achieve. The lad is taken to West Point, and it is presumed that from the moment of his reception he shall expend every energy of his mind and body in making himself a soldier. At ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... two neighbours are admirably characteristic, not confined to any age or place, but always accompany the young convert to godliness, as the shadow does the substance. Christian is firm, decided, bold, and sanguine. Obstinate is profane, scornful, self-sufficient, and contemns God's Word. Pliable is yielding, and easily induced to engage in things of which he understands neither the ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... not answer you. On the day of resurrection they shall disclaim your having associated them with God: and none shall declare unto thee the truth, like one who is well acquainted therewith. O men, ye have need of GOD; but GOD is self-sufficient, and to be praised. If he pleaseth, he can take you away, and produce a new creature in your stead: neither will this be difficult with GOD. A burdened soul shall not bear the burden of another: and if a heavy-burdened soul call on another to ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... discovery as "a Satanic abyss" (abyssum Satanae), and declared "The reddening of the water is NOT natural," and "when God allows such a miracle to take place Satan endeavours, and so do his ungodly, self-reliant, self-sufficient, and worldly tools, to make it signify nothing." In face of this onslaught Linnaeus retreated; he tells his correspondent that "it is difficult to say anything in this matter," and shields himself under the statement "It ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... the gentleman himself," responded the duenna; "I know nothing of him, but that he is the most daring and impertinent man"—(Martha indulged in the privilege granted her by Don Lope); "the most unceremonious, head-strong, self-sufficient cavalier I ever met with—Virgen Santa!—What a disturbance he has raised in the house. Then there's that most impudent rascal of a valet; he is the principal cause of the commotion, and I humbly crave and hope your honor will give him ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... power rather than a weakness; it involves interdependence. There is always danger that increased personal independence will decrease the social capacity of an individual. In making him more self-reliant, it makes him more self-sufficient; it may lead to aloofness and indifference. It often makes an individual so insensitive in his relation to others as to develop an illusion of being really able to stand and act alone, an unnamed form ...
— Creative Impulse in Industry - A Proposition for Educators • Helen Marot
... Miss Gunning," she replied coldly. "On the few occasions I have seen her I have thought her so cool in her likings and sentiments, so self-sufficient, that I could not think her attractive to a nature so warm as Colonel Digby's. Nor do I think her mental attainments such as to render a real friendship possible ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... eyebrows, a smooth-shaven face speckled on one side as by a powder scar. Beneath a thin-lipped mouth a stubborn chin protruded. He was dressed in a flannel shirt and corduroy trousers, fastened by a black belt. He had the self-sufficient air of the sailor or miner, which is developed by living a great deal apart from other men. It seemed to Wilson that the man was watching him, too, with considerable interest. Every now and then he removed the short clay pipe which he ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... and his lady; her friend, a woman of good family; and an old Baron Triste, of a sixteen-quartering family. At the name of Mayor of Bruges, you probably represent to yourself a fat, heavy, formal, self-sufficient mortal—tout au contraire: our Mayor was a thin gentleman, of easy manners, literature, and amusing conversation: Madame, a beautiful Provinciale. M. Lerret, the Mayor, found us out to be the Edgeworths ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... of which names can be truly applied to Milton. And if we wish to find Love enjoying his just supremacy in poetry, we cannot do better than seek him among the lyrists of the Court of Charles II. Milton, self-sufficient and censorious, denies the name of love to these songs of the sons of Belial. Love, he says, reigns and revels in ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... not be that she felt but a new sense of loneliness; of that isolation which contact with strange faces emphasized. What had come over her? she asked herself. She who had been so self-sufficient; whose nature now seemed filled with sudden yearnings and restlessness, impatience—she knew not what. She who thought she had partaken so abundantly of life's cup abruptly discovered renewed sources for disquietude. With welling heart she watched the sun ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... ambuscade became almost proverbial;[22] and even Mulgrave, the real author of the satire, and upon whose shoulders the blows ought in justice to have descended, mentions the circumstance in his "Art of Poetry;" with a cold and self-sufficient complacent sneer: ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... levies made. He gives ambassadors their cue, His cobbled treaties to renew; And annual taxes must suffice The current blunders to disguise When his crude schemes in air are lost, And millions scarce defray the cost, His arrogance (nought undismayed) Trusting in self-sufficient aid, 60 On other rocks misguides the realm, And thinks a pilot at the helm. He ne'er suspects his want of skill, But blunders on from ill to ill; And, when he fails of all intent, Blames only unforeseen event. Lest you mistake the application, ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... eagerly asked for, it has not been executed, and when I ask for an explanation,—I allude to the servant-maid, a quick girl, who, an't please you, has been a teacher in an English boarding-school,—dust is thrown up with a self-sufficient air, and I am obliged to appear to see her meaning clearly, though she puzzles herself, that I may not make her feel her ignorance; but you must have experienced the same thing. I will write ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... Quixote. If the selves are too unrelated, we distrust the man; if they are too inflexibly on one track we find him arid, stubborn, or eccentric. In the repertory of characters, meager for the isolated and the self-sufficient, highly varied for the adaptable, there is a whole range of selves, from that one at the top which we should wish God to see, to those at the bottom that we ourselves do not dare to see. There may be octaves for the family,—father, Jehovah, tyrant,—husband, ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... Christophe found some distraction in talking to Friedemann. He judged him, he could not long take pleasure in this vulgar bantering wit: his mockery and perpetual denial became irritating before long and he felt the impotence of it all: but it did soothe his exasperation with the self-sufficient stupidity of the Philistines. While he heartily despised his companion, Christophe could not do without him. They were continually seen together sitting with the unclassed and doubtful people of Friedemann's acquaintance, who were even more worthless ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... and of 'content' is scarcely Paul's whole idea here, though that, no doubt, is included. We have no word which exactly expresses the meaning. 'Self-sufficient' is a translation, but then it has acquired a bad meaning as connoting a false estimate of one's own worth and wisdom. What Paul means is that whatever be his condition he has in himself enough to meet it. He does not depend on circumstances, and he ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... endowed with intellect and will and freedom, God is a PERSON; and a LIVING person also, for He is both object and subject of his own activity, and to be this distinguishes the living from the lifeless. He is thus absolutely SELF-SUFFICIENT: his SELF-KNOWLEDGE and SELF-LOVE are both of them infinite and adequate, and need no extraneous conditions to ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... sirrah. You did this for impudence, to make a show of your wealth. You intended it as an insinuation of equality. I overlook the impertinence for the sake of the man whose white blood you carry; but h-mark you, if ever you bring your Parisian airs and self-sufficient face on a level with mine ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... stage nearly all human passions which lend themselves to comedy or farce. Sordid avarice, lavish prodigality, shameless vice, womanly resignation, artless coquetry, greed for money, downright hypocrisy, would-be gentility, self-sufficient vanity, fashionable swindling, misanthropy, heartlessness, plain common-sense, knowledge of the world, coarse jealousy, irresolution, impudence, pride of birth, egotism, self-conceit, pusillanimity, ingenuity, roguery, affectations, homeliness, thoughtlessness, pedantry, arrogance, and many ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... pressed by those with whom I was associated to wind up this particular venture and turn my attention to other things. I have often wondered, in the light of their subsequent actions, why they should have become so pressing just at this time. At the same time, perhaps I was a little vain and self-sufficient. I had once got the better of some agents of another great financier in a Western Power deal, and I felt that I could put this thing through too. Hence I refused to heed the warning. However, I found that all those who were previously interested to buy ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... which Mrs. Macgregor suffered with calm surprise, it became difficult to go on with the programme of tearful consolation which had been prepared. There seemed hardly a place for sympathy, much less for tearful consolation, in this well-ordered home, and with these self-sufficient folk. ...
— The Prospector - A Tale of the Crow's Nest Pass • Ralph Connor
... OF THE DUCHESS" is the adventure of a young girl, who was brought out of a convent to marry a certain Duke. The Duke was narrow-hearted, pompous, and self-sufficient; the mother who shared his home, a sickly woman, as ungenial as himself. The young wife, on the other hand, was a bright, stirring creature, who would have been the sunshine of a labourer's home. She pined amidst the dreariness and the formality of her ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... the Castle, would never have occurred to anybody, unless it were to a very ignorant child indeed. There were no safe highroads, nor quiet lanes, in those days, where a maiden might wander without fear of molestation. Old ballads are full of accounts of the perils incurred by rash and self-sufficient girls who ventured alone out of doors in their innocent ignorance or imprudent bravado. The roadless wastes gave harbour to abundance of fierce small animals and deadly vipers, and to men worse ...
— Earl Hubert's Daughter - The Polishing of the Pearl - A Tale of the 13th Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... the musical expression of a Paganini or a Liszt, or that the voice of a Malibran or a Grisi, has no special charm—nay more, that there is not some special excellence in the instruments of Amati or Stradivarius? If there be, we can leave to him, whilst the rest of mankind marvel at his self-sufficient obtuseness, to hold that it was nothing but his own imagination which so much influenced Hazlitt when he was touched to the heart by Edmund Kean's rendering of the words of the remorseful Moor, "Fool, fool, fool!" Why, ...
— The Drama • Henry Irving
... inflow and outflow. When there is any interference with these activities, then morbid symptoms appear, which ultimately must end in disaster and death. This is equally true of the intellectual life of a Nation. When through narrow conceit a Nation regards itself self-sufficient and cuts itself from the stimulus of the outside world, then intellectual decay ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... forgive an unskillful workman for doing imperfect work, because he must work, well or ill, or starve; this workman is excusable; but your God is not. According to you, He is self-sufficient; in this case, why does He create men? He has, according to you, all that is necessary to render man happy; why, then, does He not do it? You must conclude that your God has more malice than goodness, or you must admit that God was ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... a sport. He belonged to that race of men. In Manhattan it is a distinct race. They are the Caribs of the North—strong, artful, self-sufficient, clannish, honorable within the laws of their race, holding in lenient contempt neighboring tribes who bow to the measure of Society's tapeline. I refer, of course, to the titled nobility of sportdom. ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... in Cowan's eyes testified that he was again the self-sufficient commander, confident of his decisions and determined upon his ...
— Aces Up • Covington Clarke
... compassion that is so much a part of your makeup. How can we love our country and not love our countrymen, and loving them, reach out a hand when they fall, heal them when they are sick, and provide opportunities to make them self-sufficient so they will be equal in fact and not ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... self-sufficient and required little attention. A cup of hot coffee, a jug of fresh water, a little bait and a rowboat, and he was on his way. Fortunately, the Spindrift boat landing was not in sight of North Cove. Cap'n Mike sculled ...
— The Electronic Mind Reader • John Blaine
... as Wife, and came home to Berlin in all pomp;—but good came not with her to anybody there. Not only did she bring the poor old man no children, which was a fault to be overlooked, considering Sophie Dorothee's success; but she brought a querulous, weak and self-sufficient female humor; found his religion heterodox,—he being Calvinist, and perhaps even lax-Calvinist, she Lutheran as the Prussian Nation is, and strict to the bone:—heterodox wholly, to the length of no salvation possible; ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... the thereby determined division of the conceptions which form the said whole; consequently, only by means of their connection in a system. Pure understanding distinguishes itself not merely from everything empirical, but also completely from all sensibility. It is a unity self-subsistent, self-sufficient, and not to be enlarged by any additions from without. Hence the sum of its cognition constitutes a system to be determined by and comprised under an idea; and the completeness and articulation of this system can at the same time serve as ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... raised the value of even the most rascally lieutenant to the famine price of a general he would have been swept contemptuously from the army: these trials have ground the conceit out of him, and forced him to be self-sufficient and to understand that to such men as he is the world will give nothing that he cannot take from it by force. In this the world is not free from cowardice and folly; for Napoleon, as a merciless cannonader of political rubbish, is making himself useful. indeed, ...
— The Man of Destiny • George Bernard Shaw
... is a faithless, unworthy servant, who grows proud and self-sufficient upon the strength of property that belongs to me, and which he has stolen. And therefore I am about to change this impudent minister's fete into sorrow and mourning, of which the nymph of Vaux, as the poets say, shall not soon ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... sentiment as that "it is a hard case to make slaves of those whom God and Nature made free," should be ungratefully pelted by the scoundrels his crazy philanthropy had let loose on society; but to others of a more judicial cast it will be a matter of regret that reckless self-sufficient enthusiasm is not oftener requited in some such way for all the mischief it does in ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... thirty days after the commencement of the then next session of Congress." In performing this duty the act imposes but a single condition or prerequisite on the Executive: he shall "by proclamation command the insurgents to disperse." These sections are complete, harmonious, self-sufficient, and, in their chief provisions, nowise dependent upon or connected with any other section or clause of the act. They place under the President's command the whole militia, and by a subsequent ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... faithless, unworthy servant, who becomes proud and self-sufficient with property which belongs to me, and which he has stolen. And, therefore, am I about to change this impudent minister's fete into a sorrow and mourning, of which the nymph of Vaux, as the poets say, shall not ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... nor of prestige. This indeed is the superiority of the German character over all others, that it is satisfied when it can acknowledge its own worth, and has no need of recognition, authority, or privilege. It is self-sufficient. This is the course I have steered, and in politics it is much easier to say what one should avoid than to say what one should do. Certain principles of honesty and courage forbid one to do certain things, just as the access to certain fields is interdicted in the army maneuvers. But ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... their early struggles and poverty. This feast teaches that such remembrance ought always to trace the better present to God, and that memory of conquered sorrows and trials is wholesome only when it is devout, and that the joy of present ease is bracing, not when it is self-sufficient, but when it is thankful. The past, rightly looked at, will yield for us all materials for a feast of tabernacles; and it is rightly looked at only when it is all seen as God's work, and as tending to settled peace ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... investing himself with his coat was led back to his corner—where, but for having no egotism in his pleasant nature, he would have answered well enough for that radiant though self-sufficient boy, Jack Horner—Bella with her own hands laid a cloth for him, and brought him his supper on a tray. 'Stop a moment,' said she, 'we must keep his little clothes clean;' and tied a napkin under his chin, in a very ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... adopts for her patroness the blue-stocking Minerva; a man-hatress, as clever girls so often are, and determined to pay the author of the Iliad out for his treatment of her sex by insisting on its superior moral, not to say intellectual, capacity, and on the self-sufficient imbecility of man unless he has a woman always at his elbow to keep him tolerably straight and in his proper place—this, and not the musty fusty old bust we see in libraries, is the kind of person who I believe wrote the Odyssey. Of course in reality the ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... time "at the Lord's feet." Thirdly, because the contemplative life is more delightful than the active; wherefore Augustine says (De Verb. Dom. Serm. ciii) that "Martha was troubled, but Mary feasted." Fourthly, because in the contemplative life man is more self-sufficient, since he needs fewer things for that purpose; wherefore it was said (Luke 10:41): "Martha, Martha, thou art careful and art troubled about many things." Fifthly, because the contemplative life is loved more for its own sake, while ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... of counteracting or alleviating the danger. But if these views be correct, the questions to be determined by society are also two, namely: whether it be possible to get rid of these aggravations; and whether credit itself may not be so organized as to be self-sufficient and self-supporting, whatever the vagaries of the standard. The suppression of small notes might have a perceptible effect in lessening the aggravations of paper, but it would not touch the more fundamental ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... rebels let go their whole line, and fell back on Nashville and Island No. Ten, and to the Memphis & Charleston Railroad. Everybody was anxious to help. Boats passed up and down constantly, and very soon arrived the rebel prisoners from Donelson. I saw General Buckner on the boat, he seemed self-sufficient, and thought their loss was not really so serious to their ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... and more difficulty. At first the paragraphs would lose connection, and he would be forced to reread them. Then the sentences would drop apart. Immediately before the girl arrived, the words themselves grew anarchic. They stared him in the eye, each a complete entity, self-sufficient, individual, bearing no relation to any other words except that of mere proximity,—like a spelling lesson. Only by an effort could Peter enforce a temporary cohesion among them, and they dropped apart at the ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... Darrow started up and walked away to the other end of the room. He stopped before the writing-table, where his photograph, well-dressed, handsome, self-sufficient—the portrait of a man of the world, confident of his ability to deal adequately with the most delicate situations—offered its huge fatuity to his gaze. He turned back to her. "It's rather hard on Owen, isn't it, that you should have waited ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... something by her needlework. Oh, ye men and women who swim in luxury, you do not know what delight, what rapture it is when a young man or woman receives the reward of his honest labour for the first time; you know nothing of the proud consciousness of being self-sufficient, of being able to live without the compassion, without the assistance, ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... Posada one of those passengers. It was a Mr. Ezekiel Corwin, formerly known to these pages as "hired man" to the late Squire Blandford, of North Liberty, Connecticut, but now a shrewd, practical, self-sufficient, and self-asserting unit of the more cautious later Californian immigration. As the stage rattled away again with more or less humorous and open disparagement of the town and the Posada from its "outsiders," he lounged with lazy but ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... "know it all;" they appreciate their own insufficiency. They are open-minded and impressionable. Now Jesus says that the first approach to his blessedness is in this teachable spirit. The hardest people for him to reach were always the self-sufficient people. The Pharisees thought they did not need anything, and so they could not get anything. As any one thinks, then, of his own greatest blessings, the first of them must be {59} this,—that somehow he has been made open-minded to the good. It may be that the conceit has been, as we say, knocked ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... faults, which, if not inherent, will naturally be acquired by those who are too early intrusted with power. He was self-sufficient, arbitrary, and passionate. His good qualities consisted in a generous disposition, a kindness of heart when not irritated, a manly courage, and a frank acknowledgment of his errors. Had he been allowed to serve a proper time in the various grades of his profession,—had ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... done. Ten to one I couldn't keep a capable working crew three weeks on end. On the other hand, take a bunch of loggers on a pay roll working for a man that meets them on an equal footing—why, they'll go to hell and back again for him. They're as loyal as soldiers to the flag. They're a mighty self-sufficient, independent lot, these lumberjacks, and that goes for most everybody knocking about in this country,—loggers, prospectors, miners, settlers, and all. If you're what they term 'all right,' you can do anything, and they'll back you up. If you go to putting on airs and trying to assert ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... Fulmort of St. Matthew's, Whittingtonia, and when he said "Yes, he lived in the clergy house," he began regularly to play him off, asking the most absurd questions about fasts and feasts and vigils and decorations, and Clem answered them all in his prim little self-sufficient way, just as if he thought he was on the high- road to be St. Clement the Martyr, till I was ready to ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... at the moment of his elevation to the throne of Canterbury. Bradwardine, though a scholar of universal reputation, won his fame at Oxford without the supplementary course at Paris, and lived all his career in his native land. As an English university career became more self-sufficient, Oxford became the school of the politician and the man of affairs as much as of the pure student. The new tendency is illustrated by the careers of the brothers Stratford, both Oxford scholars, yet famous not for their writings but for lives devoted to the ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... a chapter in the Discourses of Epictetus, entitled: "To or against those who obstinately Persist in what they have determined." {101} There could, I think, be no better formulation of purpose grown hard and unworthily self-sufficient. This form of materialism I have termed egoism and bigotry, since the purpose may be either personal or social in scope. But in either case the diagnosis of Epictetus goes to the root of the evil. He thus describes his experience with one of his ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... thing clear to the modern mind it is that science has no room in its theory of things for an over-ruling intelligence. Sir Oliver Lodge well sums up the attitude of science in the following sentences:—"Orthodox science shows us a self-contained and self-sufficient universe, not in touch with anything above or beyond itself—the general trend and outline of it known—nothing supernatural or miraculous, no intervention of beings other than ourselves, being conceived possible." (Man and the Universe, p. 14, Popular ed.) Personally, we question ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... thing. Over and above the good of his soul and other people's souls, a man must eat—to put it baldly. He should earn his keep. He must indeed calculate upon provision for two. Mr. Thompson had made the common mistake of believing himself self-sufficient, and Sophie Carr had unwittingly taught him that a male celibate was an anomaly in nature's reckoning. He had thought himself immune from the ordinary passions of humanity. The strangest part of it was a saddened gladness that he was not. ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... some of that water frozen in the Saturnian System. Altogether, I see no end to the jobs. It's no good our depending on Earth for anything. Too expensive, too chancy. The Belt has to be made completely self-sufficient." ...
— Industrial Revolution • Poul William Anderson
... the people I meet there make me feel murderous. I like her, a sensible, sonsy woman, and I like him too, although his solemn, priggish airs make me tired, but I cannot bear the crowd they get round them: all the cranks and oddities and smug, self-sufficient, interfering people seem to get into their house, and they're all reforming something or uplifting something else or generally bleating against this country. Things done in England are always inferior to things done elsewhere. ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... instead of being preposterously and prejudicially placed behind, it had been evidently better; forasmuch as the human shin-bone could not then have been so easily broken,—Dr. Moreton's Beauty of the Human Structure, page 62.—What a pity it is that these two learned and self-sufficient authors, were not consulted in the formation of their own persons: doubtless they could have suggested many improvements, and would have felt all the advantages with due effect—probably they might have liked their heads to screw on and off like Saint ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 363, Saturday, March 28, 1829 • Various
... Silas blundered about slowly and awkwardly, he looked with wonder and admiration at the ease and facility with which his teacher and the other men did their work. They were so calm, so precise, and so self-sufficient. He wondered if he would ever be like them, and felt very hopeless as the ...
— The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... offer the explanation that Your Majesty is served in London by cowards; self-sufficient and self-important cowards who have hindered me in my task instead of helping me. I refer particularly ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... met at the house of M. Roux, the President, when M. Berna introduced his patient, a young girl of seventeen, of a constitution apparently nervous and delicate, but with an air sufficiently cool and self-sufficient. M. Berna offered eight proofs of Animal Magnetism, which he would elicit in her case, and ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... that England only contained one Stagholme, and perhaps he was right. Six miles from the nearest station, the great house stands self-sufficient, self-contained. The moat, now dry and cultivated, is still traceable, and requires bridging in two places. Surrounded by vast park-like meadowland, where huge trees guard against cutting wind or prying modern journalistic ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman
... speaking, I was standing in the window wondering what all the trouble was about. I could afford to be calm since I knew I was not hurting you very deeply. At most I was disappointing a very self-sufficient man. How do women find courage, O God, to take from men who love them the love they gave? No ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... and ticked them off on his fingers: 'the first is that you took the woman that I wanted. To a man of my temperament that is an unpardonable crime. I have never wanted women either as friends or as amusement. I am one of the few people in the world who are self-sufficient. It happened that I wanted your wife and she rejected me because ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace
... religion catholic and apostolic, for the truth of which many faithful witnesses had laid down their lives. It was, besides, the creed of an ancient race; and the mystery that shrouded it had a charm to pique the vanity even of self-sufficient Greeks, and stir up curiosity even in Roman arrogance and indifference. The doctrines of Buddha were eminently fitted to elucidate the doctrines of Christ, and therefore worthy to engage the interest of Christian writers; accordingly, among the earliest of these mention is made of the ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... quietly placing the dishes on the supper-table, The mother with mild words, clean her cap and gown, a wholesome odor falling off her person and clothes as she walks by, The father, strong, self-sufficient, manly, mean, anger'd, unjust, The blow, the quick loud word, the tight bargain, the crafty lure, The family usages, the language, the company, the furniture, the yearning and swelling heart, Affection that will not be gainsay'd, the sense of what is ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... a positive nature, the man who believes that he is equal to the emergency, who believes he can do the thing he attempts, who wins the confidence of his fellow-man. He is beloved because he is brave and self-sufficient. ...
— An Iron Will • Orison Swett Marden
... self-abandonment of angry weeping and vituperation. Perhaps it was that she had too much pride—or that in general she saw life with too much self-complacency, or that she was not in the habit of yielding to disappointment. It may have been that Jenny belonged to that class of persons who are called, self-sufficient. She plunged through a crisis with her own zest, meeting attack with counter-attack, keeping her head, surveying with the instinctive irreverence and self-protective wariness of the London urchin the possibilities and swaying fortunes of the fight. Emmy, so much ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... palace, the Marquis of Orsini suddenly lost that bold, insolent, self-sufficient air with which he had endeavored to deceive the venerable count, ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... cloister; and Satan, who had marked me for his own, breathed into my heart a vapour of spiritual pride, which could only have had its source in his own infernal regions. I had risen as high in the church as before in the state. I was, forsooth, the wise, the self-sufficient, the impeccable!—I was the counsellor of councils—I was the director of prelates. How should I stumble?—wherefore should I fear temptation? Alas! I became confessor to a sisterhood, and amongst that sisterhood I found the long-loved—the long-lost. Spare me further confession!—A ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... of her choice had wondrously improved Mabel Ashbourne. She was less self-sufficient and more conciliating. Her ambition, hitherto confined to the desire to excel all other women in her own person, had assumed a less selfish form. She was now only ambitious for her husband; greedy of parliamentary ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... WILHELM was a wilful lad, And lots of "cheek" young WILHELM had. He deemed the world should hail with joy A smart and self-sufficient boy, And do as it by him was told; He was so wise, he was so bold. If anyone dared stop his play, He screamed out—"Take the wretch away! Oh, take my enemy away! I won't have ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 26, 1892 • Various
... day to it every year; yet I sometimes fear the real article is almost dead or dying in our self-sufficient, independent Republic. Gratitude, anyhow, has never been made half enough of by the moralists; it is indispensable to a complete character, man's or woman's—the disposition to be appreciative, thankful. That ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... of GDP; expanding output of cotton, fruits, vegetables, and livestock; other crops - bananas, coconuts, cucumbers, mangoes, sugarcane; not self-sufficient in food ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... fatal thirtieth of August, Pope, self-deluded and self-sufficient as before, dismayed his best officers by ordering his sixty-five thousand men to be "immediately thrown forward in pursuit of the enemy," whose own fifty thousand were now far readier than ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... "She is self-sufficient," said Mrs. Larrabbee, with unusual feeling, "and that is just what most women are not, in these days. Oh, why has life become such a problem? Sometimes I think, with all that I have, I'm not, so well off as one of those salesgirls in Ferguson's, at home. I'm always searching for things to do—nothing ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... dead, and giving to the living, and perhaps to those who are yet unborn. The daily food and nourishment of the mind of an artist is found in the great works of his predecessors. 'Serpens nisi serpentem comederit, non fit draco.'" The fact is, the most self-sufficient of men are greater borrowers than they will admit, or perhaps know; their very novelties, if they have any, commence upon the thoughts of others, which are laid down as a foundation in their own minds. The common sense, which is called "common property," is that stock which all that have gone before ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... self-sufficient girl, she now felt lonesomely that it would be a great comfort to talk everything over with somebody. Things seemed only to get worse by being kept locked up so tight in her own bosom. Everything was changing so, just in a little while; you could not go by the old landmarks any more. Only ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... this preparation for war will be the desire of each nation to be self-sufficient—to produce within itself those materials indispensable for the waging of war. Capital will be wasted because each nation will store up quantities of these materials necessary to war which it is compelled to ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... more often? Many lack a quickened sense of a sacred Presence. Though aware of material things, they are inert to the things of the spirit. They wait to be spiritually awakened. Most of us persist in feeling that we are self-sufficient. We feel we are adequate for all ordinary affairs, and it is only when we find ourselves in overpowering situations that we recognize we are not self-sufficient, and may then turn to God. But when the crisis passes we are likely to lapse ...
— An Interpretation of Friends Worship • N. Jean Toomer
... all women, including the wealthiest and most reputable. This rule held so long as there still was no large class of people wealthy enough to be above the imputation of any necessity for manual labor and at the same time large enough to form a self-sufficient, isolated social body whose mass would afford a foundation for special rules of conduct within the class, enforced by the current opinion of the class alone. But now there has grown up a large enough leisure class ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... one of a too delicate constitution who ventures out in a storm. His will-power was great enough. He worked night and day, amidst the most violent bodily suffering, with a great ideal steadfastly before him, never satisfied with his own achievements. He was not self-sufficient. ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... in the community in which he lives make for the common defense and the general welfare. Hebbel carried the antithesis farther, asking what is the soul, and what is the body? And he answered, in effect, that the soul is indeed the very essence of personality, but is no original, self-begotten, and self-sufficient entity—on the contrary, it is a fragment, a participant in the animating principle of the universe—and that the body is indeed the medium of contact between person and person, but is also the separating barrier of soul from soul, and of the individual ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... many wonderful things; It has altered our views of Kaisers and Kings, And quite discounted the stern rebukes Of those who anathematized Grand Dukes. It has hurled from many a lofty pinnacle The self-sufficient and the cynical; And revised the judgments we once held true In various ways that are strange and new. For instance, the other day there came To see me, the same yet not the same, A former office boy, whom once I wholly misread as a Cockney dunce, Who only cared for music-hall tunes— And who ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 2, 1914 • Various
... pleasurable in itself, and so the baby begins to suck his thumb or his quilts or his rattle. Later, this impulse to stimulate the nerves about the mouth finds its satisfaction in kissing, and still later it plays a definite part in the wooing process; but at first the child is self-sufficient and finds his pleasure entirely within himself. Other regions of the body yield similar pleasure. We often find a tiny child rubbing his genital organs or his thighs or taking exaggerated pleasure in riding on someone's foot in order to stimulate these nerves, which he ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... being glorified, who would receive no homage, and who would be the melancholy Sovereign of an empire without subjects—a condition not suited to his vanity. I think it useless to remark to you what little conformity we find between those ideas and such as are given us of a self-sufficient being, who, without the assistance of any other, is supremely happy. All the characters in which the Bible portrays the Deity are always borrowed from man, or from a proud monarch; and we every where find that instead ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... as had come the burst of passion, Landor was himself again; curt, all-seeing, self-sufficient, "There'll be no blood shed." Early as it was, a crowd had collected now, and, as he had done with the newcomers, he addressed them collectively, authoratively. "When I fight it will not be with one who abandons a woman and a child at a time like this.... God! ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... below the knee, Dr. Withers says—poor Joseph! He's been an ambitious boy. So anxious to get ahead, and so self-sufficient. I feel right guilty about Joseph." She shook her ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... is the habit of a law-abiding mind—the sight of that broad, belted, self-sufficient back, symbolic of the power and sanity of the law, affected Sally with a mad impulse to turn, hail the officer, and inform him of the conditions she had just quitted. And she actually swerved aside, as if to cross the avenue, ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... Dear Father,—As you well know, I have not always been an enthusiast on the subject of teaching. The task of cramming knowledge into these self-sufficient, inefficient youngsters of both sexes discourages me at times. The more stupid they are, the less they are aware of it. If my department were geography or mathematics, I believe I should feel that I was accomplishing ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... flattered and touched Coursay, who had never expected that he, a weak and spineless back-slider, could possibly be of aid or comfort to his self-sufficient and celebrated ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... the Greek mythology four—the Golden, self-sufficient; the Silver, self-indulgent; the Brazen, warlike; and the Iron, violent; together with the Heroic, nobly aspirant, between the third and fourth. In archeology, three—the Stone Age, the Bronze, and the Iron. In history, the ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... the great vision of the future, fettered by the chains of the past, gripped and held fast in the hand of the dead, a nation of traditionalists, unable to meet the needs of a new day, serene, no doubt self-sufficient, but coming how far short of realizing that ideal of those who praise their God for that they ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... hundred years, on the doctrines of grace, free-will, predestination, reprobation, justification, &c. you will be more entertained, and will believe less, than if I told your majesty a long story of fairies and goblins. You are an eternal prater, said the emperor, and very self-sufficient; but talk your fill, and upon what subject you like till tomorrow morning; but I swear by the soul of the holy Jirigi, who rode to heaven on the tail of a magpie, as soon as the clock strikes eight, you are a dead woman. Well, who was the ...
— Hieroglyphic Tales • Horace Walpole
... is to delve for a little solid knowledge, and be sure of that, than to be a proper target for such a sarcasm as a great statesman once shot at a glib advocate, who was saying nothing with great fluency and at great length! "Who," he asked, "is this self-sufficient, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... to a priest as freedom: a happy, exuberant, fearless, self-sufficient and radiant man he both feared and abhorred. A free soul was regarded by the Church as one to be dealt with. The priest has ever put a premium on pretense and hypocrisy. Nothing recommended a man more than humility and the acknowledgment ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... buoys up self-sufficient souls, soothing them with the illusion that they themselves, their towns, country, language, and habits are above improvement, causing them to shudder, as at a sacrilege, if any changes are suggested, is fortunately limited to a class of stay- at-home nonentities. In proportion as it is common ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... off with you!" said Susan, over the hour-old baby, to Billy, who had come flying home in mid-morning. "Now I feel like David Copperfield's landlady, 'at last I have summat I can love!' Oh, the mistakes that you WON'T make, Jo!" she apostrophized the baby. "The smart, capable, self-sufficient way ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... over every other sentiment. Many appeared glad, either from hatred to the Duc du Maine, or from affection for the Comte de Toulouse; several were in consternation. The Chief-President lost all countenance; his visage, so self-sufficient and so audacious, was seized with a convulsive movement; the excess alone of his rage kept him from swooning. It was even worse at the reading of the declaration. Each word was legislative and decreed a fresh fall. The attention was general; ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... was a great deal to me then, and is so still. Though his words do not abide in memory, his presence does: serene, courtly, of darting hazel eye, a self-sufficient grace, and an appreciation of the world of stern realities, sometimes pathetic, never tragic. He is the natural man of the world; he is what he ought to be, and his darts never fail of their aim. There ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... Dale. Yet, even here, the spirit of triumphant ridicule, applied to questions not wholly within the competence of human resources, is displeasing in grave discussions: grave they are by necessity of their relations, howsoever momentarily disfigured by levity and the unseasonable grimaces of self-sufficient "philosophy." This temper of mind is already advertised from the first to the observing reader of Van Dale by the character of his engraved frontispiece. Men are there exhibited in the act of juggling, and still more odiously as exulting over their juggleries by gestures of the basest collusion, ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... amiably self-satisfied, and unconscious of his unfitness, may do more harm in his serene ignorance than he might have done good if he had chosen his proper sphere. Such a man as the last was the Reverend Harold. A good-natured, broad-shouldered, tactless, self-sufficient person, he had taken up his work with a complacent feeling that no field of labor could fail to be benefited by his patronage; he was content now as always. He had been content with himself and his intellectual ...
— That Lass O' Lowrie's - 1877 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... little writing-book for me, and told me not to make a mark in it except when she was near to tell me what to do. In my self-sufficient impatience to get out of "pothooks and trammels" into real letters and words I disobeyed her injunction, and disfigured the pages with numerous tell-tale blots. Then I hid the book away under the garret eaves, and refused to bring it to light again. I was not allowed to resume my ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... on. Watch Cathy, and help her all you can. She's got it; her weather forecast proved that much. You've got to drum that into her; never let her forget it. Maybe I'll be back—I hope so. But first, I have to find others. I need them, and they might need me. We're still not completely self-sufficient. ...
— Stopover • William Gerken
... contrary, are one of the modern aids to domesticity and preventives of gadding, while still keeping one not only in touch with a friend but within range of the voice. Surely there can be no woman so self-sufficient that she does not in silent moments yearn for a spoken word with one ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... think again of Vienna without picturing that stranded girl, sipping at her reddish drink in the Amerikan-bar in the Kaisergarten. But her case is typical. The Viennese are not hospitable to strangers. They are an intimate, self-sufficient people. ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... produced a similar tendency to reliance on foreign imports in many of the great coast towns, would alone have been sufficient to weaken the reliance of the farmer on the consumption of his products by the larger cities. The belief that the homestead might be almost self-sufficient probably lingered on in remote country districts even in the days of the Gracchi; or, if absolute self-existence was unattainable, the necessities of life, which the home could not produce, might be procured without effort by periodical visits to the market ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... interdependence. The coming of that discovery is one of the few really new things under the sun. Not so very long ago, when mankind was far less numerous, such interdependence of nations did not exist; they were self-sufficient, just as the patriarchal family was self-sufficient still ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... Tirane has reestablished diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union and the US. The Albanians have also passed legislation allowing foreign investment. Albania possesses considerable mineral resources and, until 1990, was largely self-sufficient in food; several years of drought have hindered agricultural development. Numerical estimates of Albanian economic activity are subject to an especially wide margin of error because the government until recently did not ...
— The 1991 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... "something which that self-sufficient fool has said has so far done me a service in enabling me to speak upon a subject which I have long had upon my lips, but have not had ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... mill, digging, blasting, and hauling; while carpenters and masons were busy in and around the old mansion, with a view to its thorough renovation, as the future residence of Mr. Ralph Dewey. That gentleman was on the ground, moving about with a self-sufficient air, and giving his orders in a tone of authority that most of the work ...
— The Allen House - or Twenty Years Ago and Now • T. S. Arthur |
