"Effacement" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of my child? Well, by the time that she grew up, if she lived to grow up, all the trouble and scandal would be forgotten, and the effacement of a discredited parent could be no great loss to her. Moreover, my life was insured for 3000 pounds in an office that took ...
— Doctor Therne • H. Rider Haggard
... stiffened and narrowed intellectually; while for all sinners and sufferers, within the lines of sympathy she gradually traced out for herself, she would have willingly given her body to be burned, so strong was the Franciscan thirst in her for the self-effacement and self-sacrifice that belong to the Christian ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... any protestations of regard for Allis until a propitious future, but with his quick perception he saw that the psychological moment had been moved forward by the sudden effacement of the master of Ringwood. If he spoke now to Mrs. Porter it would give her a right to call upon his services. He would appear in the light of a debtor; it would break down barriers which might seem to ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... "futile name" under the patronymic of his favourite saint. Jean Kostka is not Jean Kostka, but it is without intent to deceive that he evades any possible responsibility in connection with his concealed identity; it is a kind of pious self-effacement, I hope everyone will believe what he says, and give him all credit for having "turned towards the outraged Church." In matters of evidence, pseudonymous statements are, however, objectionable, and I therefore identify our witness as ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... British waters had been placed under the command of British naval officers. This step, so conducive to good results owing to the unity of command which was thus obtained, won our highest admiration, showing as it did a fine spirit of self-effacement on the part of the senior American ...
— The Crisis of the Naval War • John Rushworth Jellicoe
... discrediting in society of the ancient European waltz or dance with partners, and the substitution of that horrible and degrading oriental interlude which is known as skirt-dancing. That is the whole essence of decadence, the effacement of five people who do a thing for fun by one person who does it for money. Now it follows, therefore, that when Mr. McCabe says that the ballets of the Alhambra and my articles "have their place in life," it ought to be pointed out to him that he ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... of use to anybody at all he must make himself effective. The process must be reversed, for no man could fight without weapons, and weapons were only to be had as the result of steady, concentrated effort—selfish effort. A man must fashion himself before he can be effective for others. Self-effacement, he learned, was rather a futile virtue ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... a train from King's Cross at eleven. At half-past ten Tibby, with rare self-effacement, fell asleep, and Margaret was able to drive her aunt to ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... effacement of things, seeing the lights of the farmhouses in the long plain start into existence, and then remain fixed, like gold beetles pinned on a blue curtain. The chill evening drew her to him, till they seemed one; and full of ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... finding and embracing truth for ourselves, which is still nobler. People who like their teacher to be as a king publishing decrees with herald and trumpet, perhaps find Mr. Mill colourless. Yet this habitual effacement of his own personality marked a delicate and very rare shade in his reverence for ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 3 (of 3) - Essay 2: The Death of Mr Mill - Essay 3: Mr Mill's Autobiography • John Morley
... as briefly as might be, of that morning's great experience; of Hugh's return, and noble self-effacement; of the clear light she had received, and the decision to which she had come; and of how she was now going forward, with a free heart, to her ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... its brilliance, and the sense of a certain bigness in the man passed through him. He had been prepared for his quiet, well-bred dignity. All the priests he had known were thoroughbreds in their manner and bearing; their self-imposed restraint, self-effacement, absence of all unnecessary gesture, and modulated voices had made them so; but the warmth of this one's underlying nature was as ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith
... all the other anti-Clericals. Whatever liberalism or republicanism means, socialism cannot mean less than the economic solution of regality and aristocracy in Europe, and in Italy as elsewhere. It does not mean the old-fashioned revolution; it means simply the effacement of all social differences by equal industrial obligations. So far as the Socialists can characterize it, therefore, the actual municipal government of Rome is as antimonarchical as it is antipapal. But the syndic of Rome ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... believing ye in honour pledged to me, I should seek to assure myself of the plight from your own lips, ungenerous though it was at the moment. It has since been my endeavour to show that I regretted my impulsive persecution, and I trust that my long forbearance and self-effacement have proved to ye that your comfort and happiness are the first object ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... that gives everything, the false love that grasps everything; of the passionate, eloquent, suffering eyes, full of jealousy and yearning, fierce hate and fiercer desire, and behind all, yes, dominating all, the struggle for martyr-like self-effacement whose cry forever is, not for my sake, but for the sake of one that I love. Great waves of pity overwhelmed every other emotion in Helene's breast, as she leaned forward. "My poor child," she said, "how intensely you love him! Do not let my coming ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... like a father. If he hesitates a moment between his attention to his wife and the effacement of his happiness, what shall I ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... propitious instant when the tapping of the pipe-men's hammers should drown the noise of a dash for effacement. When it came, he flung himself backward, whipped Nan over his head and out of the line of sight as if she had been feather-light, and rolled ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... his supper. There had been impatience as well as amiability in his denial. For all his regard for his partner he could not allow Nan her absurd self-effacement without protest. None knew better than he the extent of his debt to Jeff for ridding the Obar of the rustlers. But Jeff, he also knew, owed his life to the devotion, the skill, the love of this girl upon ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... write to them direct if in difficulty. But that sense of her having morally no claim upon him had always led Tess to suspend her impulse to send these notes; and to the family at the Vicarage, therefore, as to her own parents since her marriage, she was virtually non-existent. This self-effacement in both directions had been quite in consonance with her independent character of desiring nothing by way of favour or pity to which she was not entitled on a fair consideration of her deserts. She had set herself to stand or fall ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... and thus resemble the Indian who, however cruelly he may be tortured, considers himself revenged on his tormentor by the bitterness of his own tongue. Supposing we withdraw from pain into nonentity, into the deaf, dumb, and rigid sphere of self-surrender, self-forgetfulness, self-effacement: one is another person when one leaves these protracted and dangerous exercises in the art of self-mastery, one has one note of interrogation the more, and above all one has the will henceforward to ask more, ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... clocks back a couple of hours in order to compensate the gas and electric light companies for all the money they will have lost. That will bring those 163 old gentlemen to life again and double their remaining term of years to make up for their temporary effacement. They are patriotic hostages to Time for the summer only. You must remember that time is only a philosophical abstraction, with no real or tangible existence, and we have a right to do whatever we want ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... sledding," replied Father Murray. "But these men take it very philosophically and with a great deal of self-effacement. The country clergyman has trials that his city brother knows nothing about. He has to figure on the pennies that rarely ...
— Charred Wood • Myles Muredach
... time I worshipped Aunt Emmy, who represented in my somewhat colourless orphaned existence the beautiful and romantic side of life. Aunt Emmy looked romantic, and the contrast between her refined, gentle self-effacement and the commonplace egotism of her two men was of the glaring nature which appeals to a young ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... Miss Conway, "the more than Greek delicacy with which the tragedy is told. No mutilation, no gore; just an effacement—prompt and absolute—'there wasn't any.' It would be hard to overpraise ...
— Concerning Cats - My Own and Some Others • Helen M. Winslow
... these diversions, not so much like a man in high spirits, but like one of an approved good-nature, habitually self-forgetful, accustomed to please and to follow others. I have remarked in old soldiers much the same smiling sadness and sociable self-effacement. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a pruning hook. With this to leaven them, the rough habiliments were most becoming. In a word, they supplied the very setting which manhood should have; and since Anthony, sitting there at his meat, was the personification of virility, they served, as all true settings should, by self-effacement to magnify their treasure. The ex-officer might have ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... been crying, but now she smiled and the two chatted with a forced vivacity, pretending to ignore the thing of which each was thinking and, though vivacity was foreign to his nature, the sufferer joined in their conversation with a grim sort of self-effacement. Soon they saw another figure approaching by the flagged path. It was the figure of Eben Tollman and his manner was full of solicitude—but as he talked with the father, Farquaharson saw him more than once steal covert glances at the daughter. Obviously ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... there was a less spiritual life in the apostles than in the bards. We cannot compare Cuculain, the most complete ideal of Gaelic chivalry, with that supreme figure whose coming to the world was the effacement of whole pantheons of divinities, and yet it is true that since the thoughts of men were turned from the old ideals our literature has been filled with a less noble life. I think a due may be found in the withdrawal of thought ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... which, he was working out his destiny. "How can I best help?" she asked herself, which showed that the spirit aroused in her that afternoon had not in reality died. And her intellect relentlessly pointed out to her that her only aid would come from her self-effacement, her standing one side. When the great work was ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... their amusements—also, which seems the last straw, their vices—can actually be enjoyed by the base mechanical sort, insomuch that, if this kind of thing goes on, there must in the end follow an effacement of all classes, and the peer will walk arm and arm with the blacksmith. But class distinctions die hard, and the working men are not yet all ready for the disciplined recreation which will help to break down the barriers, ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... little girl to walk out alone, even for a short distance, and in such positions as the older woman was able to secure, it was always with the promise that the child should be no nuisance. And so the young person grew up in a habit of self-effacement, and of sitting quietly in corners where she could not be seen or heard, instead of playing with other children of her own age. Then came a great hope, which even as she lay in bed and thought about it, ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... of the white population. But by the arrangement of 1809 the people of this section must content themselves with remaining in the minority in the state legislature, and suppress whatever of opposition they felt toward the institution of slavery, the cause of their effacement. ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... age and death of Juana la Loca, the daughter of the Catholic Kings, and widow of Philip the Handsome. The Queen's mad passion for Philip is barely mentioned, her figure is idealized, and she is made a symbol of humility, self-effacement, and love for the humble. Closely guarded by a harsh agent of her son Charles V, she escapes for a day to a country village, where she talks in a friendly way with the peasants, discussing their problems with a simplicity which conceals much wisdom. To those who wish to use her name as a standard ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... "Pray be careful," Mrs. Frayling admonished him with some sharpness. The performance had been prolonged. Not without intention had she effaced herself. But, by both performance and effacement, she had been not a little bored, having a natural liking for the limelight. She, therefore, hit out—to regret her ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... painting (I apprehend this through his own persistently modest observations) at which he works out his purpose more excellently than Watteau; of whom he has trusted himself to speak at last, with a wonderful self-effacement, pointing out in each of his pictures, for the rest so just and true, how Antony would have managed this or that, and, with what an easy superiority, have done the ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... vanished like the snows of winter. An elaborate pretence, a deliberate policy of make-believe, ever since those days invested Imperial Edicts with a majesty which they have never really possessed, the effacement of the sovereign during the Nineteenth Century contributing to the legend that there existed in the capital a Grand and Fearful Panjandrum for whom no miracle was too great and to whom people ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... young, young almost to excess. He judged it to be about two- or three-and-twenty. At his approach it drew as close as possible to the sideboard. It had the air of cultivating assiduously the art of self-effacement, for its face, when looked at, achieved an ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... this admirable friend, pass away from him. He had never so unreservedly qualified her as while confronted in thought with such a possibility; in spite of which there was small doubt for him that as an answer to his long riddle the mere effacement of even so fine a feature of his situation would be an abject anticlimax. It would represent, as connected with his past attitude, a drop of dignity under the shadow of which his existence could only become ...
— The Beast in the Jungle • Henry James
... another, that business is at an end for him. Perhaps poor Beatriz, seeing her son in such a high place at Court, has effaced herself for his sake; perhaps the appointment was given on condition of such effacement; ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... he mused, "Nature will have her way about this old world and its destiny. Self-development is the first law of life, not self-effacement." ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... feeling towards firm land and healthy motion this dream of a headlong gallop was born in him. The poem was pencilled on the cover of Bartoli's "De' Simboli trasportati al Morale", a favourite book and constant companion of his; and, in spite of perfect effacement as far as the sense goes, the pencil dints are still visible. The little poem 'Home Thoughts from the Sea' was written at the same time, and in ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... calendar described; the basis of our knowledge of early Roman religion. It expresses a life agricultural, political, and military. Days of gods distinguished from days of man. Agricultural life the real basis of the calendar; gradual effacement of it. Results of a fixed routine in calendar; discipline, religious confidence. Exclusion from it of the barbarous and grotesque. Decency and order under ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... healed sooner than he expected, but if this consciousness had enabled him to extend a certain passive forgiveness to his wife and Demorest, it was always with the conviction that his mysterious effacement had left an inexplicable shadow upon them which their consciences alone could explain. But for this unjust, vulgar, and degrading interpretation of his own act of expiation, he was totally unprepared. It completely crushed whatever sentiment remained of ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... enjoyed this hugely; the real Edward Bok did not. The one was bottled up in the other. It was a case of absolute self-effacement. The man behind the editor knew that if he followed his own personal tastes and expressed them in his magazine, a limited audience would be his instead of the enormous clientele that he was now reaching. It was the man behind the editor who had sought expression ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... have hoped to escape notice by a policy of judicious self-effacement, but unhappily his long, blank, uninterested face was held by his companions to bear an implied reproach; and being delicately sensitive on this point, they kicked his legs viciously, which made him extremely glad when dinnertime came, although he felt too ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... streets are as distinctly marked by the ruins of houses." And in another place Mr. Charney tells us "the city was of vast extent; and, without indulging in any stereotyped reflections on the vanity of human greatness, I will say that a more complete effacement is nowhere else to be seen. The whole ground, over a space five or six miles in diameter, is covered with heaps of ruins, which at first view, make no impression, so complete is ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... in his Life of Johnson, did not sufficiently realize his duty of self-effacement. He is too much in evidence, too bustling, too anxious that his own opinion, though comparatively unimportant, should get a hearing. In general, Boswell's faults are easily noticed, and have been too much talked about. He was morbid, ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... federated nation upon English models and give it a complexion far removed, socially as well as politically, from Republican simplicity, coupled with a disposition to aggress upon and dictate to the individual states of the Union, to their nullification and practical effacement. ...
— Thomas Jefferson • Edward S. Ellis et. al.
... arranging a mutually agreeable peace. Now for the third time I am come, and I flatter myself that to-day again I shall obtain a reconciliation, and on grounds exceptionally just. My eyes bear witness that our hearts are in accord; you and we alike are pained at the effacement of Plataeae and Thespiae. Is it not then reasonable that out of agreement should spring concord rather than discord? It is never the part, I take it, of wise men to raise the standard of war for the sake of petty differences; but where there is nothing ...
— Hellenica • Xenophon
... (derisive cheers), and unwilling as we are to obtrude our private affairs upon what Virgil calls the ignobile vulgus (hisses from Messrs. Errol and Bangs and the doctor), nevertheless, on this festive occasion, we owvercome our natural modesty and spirit of self-effacement (more derision) sow far as to remark that Cubbyholes (a dig from Miss Halbert) will be ready for our occupation in the second week of September, about which time the Bishop will make a visitation, including the office of howly matrimony. Meanwhile the bride elect will look forward ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... have his inferiors in rank assert themselves. That accounted, no doubt, for the meek self-effacement of the Turks who had come with him. Peter Measel did not appear to mind being rebuked. He crossed to the other side of the room, and proceeded to look the gipsies over with the air of ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... a child early destined to sacrifice and self-effacement, and as he grew older and other youngsters came to fill Cassie's cabin, he took up his lot with the meekness of an infantile Moses. Like a Moses he was, too, leading his little flock to the promised land, when ...
— The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... varied, carried on to effacement of other wing of allied forces. ATKINSON wanted to put question to JOKIM about his Coinage Bill. Took some pains in framing it; handed it in at table; next day question appeared on paper shorn of ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 1, 1891 • Various
... of the entirely efficient and clear-minded, a tolerance of imperfection. Thus for these efficient and clear-minded members there is always, in the church as in the family, a perpetual opportunity of humility, self-effacement, gentle acceptance; of exerting that love which must be joined to power and a sound mind if the full life of the Spirit is to be lived. In the realm of the supernatural this is a solid gain; though not a gain which we are very ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... Within a few centuries the greater birds, the Dinornis and Epiornis, as well as the interesting Dodo, have vanished from the southern isles which they inhabited. In the century to come we can foresee that this process of effacement of the ancient life will go ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... enthusiasm which inspires the troops, that the ideas of peace become effaced, and they must be seasoned soldiers who will endure, without flinching, the losses of Waterloo or Gettysburg. Discipline, which means the effacement of the individual, does more than break the soldier to unhesitating obedience; it trains him to die for duty's sake, and even the Stonewall Brigade, in the spring of 1862, was not yet thoroughly disciplined. "The ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... my enterprise, the first fair spring of rain in a drought of two months fell, to my disappointment, among the hills; for I feared an increase of the torrent and the effacement of the mighty lens. I set off, however, on the afternoon of the following day, in hot sunshine, mentally prognosticating a favourable termination to my expedition, and telling Madame Barbiere not to expect me back ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... showed little inclination to perform this noble act of self-effacement. On no account would {115} he have a dictator imposed upon him to shape the fortunes of Greece according to his caprice, unfettered by "military advisers of limited perceptions." If Greece was to have a dictator, the King had said long ago, he would rather ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... household calm, hitherto undisturbed on the surface. Low company and its brutalizing influences were tending to bring about a state of things to which the most patient of wives might find it hard to submit. A role of complete self-effacement was not one it was in her power long to sustain, and the utter moral solitude into which she was thrown consolidated those forces inclining her to the extreme of self-assertion. For together with trials without came the growing sense of superiority, ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... was already a much changed girl. As Grace had threatened, she had been initiated into the Girl Scout secrets to the extent of taking the "good cheer and helpful" pledge, and that this had furnished the stray child with a practical motto, was very evident in the almost complete effacement of her former wistful, dejected and often gloomy moods. Altogether it was a delightful achievement, due principally to the subtle and gentle influence of ...
— The Girl Scouts at Bellaire - Or Maid Mary's Awakening • Lilian C. McNamara Garis
... got with joy, should flower from a sublime moment of perfect union when the man and the woman were lifted out of themselves to some divine pinnacle of experience, of soul and body union and self-effacement. Then conception would be but the carrying over of their deep yearning, each for the other, the hunger of souls and bodies ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... rose in December Chatham went to Bath for the sake of his health. In February, 1767, he had a severe attack of gout, and in March the disease began to affect his mental powers. For the next two years he was unable to take any part in politics. His effacement left the ministry without a head. Before his retirement a difference arose in the cabinet on the affairs of the East India Company. From a simple trading company it had been raised by the victories of Clive and his generals to the position of a territorial power. ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... they should, as they did in their small, two-servanted house at home, share the same one. Love, even universal love, the kind of love with which she felt herself flooded, should not be tried. Much patience and self-effacement were needed for successful married sleep. Placidity; a steady faith; these too were needed. She was sure she would be much fonder of Mellersh, and he not mind her nearly so much, if they were not shut up together at night, if in ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... Head Master,—Whereas the Great War for the liberties of Europe involves sacrifices from all, and the rise in prices must cause considerable difficulties, hitherto endured with noble self-effacement, to house-masters, We, the undersigned, feel that a corresponding sacrifice on our part is necessary, and respectfully pray that we may be permitted to give up two weeks of the Easter term, thus allowing ourselves more time for war-work in our respective ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 22, 1916 • Various
... such a state of mind as would reconcile her to remaining under the military yoke of the Hohenzollerns. And Europe, without protest, accepts this condition of things, fatal to her interests and security, created for the sole profit of the lowest of nations. By her self-effacement, indeed, she increased fivefold the influence and ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... is impossible," he thought, "for that would mean the entire effacement of the past. I should have to begin a new life, to become quite a different man, ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... lived in days gone by with that feminine nation now as much forgotten as many other great things,—like the Jesuits, the Buccaneers, the Abbes, and the Farmers-General,—had acquired an irresistible good-humor, a kindly ease, a laisser-aller devoid of egotism, the self-effacement of Jupiter with Alcmene, of the king intending to be duped, who casts his thunderbolts to the devil, wants his Olympus full of follies, little suppers, feminine profusions—but with Juno out of the way, ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... played Bridge at all the houses, had given a few small things himself, and ended by paying off all scores with a garden party at Clarendon, which Mrs. Carrington had managed for him with exquisite taste (and, to him, amazing frugality)—and, more wonderful still, with an entire effacement of self. It was Croyden's party throughout, though her hand was at the helm, her ...
— In Her Own Right • John Reed Scott
... the Asiatic that he would have passed muster for one even among a gathering of Cingalese, kept appearing and disappearing at irregular intervals, it spoke well for the powers of imitation and self-effacement possessed by Dollops, that she never once thought of associating that young man with the dawdling messenger boy who strolled leisurely along with a package under his arm and patronised every bun-shop, winkle-stall, and pork-pie purveyor on ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... sign.] Obliteration — N. obliteration; erasure, rasure^; cancel, cancellation; circumduction^; deletion, blot; tabula rasa [Lat.]; effacement, extinction. V. efface, obliterate, erase, raze^, rase^, expunge, cancel; blot out, take out, rub out, scratch out, strike out, wipe out, wash out, sponge out; wipe off, rub off; wipe away; deface, render ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... use to him in public was over, for I had become hindrance instead of help. While he was outcast and hated I had the pride of standing at his side; when all the fair-weather friends came buzzing round him I served him best by self-effacement, and I never loved him better than when I stood aside. But I continued all the literary work unaltered, and no change of opinions touched his kindness to me, although when, a little later, I joined the Theosophical Society, ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... interested. She admired the peculiar beauty of Hallie; but the efforts of the latter to repress her feelings, to reach, as it were, the results of self-effacement, were not at all pleasing ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris
... rebellion. More frequently, she was glad to escape the slow, long torture, and she would rise, and go through the formality of shaking hands with each person and bidding each "good-night" ere she left the room. "Fisher manners," Madame would whisper impatiently to Marion. "I cannot teach her a decent effacement of her personality." For this little ceremony always ended in Archie's escorting her upstairs, and so far he had never neglected this formal deference due his wife. Sometimes too he came back from the duty very distrait and unhappy-looking, a circumstance always ...
— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr
... when one holds a lantern before him on some dark road, so that while the bearer of the lantern is in the darkness, the path before him is thrown into the light. The passage, then, which seems to suggest a doctrine of self-display, is really a teaching of self-effacement. Here is a railway-train thundering along some evening {10} toward a broken bridge, and the track-walker rushes toward it with his swinging lantern, as though he had heard the great command, "Let your light shine before men;" and the train ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... sixteen seconds of arc to the south-west of the true nebular nucleus. Its appearance did not then signify a sudden advance of the nebula towards condensation, nor was it attended by any visible change in it save the transient effect of partial effacement ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... purely self-absorbed is very great and intoxicating to those who are constantly—either by desire or the force of circumstances—unselfish. A faint flush swept into Brigit's face under the effect of an experience so novel. Their twofold consciousness had all the pathos of self-effacement, and all the thrill of satisfied egoism. Such instants cannot last, and they are shortest when one's habits of thought are antagonistic to such luxury. Brigit sighed deeply, and roused herself with a painful sense that ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... little man who looked less like a detective than a commercial traveler selling St. Peter's Oil or some other cheerful concoction, with manners as gentle and a voice as soft as a spring zephyr, who always took off his hat when he came into a business office, seemingly bashful to the point of self-effacement, was the one who snatched Charles F. Dodge from the borders of Mexico and held him in an iron grip when every influence upon which Hummel could call for aid, from crooked police officials, corrupt judges, and a gang of cutthroats ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne
... left before dawn, not even waiting for his customary cup of coffee. With the kindness of a sister, the girl wife urged me to take their bed; but I assured her that comfort was the least of my concerns, complete effacement being ...
— A Texas Matchmaker • Andy Adams
... become a fatal precedent. Of Saturninus himself we do not know much more than that he was an eloquent speaker, and a resolute though not over-scrupulous man at a time when to be scrupulous was equivalent to self-martyrdom or self-effacement. [Sidenote: Glaucia.] In something of the same relation in which Camille Desmoulins stood to Danton, Caius Servilius Glaucia, a wit and favourite of the people, stood towards the sombre and imperious Saturninus, and both hoped to effect their aims by the aid of Marius. If they are ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... gentleman, as the effective author of their pleasure. A moment later he wished he had held his tongue, for although the toast was drunk with demonstrative good-will, the Cavaliere received it with various small signs of eager self-effacement which suggested to Rowland that his diminished gentility but half relished honors which had a flavor of patronage. To perform punctiliously his mysterious duties toward the two ladies, and to elude or to baffle observation on his own merits—this seemed the Cavaliere's ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... things. To think of Helen, and of what, with their wealth, she and Franklin could do for Helen, seemed, really, her strongest hold on life. It was the brightest thing that she had to look forward to, and she looked forward to it with complete self-effacement. She saw the beautiful Italian villa where Helen should be the fitting centre, the English house where Helen, rather than she, should entertain. She felt that she asked nothing more for herself. She was safe, if one liked to put it so, and in that safety ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... prejudice and dislike on the part of the white man to his colored brother? Is it because he was once a slave, and a slave must forever wear the marks of degradation? Is there no effacement for the stigma of slavery—no erasement for this blot of shame? Will our white brother not remember that it was his hand that forged the links of that chain and that riveted them around the necks of the people who had roved for thousands of years ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... the New State, we can look out with great pride upon a clean and wholesome land. With strong emotion, we can look upon the physical manifestation of our glorious principles—that only through self-effacement—through fanatic love for the state—can the individual come to complete physical and mental fruition. Upon this anniversary we see our enemies, both within and without, broken, ...
— The Clean and Wholesome Land • Ralph Sholto
... defiance, almost of contempt, in her voice as she said the last words. The well-fed, much-too-well dressed Baroness stared angrily at the dowdy old woman who had come forth from her usual and seemly position of effacement to speak so disrespectfully. ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... miserable house in Durley Road and gone to an expensive nursing home, to insist later upon his meeting the bill. For all her awakened instinct of self, the fact of her still deciding to remain at Mrs Gowler's was a yet further sacrifice on the altar of the loved one. Perhaps this further self-effacement where her lover was concerned urgently moved her to stand no trifling in respect of others. Consequently, when about half-past ten Mrs Gowler opened the door, accompanied by her idiot son, Oscar, who looked more imbecile than ever in elaborate clothes, she was not a ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... sacrifice he was undergoing would be out of proportion to the good attained by it, and the interests of others to which he was postponing his own interests would not be so distinctly greater as to warrant the act of self-effacement. But now let us suppose that, in attending to the interests of the trust, he is neglecting the interests of others who have a claim upon him, or impairing his own efficiency as a public servant or a professional ...
— Progressive Morality - An Essay in Ethics • Thomas Fowler
... Secretary was again in the War Office. The early returns showed that the whole North was turning to him in enormous majorities. He showed no exultation. When the Assistant Secretary of the Navy spoke sharply of the complete effacement politically of Henry Winter Davis against whom he had a grudge, Lincoln said, "You have more of that feeling of personal resentment than I. Perhaps I have too little of it; but I never thought it paid. A man has no time to spend half his life in quarrels. If any man ceases ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... on the hypothesis of a part of the good and evil works being left behind at the time of the soul's departure from the body, and another part later on, and the effacement of works thus taking place in a double way, that a sense can be found in the scriptural declaration of the soul proceeding on the path of the gods. For otherwise there would be a contradiction. For if all the works perished at the time of the soul's departure ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... responsible to a very large extent, for being a man of exalted opinions as to his own importance, he could not long maintain the attitude of reserve and self-effacement which Barber had imposed as a condition of service under the scheme he had formulated. As soon as the miners began to fight shy of him as an opponent at the billiard-table, he forgot the necessity for caution, and ignored the ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... than two minutes from the instant of their encounter, they stood outside Troyon's back door, facing a cramped, malodorous alley-way—a dark and noisome souvenir of that wild mediaeval Paris whose effacement is an enduring monument to the fame ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... and less prestige and people in the Western hemisphere now kept a watch on that roundabout road. All of which quite applied to Pandora Day— the journey to Europe, the culture (as exemplified in the books she read on the ship), the relegation, the effacement, of the family. The only thing that was exceptional was the rapidity of her march; for the jump she had taken since he left her in the hands of Mr. Lansing struck Vogelstein, even after he had made all allowance for the abnormal ...
— Pandora • Henry James
... embodies more absolutely than any other, save perhaps the final Pieta, the ideal of tone-harmony towards which the master in his late time had been steadily tending. Richness and brilliancy of local colour are subordinated, and this time up to the point of effacement, to this luminous monotone, so mysteriously effective in the hands of a master such as Titian. In the solemn twilight which descends from the heavens, just faintly flushed with rose, an amorous shepherd, flower-crowned, pipes to a nude nymph, who, half-won by ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips
... pronounced action. This has already been noted in connection with submissiveness. Most people in the presence of their intellectual and social or even their physical superior, experience a sense of, to use McDougall's term, "negative self-feeling." In some people this negation or effacement of the self is ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... the course of time you forget their hurried writing, their inconsistencies, and their qualities of the "Shilling Shocker," the result of their author's failure to attain "the tempestuous loveliness of terror" that are in so many of them, long or short. As aids to this effacement of the cheapening elements are the very materials of the tales, their characters, now elemental, now other-worldly, and their background of mountains that uplift the spirit, ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... more lucrative and materially satisfactory field of endeavor—if he starve in his obstinacy—engineers are men of the temperament, aside from the training, to minister to public needs and desires. Self-effacement is the engineer's chief characteristic. He views largely and without bias. He can see things from the other fellow's angle because he is not an engineer if he has not the gift of imagination. The successful engineer has this most precious of endowments, ...
— Opportunities in Engineering • Charles M. Horton
... in thought or conduct there are good and real reasons in the nature of things. To leave such habits attached to false opinions is to lessen the weight of these natural or spontaneous reasons, and so to do more harm in the long run than effacement of them seems for a time to do good. Most excellences in human character have a spontaneous root in our nature. Moreover if they had not, and where they have not, there is always a valid and real external defence for them. The ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... the twist. The hand should meanwhile be introduced into the womb and the snared limbs seized and pressed against its walls so as to secure the rotation of the uterus along with the body of the fetus. The relaxation of the constriction and the effacement of the spiral folds will show when success has been gained, and the different members at one end of the body should then be brought up so as ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... theory had occurred to them, forty years prior to the time when he wrote this work. The footnote to the first page of the fourth part is the testimony of a collaborator to the genius of his fellow-workman, an example of appreciation and modest self-effacement which it would not be easy to match, and to which literary men who work together are not over-prone. Nothing else could bear more eloquent testimony to the loftiness of character and sincerity of purpose ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... as a record of a historical event, is manifestly hampered by that modest and insatiable desire for self-effacement which marks this eminent man. We see anonymous "persons who had access to the SULTAN approaching" the SHAH, and "suggesting to him that he ought to apply for an audience." We see him "declining to do so on the ground that, ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 17, 1891 • Various
... mind this alarming fact, that eccentricity of thought, habit, or behaviour may result, as in the case of this unfortunate ellipse, which once presented such fair and promising proportions to the student's admiring gaze, in the 'sinister effacement of a man,' or the gradual absorption of a State into an uninteresting thing 'which lies evenly ...
— The Romance of Mathematics • P. Hampson
... dim object must have been a canoe, but its sudden effacement, and the loud cry for help, were mysteries too deep for immediate comprehension. He shouted with all the power of his voice full half a dozen times, but no ...
— Canoe Boys and Campfires - Adventures on Winding Waters • William Murray Graydon
... seize me," he said to Ko-tan, "lest Jad-ben-Otho, mistaking their intention, strike them dead." The effect of his words was immediate upon the men in the front rank of those who faced him, each seeming suddenly to acquire a new modesty that compelled him to self-effacement behind those directly in his rear—a modesty ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... again; since his blending of blazing passion with austere self-discipline is all too rare, let us hope he will change his mind), Oscar Sauer, Mathilde Sussin (whose sublime Deaconess in 'When We Dead Awake' so fully meets Ibsen's requirement of the actor of this character: complete self-effacement until the close, and then tragic acting of the highest order; Alfred Kerr, whose words—don't you think?—no other living critic can equal, has called her 'eine der Schattengestalten dieses groessten Theaters der Unscheinbarkeit, ...
— Poet Lore, Volume XXIV, Number IV, 1912 • Various |
