"Self-imposed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... irrevocably committed Leo's happiness to his honor, it might then be safe to tell him the truth, and solicit release from the self-imposed terms. Five hours ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... pine woods of Northern Maine. But to tell the truth he did not look very formidable now; for his beard was singed, his face blackened, and his clothes smouldering in patches, as though he might have been compelled to run the gauntlet of fire in returning from his self-imposed errand of mercy in connection with ...
— The Boy Scouts in the Maine Woods - The New Test for the Silver Fox Patrol • Herbert Carter
... such old date as to seem iron—induced her to say, as if consenting: "You think he is not quite at home in society?" But she wished to defend him strenuously, and as a consequence she had to quit the self-imposed ideal of her daily acting, whereby—the case being unwonted, very novel to her—the lady's intelligence became confused through the process that quickened it; so sovereign a method of hoodwinking our bright selves is the acting of a part, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... them to their aunt's where his regret and vexation, and the concern of everybody, was well talked over. To Elizabeth, however, he voluntarily acknowledged that the necessity of his absence had been self-imposed. ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... task, self-imposed and in the ends of justice; Sir Lionel Trevalyon is free to go to God's altar with the proudest and fairest woman in the world; and may the blessing of heaven rest upon his union. Had he not exposed the facts, he could not have wed, while ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... muttered as she went about her self-imposed tasks, "'tain't fair." And scowlingly Mary still ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... For Napoleon's self-imposed solitude everything at Brienne arranged itself propitiously. Each of the students was provided with a small patch of ground which he could do with as he pleased, and Napoleon's use of his allotted share was characteristic. ...
— Mr. Bonaparte of Corsica • John Kendrick Bangs
... read tracts and sermons, frequented churches and preachings, gave up driving on Sundays, and appeared in considerable danger of falling into the gulf of methodism; but this turn did not last long, and whatever induced him to take it up, he apparently became bored with his self-imposed restrictions, and after a little while he threw off his short-lived sanctity, and resumed his worldly habits and irreverent language, for he was always a loose talker. Active and ambitious in his pursuits, and magnificent ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... these maxims is: "So act as if thy maxim were to serve likewise as the universal law (of all rational beings)." A kingdom of ends is thus only possible on the analogy of a kingdom of nature, the former however only by maxims, that is self-imposed rules, the latter only by the laws of efficient causes acting under necessitation from without. Nevertheless, although the system of nature is looked upon as a machine, yet so far as it has reference to ...
— Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals • Immanuel Kant
... mild exercise as a man may take, in company with a little round-eyed woman, feather-light and active, yet in relation to Diana, like a tethered dove, that can only take short flights. Only here it was a tether self-imposed and of ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... persons most easy to dupe in matters of affection are usually those most astute in the larger affairs of life. Moliere, reading every riddle in the vast complexities of human character, and clinging, in self-imposed credulity, to his profligate wife, is a type of a striking truth. Still, a foreboding, a warning instinct withheld Lucretia from plumbing farther into the deeps of her own fears. So horrible was the thought that she had been ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... problem in all its bearings, now arguing with and now against each other, and here was the last day. To-morrow in the Theatre they would receive the formal acknowledgment which would crown their academic careers. Vane's self-imposed probation would then be over, the crisis would be passed, and his life's course fixed for ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... afflicted mother." Without a word, but with trembling lips, he stretched forth his arms to embrace her, and I stole away, leaving to her sacred sorrow the poor woman who for the moment, forgetting her self-imposed ascetic restraint, was yielding to every impulse of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... private members of their former churches. Some of them were very young men, and they were nearly all uneducated as regards clerical instruction. One of the most successful was Isaac Vidal, a lame young man, a mechanic of Colognac, near St. Hypolite, in the Cevennes. His self-imposed ministrations were attended by large numbers of people. He preached for only six months and then died—a natural death, for nearly all who followed him were ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... characteristic remedy. Each time that he lost his temper, he transferred a fine of two rupees (then about five shillings) from his right to his left pocket. When about to leave Roorkee, he devoted this accumulation of self-imposed fines to the erection of a sun-dial, to teach the natives the value of time. The late Sir James Caird, who told this legend of Roorkee as he heard it there in 1880, used to add, with a humorous twinkle of his kindly eyes, "It ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... split and piled firewood far beyond his immediate need. He could not sit passive too long. Enforced leisure made too wide a breach in his defenses, and through that breach the demons of brooding and despondency were quick to enter. When neither books nor self-imposed tasks about the cabin served, he would take his rifle in hand, hook on the snowshoes, and trudge far afield in ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... went off to hunt, and I was left with only the companionship of the grazing horses. I remained behind to water the animals, and protect our goods from any prowling savage who might chance to be in the neighborhood. My saddle-bed was spread under a large burning bush, or incense tree, and my self-imposed duty was to keep a fire burning in the open, that its smoke might be seen by day and its light ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... volume away safely, I turned-to and gave Tonnison a hand with his self-imposed task of excavating; yet, though we put in over an hour's hard work, turning over the whole of the upheaped stones and rubbish, we came upon nothing more than some fragments of broken wood, that might have been parts of a desk or table; and so we gave up searching, and went back ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... mischievous ones. It could not be so in America or in England; in either of those countries the whole street would go mad in earnest and come to blows and bloodshed were the populace to let themselves loose to the extent we see here. All this restraint is self-imposed and quite apart from ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... Besides, remember those angels unaware that the Bible talks about. I guess this is up to me, so put away your frets and come on in. It's time we had worship and ended this day. But I guess those two self-imposed boarders of ours need a little religion ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... energy, stern force of will, delight in danger for its own sake, contempt for all laws but the self-imposed, those are the cardinal virtues, and challenge our sympathy even when they lead their possessor to destruction. The psychology implied in Jonson's treating of 'humour' is another phase of the same sentiment. The side by which energetic characters lend themselves to comedy is the exaggeration of some ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... I shall confine myself to a brief explanation of the manner in which I have endeavoured to perform my self-imposed task. For one wilful, but as I trust excusable, inaccuracy, I throw myself on the indulgence of my critics. Finding my pages already overloaded with names, and that they must consequently induce a considerable strain upon the memory of such readers as might not chance to be intimately acquainted ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... Senabawdee, was inducted by that "Royal Council" into power. Unequal to the exploit of unseating the usurper, and fearing his unscrupulous jealousy, the Chowfa Mongkut took refuge in a monastery, and entered the priesthood, leaving his wife and two sons to mourn him as one dead to them. In this self-imposed celibacy he lived throughout the long reign of his ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... disowned my name, and my kindred, and my home, and entered the service of the mighty Biorn, as a strange wild man, in order that Weigand the Slender should always remain a murderer, and that I might feed on his anguish. So have I fed upon it for all these long years; I have fed frightfully upon his self-imposed banishment, upon his cheerless return home, upon his madness. But to-day—" and hot tears gushed from his eyes—"but to-day God has broken the hardness of my heart; and, dear Sir Weigand, look upon yourself no more as a murderer, and say ...
— Sintram and His Companions • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... no willing fetters wear Which our own hands have made, No self-imposed distresses bear, And ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... for fine lawn sleeves? By Jove, you seem to have done it well. If any one were to ridicule any belief of the bishop's, would he not blandly shrug his shoulders and be inexpressibly shocked? I am very, very sorry to hear that you are not well; but am not surprised after all your self-imposed labour. I hope you will soon have an outing, and that will do you ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... hanging fire! Likewise the members of the Commission began to look exceedingly prosperous, and to blossom out into family life; and, for the first time in his existence, even Chichikov also departed from the iron laws of his self-imposed restraint and inexorable self-denial, and so far mitigated his heretofore asceticism as to show himself a man not averse to those amenities which, during his youth, he had been capable of renouncing. That is to say, certain superfluities began to make their appearance ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... Crosby understood some of the shortcomings which lay underneath this attractive exterior, he could not remember them just now. There was the temptation to offer himself heart and soul to this man and forget the self-imposed mission on which he had come. He had been brought in contact with Monmouth some years ago, had begun, perhaps, by pitying, and had ended by giving him a friendship which was truer and stauncher than any other he had ever ...
— The Brown Mask • Percy J. Brebner
... library seemed to be a sort of household rite—a self-imposed Truce of Bacchus before the resumption of hostilities in the dining-room. It lasted from six forty-five to seven; everybody sipped Manhattans and kept quiet and listened to the radio newscast. The only new face, to Rand, ...
— Murder in the Gunroom • Henry Beam Piper
... savoured a peculiar satisfaction from transcribing them. One can imagine the deliberate and epicurean way he would go about this task, deriving from the mere bodily effort of "copying out" these long and carefully chosen excerpts, an almost sensual pleasure; the sort of pleasure which the self-imposed observance of some mechanical routine in a leisured person's life is able to produce, not unaccompanied by agreeable sensations of ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... massed, invading plants or bushes thinned out. But far more often there is not even a fence, or if there is, it has heavy woods or a swamp or a wild pasture beyond it. I could go after plants every day for six months and nobody would ever detect where I took them. My only rule—self-imposed—is never to take a single specimen, or even one of a small group, and always to take where thinning is useful, and where the land or the roadside is wild and neglected, and no human being can possibly be injured. ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... court knew nothing of Prince Hamlet's determination until he had sailed from Elsinore; their knowledge then was confined to the fact of his departure. It was only to Horatio, his fellow-student and friend, that Hamlet confided the real cause of his self-imposed exile, though ...
— A Midnight Fantasy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... her. All the Plummers have kept diaries," Aunt Olivia mused, knitting stolidly on while the child stooped painfully to her self-imposed task. The quaint resemblance to herself at her own diary-writing did not escape her, and she smiled a little in the Aunt Olivia way that scarcely stirred her lips. Aunt Olivia smiled oftener now when she looked at the child. She was "failing" a little, Plummerly. Between ...
— Rebecca Mary • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... be a mistake, then, to suppose that the Federal judiciary has suffered any loss of influence through its voluntary relinquishment of the veto power in the case of political questions. This self-imposed restriction on its authority merely affords it a convenient means of placing beyond its jurisdiction measures which it may neither wish to approve nor condemn. And since the court must decide what are and what are not political questions, it may enlarge or narrow the scope and meaning of the ...
— The Spirit of American Government - A Study Of The Constitution: Its Origin, Influence And - Relation To Democracy • J. Allen Smith
... not a particularly lively affair; the strain of trying to impersonate a self-imposed character or to glean hints of identity from other people's conduct acted as a check on the natural festivity of such a gathering. There was a general feeling of gratitude and acquiescence when good-natured Rachel Klammerstein suggested that ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... Mythology.—In Vol. ii., p. 12., I desired to be informed whether this practice has prevailed amongst any people besides the American Indians. As you have established no rule against an inquirer's replying to his own Query, (though, unfortunately for other inquirers, self-imposed by some of your correspondents) I shall avail myself of your permission, and refer those who are interested in the subject to Herodotus, Melpomene 64, where they will find that the practice of scalping prevailed amongst the Scythians. ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 39. Saturday, July 27, 1850 • Various
... a few paces out of their indifference to this self-imposed guest and gathered around the sheet of newspaper while Laurie held an intensive conversation with his family beginning with several servants who were too excited at ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... part of my subject inconceivably painful; I hurry over it, but if I am to perform my self-imposed duty of giving a true picture, of what school-life sometimes is, I must not pass ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... He carried the promised repeal of all the duties but the tea tax, and in 1772 replaced the arrogant and quarrelsome Hillsborough with the more amiable Lord Dartmouth. It looked for a while as though the political skies might clear, for the American merchants, tired of their self-imposed hardships, began to weaken in opposition. In 1769 the New York assembly voted to accept the parliamentary terms; and in 1770 the merchants of that colony voted to abandon general non-importation, keeping only the boycott on tea. This led to the general ...
— The Wars Between England and America • T. C. Smith
... One-Eye's departure. They had been quiet days. Mrs. Kukor was still gone. Big Tom ventured forth from his self-imposed imprisonment only late at night. Cis and Mr. Perkins, save for a cheery greeting scribbled on a post card that pictured the Capitol at Washington, seemed utterly to have cut themselves off from the flat. As for Father Pat, of course he had not forgotten Johnnie, not forsaken a friend; ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... seconds, give a half dozen or more of them vigorous shakes, which would set them to howling, and warn the others of the thoughtless tribe of an impending danger. Immediately the offenders would all scamper to another part of the field, and remain quiet until the dress parade was over. This duty was self-imposed and ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... sympathize with the poet, yet we cannot but have inwardly a feeling of rejoicing; for, if it had not been for this unheard of villainy, we should probably never have had the other magnificent poetry and prose of Percy Bysshe Shelley composed during his self-imposed ostracism, and which furnish such glorious thoughts for the philosopher, and keen trenchant weapons ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran
... It is no mere mood of feeling, no mere liability to emotion, no mere natural aptitude or endowment, it is a permanent state of the agent's self, or, as we might in modern phrase put it, of his will, it consists in a steady self-imposed obedience to a rule of action in certain situations which frequently recur in human life. The rule prescribes the control and regulation within limits of the agent's natural impulses to act and feel thus and thus. The situations ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... be able to walk very far at once. Her feet were tender, and her shoes were thin. Bambo knew she should have to be carried the greater part of the way, and his great anxiety was lest his fund of strength, which had gradually grown so sadly small, should fail him before he had completed his self-imposed task. What would become of the little ones if he were forced to lie down under the friendly shelter of some wayside hedge, utterly unable to drag himself another step? Would Joe and Moll find them and force them back to a life of lovelessness, hardship, and degradation? Oh, surely not! ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... to her undoing. In her distraction she sniffed audibly. A tear ran down either side of her pink shiny nose and dropped on the folds of shepherd's-plaid silk veiling her plump bosom. For, with some obscure purpose of living up to her self-imposed indispensability, Miss Bilson was distinctly dressy at this period, wearing her best summer gown on every possible occasion and tucking a bunch of roses or carnations archly ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... after supper Grant had never seen General Morrison looking quite that old. The man was sustaining an overload of responsibility, and probably self-imposed guilt on top ...
— A Fine Fix • R. C. Noll
... is as though a new and undivided Europe had sprung to arms in moral horror against Germany. She has this to add fierceness to her soul—the reproach that she came in too late. That reproach is being wiped out rapidly by the scarlet of self-imposed sacrifice. She did come in late—for that very reason she will be the last of ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... work of clearing off the logs was prosecuted with increasing spirit and resolution. And so eagerly intent had all the hands become, in pressing forward to its completion their self-imposed task, which all could see was now fast drawing to a close, that they took no note of the flight of time, and were consequently taken by surprise when the sound of the horn summoned them to their ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... immense sum of money at his disposal if he would consent to reside in the city of New York and represent Southern commerce. Millions would have flowed to him. But he declined. He said: 'No; I am grateful, but I have a self-imposed task which I must accomplish. I have led the young men of the South in battle; I have seen many of them fall under my standard. I shall devote my life now to training young men to do their duty in ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... is the outward and sure expression of a change in Mr. Whiting's way of musical thinking, and the change is decidedly for the better. There is still a display of pure intellectuality; there is still a solving of self-imposed problems; but Mr. Whiting's musical enjoyment is no longer strictly selfish. Here is a fantasia in the true sense of the term; form is here subservient to fancy. The first movement, if you wish to observe traditional terminology, is conspicuous chiefly for the skill, yes, fancy, ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... charge, and sends instructions from time to time as to poor pensioners and others who were not to be neglected in the weekly ministrations. At the same time, he seems rarely to have omitted the self-imposed task of adding daily to the pile of manuscript on which he was at work—the collection of stories to be subsequently issued as Tales of the Hall. Crabbe had resolved, in the face of whatever distractions, to write if possible a fixed amount every day. More than ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... minds of many who would have shrunk from following his example, or even from publicly avowing his creed. Moreover, the miserable condition of the masses of the agricultural population, of which we shall give some startling evidence later on, must have prepared a soil favourable to his self-imposed mission, to awaken them to a knowledge both of their rights and of their duties. Especially welcome must have been doctrines in accordance with their simple religious beliefs, as well as with their ancient and well-founded ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... moaning with pain, sometimes shrieking in terror, but always in such a state as to banish every thought save of herself from Glory's mind. And then began a week of the greatest anxiety and distress which even the little caretaker of Elbow Lane, with her self-imposed charge of its many children, had ...
— A Sunny Little Lass • Evelyn Raymond
... the depository of her trust. He had sent clerks out to Prague,—one who had returned ill,—as some had said poisoned, though the poison had probably been nothing more than the diet natural to Bohemians. And then another had been sent. This, of course, had all been previous to Madame Goesler's self-imposed mission,—which, though it was occasioned altogether by the suspected wickednesses of Mr. Emilius, had no special reference to his matrimonial escapades. And now Mr. Camperdown was down stairs. "Shall I go down to ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... yet arrived when the masses could be expected to recognize the distinction between liberty within the law and the license that leads always to tyranny. It takes time and experience of freedom to teach the stern lesson that, as Rousseau has it, freedom comes by way of self-imposed compulsions ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... we needed to clear the problem, it didn't take me long to finish processing the rest of the handful of possible loners we had located. Unlike Johnson, all the rest had reasons for their self-imposed loneliness. Unlike Meyverik none of their reasons were associated with the interstellar flight. They instead involved literary research, swindles, isolated paranoid insanity and other things in which the government ...
— Measure for a Loner • James Judson Harmon
... generous emotions, it is a creeping, sly, keen, persevering, insidious sin, assuming various forms, to cheat even itself; for it shames to name itself unto itself; a cowardly, darkness-loving sin, never daring to look human nature in the face; full of lean excuses for self-imposed starvation, only revelling in the impurity and duskiness of its own shut-up heart. At last the joy-bells ring its knell, while it crawls into eternity like a vile reptile, leaving a slimy track upon ...
— Turns of Fortune - And Other Tales • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... murdered his partner to get possession of the claim. It was true that Corbin had voluntarily assumed an unrecorded and hitherto unknown responsibility that had never been even suspected, and was virtually self-imposed. But that might have been the usual one unerring blunder of criminal sagacity and forethought. It was equally true that he did not look or act like a mean murderer; but that was nothing. However, there was ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... the brow of the hill, began rolling and tossing the several tubs, buckets, watering-pots, sacks, and spades, which were destined for the removal and conveyance of the much coveted-bog; we followed, amused and pleased, as, in certain moods, physical and mental, people are pleased and amused at self-imposed difficulties, down the abrupt and broken descent; and for some time the process of digging among the mould at the edge of the bank ...
— The Ground-Ash • Mary Russell Mitford
... acquaintance with Coralie Mansoni. It would be for the most part a narrative of foolish actions and a repetition of trivial conversations. I have shown how I came to enter on it, led by a spirit of rebellion and the love of a joke, weary of the repression that was partly inevitable, partly self-imposed, glad to find an outlet for my youthful impulses in a direction where my action would involve no political danger. On one good result I can pride myself; I was undoubtedly the instrument of sending my brother-in-law back to his wife a humbled and ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... few problems more profound than that of the courage with which men like him continue their self-imposed penal-servitude until they become too infirm to work and are sent to die in some refuge for aged freres. They have accepted celibacy and poverty, that they may the better devote their lives to the instruction of children. They have no sacerdotal state or ideal, no ecclesiastical ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... law, the law of right, which binds the individual, binds also two or three when gathered together, binds conventions and congregations of men, binds villages, towns, and cities, binds states, nations, and races, clasps the whole human family in its embrace, and binds in self-imposed bonds, ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... had again fanned what he delighted to think of as his love for her into flame. During the last months of the winter he had not played the languishing swain as conscientiously as during the autumn. Like the sailor in the song "is 'eart was true to Poll" always, but he had broken away from his self-imposed hermitage in his room at the Snow place several times to attend sociables, entertainments and, even, dances. Now, when she returned he was eagerly awaiting her and would have haunted the parsonage before and ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... of government might be made the subject of interference by the church, for Knox's profession, "with the policy, mind {364} us to meddle no further than it hath religion mixed in it," was obviously an elastic and self-imposed limitation. ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... treachery be attempted by these Tamils." We knew that under the circumstances Hassan's keen sense of hearing would be more valuable than our own, and after a slight protest agreed to leave him to his self-imposed task of watching while we slept. He moved close to the entrance of the cave, and we followed his example before seeking repose. Hassan made some further remark, to which I do not clearly remember ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 26, February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... and Toni's eyes and head ached when the luncheon-bell rang to set her free from her self-imposed task; but she did not give in, and after her hasty meal she would return to the library and struggle till tea-time with half a dozen French exercises, which by the aid of a key ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... silence hitherto. I don't even apologize for it. Faced by a similar dilemma tomorrow I should probably take the same line. But, to adopt your own simile, now that Mr. Forbes has come out of his shell, and admits his presence here on Monday night, my self-imposed restrictions cease. In the first place, then, Miss ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... of the great Napoleon, Joseph Bonaparte, king of Spain and Rome, passed many years of his self-imposed exile in Bordentown, in a house made beautiful with furnishings he brought from France, it is possible this old mirror has an interesting story, if only it could talk! Then, too, it was Bordentown that sheltered a Prince Murat, the relative of Joseph Bonaparte. If it was he who conveyed our mirror ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood
... controlled and praiseworthy. The naturalist, then, ignores the group; he flaunts impartially both the classic and the religious law. He is equally unwilling to submit to a power imposed from above and without, or to accept those restrictions of society, self-imposed by man's own codified and corrected observations of the natural world and his own impulses. He jeers at the one as hypocrisy and superstition and at the other as mere "middle-class respectability." He himself is the perpetual Ajax standing defiant upon the headland of his own inflamed ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... break any of the commandments which he recognized, if he saw his way to making a small profit on the sin. But I did not think that even a 25 per cent. dividend would tempt Crossan to disregard his self-imposed ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham
... penetrate farther into that melancholy country which Cervantes loved, and almost at once were in the Venta de Cordenas, that wide and stony waste where Don Quixote rode to do his penance. The gayest spirits must have been dashed by the gloom of the knight's self-imposed prison, and mine were not improved. I had a disquieting impression that Monica's voice, calling an appeal, came echoing from ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... fear and the hypocritical disesteem of a man's own self, sets to work with self-reproaches, whimpering compunction and a torturing of the body. It is intended not to result in virtue but to make expiation for sins, and by self-imposed punishment the sinners expect to do penance, instead of ethically repenting." And again—"All ethical gymnastics consist therefore singly in subjugating the instincts and appetites of our physical ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... day, and every spare moment relaxation; little you guess the frightful drudgery undergone by a man of the people who has vowed to educate himself,—to live at once two lives, each as severe as the whole of yours,—to bring to the self-imposed toil of intellectual improvement, a body and brain already worn out by a day of toilsome manual labour. I did it. God forbid, though, that I should take credit to myself for it. Hundreds more have done it, with still fewer advantages than mine. Hundreds more, an ever-increasing army of martyrs, ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... finished my self-imposed task, swung the spade over my shoulder, and prepared to return to the cave. I could see Moira in the distance moving towards me, and I guessed that my prolonged absence had made her feel ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... to the mind. Finally, in all the experiences of Manresa, he tried the temper of his own character, which was really not that of a poet or a mystic, but of a sagacious man of action, preparing a system calculated to subjugate the intelligence and will of millions. Tested by self-imposed sufferings and by diseased hallucinations, his sound sense, the sense of one destined to control men, gathered energy, and grew in, solid strength: yet enough remained of his fanaticism to operate as a motive force in the scheme which he afterwards developed; enough ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... even say so unlike himself. The distribution of keys and the character of the themes show that the importance of contrast in the construction of larger works was still unsuspected by him. The two middle movements, a Menuetto and a Larghetto—although in the latter the self-imposed fetters of the 5-4 time prevent the composer from feeling quite at his ease—are more attractive than the rest. In them are discernible an approach to freedom and something like a breath of life, whereas in the first and the last movement there is almost nothing but painful ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... opportunity thus presented. The work was laborious and dreary in the extreme, for the story was long and insipid, and the wretched handwriting danced under her eyes till they ached and grew weak. But she persevered boldly, and for three hours a day pored over her self-imposed task. When Horace returned at evening no trace of it was to be seen, only the pale face and weary eyes of his mother, who yet was ready with a smile to read aloud as long as the boy wished, and pretend that she only ...
— Reginald Cruden - A Tale of City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... to do, exactly what progress has been made in one hundred years by a people left free to work out its own destiny, alike in form of government and in material, moral and intellectual development, under no check except its own self-imposed restraints. The record of such progress ought to be the most valuable contribution ever made to political, economic and social science. Whether it shall prove so or not depends chiefly on the manner in which the essential work is done. It is already time that public attention ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... stay with the Dodans. Mr. Dodan had frequently invited him, and Miss Dodan's brightness and her cheerful art at the piano would, I know, cheer him, inured too long to his lonely life, subject to the periodic returns of that bitter sadness, which was now only accentuated by his self-imposed exile from the home and ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... affairs, sewing, dusting, getting Vesta off to school, and seeing that things generally were put to rights. Gerhardt busied himself about his multitudinous duties, for he was not satisfied unless he had his hands into all the domestic economies of the household. One of his self-imposed tasks was to go about the house after Lester, or the servants, turning out the gas-jets or electric-light bulbs which might accidentally have been left burning. That ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... amidst airy visions of the past, of my father, earlier days, and of youthful pleasures mixed with pain, fell asleep—BUT—with a determination. To carry it out,—on the morrow I began this sketch. You must judge how I have performed my self-imposed task, and wishing it may amuse you, and encourage young aspirants who shall chance to read it, not to give way under difficulties, but strenuously to persevere, seeing how much may be achieved by diligence and a determination not to yield, remembering ever the ...
— A Sketch of the Life of the late Henry Cooper - Barrister-at-Law, of the Norfolk Circuit; as also, of his Father • William Cooper
... hardly express, but I wondered to see her. As to that gentle ice of hers—that reserve on which she had depended; where was it now? Ah! Graham would not long bear it; he brought with him a generous influence that soon thawed the timid, self-imposed restriction. ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... meekly resigning himself to the tyranny of his accidental situation. What they call the allotment of Providence is, often enough, the allotment of their own laziness or defective energy. At any rate, I feel much more inclined to respect the aspiring Englishman or Scotchman that kicks against these self-imposed restraints; that rebels in heart against whatever there may be of degradation in his own particular employment; and, therefore, though submitting to this degradation as the sine qua non for earning his daily bread, and submitting also to the external badges and ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... she was driven to war to preserve her national existence, by pointing to her rapidly-increasing population, existing in an archipelago incapable of producing food for even two thirds of her people, since every possibility of obtaining a foothold on the adjacent continent had been cut off by self-imposed Russian rule. There was no room for expansion, ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... self-imposed duty, came to see if Percival would go with him for half an hour or so to the Latimer Arms. "I've got a kind of tea-dinner," he said—"chops and that sort of thing. You'd better have some." But it was of no use. So when he came ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... people have their fancies. You must not lose heart, my dear,—remember you are my chief comfort as well as David's." Then again she tried to smile. The next minute they came in sight of the White Cottage, and Mr. Carlyon left her to fulfil his self-imposed duties. ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... out this theory, I am not prepared to say that Wordsworth never transgressed his own self-imposed laws. But he adhered to his theory to the last. A friend of the poet's told me that Wordsworth had to him expressed his belief that he would be remembered longest, not by his sonnets, as his friend thought, ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... mark your name on this hammer," and, turning the conversation so quickly that Sleeny had no opportunity to resent the last taunt, he took his knife and began dexterously and swiftly to cut Sam's initials in the handle of his hammer. Before, however, he had half completed his self-imposed task, he exclaimed, "This is dry work. Let's go out and get some beer. I'll finish your hammer and bring it around ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... myself, and that I had changed my gun to the other shoulder? The image of the Boulevard office rose suddenly before me. I heard the voice of the editor-in-chief saying, "Interview Fauchery? You will never accomplish that;" so, faithful to my self-imposed role, I replied, "I have retired to Nemours to work upon a novel called The Age for Love, and it is on this subject that I wished to consult you, my ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... brutish condition is self-imposed, and to what end? That some dozen harpies may fatten on your flesh; that your labor may give them leisure; that your suffering may give them pleasure; that your sweat may cool their brows, and ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... intoxicated his senses. She felt his great frame tremble with emotion, and a thrill of exquisite delight sped through every fibre of her body, warming every drop of blood in her veins. But Max, by a mighty effort, checked himself, and remained true to his self-imposed renunciation in word and act. After a little time she drew ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... which we must make haste to get rid. It is the weakest sort of sentiment, and yet it is treasured by many natures as if it were something refined and noble. To yield to it, is to fetter our life with self-imposed and fantastic chains. There is no sort of reason why we should not love to live among familiar things; but to break our hearts over the loss of them is a real debasing of ourselves. We must learn to use the things of life very lightly and detachedly; and to entrench ourselves in ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... theory—a fact of sensual pleasure. Aristotle does not, however, attain to so precise a definition as Plato, whose erroneous definition he does not succeed in supplanting. The truth is that he failed of his self-imposed task; he failed to discern the true nature of Aesthetic, although he restated and re-examined the problem ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... mother's love was more imperious, more craving in its nature, than the love of a father? Had that been severe? And had he not resolved to allow her every comfort which her unfortunate position,—the self-imposed misfortune of her position,—would allow her to enjoy? She had come to him without a shilling; and yet, bad as her treatment of him had been, he was willing to give enough not only to support her, but her sister also, with every comfort. Severe! No; that, at least, ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... had, so he told himself, done with fine illusions and fair beliefs for ever. And he had started on a lonely quest,—a search for something vague and intangible, the very nature of which he himself could not tell. Some glimmering ghost of a notion lurked in his mind that perhaps, during his self-imposed solitary ramblings, he might find some new and unexplored channel wherein his vast wealth might flow to good purpose after his death, without the trammels of Committee-ism and Red-Tape-ism. But he expected and formulated nothing,—he was more or less in a state of quiescence, awaiting adventures ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... now. The question before his mind was growing clear; whether he was to persist in this self-imposed martyrdom of himself and his family or whether he was to go back upon his outbreak of visionary fanaticism and close with this last opportunity that Lady Sunderbund offered of saving at least the substance of the comfort and social status of his wife and daughters. In which case ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... of our Lord eighteen hundred and three: All I mean to say is, that the Muse is now free From the self-imposed trammels put on by her betters, And no longer like Filch, midst the felons and debtors, At Drury Lane, dances her hornpipe in fetters. Resuming her track, At once she goes back To our hero, the Bagman—Alas! and Alack! Poor Anthony Blogg Is as sick as a dog, Spite ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... Interest and be unconditional, except as enjoining everything to be done from the maxim of a will that in legislating universally can have itself for object. This is the point that has been always missed, that the laws of duty shall be at once self-imposed and yet universal. Subjection to a law not springing from one's own will implies interest or constraint, and constitutes a certain necessity of action, but never makes Duty. Be the interest one's own or another's, the Imperative ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... fallen angel. The idea was in accordance with his frame of mind. But, alas! how soon he was convinced of the vanity of his efforts! His hand and imagination had been too long confined to one line and limit, and his fierce but impotent endeavour to overleap the barrier, to break his self-imposed fetters, had no result. He had despised and neglected the fundamental condition of future greatness—the long and fatiguing ladder of study and reflection. Maddened by disappointment, furious at the conviction ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... round about Saul on the Damascus road, because already scoffers, while the disciples were still alive, may have been talking about the failure of Christianity. It must have been another of God's self-imposed limitations that He did not give to St. John that capacity of St. Paul for organization which might have made practicable the Christianity of the master Who loved him. Woman, behold thy son! Behold thy mother! That dying charge showed that Our ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... he was pledged to defend, called upon him to stand with the secession leaders in the revolt of 1861. He was thus ensnared in the toils of his own reasoning. His very strength became his weakness. He could not escape from his self-imposed thraldom and he ended by following a cause whose success could bring no peace, instead of sustaining a cause whose righteousness was the assurance ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... in the field of bibliography I cannot plead as palliation for any imperfections that may be discovered in this, that it is the work of a 'prentice hand. Difficult as I found my self-imposed task in the case of the Meredith and Hardy bibliographies, here my labour has ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... soliloquy returned without delay to Sam Yen's, who welcomed him with a wan smile, and after explaining some minor details of the work, crept off to his cot. Ah Moy immediately began his self-imposed task, and worked with a will, crooning the while a quaint Celestial air. It was ironing day at Sam Yen's, and the new hand did not object particularly to that part of the process. By a quarter after four he had completed the job, and surveyed with much satisfaction ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... filled a large place in Kelley's gloomy world. He was not a romantic person, but he was often lonesome in the midst of his self-imposed penance. He forbade himself the solace of the saloon. He denied himself a day or even an hour off duty, and Harford, secretly amazed and inwardly delighted, went so far one day as ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... not last very long, and the night began to get a little wearisome, and too cool to be quite comfortable. By degrees, doubts as to the wisdom of his self-imposed task crept into his head. He dismissed them for a time by turning his thoughts to other matters. The neighbourhood of Englebourn, some two miles up above him, reminded him of the previous summer; and he wondered how he should get on with his cousin when ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... understood something of that self-imposed task which the gambler had undertaken, though its full significance had never quite been his. Now he felt that in some way he was responsible. Now he felt that the journey should never have been taken. He felt that he should have refused to ship his gold. ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... one finds a noble simplicity of line and color scheme, an elimination of useless detail, a contempt for tricks to enforce an effect, and above all a comprehension and mastery of light, vitality, and texture—those three unities of the painter’s art—that bring his canvases very near to those of his self-imposed Spanish master. ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... the blood-hound, or the fiery stake, could divert her from her self-imposed task of leading as many as possible of her people "from the land of Egypt, ...
— Harriet, The Moses of Her People • Sarah H. Bradford
... indubitable integrity. But we seem to detect behind his superfluity of technical, and at times archaic phrase, an unconscious desire to convince himself that he is saturated in essential Englishness, and we incline to think that even his choice of an actual subject was less inevitable than self-imposed. He would isolate the quality he would capture, have it more wholly within his grasp; yet, in some subtle way, it finally eludes him. The intention is in excess, and in the manner of its execution everything is (though often very subtly) in excess also. ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... disposed to deny the artist, dedicated to this high achievement by his love of the material not less than by his peculiar gift, the range of a liberal idealism. We would not have him bound by any precedent or any self-imposed law of literality. If he should see his work as a mighty historical picture, or series of such pictures, we should not gainsay him his conception or bind him rather to any genre result. We ourselves have been evolving here the ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... though, of course, their ways seem peculiar to her, and she can never entirely sympathize with their fancy for going into water. I need not be told that the hen is after all only step-mother to her ducklings, since I am contending that the civilized woman—the artificial product of our self-imposed conditions—cannot have the same relation to her offspring as the uncivilized woman really has to hers. The comparison, therefore, holds good, the mother with us being practically step-mother to children of another race; and if she is sensible, and ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... all Lambert's was one of those dispositions, often peculiar to those who have led an isolated and introspective life, which never do anything half-heartedly; and just as he took his somewhat empty secretarial duties seriously, so did he look on this self-imposed task, against which his better judgment rebelled, with earnestness ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums with introspective analyses of their Teutonic souls. On the other hand, there are those who, while quite as good Germans as the others, so far as practical patriotism is concerned, do not renounce the intellectual and spiritual heritage which is their own. Their self-imposed task is therefore the cultivation, enrichment, and modernization of Jewish thought and tradition. Hence the great output of highly meritorious literary works on purely Jewish subjects which, if not as scholarly as those of the German Jewish scientists of the past generation, ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... was a hot one, and the heat from the fire, together with that from the sun, was almost insupportable; but, stripped of all clothing that could conveniently be cast aside, each one continued at his self-imposed task of averting the threatened destruction ...
— Ralph Gurney's Oil Speculation • James Otis
... soon—but—well, he simply could not bring himself to the point of hastening the separation. So he shifted from the powder barrel to the sharp horn of the other dilemma and shifted back again. Both seats were most uncomfortable. The idea that there was an element of absurdity in his self-imposed martyrdom and that, after all, what he had done might be considered by the majority as commendable rather than criminal, did not occur to him at all. He would not have been Galusha Cabot Bangs if ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... represent the supreme power of the State, and be capable of subjecting the will of its individual citizens to its authority. Such a government can derive its just powers only from the consent of the governed, and can be established only under a fundamental law which is self-imposed. Every person of suitable age and discretion who is to be subject to such a government has, in my judgment, a natural right to participate in its formation. It is a significant fact that, should Congress pass this ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... submit to the decisions of the legislature, whatever they may be. Besides which, the people in America obeys the law not only because it emanates from the popular authority, but because that authority may modify it in any points which may prove vexatory; a law is observed because it is a self-imposed evil in the first place, and an evil of transient ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... never sought to implicate his son in the same guilt in the most remote degree, or even by the gentlest whisper of insinuation. Whether Richard died in consequence of any foul act at the hand of an enemy, or by the fatal workings of a harassed mind and broken heart, or by self-imposed abstinence from food, (for to every one of these, as well as to other causes, has his death been severally attributed,) is a question probably now beyond the reach of successful inquiry. The whole subject ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... before you, an apprenticeship more difficult than the former; for nature delivers us from the evils she lays upon us, or else she teaches us to submit to them; but she has no message for us with regard to our self-imposed evils; she leaves us to ourselves; she leaves us, victims of our own passions, to succumb to our vain sorrows, to pride ourselves on the tears of which we ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... living art so long because it has had the power of freeing itself from professionalism and choosing the better path with Mary and with Ruth. The value of the Romantic movement lay, not in its escape to the wonders of the past, but in its escape from professionalism and all its self-imposed and easy difficulties. For it is much easier to write professional verses in any style than to write songs of innocence; and that is why professionalism in all the arts tempts all kinds of artists. Anyone can achieve it who has the mind. It is a substitute for expression, as mere duty ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... From his quiet gains in his legitimate business, from the little capital accumulated through industry and economy, he lavished thousands on this chimera of his fancy. He grew grizzled and worn over his self-imposed delusion; he no longer jested with his customers, regardless of quality or station or importance; he had cliques to mollify, enemies to placate, friends to reward. The grocery suffered; through giving food and lodgment to clouds of unimpeachable witnesses ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... finish of tempera with the very material that had long been considered intractable. Mere finish was, however, the least of the excellences of these reformers. The step was short which sufficed to remove the self-imposed difficulties of the art; but that effort would probably not have been so successful as it was, in overcoming long-established prejudices, had it not been accompanied by some of the best qualities which oil-painting, ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... his person—beautiful, but dressed in a stiff mode. We do not, in every point, homologate the opinions of Prynne, as to the 'unloveliness of love-locks;' but we do certainly look with a mixture of contempt and pity on the self-imposed trammels of affectation in style and manner which bound many of the poets of that period. The wits of Charles II. were more disgustingly licentious; but their very carelessness saved them from the conceits of their predecessors; and, while lowering the ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... there were few men who, after a night walk and perhaps some labour in forcibly opening a door or a window-shutter, would not cease for a moment in pursuance of their self-imposed task to partake of the refreshments so conveniently left behind them by the occupants of the house when they retired to rest. Should my surmises be correct, I might reasonably expect, should my house be broken into, to find an unconscious ...
— The Stories of the Three Burglars • Frank Richard Stockton
... re-admission of the States to representation, was practically ended. Eight of the eleven Confederate States, at the close of June 1868, had their senators and representatives in Congress. Three—Virginia, Mississippi, and Texas—were prevented by self-imposed obstacles from enjoying the same privilege until after President Johnson had retired from office. Of the representatives on the floor of the Fortieth Congress from the eight states lately in rebellion, only two were Democrats. The senators were unanimously ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... Sophia, 'vile day!' and with a clouded countenance she silently resumed her self-imposed task. Edoardo, on the contrary, seemed glad of ...
— Tales for Young and Old • Various
... virtue of my self-imposed duty as chronicler of the deeds of Dr. Fu-Manchu—the greatest and most evil genius whom the later centuries have produced, the man who dreamt of an universal Yellow Empire—I should have acquired a certain facility in describing bizarre happenings. But I confess that it fails me now as I attempt ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... proclamation; but as the squadron had not been paid their twelve months' wages, nor the 50,000 dollars promised by General San Martin, I went on shore on the 4th of August, to make the demand on behalf of the squadron, the seamen having served their time. Being ignorant of the self-imposed title which General San Martin had assumed, I frankly asked him to devise some means for defraying ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 1 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... interest in the subject which was destined to bear fruit at a later period. At any rate, the fact cannot be gainsaid that she followed in his steps, visiting the Continent in the prosecution of her self-imposed task, and examining into the most loathsome recesses of prisons, lunatic ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... about avoiding the cares of life is no doubt merely metaphorical; but the self-imposed doom of eternal loneliness reveals the excess of sombreness in which he clothed his condition to his own perception. One may say that the adverse factors in his problem at this time were purely imaginary; that a little resolution ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... Harker's self-imposed task was at an end, and George Jernam's long brooding upon his brother's fate was over. A solemn stillness came upon the happy party at Allanbay, and Rosamond's tears fell upon little Gerty, as she slept upon her bosom—slept where George's child was soon to slumber. Mr. Colburne asked no ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... borne her weight of mental anguish for three years, the Almighty was pleased to alleviate it, propitiated as it would seem by a new self-imposed and very heroic act of humiliation. Externally too, prospects brightened. After spending eighteen months in Montreal, Madame de la Peltrie resolved to return to Quebec. Her zeal for the conversion of the savages urging her to attempt even impossibilities, she had for a time entertained ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"
... tone was like the clasp of the arm, and Max glowed anew. By a swift, emotional effort, he conjured up the longings that had preyed upon him in his self-imposed solitude—conjured them for the sheer joy of feeling them evaporate ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... they were drawn to her as surely as bee to flower. Old and young, dignified and happy-go-lucky, all were moved irresistibly to do something for her, to coddle her, to undertake impossible missions, self-imposed. ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... It is daily bringing strength to the nation, showing it its weak spots and the remedy for removing them. It is a movement of self-reliance. It is the mightiest force for revolutionising opinion and stimulating thought. It is a movement of self-imposed suffering and therefore possesses automatic checks against extravagance or impatience. The capacity of the nation for suffering regulates its advance towards freedom. It isolates the force of evil by refraining from participation in it, in ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi
... drained, I may believe, in hollow bliss, My rest in the empyrean is. Watch thou; and when up comes the moon, Atowards her turn me; and then, boon, Thyself compose, 'neath wavering leaves That hang these branched, majestic eaves: That so, with self-imposed deceit, Both, in this halcyon retreat, By trance possessed, imagine may We couch in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... supererogatory duty. How have I blonched to see day adding itself to day, unrecorded, time flying without being "kodak'd" on the wing; and each new neglect retarding the day of reckoning even while it aggravated it! Then have I felt myself sinking beneath the self-imposed ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... and that the taxes are heavy, will not mend matters. Aristocratic government, and the tyranny of masters, are nothing like so injurious as the tyranny of vicious appetites. Men are easily led away by the parade of their miseries, which are for the most part voluntary and self-imposed,—the results of idleness, thriftlessness, intemperance, and misconduct. To blame others for what we suffer, is always more agreeable to our self-pride, than to blame ourselves. But it is perfectly clear that people ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... him freed him from his self-imposed obligation, which, in a moment of weakness, seemed to him burdensome and dreadful; and yet it was not only unpleasant, but painful. The offer of Simonson destroyed the exclusiveness of his act, minimized in his own and other people's ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... arranged vase of flowers in the centre of the breakfast-table, and one magnificent rose and bud by my plate, were silent but eloquent appeals to my interest on behalf of my would-be page; and when Joe himself appeared, fresh from an hour's self-imposed work in my garden, I saw he had become quite one of the family; for Bogie, my little terrier, usually very snappish to strangers, and who considered all boys as his natural enemies, was leaping about his feet, evidently ...
— J. Cole • Emma Gellibrand
... form or formulate any positive opinions as to the origin of the existing crisis in Ireland. Nor need I volunteer any suggestions of my own as to the methods by which order may best be maintained and civil government carried on in Ireland. It suffices for me that I close this self-imposed survey of men and things in that country with a conviction, as positive as it is melancholy, that the work which Mr. Redmond, M.P., informed us at Chicago that he and his Nationalist colleagues had undertaken, of "making ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (2 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... to which the cuckoos resorted who were driven away by the other birds; that is, a feigned place of printing, adopted by those who would have caught it if orthodoxy could have caught them. Thus, in 1656, the works of Socinus could only be printed at Irenopolis. The author deserves his self-imposed ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... after breakfast, when Heidi began her self-imposed task, it took her longer than usual, for the weather was too glorious to stay within. Over and over again a bright sunbeam would tempt the busy child outside. How could she stay indoors, when the glistening sunshine was pouring down and all the mountains seemed to glow? ...
— Heidi - (Gift Edition) • Johanna Spyri
... to the perfect work, the same idea abides with him, "even from the flower till the grape was ripe." It may assume various changes—an image of beauty, a figure of philosophy, a voice from the other world, a type of heavenly wisdom and joy—but still it holds, in self-imposed and willing thraldom, that creative and versatile and tenacious spirit. It was the dream and hope of too deep and strong a mind to fade and come to naught—to be other than the seed of the achievement and crown of life. But with all faith in the star and the freedom of genius, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... severity upon the people of the South. Comprehensive as was the Enrolment Act, which rendered liable to military duty the entire male population between the ages of seventeen and fifty, the South was compelled to overstep its self-imposed limit. The forces which Lee and Johnston surrendered contained so many boys unfitted by youth and so many men unfitted by age for military service, that a Northern General epigrammatically remarked that for its armies the Confederacy had been ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... attained. India-rubber was introduced under his patents, and soon proved to have all the value he had, in his wildest moments, claimed for it. Success thus crowned his noble efforts, which had continued unceasingly through ten years of self-imposed privation. India-rubber was now seen to be capable of being adapted to at least five hundred uses. It could be made "as pliable as kid, tougher than ox-hide, as elastic as whalebone, or as rigid as flint." But, as too ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... become familiar with every separate leaf and twig before he had completed his task. The whole is broad and simple, and scarcely suggests the enormous patience which must have been needed to carry out the self-imposed toil. Nothing is shirked, nothing is scamped; from the stem to the outermost leaf, every part in succession reveals equal interest, and yet the whole is not without that larger quality which brings it together in a harmonious whole, ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... society to the individual has been one long conflict. This is necessarily true because every human organism has instincts, feelings and desires and is naturally impatient at any limitations placed upon it unless self-imposed. On the other hand, organized society functions to preserve itself, and if the activities of the individual are hostile to this preservation the individual must give way. Theorists of various schools are forever propounding social ideas, with the positive assurance that, if followed, ...
— Crime: Its Cause and Treatment • Clarence Darrow
... self-imposed darkness, with nothing to do but listen, fancied she could hear the low hum of quiet voices in the room beneath, carrying on a more or ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... millions marriage had added the colossal fortune of a beautiful heiress, whose extravagances aggregated less than his own solely through the limitations of her sex. Yet, were it not for the self-imposed handicap of adhering strictly to the somewhat old-fashioned precept that jewels should be acquired only through affectionate beneficence, Mrs. Fernmore might have succeeded in surpassing the princely prodigalities of ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... life, but too many miss the joy of it, some because their work has gone to the extreme of drudgery and others because it has shrunk into nothingness and futility. Sometimes people become ill because their personality, hungry for work, is given nothing but introspection to feed upon. This is the self-imposed ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk
... family's years of struggle there are a few glimpses. Cheerfully Richard Lloyd bent himself to his self-imposed task of lightening his sister's lot, and Mrs. George worked hard that her children should not suffer from want. There was no money to spare in the household. Mrs. George baked bread so as not to take anything from their small resources for the baker. Twice a week there was a little meat for the ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... her people in this subordinate condition, she shall enjoy only this limited degree of representation. To us, it appears to be a concession made to freedom, and not to slavery. There is no obligation, unless self-imposed, to admit any but a minority of her whites to the enjoyment of political power, aristocracy being, in truth, more closely assimilated to republicanism than democracy. Republicanism means the sovereignty of public THINGS ...
— New York • James Fenimore Cooper
... Miss Sadie Adams were aunt and niece, the former a little, energetic, hard-featured Bostonian old-maid, with a huge surplus of unused love behind her stern and swarthy features. She had never been from home before, and she was now busy upon the self-imposed task of bringing the East up to the standard of Massachusetts. She had hardly landed in Egypt before she realised that the country needed putting to rights, and since the conviction struck her she had been very fully occupied. ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... some that the recognition of variations in sexual relationships, of the tendency of the monogamic to overpass its self-imposed bounds, is at best a sad necessity, and a lamentable fall from a high ideal. That, however, is the reverse of the truth. The great evil of monogamy, and its most seriously weak point, is its tendency to self-concentration at the expense of the outer world. The devil ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis |
