"Self-righteous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Pure. The same characters generally have no metaphysical tendencies: they do not look back into themselves. Hence they are not distressed by their own imperfections: yet it would be absurd to call them self-righteous; for they hardly think of themselves AT ALL. This childlike quality of their nature makes the opening of religion very happy to them: for they no more shrink from God, than a child from an emperor, before whom the parent trembles: ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... his family disagreements; as he would have it that it did: really, you know, sir, it was in his sinking frame. We might have got on tolerably, notwithstanding, but for two people—Miss Cathy, and Joseph, the servant: you saw him, I daresay, up yonder. He was, and is yet most likely, the wearisomest self-righteous Pharisee that ever ransacked a Bible to rake the promises to himself and fling the curses to his neighbours. By his knack of sermonising and pious discoursing, he contrived to make a great impression on Mr. Earnshaw; and the more feeble the master became, the ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte
... speaker had a number of gilt buttons, nearly new, in his possession, which they had given him to sell, for they were frequently obliged to make such shifts for a meal, and when his invective was finished, he arose to take his leave, but the self-righteous priest had neglected, in the hurry of discourse, to secure a few buttons which he had purloined, for as he stood up they dropped from the folds of his garment on the floor. The man's confusion was immediately apparent, but they ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... up within the country, were promoted by American citizens, admired by millions of them, and acquiesced in by almost all of them. Whoever thinks that business corruption is the work of a few inhumanly cunning individuals with monstrous morals is self-righteous without excuse. Capitalists did not violate the public conscience of America; they expressed it. That conscience was inadequate and unintelligent. We are being pinched by the acts it nourished. A great ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... carnal ends, during many years. It is notorious that five Synods are in organic fellowship, while hardly two of them will hold ministerial or sacramental communion! What a picture does this state of things in the professing church of Christ present to the infidel; how hardening to the self-righteous and the openly profane! And although conventional regulations be lightly looked upon by many, not being based upon express words of scripture; yet when framed and engaged to, according to the general rules of scripture, much sin is the result of violating them, and trampling ...
— Act, Declaration, & Testimony for the Whole of our Covenanted Reformation, as Attained to, and Established in Britain and Ireland; Particularly Betwixt the Years 1638 and 1649, Inclusive • The Reformed Presbytery
... purpose of saving and blessing men, yet that he necessarily was also a judge. The thoughts of many hearts were revealed by his presence. The pure in heart came to him in humility, penitence, and faith. The proud in heart, the self-willed, the self-righteous, turned away from him, and so judged themselves unworthy of receiving his truth. The Galilean peasants, the common people, heard him gladly. The Scribes and Pharisees murmured against him and rejected him. This was really a judgment on both: the sheep went to the right hand, and ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... last letter, some allusion to religion, I didn't quite like, and at any other time I would have written you a sermon on the subject. In Calcutta (where I felt so self-righteous) nothing would have prevented me—but now I haven't the spirit. Mark, please, how the whirligig of Time brings its revenges! In Calcutta I thought myself a saint, in Takai I am regarded as a Brand Unplucked. It is rather dispiriting. I am ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... of a wealthy and historic family, whose head—he is precisely the type of the elderly, cold-blooded, self-righteous, self-conscious New York aristocrat of the stage—will not permit her to gratify her desire to write for publication, "for," saith he, "I do not wish to see my honored name on the ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... The self-righteous man will never understand these things. Men and women of meagre natures, with whom love is a compact, not a passion, will vehemently disapprove them. People of smooth lives, ignorant of strong temptations, will refuse even to discuss them. Jesus was well ...
— The Empire of Love • W. J. Dawson
... had been a follower of strange gods, and a lover of this world and its vanities. I was self-righteous, and thought I had religion of my own which was better than that of the Bible. I did not know God, and did not serve him. Prayer was forgotten, public worship neglected; and worldly morality was the tree which brought forth its ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... justice of his affliction, and his complaints are both specific and protracted. He does not even display any very conspicuous fortitude under his afflictions. He is not indomitable so much as persistent. He is rather stubbornly self-righteous. It could not, of course, be otherwise, for the essence of the situation is that the sufferer should be aware that his deeds do not deserve punishment, and that the sufferings he endures should be permitted in order that his ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... and soul, in maintaining one of the propositions of the Oxford Tracts' controversy, he could not have uttered these words with greater zeal or with a more self-righteous emotion. His mind was stored with the most vulgar accusations of an exceedingly vulgar set of sectarian distinctions; and he fancied it a high proof of Protestant perfection to hold all the discarded usages in abhorrence. On the other hand, Ghita listened with surprise; for, to her, the estimation ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... that in worshipping God through his ordinances they should cast all malice and wickedness out of their hearts. In like manner, when the great Teacher warned his followers to beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees, he meant that they should eschew on the one hand the lie of self-righteous superstition, and on the other the lie of libertine unbelief. The Apostle Paul, too, while he does not forbid another use, employs the conception, in point of fact, to illustrate the presence and ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... of that I have seen, where I do verily believe that pride, and naught else—that abominable sin that God hateth—kept His afflicted child up, and smirking with a false smile over the breaking heart; and no sooner was that self-righteous pride subdued, and the child brake forth into open sobbing,—crying, 'Father, Thy rod doth hurt, and I have been a fool!'—no sooner, I say, was this confession made, than God threw away His rod, and took His humbled child to His heart. ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... Englanders were "a plain people struggling for existence in a poor wilderness.... Their lives were to the last degree matter of fact, realistic, hard." [21] Shrewd in consequence of their poverty, self-righteous in consequence of their religion, they took their slave-trading and their slaveholding as part of their day's work and as part of God's goodness to His elect. In practical effect the policy of colonial Massachusetts toward the backward races ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... Church and to a large extent, in spite of the teachings of Scripture; and it is often as difficult to inspire true expectation toward God in the Christian mind in the matter of daily victory, as it is to move the self-righteous and self-sufficient sinner to believe ...
— Satan • Lewis Sperry Chafer
... My father spoilt them—abominable old limpets. And they're so self-righteous. They think I'm a sort of criminal who has instigated this new devilish system which runs everything so close and cuts it so fine—as if they hadn't made this inevitable by their shameless carelessness and wastefulness in the past. He may ...
— Touch and Go • D. H. Lawrence
... everything else connected with your peace: you mistake the real nature of that very inability to believe of which you complain so sadly. For that inability does not lie, as you fancy it does, in the impossibility of your performing aright the great act of faith, but of ceasing from all such self-righteous attempts to perform any act, or do any work whatsoever in order to your being saved. So that the real truth is, that you have not yet seen such a sufficiency in the one great work of the Son of God upon the cross, as to lead you utterly to discontinue your mistaken ...
— God's Plan with Men • T. T. (Thomas Theodore) Martin
... violin-playing and liquor-drinking, and Brother Peter Vickers's mild and merciful attitude toward sinners in those un-spiced sermons of his, that held out such affluence of hope to the repentant rather than to the self-righteous. The blood surged unseen into Nehe-miah's face. For shame, for very shame he could not confess himself one with these outcasts. He made a feint of searching in the semi-obscurity for the rickety chair on which he had been ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... 1465. Louis almost alone, deserted by his brother the Duke of Berry, and his nobles banded together in apparent unity, hedged in by their pompous and self-righteous assertions that all their thoughts were for the poor oppressed people whose burdens needed lightening. Of all the great vassals, Gaston de Foix was the single one loyal to ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... This lady was long remembered both by friends and neighbours with veneration. She was sensible and intelligent, polite, agreeable, and of unbounded charity; but Miss Burney, who knew her, depicts her as ostentatious in her exertions, and somewhat self-righteous and vainglorious. She was, however, fervently beloved by her daughter, who afterward made several pecuniary sacrifices to ensure her mother's comfort. The earliest years of Lady Georgiana (as she ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... justified. The two friars, his servant Ithamore and the rest can well be spared by any exit; his betrayal of the town is not unreasonable, considering the treatment meted out to him within it; and his proposed second treachery is based on sound policy.—We may observe, in passing, that the self-righteous governor takes no steps to prevent, by a timely warning, the massacre of the enemy's soldiers, availing himself of the atrocity, instead, to secure a victory for his side.—Consequently, when the final doom does fall upon ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... to play the Lady Bountiful. There were moments during her brief visit when her face was very sad, but no doubt her predominant feeling escaped her in regard to the criticism quoted from somebody on Jerry Hollowell's methods and motives. "People are becoming very self-righteous," she said. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... more bitterly ironic because the self-righteous opponents of Birth Control practise themselves the doctrine they condemn. The birth-rate among conservative opponents indicates that they restrict the numbers of their own children by the methods of Birth Control, or are of such feeble procreative energy as to ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... luxury and vice. Such was the summing up of Dr. Bill, and the few who paused in the mad riot for a moment's sober thought. Furthermore Dr. Bill's estimate of the blatant gold city was by no means a self-righteous belief. He had known the place from its birth. He had treated its every ailment at the height of its burning youth. Now, in its maturity, it fell to him to learn much of the inner secrets of its accruing mental disease. He hated it and loved it, ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... a rebuff, Patty felt very diffident about mentioning the matter to the remaining members of the class. She had no wish to be considered self-righteous and interfering, but, all the same, she thought she was bound to try and use her influence to set straight what was certainly a doubtful practice, and she meant to persist even at the risk of being called hard names. She found Muriel ...
— The Nicest Girl in the School - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... fire and Holy Ghost, which was his baptism, who came with a fan in his hand, that he might thoroughly, and not in part only, purge his floor, and take away the dross and the tin of his people, and make a man finer than gold. Withal, they grew high, rough, and self-righteous; opposing further attainment; too much forgetting the day of their infancy and littleness, which gave them something of a real beauty; insomuch that many left them, and all visible churches and societies, and wandered up and down as sheep without ...
— A Brief Account of the Rise and Progress of the People Called Quakers • William Penn
... answered gloomily. "But if she learns to love a man worthy of her, I shall take myself out of her way forever. Let us stand together, Baron Ned, and help this girl to happiness for life, without respect to myself. You see I'm not all bad. In truth, I am becoming self-righteous. I have left the ranks of the publicans and sinners and have become a Pharisee. I tell you, Baron Ned, nothing so swells a man in the chest as the belief that he is not as other ...
— The Touchstone of Fortune • Charles Major
... features conspicuous in their clean-cut fairness among the younger instructors in the choir-seats behind the trustees on the platform. Bea had never liked Miss Whiton. It seemed to her now, as she studied the immobile face, that she had always recognized there a suggestion of the self-righteous Pharisee. There could be nothing but misunderstanding and antagonism between the possessor of such a countenance and Miss More with those eyes of hers, that nose and that mouth. Bea's labors over the classes in manners had included some research in the subject of physiognomy. Now she leaned forward ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... his fault, as all of us do, and openly overtaken, as not all of us are, by its consequences, to gloss the matter over, with too polite biographers, is to do the work of the wrecker disfiguring beacons on a perilous seaboard; but to call him bad, with a self-righteous chuckle, is to be talking in one's sleep with Heedless and Too-bold ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... them amateurs, laid the foundation of the greatest navy and mercantile marine of the world. It is to these fascinating adventurers, too, that the generations which followed are indebted for the initiative in human comforts and progress. The superficial self-righteous critic may find it an agreeable pursuit to search out their blemishes; but these men cannot be airily dismissed in that manner. They towered above their fellows, the supreme product of the spirit of their day in adventure and daring; ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... from which love was absent? Kindness was the test, kindness the aim and soul; and judged by such a standard, the discarded prodigal - now rapidly drowning his sorrows and his reason in successive drams - was a creature of a lovelier morality than his self-righteous father. Yes, he was the better man; he felt it, glowed with the consciousness, and entering a public-house at the corner of Howard Place (whither he had somehow wandered) he pledged his own virtues in a glass - perhaps ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to-morrow the severing of the cords and the stepping forth with freedom from obligation. He knew that the very best people, being those who are most sensitive to gratitude and to other people's pains, are incessantly let in for complications that never involve selfish or self-righteous persons. ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... to any body of Christians under the sun; but there are in addition, as there are in every building set apart for the purposes of piety, several who have "more frill than shirt," and much "more cry than wool" about them—rectified, beautifully self-righteous, children who would "sugar over" a very ugly personage ten hours out of the twelve every day, and then at night thank the Lord for all his mercies. In Lune-street Chapel faction used to run high and wilfulness was a gem which many of the members wore ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... tout manger must not be too sweepingly condemned by the self-righteous white man as long as drinking bouts are a part of civilized customs; and at least one civilized nation has the gross proverb, "Better ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... scene, all looked a little self-righteous. Occasionally they relieved their feelings by spitting outside the door. Sam did not look greatly concerned; his conscience was clear. True, he felt the degradation of the bound wrists, but must he not presently be triumphantly vindicated? ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner
... whom the easy-going habit of the world, the perfectly self-righteous indifference to a woman's happiness or honour of the well-bred people of that day, gave over as a partner for life a half-educated, worldly-ignorant and absolutely will-less young girl of nineteen and a half, who doubtless ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... the beginning that there often come to our people arrogant and self-righteous persons, who say "the Lutheran Church has no religion," that it "does not bring its members into the light," and does not "believe in or insist on ...
— The Way of Salvation in the Lutheran Church • G. H. Gerberding
... Margaret with her beads in her hand. Isabel, who came up to see her two or three times, was both startled and affected by the change in her; and by the extraordinary mood of humility which seemed to have taken possession of the hard self-righteous Puritan. ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... low down levels of existence, and, with the exception of those whose enmity it is a distinction to have, people will come to realize that your position is neither that of the religious crank nor of self-righteous conceit—that it is the expression and outcome of your reverence for whatsoever things are pure and lovely and of ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd
... are the person who has been stealing jewelry from the campus houses all through this year." Betty's voice grew harder as she remembered the injustice she had so nearly done Georgia and Miss Harrison's self-righteous attack on ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde
... the community who are really happy in their life's work, as they fantastically call it, are those commercial ruffians whose brutal, self-righteous, puritanical countenances one is swamped by—as if by a flood of suffocating mediocrity—in the streets of ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... of those unfortunate outcasts of society—tramps and destitute, drunken loafers. If the self-righteous hypocrites who despise these poor wretches had been subjected to the same conditions, the majority of them would inevitably have become the same ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... as she listened. She adored her baby sister, and she found it hard not to blame Audrey. "I ought not to have gone away," she began irritably, but stopped, as it struck her what a self-righteous and conceited thing it was that she was saying. "I had better put her back to bed again, I ...
— Anxious Audrey • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... as reached by the Stoics is certainly again threatened by the self-righteous and self-complacent distinction between men of virtue, and men of pleasure, who, properly speaking, are not men. Aristotle had already dealt with the virtuous elite in a notable way. He says (Polit. 3. 13. p. 1284), that men who are ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... the eating-house when Mrs. Pennycook called, but the nurse received her—not, however, without an inward chuckle as she recalled Mr. Hennage's warning and discovered that Mrs. Pennycook's mouth did really resemble a new buttonhole—as the mouth of every respectable, self-righteous, provincial female bigot has had a habit of resembling even as far back as the days of ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... state. It galls me to think of it, and me doing my best for the Republic and the Empire, denying myself hours of pleasure daily, missing races and all kinds of contests and toiling over documents and estimates and statistics. But it is true. If I decide this case of yours, ten to one any number of self-righteous nobles will say ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... Jews would not accept the truth he told them. They were a very proud and self-righteous people, and were not willing to be instructed in things they vainly believed they understood better than Jesus did. He called on them to repent of their sins. They denied their being sinners. He told them he was the Son of God, and that ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... her children, she feels acutely vulnerable and guilty. As a defense, she has built for herself a fortress made up of precepts, ideals, and rules, all based on a foundation of righteousness, and this has made her a formidable and rigid person. Like all self-righteous people, she tirelessly dispenses obvious truths, and keeps her own life and that of others ...
— Herein is Love • Reuel L. Howe
... wherever its sacred contents have been made known. To all who have received it with penitence, humility, and confidence, as the infallible word of God, it has proved their pleasure and delight—their fountain of consolation—their guide to peace: while the self-righteous and unbelieving have transformed it into a subject of perplexity and disputation—a cause of deeper guilt and more aggravated ruin. The Gospel has appeared transcendently beautiful and glorious to all who have been savingly enlightened by the Holy Spirit—while, to the impenitent ...
— The National Preacher, Vol. 2 No. 7 Dec. 1827 • Aaron W. Leland and Elihu W. Baldwin
... wisdom of the ancients, in whose splendid civilization suicide had as honorable place as any other courageous, reasonable and unselfish act. Antony, Brutus, Cato, Seneca—these were not of the kind of men to do deeds of cowardice and folly. The smug, self-righteous modern way of looking upon the act as that of a craven or a lunatic is the creation of priests, Philistines and women. If courage is manifest in endurance of profitless discomfort it is cowardice to warm oneself when cold, to cure oneself when ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... justified. They would "settle the matter once and for all, definitely and right." She would marry Rodney Harrison, and they would live like sane human beings, comfortably, logically, merrily, and there would be no dope fiends with plucking fingers and no Fallen Sisters and self-righteous settlement workers and no drab days and drab ways in their ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... added to it. Human penalty must be reserved for the administration of social laws. To his mind the broad road of evil would automatically claim its own without the augmentation of the loads of human freight borne thither on the dump-carts of the self-righteous. Rather it was his delight to hold out a hand to a poor soul in distress, even if his own ground ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... the more sober portion of society whose favour he courted. As his talents and industry gained him grace in the eyes of the dons of his college, so his good life and good understanding made him friends among the more worthy of his companions. He was conceited and self-righteous, ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... thought of the broken faith that had poured those slaughtering hosts into the decent peace of Belgium, that had smashed her cities, burnt her villages and filled the pretty gorges of the Ardennes with blood and smoke and terror, he was flooded with self-righteous indignation, a self-righteous indignation that was indeed entirely Teutonic in its quality, that for a time drowned out his former friendship and every kindly disposition towards Germany, that inspired him with destructive impulses, ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... coast, and were already pushing across the mountains to occupy the great interior valleys. And with rapid material development there had come a confident and aggressive spirit, a proud and intractable temper, a certain self-righteous sense of separation from the Old World and its traditions. The very rivalries between colony and colony were the result of close contact and daily intercourse, their very jealousies born of interrelated interests and the recognition of ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... you I was here for absolute rest. I couldn't think of preaching. Besides, it's against my principles to preach without remuneration. It's a wrong idea. The workman is worthy of his hire, you know, Mrs. Tanner, the Good Book says." Mr. West's tone took on a self-righteous inflection. ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... complexion, approaching nearly to black, and some have the broad distended nostrils of the negro. The Shereef said to me this afternoon, "I'm going to pray at the Marabout shrine; I go happily, I return happily." Our Shereef is a little self-righteous. ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... Beethoven's most faithful disciple. All his life he was seeking to write the "Tenth Symphony," the symphony that Beethoven died before composing. He was continually attempting to approximate the other's grand, pathetic tone, his broad and self-righteous manner. His music is full of but slightly disguised quotations. The trumpet-theme that ushers in Mahler's Fifth Symphony, for instance, appears the result of an attempt to cross the theme of the funeral march of the "Eroica Symphony" with the ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... his own imitation. This "mystery of iniquity" locks him from all true knowledge of himself. He must be worse before he will be better. The refined hypocrisies which so elude his eye, and thus nurse his self-righteous pride, must put on a grosser form, till he cannot choose but see himself as he is. The secret devil within must blaze out in a shape too palpable to be ignored. And so, as often happens where the subtleties of self-deceit are thus ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... other recruits, but in the main its inmates are not the victims of lust but of self-sacrifice. There is too often a whole tragedy in the story of a Japanese girl of this kind, and it is deplorable when the self-righteous European comes along and points the finger of scorn at her. I am aware that though not despised, as in this country, the lot of the inmate of the Yoshiwara is often, if not always, a horrible one. She is, as a rule, sold, or sells herself, for a lump sum of money to which amount is ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... doctor had told him so. But the man had eight children and, weak and emaciated as he was, he couldn't find other work anywhere. And so he had to stay In the soap factory and his employer was quite self-righteous because he kept him. He seemed to himself an extraordinarily humane person.—One August afternoon—the heat was frightful—Burmeister dragged himself across the yard with a wheelbarrow full of lime. I was just looking out of the window when I noticed him ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... were in a terrible taking; scandalised, flustered, very sore, poor birds, and quite past recollecting that feathers grow again if the system is sound and the cuticle health. To Iglesias these purse-proud, self-righteous, middle-aged gentlemen presented a spectacle at once pathetic and humorous in their present sad plight. A calm head and clear judgment might do much to ameliorate their position, and a calm head and cool judgment he was confident of possessing. Only was he, after all, disposed to ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... the price for this, as he knew he would pay; but without a word, and with as few outward signs as possible. For Miss Liz could not have been termed in sympathy with the easy-going Colonel, nor, in her self-righteous moods, sympathetic with any man. From long practice and research she had at her fingers' tips the measurements of every male transgressor from Cain to Judas Iscariot, and could work up about as unhappy an hour for gay Lotharios as might be found this side ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... conscience by exercise (Rom. 12:2). Alas! how much mischief has come from neglect of these facts. How many have tried to thrust the leadings of their conscience on others, in and out of creeds. Again, how many good people have become self-righteous and despised those who differed from them because they mistook matters of opinion and expediency as matters of conscience, through failing to recognize the fallible, variable element in their conscience. How foolish we act if we do not keep in mind these ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... form, he was ready, on the instant, to repel it and turn the tables completely upon his assailant. He exercised the most absolute freedom of speech, making his thrusts with the same coolness at "unrighteous copperheads and self-righteous Republicans." In referring to the moderate and deprecatory views of Colfax and Olin, in January, 1863, he said he had always been fifteen years in advance of his party, but never so far ahead that its members did not overtake him. His keenest thrusts were frequently made in such a tone ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... he cried, "from this day I forbid you to have anything to do with them, do you hear. I forbid you! They're a set of confounded, self-righteous hypocrites. Give them time! In all conscience they have had time enough, and opportunity enough to know what our intentions are. How long do they expect us to fawn at their feet for a word of recognition? What have we done that ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... friend, he did not translate evil into good. Through all the generous and kindly narrative we may see clearly that Savage was an impostor. There is the heart of Johnson in the noble appeal against judgment of the self-righteous who have never known the harder trials of the world, when he says of Savage, "Those are no proper judges of his conduct, who have slumbered away their time on the down of plenty; nor will any wise man easily presume to say, 'Had I been in ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... that Toombs is indisposed. Sumner is in poor health. Douglas, the little giant, is losing strength. What a curious people, aged and young, corrupt and idealistic, candid and hypocritical, religious and materialistic, hoarders and spenders, self-righteous, licentious, Puritanical." "Like all ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... on everything. God knows I have had no pleasure in my life, though I am pretty and young and father has plenty of money. And then people come and tell me that I ought to do things and I do them and it's all drivel. They want you to do work among the poor; which means reading Ruskin and feeling self-righteous in the best room in a poor tenement. Or to help some cause or other, which always means bundling people out of crooked houses, in which they've always lived, into straight houses, in which they often die. And all the time you have inside only the horrid irony ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... sat within the woman of the house, who heard me." This passion for locality was always at his elbow. A few pages further on in Grace Abounding, when he tells us how he abandoned not only swearing but the deeper-rooted sins of bell-ringing and dancing, and nevertheless remained self-righteous and "ignorant of Jesus Christ," he introduces the next episode in the story of his conversion with the sentence: "But upon a day the good providence of God called me to Bedford to work at my calling, and in one of the streets of that town I came where there were three or ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... caution should be used to continue to them the enjoyment of those civil and religious Rights which were secured to them by the Capitulation or which have since been granted by the liberal and enlightened spirit of the British Government.' Except for its rather too self-righteous conclusion this confidential announcement really is an admirable statement of the 'liberal and enlightened' ...
— The Father of British Canada: A Chronicle of Carleton • William Wood
... am. I could tell you within three or four. I found myself a-countin' of 'em up and a-gloryin' in it all the tother night, takin' credit to myself for givin' away a few victuals after I had had plenty myself. Think of a man gittin' self-righteous over givin' to some poor fellow-critters what he couldn't eat himself! If that ain't meanness, ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... belief and practice, so serious, or so violent, as to answer to the notion of a great corruption or perversion of the Primitive Religion? Was there ever a time, what was the time, when Christianity was not that which Protestants protest against, as if formal, unspiritual, self-righteous, superstitious, and unevangelic? If that time cannot be pointed out, is not "the Religion of Protestants" a matter, not of past historical fact, but of modern private judgment? Have they anything to say in defence of their idea ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... itself in him. He saw the fine, rich-coloured, secretive face of the Hebrew woman, so loudly self-righteous, and so dangerous, so destructive, so lustful—and he waited for his blood to melt with passion for her. But not tonight. Tonight his innermost heart was hard and cold as ice. The very danger and lustfulness of her, ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... right,' he said. 'I was afraid that with this success he'd want to stick it out. These idealists are so infernally self-righteous.' ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... class only in the community failed of his sympathy,—the self-righteous hypocrites, who thought that godliness consisted in scrupulous regard for pious ceremonies, and that zeal was most laudable when directed to the removal of motes from their brothers' eyes. For these Jesus had words of rebuke and burning scorn. It has been common with some to emphasize ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees
... because it almost closed the door of hope for the amelioration of the condition of the freedmen. But men in pursuit of justice must never despair. Let us again try and see whether we can not devise some way to overcome the united forces of self-righteous Republicans and unrighteous Copper-heads. It will not do for those who for thirty years have fought the beasts at Ephesus to be frightened by the ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... all; you do not hear a word I say; and if you did, you would not heed, O, self-righteous ...
— Dotty Dimple's Flyaway • Sophie May
... social tribunal which sits in judgment on virtue and vice. To her, for instance, the woman who sells herself with ecclesiastical sanction differed only in degree of impurity from her whose track is under the street-lamps. She was not censorious, she was not self-righteous; she spoke to no one of the convictions that ruled her, and to herself held them a mystery of holiness, a revelation of high things vouchsafed she knew not whence nor how. Suppose her to have been heart-free at this juncture of her fate, think you she would have found it a whit ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... lines than the people who interfered with you, no doubt; but of course the truth is that our principles ought to be used, like a stick, to support ourselves, not like a rod to beat other people with. The most difficult people to teach, as you will see hereafter, are the self-righteous people, whose lives are really pure and good, but who allow their preferences about amusements, occupations, ways of life, to become matters of principle. The worst temptation in the world is the habit of influence and authority, the desire to direct other lives and ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... sight of her friends who had fought her battles for her because they believed in her, stripped of everything which had gone to make life worth the living, and she would place herself in the power of a man whose only attitude toward the story might be one of self-righteous justification. Was it worth the price? Her own words rose up before her, "Without honesty no other virtue is a virtue at all." Elizabeth pondered a long time, and again her own words rose up to ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... denoted the more open forms of evil; and, in the second place, wicked men who might interfere with him; and under the head of wicked men he classed all whom he knew to be wicked, and most other men, whom he supposed to be so. He was not a self-righteous man—at least, not more self-righteous than most men, for he read with as great fervour the adjurations against sins into which he might fall as against those which seemed to him pointed more especially at other sinners who might persecute him for his innocence. He was ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... removed, and tumbles over backward. Henry had an odd sensation of having ignominiously tumbled over backward, and he missed, with ridiculous rancor, his sense of injury which he had cherished for so many years. After kicking against the pricks for so long, he had come to feel a certain self-righteous pleasure in it which he was now ...
— The Shoulders of Atlas - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... with a grin of good-nature on his perspiring and dirty face. He was feeling very self-righteous. It was pleasant to think he was doing a good work. So much so that the effort of doing it did not draw the usual ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... not exist, for God to answer prayer would be both a dishonour to Himself and a damage to the suppliant. To encourage those who come to Him in their own name, or in a self-righteous, self-seeking, and disobedient spirit, would be to set a premium upon continuance in sin. To answer the requests of the unbelieving would be to disregard the double insult put upon His word of promise and His oath of confirmation, by persistent doubt of ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... a sort of self-righteous superiority over his comrade, inasmuch as he had never given way to drink, said, "You should be thankful for ...
— The Coxswain's Bride - also, Jack Frost and Sons; and, A Double Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... allegorical explanation of the details only. In a similar manner Luther also explains it, who, e.g., on ver. 6, "the wolf shall dwell with the lambs, etc." remarks: "But these are allegories by which the Prophet intimates that the tyrants, the self-righteous and powerful ones in the world, shall be converted, and be received into the Church." Calvin says: "By these images, the Prophet indicates that, among the people of Christ there will be no disposition for injuring one another, nor any ferocity or ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... dance for joy, but for sadness that they have been expelled from the sweet dawn, and therefore their midnight revels are only ceremonies to remind them of their happy state in the morning of the world before thoughtful curiosity and self-righteous moralities drove them from the kind face of the sun to the dark exile of midnight. It is strange that we may not be angry while looking on the moon. Indeed, no mere appetite or passion of any kind dare become imperative in the presence of the Shining One; and this, in a more limited degree, is ...
— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens
... naughty, only after a self-righteous fashion. It was evident that whatever was the cause of it, she was not in sympathy with her son, and therefore could not help him out of any difficulty he might be in. I made no further attempt to learn from her the cause of her son's discomfort, ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... people and drew them to Him. It would have been a long while before any penitent woman would have come in and wept over the feet of Gamaliel and his like. It would have been a long while before any sinful men would have found their way, with tears and yet with trust, to these self-righteous hypocrites. But perfect purity somehow draws the impure, though assumed sanctity always repels them. And it is a sign, not that a man is bad, but that he is good in a Christlike fashion, if the outcasts that durst not come near your respectable people find themselves drawn to Him. Oh! if there were ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... self-righteous texts come principally from the three first gospels, and are greatly counteracted by the deeper spirituality of the apostolic epistles. I therefore by no means charge this tendency ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... that the long-nosed, lanky, dyspeptic-looking body-snatchers, with the indescribable hats on, and a long curl dangling down in front of each ear, are the old, familiar, self-righteous Pharisees we read of in the Scriptures. Verily, they look it. Judging merely by their general style, and without other evidence, one might easily suspect ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... is the worst of Tadpole! he is so self-righteous as to imagine he deserves praise for standing on his rights! He is but a dog, you ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... time could ever come when the mists and fogs of complacency would be swept off, and we could see that it was the innocent suffering for the guilty, not that these poor souls were sinners above all men, as the self-righteous ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... 9. The self-righteous are unable to concede this equality. They must stir up sects and distinctions among Christians. Priests aspire to be better than laymen; monks better than priests; virgins than wives. The diligent, in praying and fasting, would be better than the ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. II - Epiphany, Easter and Pentecost • Martin Luther
... down to die. Very subtile and beautiful is the manner in which Bjoernson indicates the interaction of psychical and physical conditions. The "soul-frost" which chills the very marrow of her bones is so vividly conveyed that you shiver sympathetically. The self-righteous and brutally censorious attitude of the community lowers the temperature and makes the atmosphere deadly. And the fact that it is Ragni's unsuspicious innocence, and even her love of her husband, which expose her to this condemnation is made plain with much delicate art. Her residence ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... father was manager of an immense railroad system in the middle West. Rosalie Breeze and oh "cursed spite!" Isabel Boylston—"Is-a-bel," as she pronounced it,—roomed together and squabbled incessantly. At least, Rosalie did the squabbling, Is-a-bel affected the superior, self-righteous air which acted upon Rosalie's peppery temper as a red rag upon a bull. It was Miss Sturgis, of course, who had advised placing them together. Isabel was a great favorite of Miss Sturgis, and ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... persuasion to the paths of righteousness and peace. His presence was not needed among those who were whole. He was of course seldom found in their society. He did not desire to rank with the rich, self-righteous pharisee. So ought those, who profess to be the servants of Christ, to go among them, who are most in need of their aid. "The servant is not above his Master." They ought, therefore, to condescend to men of low estate, and visit the abodes of ...
— Twenty-Four Short Sermons On The Doctrine Of Universal Salvation • John Bovee Dods
... goodness and nobility of character that always humiliates the bad and makes them feel their degradation. A real pity and sympathy for him tinged her manner, but these qualities are not agreeable to pride. And it must be admitted that she had a little self-righteous satisfaction that she was so much better than this sadly robbed and wounded man suddenly appearing at the wayside of her life. In human strength there is generally a trace of arrogance. Only divine strength and purity can say with perfect love and ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... common; "and its existence drags on, to our deep shame, because we have not the courage frankly to say that the sexual relations of husband and wife, or those who live together, concern their own selves, and do not concern the prying, gloating, self-righteous, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... of that teaching, in its intolerance, its mixture of sanctimoniousness and covetousness, and its self-righteous assumption of a world-improving mission, is closely akin to the spirit from which were bred the religious wars of the past through the long and dark years when Protestants and Catholics killed ...
— Right Above Race • Otto Hermann Kahn
... Carolina, had an uncle in the Senate; South Carolina, and this Senator in particular, had been specially favoured with self-righteous insolence in Sumner's speech. A day or so later the Senate had just risen and Sumner sat writing at his desk in the Senate chamber in a position in which he could not quickly rise. Brooks walked in, burning with piety towards his State and his uncle, and in the presence, ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... still there was disturbance and disquiet, for Mr. Earnshaw did not love his daughter Catharine, and his heart was yet further embittered by the grumbling and discontent of old Joseph the servant; the wearisomest "self-righteous Pharisee that ever ransacked a Bible to take the promises to himself and fling the curses to his neighbours." But Catharine, though slighted for Heathcliff, and nearly always in trouble on his account, was much too fond of him ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... I suppose I was. But I believe then I was interested in myself, and what was good for my social success, and now—it sounds painfully self-righteous—but now I'm interested in things outside. I'm interested in what's good for the success of the world." I blushed in the dusk. It sounded so affected. "I mean," I said, "I'm interested in reforms and unions, and suffrage, ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty
... vision you have. In one's own estimation, there may seem to be a knowledge of what is right, and a self-satisfied doing of it. There may be a painstaking attention to the forms of obedience, and a self-righteous content in doing the required things. Is this the underlying thought in Peter's self-complacent remark, "Lo, we have left all and followed Thee.[102] We're so much better than this rich young ruler who couldn't stand the test you put to him. We——"? Poor, self-confident Peter! When the fire ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... I meet these self-righteous people. I fear they will demand that I make the world over to fix it good enough for them, and when I fail they will blame ...
— Oklahoma Sunshine • Freeman E. (Freeman Edwin) Miller
... which the dramatist has seemed willing for once to be identified. We may even incline to the belief that Moliere would have dismist Dr. Stockman as lacking in common-sense, and in the sense of humor, and also as a creature both conceited and self-righteous, pitiably impractical and painfully intolerant. And we are quite at a loss even to guess what the French playwright-psychologist, who has left us the unforgetable figure of Celimene would have ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... find that ever the Lord did thus yearn in his bowels for and after any self-righteous man? No, no; they are the publicans and harlots, idolaters and Jerusalem sinners, for whom his bowels thus yearn and tumble about within him: for, alas! poor worms, they have most ...
— The Jerusalem Sinner Saved • John Bunyan
... Diane imagined that Catherine might rest content with what she had accomplished, but the grim, hard-featured woman still continued to exhibit the same self-righteous disapproval towards her brother's ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... might have been trained and swayed aright until it had developed grandly out into the glorious womanhood the Creator must have planned for her. He knew, as if by revelation, that this woman had nothing in common with the narrow, self-righteous souls of Rykman's Corner. Warped and perverted though her nature might be, she was yet far nobler than those who ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... themselves! Was it not even better to do wrong, she asked herself, than to think it a very grand thing not to do it? What merit was there in being what it would be contemptible not to be? The Lord Christ could get nearer to the publican than the Pharisee, to the woman that was a sinner than the self-righteous honest woman! The Pharisee was a good man, but he thought it such a fine thing to be good that God did not like him nearly so well as the other who thought it a sad thing to be bad! Let her but get among her nice, honest, wicked poor ones, out of this atmosphere of pretence and appearance, ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... corrupt and self-righteous inhabitants of Jerusalem. While claiming to observe rigidly the precepts of God's law, they were transgressing all its principles. They hated Christ because His purity and holiness revealed their iniquity; and they accused Him of being the ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... Lee's mind with sensations and ideas. However, it was the world surrounding the central motive, the action, that most engaged him; hardly a trait of generosity dignified it; and, exaggeratedly as a universal meanness and self-righteous cruelty was shown, it scarcely departed, he felt, from ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... hate your fellow-men as I have had, my boy. For that has been the keynote of my unhappy life. God, how I hated them all, and how I do yet!... Not least Weyland, with his ostentatious virtue, his holier-than-thou kindness, his self-righteous magnanimity tossed even to me ... the broken-kneed idol whom others passed with averted face, and there was none so poor to ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... evil others have thought; nor would the mere frequent calling upon the Lord save those who in their deeds rejected the Divine government. In fine, Dr. Beaumont, weary of the obstinacy and determined ignorance of these self-righteous, told them that their pretensions to a larger share of heavenly gifts was presumptuous, since they indulged in offences that spoke a more infernal origin than merely carnal sins; for, so far as human eye can penetrate ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... find facts that appear to prove that Neanderthal man buried his dead with ceremony, and to the best of his means equipped them for a future life, I openly confess that I would rather stretch out a hand across the ages and greet him as my brother and fellow-pilgrim than throw in my lot with the self-righteous folk who seem to imagine this world and the next to have been created ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... against Valjean, appeals to the civil arm to protect the victim, but, for reasons which seem good to him, turns tail, breaks his arranged part, and is very nearly accessory to a murder. At the other end of the story, carrying out his general character of prig-pedant, as selfish as self-righteous, he meets Valjean's rather foolish and fantastic self-sacrifice with illiberal suspicion, and practically kills the poor old creature by separating him from Cosette. When the eclaircissement comes, it appears to me—as Mr. Carlyle said of Loyola that he ought to have consented ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick," was the significant answer of our Lord to the self-righteous Pharisees who took offence at his companions,—the poor, the degraded, the weak, and the sinful. "Go ye and learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice; for I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... grim, and these lapses are characteristic. He hates false friends and timeservers, the whole tribe of the ungrateful, the lords of Timon's acquaintance and his artists; he loathes Shylock, whose god is greed and who battens on others' misfortunes; he laughs at the self-righteous Malvolio and not with him, and takes pleasure in unmasking the pretended ascetic and Puritan Angelo; but for the frailties of the flesh he has an ever-ready forgiveness. Like the greatest of ethical teachers, he can take the publican and ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... personal integrity to withstand the domination of her immediate family. They put her in a hospital, where Marie had a radical mastectomy, chemotherapy and radiation. Assured that they had done everything that should have been done, the self-righteous parents went back home. Marie never recovered from chemotherapy and radiation. She died in the hospital surrounded by her lesbian friends who took dedicated, ever-so-sympathetic turns maintaining an ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon |
