"Self-made" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... cried. "How am I for a bird? I believe no one will know me, and that is just as well; for now I am so fine that I shall myself refuse to know any one. Ho! This ought to give some ideas to that conceited Peacock family! I am a self-made man. I am an artist who knows how to adapt his materials. I am a genius. King Solomon himself will wonder at my glory. And as for the Eagle, King of the Birds, he will grow pale with envy. King of the Birds, indeed! It is now I who should rightfully be King. No other ever wore clothes ...
— The Curious Book of Birds • Abbie Farwell Brown
... was to be delivered by a gentleman whose reputation would naturally create the expectation of an intellectual treat, and that address was what Nat wanted to hear. It was singular that the lecture should be upon the life and character of a self-made man, of the stamp of Dr. Franklin and others, whose biographies our young hearer had read with the deepest interest. But so it was. The subject of the address was Count Rumford; and you might know that Nat swallowed ...
— The Bobbin Boy - or, How Nat Got His learning • William M. Thayer
... demon which has produced untold discomfort in many a household, and, I am almost ready to say, as much unhappiness as the husband's dram. My phrase may seem outrageously strong, but only the doctor knows what one of these self-made invalids can do to make a household wretched. Mrs. Gradgrind is, in fiction, the only successful portrait of this type of misery, of the woman who wears out and destroys generations of nursing relatives, and who, as Wendell ...
— Wear and Tear - or, Hints for the Overworked • Silas Weir Mitchell
... outer skin of the planet cools—rests. Internal troubles prevail for longer periods still; and these, in their unsupportable agony, bend and burst the solid strata overlying; vomit fire through their self-made blow-holes, rear mountains from the depths of the sea, then ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... willing to be at some charge to make its treasures useful to its citizens, and, for its own sake, especially to that class which has charge of health, public and private. This country abounds in what are called "self-made men," and is justly proud of many whom it thus designates. In one sense no man is self-made who breathes the air of a civilized community. In another sense every man who is anything other than a phonograph on legs is self-made. But ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... "time-indications" for the most part fail us, or can be extracted only by elaborate and somewhat uncertain calculations, so it would seem as if the poet, no longer hampered by the necessities of time and space, had wished to show how he could work with no self-made restrictions. ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... Lillah, with the air with which one speaks of a self-made man who has just appeared in the Honours List—"tell us how ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 8, 1916 • Various
... call a wholesome face," smiled Danvers. "In fact, I think Mr. Rhinds must be a self-made man, made very badly. I can't quite think that he has anything of the ...
— The Submarine Boys' Lightning Cruise - The Young Kings of the Deep • Victor G. Durham
... and by their organization as territories of the United States, they lost that state particularism which distinguished many of the old commonwealths of the coast. The section was nationalistic and democratic to the core. The west admired the self-made man and was ready to follow its hero with the enthusiasm of a section more responsive to personality than to the programmes of trained statesmen. It was a self-confident section, believing in its right to share in government, ...
— Rise of the New West, 1819-1829 - Volume 14 in the series American Nation: A History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... with Clyde Fitch emphasized this to a remarkable degree. Personally no two men could have been more opposite. One was the product of democracy, buoyant and self-made, while the other represented an intellectual, almost effeminate, aristocracy. Yet nearly from the start Frohman perceived the bigness of vision and the profound understanding that lurked behind Fitch's ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... three men from among a host of applicants for membership in the expedition, because of the special fitness of each one. Dr. Goodsell was a solid, sturdy, self-made physician of Pennsylvania stock. His specialism in microscopy I trusted might give valuable results in a field not hitherto investigated in the North. He was to make microscopic studies of the germ ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... William had been what is called a "self-made man," and had raised himself from the ranks of the soldiery through native genius backed by strength of will. His father is first noticed in the annals of the Isles of Shoals. The mansion now seen in Kittery Point was built, indeed, partly by this oldest Pepperell known to ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... years debarred from inclusion in a so-called Hall of Fame! Walt Whitman and Mark Twain, the two great interpreters and embodiments of America, represent the supreme contribution of democracy to universal literature. In so far as it is legitimate for anyone to be denominated a "self-made man" in literature, these men are justly entitled to such characterization. They owe nothing to European literature—their genius is supremely original, native, democratic. The case of Mark Twain, which ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... could better elucidate the Talmud, or because, as they held, it was their truth, of which the nations had deprived them during their long exile.[43] They were unlike their German brethren in another respect. Almost all of them were "self-made men," autodidacts in the truest sense. Lacking the advantages of secular schools, they culled their first information from scanty, antiquated Hebrew translations. Maimon learned the Roman alphabet from the transliteration of the titles on the fly-leaves of some Talmudic tracts; ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... means, went to the South many years ago. Uprightness in dealing with his fellow-man, industry in business, and large and comprehensive views, marked his career. Step by step he fought his way up from a humble station in life to one of the grandest positions that has ever been attained by a self-made man. More than one state feels the results of his tireless energy and successful commercial schemes. He is now the sole proprietor of two railroads, and the owner of a magnificent fleet of steamers which unite the ports of New York ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... conscious of the needless difficulties they themselves had had to surmount in reaching the level they had. It involved no detraction from their professional excellence, the excellence of men professionally self-made; but none comprehend the advantages of education better than candid men who have made their way without it. By the time I entered, however, there had been a decided, though not decisive, reaction in professional feeling. Ten years had elapsed since the founding of the school, ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... excitement ceased, all seemed to me flat and objectless. Heavy, heavy was my heart. Perhaps grief had been less obstinate, but that I feared I had cause for self-reproach. Since then I have been a wanderer—a self-made exile. My boyhood had been ambitious—all ambition ceased. Flames, when they reach the core of the heart, spread, and leave all in ashes. Let me be brief: I did not mean thus weakly to complain—I to whom heaven has ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... the other. "To begin with, I'm not going to be exactly consumed with Corsican revenge because somebody has killed Hook. Perhaps you may guess by this time what Hook was. A damned blood-sucking blackmailer was that simple, strenuous, self-made captain of industry. He had secrets against nearly everybody; one against poor old Westmoreland about an early marriage in Cyprus that might have put the duchess in a queer position; and one against Harker about some flutter with his client's money when he was a young solicitor. That's ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... his legal attainments, his congressional services, his attractive eloquence and skill in debate, marked him out as the rising man of his party, He was a Vermonter by birth, and like Lincoln had arisen from nothing,—a self-made man, so talented that the people called him "the little giant," but nevertheless inferior to the giants who had led the Senate for twenty years, while equal to them in ambition, and superior as a wire-pulling politician. He was among those who at first supposed ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord
... Miss Westcote. He is a self-made man, and his life has been a hard one. He has had to struggle against many obstacles. But he will win and make a name for himself, ...
— Under Sealed Orders • H. A. Cody
... Moreover, the hard-headed skeptic, self-made and self-secure, who will not traffic with the literature that touches his life work, is seldom so confined to his own little shop that he will not, for recreation, take holiday tours into the literature of other men's lives and labors. The man who ...
— The Guide to Reading - The Pocket University Volume XXIII • Edited by Dr. Lyman Abbott, Asa Don Dickenson, and Others
... breast and an untamed eye. And a romancer might have wondered what paths had led her, in the superb realization of her beautiful womanhood, at twenty- seven, to this subordinate position in the home of a self-made rich man, and this conventional tea table on a terrace over the Hudson. The smoky blue eyes to-day were full of an idle content; the rounded breast rose and fell quietly under the plain checked gown with its ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... raised themselves in the world; and when we hear that the son of a washerwoman has become Lord Chancellor or Archbishop of Canterbury we do, theoretically and abstractedly, feel a higher reverence for such self-made magnate than for one who has been as it were born into forensic or ecclesiastical purple. But not the less must the offspring of the washerwoman have had very much trouble on the subject of his birth, unless he has been, when young as well as when old, a very great man indeed. After ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... business, and, being new to the country, had no notion that Indian banking is totally distinct from Home work. Like most clever self-made men, he had much simplicity in his nature; and, somehow or other, had construed the ordinarily polite terms of his letter of engagement into a belief that the Directors had chosen him on account of his special and brilliant talents, and that they set great store by him. This ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... the same name, and the local oath "Per Perkeo!" has a harmless sound, but nothing could be more binding in Heidelberg. Momma thought his example a very unfortunate one for a University town, but the rest of us were inclined to admire Perkeo as a self-made man and a success. As Dicky protested he had made the fullest use of the capacities Nature had given him, it was evident from his figure that he had even developed them, and what more profitable course should the German youth follow? ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... "I would give fifty thousand dollars for a college education." When he came to measure his ability with that of men who had had greater opportunities in an educational line, he realized his loss. Chauncey M. Depew is also reported as having said, "I never saw a self-made man in my life who did not firmly believe that he had been handicapped, no matter how great his success, by deficiency in education, and who was not determined to give his children the advantages of ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... Cambridge jail, and was altogether rather trying in his relations with the godly ministers who were associated with him in his printery. The second printer had to sleep in a cask after he landed, but he died with a fortune, a true forerunner of the self-made men of America. The third printer, Johnson, having a wife in England, was "brought up" and bound over before the court not to seduce the affections of the daughter of printer No. 2. The next Bostonians who tried their hands at the ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... to fight his way through life, as it were, and yet who has come out of obscurity and attracted the attention of the authorities, and won the good will of those with whom he came in contact, will always find me cordial and pacific. So I allowed this self-made man with the broad, high, intellectual shoulder blades, to sit in my seat with his feet on my new and expensive traveling bag, while I sat with the tear-bedewed ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... Christ; And while they rise to heaven for my success I cannot doubt, or I should doubt my God. I think I see a pathway through this gloom; I have a kinsman'—and I told her where— 'A lawyer; I have heard my mother say— A self-made man with charitable heart; And I might go and study under him; I think ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... world. I think it's worse than stealing, or lying, or any of the other bad things you can name. And do you know where I think lots of the hypocrisy comes from? I think it comes from the so-called self-made men—from the real good men, the men who say 'I haven't got one bad thing charged up ...
— Lifted Masks - Stories • Susan Glaspell
... Something was hanging to the soiled brass knob of the front door, and as he approached he saw that it was a streamer of black crepe. His heart, which for twenty long years had thrilled only to the hard-won successes of a self-made man, beat with a sudden passionate fear, and a tear stole out upon his cheek. A new-born awkwardness grappled with him as he stumbled along the roadway. Somehow he saw a pair of dirty, sun-scorched feet encased in his shining leather shoes. ...
— Nancy McVeigh of the Monk Road • R. Henry Mainer
... while a mere stripling, and shifted for himself ever after. An adventurer, therefore, in the fullest sense of the word, he was; and doubtless he had the appreciation of his own achievements which self-made men are apt to have. But there was sterling pith in him, a dauntless and humane soul, and inexhaustible ability and resource. Such a man could not fail to possess imagination, and imagination and self-esteem combined conduce to highly-colored narrative; but that Smith was ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... a self-made man, the son of a blacksmith. He brought the anvil, the hammer, and bellows into the pulpit, and he pounded and blew, for he was in earnest. I felt the more respect for him because he was in earnest. But when he snapped his ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... of the archbishop Giovanni marks a new epoch in the despotism of the Visconti. They are now no longer the successful rivals of the Della Torre family or dependents on imperial caprice, but self-made sovereigns, with a well-established power in Milan and a wide extent of subject territory. Their dynasty, though based on force and maintained by violence, has come to be acknowledged; and we shall soon see them allying themselves ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... and King Humbert said: "From this day forth I will not smoke another cigar, or anything in the shape of tobacco." His majesty has kept his word, and the result has been a most noticeable improvement in his health. King Humbert is a man of iron will, and no one doubts that he will keep his self-made pledge. ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, November 1887 - Volume 1, Number 10 • Various
... money belonging to his wife, from the man he had insulted. He could no longer ask his wife to intercede for him. He was without money of his own, with out the means of obtaining it; from his wife he had ceased to expect even sympathy, and from the world he knew, the fact that he was a self-made king caused him always to be pointed out with ridicule as a charlatan, ...
— Real Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... been so often called on to draft resolutions and prepare addresses, as the modest and earnest William Whipper. He has worked effectively in a quiet way, although not as a public speaker. He is self-made, and well read on the subject of the reforms of the day. Having been highly successful in his business, he is now at the age of seventy, in possession of a handsome fortune; the reward of long years of assiduous labor. He is also ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... striking and encouraging one for those who believe in the example of "self-made men." His aim was somewhat different from the worldly types, who set themselves to become wealthy, or to have lands or mansions. Forster's more moderate aspiration was to reach to the foremost rank of the literary world: and he succeeded. He secured for himself an excellent education, ...
— John Forster • Percy Hethrington Fitzgerald
... Mr. Cranch, a "joined methodist," and a "self-made man," are not complimentary. "Cranch, I fear," says Professor Smith, "by his absurd conduct, will diminish the liberality of the captain towards us: he is like a pointed arrow to the company." And, again, "Poor Cranch is almost too much the object of jest; Galway is the principal banterer."In ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... he was inconsistent in his lessons. He dragged in all that came to his hand for the astonishment of Liubka. Once he brought along for her a large self-made serpent—a long cardboard hose, filled with gunpowder, bent in the form of a harmonica, and tied tightly across with a cord. He lit it, and the serpent for a long time with crackling jumped over the dining room and the bedroom, filling the ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... original of the Latin poets is Lucretius (95-51 B.C.), whose poem "On the Nature of Things" is an effort to dispel superstitious fear by inculcating the Epicurean doctrine that the world is self-made through the movement and concussion of atoms, and that the gods leave it to care for itself. A contemporary of Lucretius, and a poet of equal merit, but in an altogether different vein, is Catullus. He is chiefly noted for his lyrics. Virgil (70-19 B.C.), in the Aeneid, has produced a genuine ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... his tongue, his mere presence in a corner of the drawing-room, with his open-air wrinkles, his scanty hair, his battered hands, and the cheerful craftiness of his expression, advertised the whole gang of us for a self-made family. My aunt might mince and my cousins bridle, but there was no getting over the solid, physical fact of the stonemason in ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in writing a burlesque on Dryden's 'Hind and Panther', 'Transversed to the Story of the Country and the City Mouse.' In Parliament in James the Second's reign, he joined in the invitation of William of Orange, and rose rapidly, a self-made man, after the Revolution. In 1691 he was a Lord of the Treasury; in April, 1694, he became Chancellor of the Exchequer, and in May, 1697, First Lord of the Treasury, retaining the Chancellorship and holding both offices till near the close ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... you read his Songs, his Werther, his Wahlverwandtschaften, you feel that extraordinary intimacy—I had almost said identification—with nature, present everywhere. Werther's love springs up with the blossom of all nature; he begins to sink and nears his self-made tomb while autumn, the death of nature, is in the fields and woods. So does the moon spread her mellow light over his garden, as "the mild eye of a true friend over his destiny." Never was there a poet who humanized ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... "Stephen Holmes is not miserly. I've knowed him since a boy. To buy place, power, perhaps, eh? Yet not that, neither," he added, hastily. "We think a sight of him out our way, (self-made, you see,) and would have had him the best office in the State before this, only he ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... is a good specimen of a self-made man, who was not spoiled in the making. Hard work did not harden his character, nor has prosperity turned his head. Coming to Cleveland without a dollar, he has built up a large fortune by sheer hard work, close application ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... him gradually that this great, cumbersome creature was not a shrewd, thrifty, self-made and self-finished adult at all; only a big, wistful, lonely boy, without comrades and with nowhere to play. On Plank's round face there remained no trace of shrewdness, of stubbornness, nothing even of the heavy, saturnine placidity ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... a syllable in order to come here, and that ambition for outward pomp was not what led me to this separation. We are not in this world to be happy and to enjoy, but to do our duty; and the less my condition is a self-made one, the more do I realize that I am to perform the duties of the office in which I am placed. And I certainly do not wish to be ungrateful, for I am, nevertheless, happy in the knowledge of possessing so much that is dear, even ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... beneath me. Prove that your love is not presumption. Show yourself my peer. For I could love a brave and valiant knight before whose spear men bowed as to a king, nor would I ask his parentage, prouder far to know that my children took their nobleness from a self-made nobleman. But a weeping, love-sick page! No! Go, fight and battle—show me something that you do that I can love. Meantime I look for such a lover, and I care not if his name be ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... White," says George Gordon in his book The Men Who Make Our Novels, "writes out of a vast self-made experience, draws his characters from a wide acquaintance with men, recalls situations and incidents through years of forest tramping, hunting, exploring in Africa and the less visited places of our continent, for the differing occasions of his books. In his boyhood he spent ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... very foot of the scaffold, with a devotion which caused his own very sensitive nature much cringing. Born in 1788, he had embraced the ecclesiastical calling through choice, and all his studies had been to that end. He belonged to a family of more than easy circumstancaes. His father was a self-made man, stern and unyielding. Abbe Bonnet had an older brother, and a sister whom he counseled with his mother to marry as soon as possible, in order to release the young woman from the terrible ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... made no reply. He was a rough self-made man—a Roman Catholic, although not a churchman, who could give them points on charity and who did his good deeds quietly and without boasting. Mr. Casey was a Scout, although not a young one, for that was the way they were taught to ...
— Ethel Hollister's Second Summer as a Campfire Girl • Irene Elliott Benson
... shout out. The thought gnawed in his brain, an unceasing torment, while he smiled and succeeded in being tolerant. As he grew silent, Bernard Higginbotham got the reins and did the talking. He was a success himself, and proud of it. He was self-made. No one had helped him. He owed no man. He was fulfilling his duty as a citizen and bringing up a large family. And there was Higginbotham's Cash Store, that monument of his own industry and ability. He loved Higginbotham's Cash Store as some men loved ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... brought with it no improvement in the embarrassed circumstances, no reform of the disordered life. Still domiciled with Mr. Morgan at Calne, the self-made sufferer writes to Cottle: "You will wish to know something of myself. In health I am not worse than when at Bristol I was best; yet fluctuating, yet unhappy, in circumstances poor indeed! I have collected my scattered and my manuscript poems sufficient to make one volume. ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... had ever thought of the possibility of a matrimonial connection between the families. He doubted if he would consent to it. And unfortunately it was this very doubt that, touching his own pride as a self-made man, made him first seriously consider his wife's proposition. He was as good as Don Ramon, any day! With this subtle feminine poison instilled in his veins, carried completely away by the logic of ...
— A Millionaire of Rough-and-Ready • Bret Harte
... not a man likely to be turned away from his purpose of ruling well by personal pride—less likely, we should say, than any self-made despot dealt with in history. He did make efforts to be as he was before. He endeavored to live on terms of friendship with his old friends; but the spirit of pride which had taken hold of him was too much for him. Power had ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... proud of himself. He was a "self-made" man who attributed his own successes in life to his mastery of Facts. He is here represented as officially testing a school upon its knowledge of his ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... call. Peace ensued. As when the winds fall the sails droop, so when excitement ceased, all seemed to me flat and objectless. Heavy, heavy was my heart. Perhaps grief had been less obstinate, but that I feared I had causes for self-reproach. Since then I have been a wanderer, a self-made exile. My boyhood had been ambitious,—all ambition ceased. Flames, when they reach the core of the heart, spread, and leave all in ashes. Let me be brief: I did not mean thus weakly to complain,—I to whom Heaven has given so many blessings! ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... in low and oddly uneven tones; "but that depends upon you. I'll be as honest as you were. I poisoned my husband. I am a self-made widow. A man cannot love a murderess. So I suppose that ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... self-made man in a lot of things. I learnt my own self how to blacksmith. I worked for a man for nothin' just so I could learn and after that for about a year I was the best plow sharpener. And then I ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... Mr. Raynor himself, though he seemed to Lorraine vulgarly proud of his self-made position, vulgarly ostentatious of his wealth, and vulgarly familiar with both herself and her mother, she could not actually lay any offence to his charge. And in any case, he undoubtedly could ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... stamp of denominational individuality. Salvation itself made no one a member of a church fashioned according to the kingdoms of this world. Consequently another standard of membership was necessary, a standard which required acceptance of and conformity to the self-made rules and regulations of that foreign society called a church. And when these earth-born institutions became identified in the public mind with the real church of Christ and membership in them became confused with membership in the true church of God, the ...
— The Last Reformation • F. G. [Frederick George] Smith
... merchant, manufacturer, and what not. A big, loud man, with a stare and a metallic laugh. A man who could never sufficiently vaunt himself—a self-made man. A man who was always proclaiming, through that brassy speaking-trumpet of a voice of his, his early ignorance and poverty. A man who was the bully ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... will. When she left the king, Abraham complacently took her back without objection, which was no more than he should do seeing that her sacrifice had brought him wealth and honor. Like many a modern millionaire he was not a self-made but a wife-made man. When Pharaoh sent him away with his dangerously beautiful wife he is described as, "being rich in cattle, in silver and in gold," but it is a little curious that the man who thus gained wealth as the price of his wife's dishonor should have been held up ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... on the other hand, like a foreign Federation, has in its own self-made, domestic Constitution to apportion powers with some approach to precision between the federal and the provincial authorities, and in this respect the Irish Bill, in reserving certain powers to the Imperial Parliament, will ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... primeval tendency. You expected at any moment to see a reversion to some earlier and uglier type. Across the chastened accents of the journalist there sounded the wild intemperate tongue of the man of the people. Miss Batchelor used to declare that Tyson was a self-made man, because he was constructed on such eccentric principles. His slightest movements showed that he was uncertain of his ground, and ready to fight you for it, if it came to that. And now he still met you with the twinkle in his small blue eyes, but there was a calculating light behind it, as if ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair
... man or of a corporation was determined by the mode in which they held their land. "No land without a lord" was the principle of mediaeval polity; just as "money has no master" is the basis of the modern world with its self-made men. Every distinction of rank in the feudal system was still denoted for the most part by a special costume. It was a world of knights in armour, of ecclesiastics in vestments and stoles, of lawyers in robes, of princes in silk and velvet and cloth of gold, and of peasants in laced ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... did him so much good," said the self-made man's daughter. "He looks better, feels better, and as for appetite—honestly, it would just do your heart good ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... pairs of well-darned woollen stockings, the few decent shirts that Isaac had left, his winter flannels, which had already served six years, his comb and brush, a hand mirror that had been one of his mother's wedding presents, likewise a couple of towels that had formed a part of her self-made trousseau; and we must not forget the neckties that Abbie had sewed from remnants of her dresses, and which Isaac naively considered masterpieces ...
— McClure's Magazine, January, 1896, Vol. VI. No. 2 • Various
... from him—or, rather, the company of which he was managing director and principal shareholder—if these other fruiterers and greengrocers did not buy their stuff from his company, he tried to smash them by opening branches in their immediate neighbourhood and selling below cost. He was a self-made man: an example of what may be accomplished by cunning ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... that is ours. There is one day when all we Americans who are not self-made go back to the old home to eat saleratus biscuits and marvel how much nearer to the porch the old pump looks than it used to. Bless the day. President Roosevelt gives it to us. We hear some talk of the Puritans, but don't just remember ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... to his self-made gibbet fast, Self-pilloried to the public view, A mark for every passing blast Of scorn ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... across the car. Edward Everett sat there, the orator of the following day, the finished gentleman, the careful student, the heir of traditions of learning and breeding, of scholarly instincts and resources. The self-made President gazed at him wistfully. From him the people might expect and would get a balanced and polished oration. For that end he had been born, and inheritance and opportunity and inclination had worked together for that end's perfection. While ...
— The Perfect Tribute • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... this lesson to the young, dissatisfied officer, was the self-made Emperor of the French and of a great many other nations. He had come to Paris a thin, hollow-cheeked, under-sized boy from the conquered and despised island of Corsica. He stuck in the humble grade of lieutenant for seven years. When the ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... very fond of him. He was a good man, though simple and self-made; very kind to everybody; ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... propositions were placed before him; his name was in demand everywhere. Nothing could be started without the support of the business element; and it was especially the younger business men, the energetic and self-made men who conducted the large enterprises, who commanded money and credit and knew and recognised opportunities, whose interest had to be enlisted. There was the electric street-car proposition, the new theatre, the proposed pulp-mills in Vardal, the whale-oil ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun
... year of his success Rantoul, quite by accident, met a girl in her teens named Tina Glover, only daughter of Cyrus Glover, a man of millions, self-made. The first time their eyes met and lingered, by the mysterious chemistry of the passions Rantoul fell desperately in love with this little slip of a girl, who scarcely reached to his shoulder; who, on her part, instantly ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... who are tainted with snobbishness and shoddyism, but how frequently we see it in men, generally those who have very little brain and often in those whom the world calls self-made-men. Now there is nothing in the world so aggressive as the same self-made-man. The air with which he moves along, as though upon him depended the revolution of the world on its axis, and the safety and welfare of its inhabitants. He never allows himself, nor others, to ...
— Bohemian Society • Lydia Leavitt
... Harllee is a self-made man, for he taught himself to read and write after being taught to spell about a third through Webster's blue-back spelling book, and with this small beginning he laid the foundation for a collegiate education and for the active work ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... of real Southerners; but there are a whole lot more who—so it seemed to me—are giving remarkably realistic imitations of the type known in New York as the Professional Southerner. San Francisco excels in Southerners—the regular kind and the self-made ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... allowed irreparable misunderstandings to grow up between my mother and himself. Like me afterwards, he was passionate, awkward, hopelessly timid in the presence of that proud, aristocratic woman, so different from him, the self-made man of almost peasant origin, who had risen to professional prosperity by the force of his genius. Like me—ah! not more than I—he had known the torture of false positions, which cannot be explained except by words that one will ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... Biographical Dictionary and Portrait Gallery of Eminent and Self-Made Men, Minnesota Volume by Jeremiah Clemmens, assisted by ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... begun as an early advocate of the anti-slavery cause, and in which he had twice overthrown the power of the Democratic party in New Hampshire.—Henry Wilson was the colleague of Mr. Sumner, and was a man of strong parts, self-made, earnest, ardent, and true.—Lot M. Morrill was the worthy associate of Mr. Fessenden, prominent in his profession, and strong in the regard and confidence of the people of his States.—The author of the Wilmot Proviso came from Pennsylvania as the successor of Simon Cameron, ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... Constitution in thus limiting popular rule did not take sufficient account of the genius of an English-speaking people. A few of their number recognized this. Franklin, a self-made man, believed in democracy and doubted the efficacy of the Constitution unless it was, like a pyramid, broad-based upon the will of ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck
... bad enough at first. You have had a heavy trial indeed, poor Emma; but what is a trial but something to try us? Would it not be more manful to face the pain of going home, and to take up your allotted work? Then you would be submitting, not to a self-made rule, ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... ten years have to do with it? Families are not made in ten years, Mr. Starr, and how could that length of time alter the fact that your father was a person of no education and that you yourself are a self-made man?" ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... noteworthy. His researches in biology, his contributions to scientific controversy, his pungent criticisms of conventional beliefs and thoughts have probably had greater influence than the work of any other English scientist. And yet he was a "self-made" intellectualist. In spite of the fact that his father was a schoolmaster he passed through no regular course of education. "I had," he said, "two years of a pandemonium of a school (between eight ...
— The Present Condition of Organic Nature • Thomas H. Huxley
... had been of late ransacking his grandfather's library and had found besides sea-stories and stories of wrecks, and foreign lands and pirates and deep sea treasure—what interested him more than all, a volume of biographies of self-made men. ...
— An Australian Lassie • Lilian Turner
... too poor to send him to any but a common country school, where he was drilled only in the "three R's." But he used every spare moment to study without a teacher, and in after years he was a king among self-made men. The boy who had learned to speak in a barn, with only a cow and a horse for an audience, became one of the greatest of ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... theory of Boniface Newt, which, unlike that worthy commission merchant, he did not impart to his ma and the partner of his bosom, but locked up in the vault of his own breast. Mr. Van B. gloried in being what he called a self-made man. He was proud of his nasal twang and his want of grammar, and all amenities and decencies of speech. He regarded them as inseparable from his success. He even affected them in the company of those who were peculiarly elegant, and was secretly suspicious ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... prospector or explorer who has not absorbed empirically some of the elements of geology, and locally this may be enough. Very often men who take pride in the title of "practical prospectors" are the ones with the largest stock of self-made ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... you 'm wise enough to see that, you ought to be wise enough to see I'm right 'bout the gate-post. Who 's Martin Grimbal to offer me money? A self-made man, same as me. Yet he might have had it, an' ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... should redound eternally to his honour that he began in newspaper English, and by the production of an imitation of the novela picaresca—a string of adventures as broken and disconnected as the adventures of Lazarillo de Tormes or Peregrine Pickle, and went on to become an exemplar. A man self-made and self-taught, if he knew anything at all about the 'art for art' theory—which is doubtful—he may well have held it cheap enough. But he practised Millet's dogma—Dans l'art il faut sa peau—as resolutely as Millet himself, and that, too, under ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... critical power in dealing with literary evidence, his practical abilities as a navigator, his tenacity of purpose and boldness of execution, his lack of fidelity as a husband and a lover,... all stand out in clear relief.... Of all the self-made men that America has produced, none has had a more dazzling success, a more pathetic sinking to obscurity, or achieved a more universal celebrity ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... an era of national self-assertion of which the Monroe Doctrine was only one expression. The raw Jacksonism of the West seemed to be gaining upon the older civilizations represented by Virginia and Massachusetts. The self-made type of man began to pose as the genuine American. And at this moment came forward a man of natural lucidity and serenity of mind, of perfect poise and good temper, who knew both Europe and America and felt that they ought to know one another better and to like one another more. That ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... The self-made man, with all his splendid intellectual faculties developed, with his independence of judgment, and his acquired habit of thinking for himself instead of leaning on precedent and borrowed wisdom, rides ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... had a gleam of hope for civil freedom under the rule of the Duke of York and the county Democracy, but when the duke became James II. he was just like other people who get a raise of salary, and refused to be privately entertained by the self-made ancestry of ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... whom he didn't know, and who didn't know him. The truth was, he didn't know anybody to whom he could give his heart, but longed, with a certain twenty-four-year power, for her to whom he could offer it,—her who was worthy to receive his whole self-made being, and in exchange give him all that queer imagined bliss, which is or ought to be in the world, as every one ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors • Various
... has exploited all available resources of this genetic period of storm and stress more fully perhaps than any other writer. At the other extreme, we have writers like Charles Dudley Warner,[2] a self-made man, whose early life was passed on the farm, and who holds his own boyhood there in greater contempt than perhaps any other reputable writer of such reminiscences. All the incidents are treated not only with seriousness, but with a forced drollery ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... fellest of the giant brood, Sons of brutish Force and Darkness, who have drenched the earth with blood, Famished in his self-made desert, blinded by our purer day, Gropes in yet unblasted regions for his miserable prey;— Shall we guide his gory fingers where our helpless ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell |
