"Self-made" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... justly supposed to be the key to national success. It was at least the twin, in importance, with the War Office. Mr. Memminger, of South Carolina, was a self-made man, who had managed the finances of his state and had made reputation for some financiering ability and much common sense. He had, moreover, the advantage of being a new man; and the critics were willing to give him the benefit of common law, until ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... There was Simon the Magician, founder of gnosticism, father of every heresy, Messiah to the Jews, Jupiter to the Gentiles—an impudent self-made god, who pretended to float in the air, and called his mistress Minerva—a deification, parenthetically, which was accepted by Nicholas, his successor, a deacon of the church, who raised her to the eighth heaven as patron saint of lust. To him, as to Simon, she was Ennoia, Prunikos, Helen of ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... you wish to forget it? I think I shall be proud of it when I have risen far enough above it to claim you. It is no small thing to be a self-made man." ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... he was quite a self-made man, and his wonderful knowledge and command of the English language must have been acquired by long and patient study after ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... seven children of a widow too poor to send him to any but a common country school, where he was drilled only in the "three R's." But he used every spare moment to study without a teacher, and in after years he was a king among self-made men. The boy who had learned to speak in a barn, with only a cow and a horse for an audience, became one of the greatest of American orators ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... harsh chestnut hue; the pride of office, intensified by suppressed envy, looked out of eyes that had lost none of their brightness nor their satirical expression. As a matter of fact, Mme. Camusot de Marville felt almost poor in the society of self-made wealthy bourgeois with whom Pons dined. She could not forgive the rich retail druggist, ex-president of the Commercial Court, for his successive elevations as deputy, member of the Government, count and peer of France. She could not forgive her father-in-law for putting himself forward ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... reply. He was a rough self-made man—a Roman Catholic, although not a churchman, who could give them points on charity and who did his good deeds quietly and without boasting. Mr. Casey was a Scout, although not a young one, for that was the way they were taught to do ...
— Ethel Hollister's Second Summer as a Campfire Girl • Irene Elliott Benson
... Palmer did not receive an average common-school education, he converses like a man of liberal culture, showing that he belongs to the class of self-made men. ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the two eras, and marking the transition from spiritual to practical interests, is Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), a "self-made" man, who seems well content with his handiwork. During the latter part of his life and for a century after his death he was held up to young Americans as a striking example of practical ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... Harllee is a self-made man, for he taught himself to read and write after being taught to spell about a third through Webster's blue-back spelling book, and with this small beginning he laid the foundation for a collegiate education and for the active ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... though he seemed to Lorraine vulgarly proud of his self-made position, vulgarly ostentatious of his wealth, and vulgarly familiar with both herself and her mother, she could not actually lay any offence to his charge. And in any case, he undoubtedly could help her, if he chose, to procure at last the coveted part in a London theatre. With this end in view, ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... is bad enough at first. You have had a heavy trial indeed, poor Emma; but what is a trial but something to try us? Would it not be more manful to face the pain of going home, and to take up your allotted work? Then you would be submitting, not to a self-made rule, but to Heaven's ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of royal wild man of the woods, rather than as a great reformer whose aim it was to elevate his country to an equality with kingdoms that had become old while Russia was ruled by barbarians of the remote East. He was "a self-made man" on a throne, and displayed all the oddities and want of breeding that usually mark the demeanor of persons whose youth has not had the advantages that proceed from good examples and regular instruction. Of the courtly graces, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... his relationship to Marius. An aunt of Caesar had married Caius Marius, the modest bankrupt farmer of revenues, who, having entered politics, had become the first general of his time, had been elected consul six times, and had conquered Jugurtha, the Cimbri, and the Teutons. The self-made man had become famous and rich, and in the face of an aristocracy proud of its ancestors, had tried to ennoble his obscure origin by taking his wife from an ancient and most noble, albeit ...
— The Women of the Caesars • Guglielmo Ferrero
... repeated the other. "To begin with, I'm not going to be exactly consumed with Corsican revenge because somebody has killed Hook. Perhaps you may guess by this time what Hook was. A damned blood-sucking blackmailer was that simple, strenuous, self-made captain of industry. He had secrets against nearly everybody; one against poor old Westmoreland about an early marriage in Cyprus that might have put the duchess in a queer position; and one against Harker about some flutter with his client's money when he was a young ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... which are supposed to guide the rise of a self-made man, Lloyd George should have been a master of routine, with the orderly mind and undeviating habits without which we are sometimes told no person of affairs can secure permanent success. It is much to be regretted that Lloyd George lends no aid to ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... often did, he never spoke of any games or sports in which he had shared, nor, in fact, of any amusements before the time when he began to attend lectures and the theatre. It was the childhood of what we call in America a self-made man—one in which the plastic human material is rudely dealt with by circumstances. His mother taught him his prayers, the schoolmistress his letters, necessity his daily round of duties, and for the rest he was left ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... of demeanour and the fabrication of insulting nicknames, such as Prince Featherhead, which run from ear to ear and create a laugh throughout the country. Gondremark has thus some of the clumsier characters of the self-made man, combined with an inordinate, almost a besotted, pride of intellect and birth. Heavy, bilious, selfish, inornate, he sits upon this court ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Holland, who doubtless knew whereof he wrote, declares that it was a great misfortune that Lincoln was introduced to the country as a rail-splitter. Americans have no prejudice against humble beginnings, they are proud of self-made men, but there is nothing in the ability to split rails which necessarily qualifies one for the demands of statesmanship. Some of his ardent friends, far more zealous than judicious, had expressed so much glory over Abe the rail-splitter, that it left the impression that he was ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... was the embodiment of common sense and of the useful virtues; with the enterprise but without the nervousness of his modern compatriots, uniting the philosopher's openness of mind with the sagacity and quickness of resource of the self-made business man. He was representative also of his age, an age of aufklaerung, eclaircissement, or "clearing up." By the middle of the eighteenth century a change had taken place in American society. Trade had increased between the different ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... and balls, the tour abroad, the children, the nurses, the doctor? I tell you this, Mr. Goldenheart, I'm willing to make a sacrifice to you, as a born gentleman, which I would certainly not consent to in the case of any self-made man. Enlarge your income, sir, to no more than four times five hundred pounds, and I guarantee a yearly allowance to Regina of half as much again, besides the fortune which she will inherit at my death. That will make your income three thousand a year to start with. I know something of domestic ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... alone. Friendless, shorn of his sports and the habits of a lifetime, he still lived in a glory of happiness, content with his acquired respectability, and with no care but to support it solemnly. Are we to condemn or praise this self-made dog? We praise his human brother. And thus to conquer vicious habits is as rare with dogs as with men. With the more part, for all their scruple-mongering and moral thought, the vices that are born with them remain invincible throughout; and they live all their years, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the plaintiff in the act of assisting to build a wall.; He is a self-made man, having started life as a solicitor and by sheer perseverance raised himself to the lucrative and responsible' position of an ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156., March 5, 1919 • Various
... she had no admiration for that upstart Bonaparte family (Miss Cassandra is nothing if not aristocratic); that for her part she liked old-established dynasties, like the Hapsburgs, and had always considered the marriage of the daughter of a long line of kings with the self-made Emperor a great come down for Maria Louisa. Please remember that these are Miss Cassandra's sentiments, not mine, and how the dear Italian-American lady managed to translate them into good German and keep her face straight at the same time, I know ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... barrister, had reached the position of deputy public prosecutor by dint of subservience to the Ministry. In the absence of his chief he was head of the staff of counsel for prosecution, and, consequently, it fell to him to take up the charge made by du Croisier. Sauvager was a self-made man; he had nothing but his stipend; and for that reason the authorities reckoned upon some one who had everything to gain by devotion. The President now exploited the position. No sooner was the document with the alleged forgery in du ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... all this cumbering consciousness, all these self-made doubts and worries, had for the moment dropped clean away! A transfigured man it was that lingered at the old spot—a man once more young, divining with enchantment the approach of passion, feeling at last through ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... whispered the lady Ugly-Wugly; "don't mind him quite a self-made man," and squeezed Mabel's arm with horrible ...
— The Enchanted Castle • E. Nesbit
... action must be self-made or self-begotten, but yet they must be congruent with known fact; but the manner of such congruence is hard to see, hard to express. Ideals cannot be themselves facts, and therefore cannot be known, ...
— Progress and History • Various
... merchant, manufacturer, and what not. A big, loud man, with a stare and a metallic laugh. A man who could never sufficiently vaunt himself—a self-made man. A man who was always proclaiming, through that brassy speaking-trumpet of a voice of his, his early ignorance and poverty. A man who was the bully ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... Niccolo;. It was a burning question of the day if he, too, would succeed in founding a princely house. The greater States had an obvious interest in hindering it, and even Francesco Sforza thought it would be all the better if the list of self-made sovereigns were not enlarged. But the troops and captains sent against him, at the time, for instance, when he was aiming at the lordship of Siena, recognized their interest in supporting him: 'If it were all over with him, we should have to go back ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... a striking and encouraging one for those who believe in the example of "self-made men." His aim was somewhat different from the worldly types, who set themselves to become wealthy, or to have lands or mansions. Forster's more moderate aspiration was to reach to the foremost rank of the literary world: and ...
— John Forster • Percy Hethrington Fitzgerald
... of a man or of a corporation was determined by the mode in which they held their land. "No land without a lord" was the principle of mediaeval polity; just as "money has no master" is the basis of the modern world with its self-made men. Every distinction of rank in the feudal system was still denoted for the most part by a special costume. It was a world of knights in armour, of ecclesiastics in vestments and stoles, of lawyers in robes, of princes in silk and velvet ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... as "self-made men," often undergo remarkable changes of fortune. No one, however high or low, is free from the accidents of this world. All men have surprises, either good or bad, in ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... He banked everything on—me—and I wasn't up to the expectation. I was made out of the odds and ends that were left out of his constitution—and we didn't get on. My mother—" Jock pulled himself together; "she was the sort those self-made men generally hanker after, all lady, and pretty and dainty. You know ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... leaders of a nation. From its halls "emerge those who have that power of command which is born of penetrating insight. Such a power generally carries in its train the gift of organization, and organization is one of the foundations of national strength." (Lord Haldane.) The belief that the self-made men were the real successful men is a thing of the past. A careful investigation has proved that ninety per cent of the men who stood at the head of large financial, political, philanthropic, economic, industrial and commercial institutions ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... ancient arms and tapestries, which are still authorities. He was an homme de lettres connected with a leading paper, and a deputy in the Corps Legislatif for the department of the Hautes-Pyrenees. He was a self-made man, and thoroughly well made was he—witty, kind, just, and learned in certain lines; and his warm Southern blood colored his personality with a shade of materialism which his refined tastes never allowed to sink to ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... But Amory's pen the brighter God displays: While his great works in Amory's pages shine, And while he proves his essence all divine, The Atheist sure no more can boast aloud Of chance, or nature, and exclude the God; As if the clay without the potter's aid Should rise in various forms, and shapes self-made, Or worlds above with orb o'er orb profound Self-mov'd could run the everlasting round. It cannot be—unerring Wisdom guides With eye propitious, and o'er all presides. Still prosper, Amory! still may'st thou receive ...
— Religious and Moral Poems • Phillis Wheatley
... you pour out your sympathy upon these self-made sufferers, you add to their burden of wrong thought, and make it just so much more difficult for them to rise out of ...
— The Heart of the New Thought • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... of the giant brood, Sons of brutish Force and Darkness, who have drenched the earth with blood, Famished in his self-made desert, blinded by our purer day, Gropes in yet unblasted regions for his miserable prey;— Shall we guide his gory fingers where our helpless children ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... education." When he came to measure his ability with that of men who had had greater opportunities in an educational line, he realized his loss. Chauncey M. Depew is also reported as having said, "I never saw a self-made man in my life who did not firmly believe that he had been handicapped, no matter how great his success, by deficiency in education, and who was not determined to give his children the advantages of which he felt, not only ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... never hear of a self-made woman is because she changes the plans so frequently that ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... by the way, was what we should call a self-made man; that is, he had not risen to office by the usual route, which in China is the way of a scholar. Undistinguished for any particular learning, he had none of those literary degrees which the conservative ...
— Sir Robert Hart - The Romance of a Great Career, 2nd Edition • Juliet Bredon
... prosper in this life, but who live and die unhappy, tortured by some evil genius, the victims of unfortunate circumstances. The innocent and naturally light-hearted Eugenie had fallen into the hands and beneath the malicious despotism of a self-made man on leaving the maternal prison. Angelique, whose nature inclined her to deeper sentiments, was thrown into the upper spheres of Parisian social life, with the bridle lying loose ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... If Self-made, why fare so far to fare the worse "Sufficeth not a world of worlds, ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... everywhere lovely. Had the ancient Greeks chiselled but the wasp waists of our modern belles, their hideous works would have sunk into oblivion in as little time as our self-made martyrs drop into ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... name of common decency, law, and order. The President is a man of inherent power, even if he did learn to read after his marriage. Like many other Americans, he is a self-made man——" ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... to him gradually that this great, cumbersome creature was not a shrewd, thrifty, self-made and self-finished adult at all; only a big, wistful, lonely boy, without comrades and with nowhere to play. On Plank's round face there remained no trace of shrewdness, of stubbornness, nothing even of the heavy, ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... Ball is, so I will tell you that it is a ball given at some kind house by a kind lady. People dress themselves up as servants. It is our wildest dream, and we are never so happy as when we are gotten up to look like ladies' maids. I can tell you how some of them will look—self-made and to the manner born. I am going, since commands from superior quarters make it imperative, as a giddy old housekeeper or a care (worn) taker who has taken a smart gown from her ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone
... really have a father?" interrupted the School-master. "I thought you were one of these self-made Idiots. How terrible it must be for a man to think that he ...
— Coffee and Repartee • John Kendrick Bangs
... more scrupulous in the case of such persons than (one might almost say) in the case of emperors themselves. To the latter it is ascribed as a virtue to pardon any one if an error is committed; but in the self-made persons that course appears to argue an inherent weakness, whereas to attack and to exact vengeance is thought to furnish proof of ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. 4 • Cassius Dio
... had a gleam of hope for civil freedom under the rule of the Duke of York and the county Democracy, but when the duke became James II. he was just like other people who get a raise of salary, and refused to be privately entertained by the self-made ancestry of the American. ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... most original of the Latin poets is Lucretius (95-51 B.C.), whose poem "On the Nature of Things" is an effort to dispel superstitious fear by inculcating the Epicurean doctrine that the world is self-made through the movement and concussion of atoms, and that the gods leave it to care for itself. A contemporary of Lucretius, and a poet of equal merit, but in an altogether different vein, is Catullus. He is chiefly noted for his lyrics. Virgil (70-19 B.C.), in the Aeneid, has produced a ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... and rather coarse-grained man, not over-scrupulous in business, but upon the whole as honest and trustworthy as the bulk of humanity. By dint of sheer hard work and shrewdness he had risen to a position of wealth and importance, and, as self-made men are apt to do, laid much more stress upon what he owed to himself than upon what he owed to his Creator. In his own rough way, that is to say in somewhat the same fashion as we may suppose a lion loves his whelp, he loved the only child ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... will stride on their barren roads And prick themselves to haste with self-made goads, Unheeding, as they struggle day by day, If flowers be sweet or skies be blue or gray: For me, the lone, cool way by purling brooks, The solemn quiet of the woodland nooks, A song-bird somewhere trilling sadly gay, A pause to pick a ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... doesn't mean to abandon it. There is no doubt of it. Manchester and Stockport and Birmingham have put this in his head. Their great smelting-houses and steam-power factories require big chimneys; and being an overbearing set of self-made vulgar fellows, they say they ought to be a law to all England. You don't want to make cotton-twist, or broad-gauge iron; so much the worse for you. It is the grandest object of humanity. Providence created men to manufacture ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... gone up, Sir William came near and put his hand on Aaron's shoulder. It was evident the charm was beginning to work. Sir William was a self-made man, and not in the least a snob. He liked the fundamental ordinariness in Aaron, the ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... altercation, and the room had to be cleared while the question was debated. On the return of the Public, the query was repeated without a satisfactory result. And yet the evident answer is, that he is another person's child, except when he is "a self-made man." ...
— Punch, Vol. 99., July 26, 1890. • Various
... such an impression upon me that I recall it even at this distance: a string of jokes spoken with an effect of rapid-fire smartness, and simply reeking with commercialism. I could not describe it better than to say that it was on the ethical level of the "Letters of a Self-Made Merchant to His Son". Again, I attended a debate on Socialism, in which the capitalist end was taken by another famous clergyman, pastor of the Metropolitan Temple, the Rev. J. Wesley Hill. He was so ignorant that when he wished to prove that ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... (and it is this last fact alone, which was malice for which no excuse of indolence self-made is adduced which determined me to refer to what I had already forgiven and almost forgotten) in the year 1806 ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... outrageously, and each and every member of the tribe walks about with short steps and a stuffy parvenu small-town self-sufficiency. One is quite certain that it is only by accident that they have long tusks and live in Africa, instead of rubber-plants and self-made business and a pug-dog within commuters' distance of New York. But at the slightest alarm this swollen and puffy importance breaks down completely. Away they scurry, their tails held stiffly and straightly perpendicular, their short legs scrabbling the small stones in a frantic effort ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... diamonds until she makes you think of the ice coming out of the Hudson River in the early spring. But about her complexion there is no suggestion of a March thaw. For it is a climate-proof shellac. Her eyebrows are the self-made kind, and her lips were done by hand. Her skirt is too short for looks and too tight for comfort; she is tightly prisoned at the waistline and not sufficiently confined in the bust. There is nothing natural or rational anywhere about ...
— 'Oh, Well, You Know How Women Are!' AND 'Isn't That Just Like a Man!' • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... word but had he taken a look at her face just then he would have found there the expression that he had seen there before, the expression which she had inherited from her father, the self-made millionaire. ...
— Curlie Carson Listens In • Roy J. Snell
... was, he had been of late ransacking his grandfather's library and had found besides sea-stories and stories of wrecks, and foreign lands and pirates and deep sea treasure—what interested him more than all, a volume of biographies of self-made men. ...
— An Australian Lassie • Lilian Turner
... appears in that fiction which sprang from local color except as the canny trader of some small town or as the ruthless magnate of some glittering metropolis. David Harum remains his rural avatar and The Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son his most popular commentary. Doubtless the existence of this type in every community tends to warn off the searchers after local figures, who have preferred, in their fashion, to be monopolists ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... tickets rose from a sturdy chair before a large cylinder desk, and Lucien beheld the leader of the claque, Braulard himself, dressed in a gray molleton jacket, footed trousers, and red slippers; for all the world like a doctor or a solicitor. He was a typical self-made man, Lucien thought—a vulgar-looking face with a pair of exceedingly cunning gray eyes, hands made for hired applause, a complexion over which hard living had passed like rain over a roof, grizzled hair, and a ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... the gutter and mastering it by stealth! Yet this boy grew up to be the friend and co-worker of Garrison and Phillips, the eloquent spokesman of his race, the honored guest of distinguished peers and commoners of England, one of the noblest examples of a self-made man that the world has ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... spent at Master Swift's cottage, and in reading his books. The schoolmaster had marked an old biographical dictionary at pages containing lives of "self-made" men, who had risen as inventors or improvers in mechanics or as discoverers of important facts of natural science. Jan had not hitherto studied their careers with the avidity Master Swift would ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... respect for those who by their own energies have raised themselves in the world; and when we hear that the son of a washerwoman has become Lord Chancellor or Archbishop of Canterbury we do, theoretically and abstractedly, feel a higher reverence for such self-made magnate than for one who has been as it were born into forensic or ecclesiastical purple. But not the less must the offspring of the washerwoman have had very much trouble on the subject of his birth, unless he has been, when young as well as when old, a very great man indeed. ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... the wall of the whitewashed room with slender, forklike fingers. Jacques and the three men were knotted in talk beside the ruddy fire glow. Claire RenA(C) braced herself with a sharp sigh. No soldier ever went into battle with a more self-made courage ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Clubs Perkeo, probably a suburb and steamboats of the same name, and the local oath "Per Perkeo!" has a harmless sound, but nothing could be more binding in Heidelberg. Momma thought his example a very unfortunate one for a University town, but the rest of us were inclined to admire Perkeo as a self-made man and a success. As Dicky protested he had made the fullest use of the capacities Nature had given him, it was evident from his figure that he had even developed them, and what more profitable course should the ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... are our successful men? The vast majority of them are self-made men who started at ...
— War Taxation - Some Comments and Letters • Otto H. Kahn
... odorous mazes of some hundred odd kegs of salt mackerel and boxes of brown soap impressively stacked before one very enterprising Commission house, Mr. BENTHAM lightened the journey with anecdotes of self-made Commission men who had risen in life by breaking human legs and city ordinances; and dwelt emotionally upon the scenes in the city hospitals where ladies and gentlemen were brought in, with nails from the hoops of sugar-hogsheads sticking into their feet, or limbs dislocated from ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 2, No. 29, October 15, 1870 • Various
... such an order! But if you wish to bring the wrath of your masters down upon your ugly head." She watched his unkempt face, fanned the sudden puzzlement she saw growing in his red, sadistic eyes. If his intelligence were blurred enough by the self-made drug of his lust. "I myself heard such an order; and if you can prove me mistaken you may do with me what you will!" God, would he stop to realize that she understood not a word of the ...
— The Women-Stealers of Thrayx • Fox B. Holden
... his success Rantoul, quite by accident, met a girl in her teens named Tina Glover, only daughter of Cyrus Glover, a man of millions, self-made. The first time their eyes met and lingered, by the mysterious chemistry of the passions Rantoul fell desperately in love with this little slip of a girl, who scarcely reached to his shoulder; who, on her part, instantly made up her mind that she had found the husband she intended ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... new and miraculous thing, a self-made woman. I must have been the first "common" person she had ever known intimately. She had seen us afar off, and wondered vaguely about us, consoling herself with the reflection that we probably did not know enough to be unhappy over our sad lot ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... was precisely the little person with whom it was natural that such a man, a self-made man, should fall in love. She was very small, quiet and gentle, not exactly pretty, but elegant and ladylike. She was, indeed, a well-educated young lady of good connections; a very Phoenix she must have seemed in the eyes of a lover conscious of a background of Pruntyism and potatoes. ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... of a mind and heart thoroughly educated; since there is an inner work to be performed by the subject of those advantages before he can lay claim to the possession of a well-disciplined and richly-stored intellect and affections. The phrase, "self-made men" is often so used as to convey the idea that the persons who have enjoyed the advantages of a liberal education, are rather made by their instructors. The ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... been made second Secretary in 1804 by Dundas; he was a self-made man, and a most indefatigable traveller, writer, and promoter ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria
... great expense he had a large organ built which could be played by pedalling and pulling stops in and out, and sometimes on Sunday morning he would rise by half-past six, and be downstairs in his shirt sleeves hard at work, eliciting oratorio or opera music for his own delectation. A self-made man, "who did not worship his creator." He was always singularly modest, although very decided in his opinions. Men are asking of late who can be called educated. Certainly not a student of the ancient Assyrian or the mysteries of the Yogi, ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... she thought, frantically. "Am I in love with Little Billee? With a Westerner? A self-made man? Why, he can't hold a candle to Phil for birth and name! And yet—oh, no, I'm not in love with him! He's too—too—he takes too much for granted. It's got to stop! Think how he carried me out of the Studio party! And last night! No wonder he walked off home without seeing me again! I wonder what ...
— Patty Blossom • Carolyn Wells
... not come at our call. Peace ensued. As when the winds fall the sails droop, so when excitement ceased, all seemed to me flat and objectless. Heavy, heavy was my heart. Perhaps grief had been less obstinate, but that I feared I had causes for self-reproach. Since then I have been a wanderer, a self-made exile. My boyhood had been ambitious,—all ambition ceased. Flames, when they reach the core of the heart, spread, and leave all in ashes. Let me be brief: I did not mean thus weakly to complain,—I to whom Heaven has ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of and educated very much in the same way that the authorities here look after the inmates of a poor-house or penitentiary. Such a thing as a German railway conductor rising to be president of the road is an impossibility in Germany; and the list of self-made men is small indeed,—by that I mean men who have risen from the ranks of ...
— My Four Years in Germany • James W. Gerard
... says one of the apologists for Lincoln's ruggedness of character and outward air; at an early political meeting, when asked if he were self-made and he answered in the affirmative, the rough critic remarked: "Then it is a poor job," as if it were by nature's apprentice. But in 1860, when friends reproached him for the lack of "Old Hickory" Jackson's ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... looked perplexedly at the speaker. "You have had the wrong kind of education, Lewie. You have always been the spoiled child, and easily and half-unconsciously you have mastered things which the self-made man has to struggle towards with a painful conscious effort. The result is that you are a highly cultured man without any crudeness or hysteria, while the other people see things in the wrong perspective and run their heads against ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... South Side may put on airs as containing the heart of the vast business district of Chicago, but the West Side is as big as the two of them, and its population contains a large number of exceedingly rich men, who, like the rich men of the other sides, are as content with themselves for being "self-made," are just as grumpy, and with as many weaknesses. Some of these West Side rich men live on Ashland Avenue. There certainly lived and lives Mr. Jason B. Grampus, a great speculator, whose home has ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... stage; but Mr. Coles looked particularly the reverse. He is justified in his complacent appearance, for he has a majority in the house, a requisite scarcely deemed essential in England, and the finances of the colony are flourishing under his administration. He is a self-made and self-educated man, and by his own energy, industry, and perseverance, has raised himself to the position which he now holds; and if his manners have not all the finish of polite society, and if he ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... the president, Hodges, was not portly, but a man almost as lean as The Spider himself; a quick, nervous man, forceful and quite evidently "self-made." ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... days thereafter, multitudinous affairs of more imperative public import were brought to light; a celebrated murder was committed; a notorious band of criminals was rounded up; a political boss toppled and fell from his self-made pedestal; a diplomatic scandal of far-reaching effect was unearthed, and in the press of passing events, the fact that Lawton had been eliminated from the scheme of things faded into comparative insignificance, from the point of view of the ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... Silas Lapham is a story of the home life and business career of a self-made merchant, who has the customary braggadocio and lack of culture, but who possesses a substantial integrity at the root of his nature. The little shortcomings in social polish, so keenly felt by his wife and daughters, as they rise to a position due ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... dark?" Thorpe questioned. "Or...." He visioned dimly some denizen of the vast depths, living beyond the limits of the sun's penetration, far in the abysmal darkness where its only light must be self-made. But his mind failed in the attempt to picture what manner of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... denied That He liveth Eternal, "Self-made," Shall call to the mountains to crush them; ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... pursuing the career which he had begun as an early advocate of the anti-slavery cause, and in which he had twice overthrown the power of the Democratic party in New Hampshire.—Henry Wilson was the colleague of Mr. Sumner, and was a man of strong parts, self-made, earnest, ardent, and true.—Lot M. Morrill was the worthy associate of Mr. Fessenden, prominent in his profession, and strong in the regard and confidence of the people of his States.—The author of the Wilmot Proviso came from Pennsylvania as the successor of Simon ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... made himself especially useful to Scipio; he forced his way steadily upward, by his mere soldierlike qualities, to the rank of military tribune. Rome, too, had learnt to know him, for he was chosen tribune of the people the year after the murder of Caius Gracchus. Being a self-made man, he belonged naturally to the popular party. While in office he gave offence in some way to the men in power, and was called before the Senate to answer for himself. But he had the right on his ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... figure lumbered closer, a lumpish clumsy caricature of the self-made man, brutally strong, unashamedly misfit to the society of the smooth-wise, smiling, easy mannered people that he and Bryce had joined; a model of everything that Bryce was ...
— The Man Who Staked the Stars • Charles Dye
... is ours. There is one day when all we Americans who are not self-made go back to the old home to eat saleratus biscuits and marvel how much nearer to the porch the old pump looks than it used to. Bless the day. President Roosevelt gives it to us. We hear some talk of the Puritans, but don't just remember who they were. Bet we can lick 'em, ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... said that he was inconsistent in his lessons. He dragged in all that came to his hand for the astonishment of Liubka. Once he brought along for her a large self-made serpent—a long cardboard hose, filled with gunpowder, bent in the form of a harmonica, and tied tightly across with a cord. He lit it, and the serpent for a long time with crackling jumped over the ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... most part fail us, or can be extracted only by elaborate and somewhat uncertain calculations, so it would seem as if the poet, no longer hampered by the necessities of time and space, had wished to show how he could work with no self-made restrictions. ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... mattress, they proceed to the shop of the recalcitrant debtor or security as circumstances may dictate, and there take up their abode until the amount is paid. If inability to meet the debt has been pleaded, then this self-made bailiff will insist on taking so much per cent. out of the daily receipts; if it is a mere case of obstinacy, a desire to shirk a just responsibility, the place is made so hot for its owner that he is glad to get rid of his visitor at any price whatever. ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... drugs, a belief in their supreme control and exactness of effect which amounts to superstition, and fills many of us with amazement. This form of idolatry is at times the dull-witted child of laziness, or it is a queer form of self-esteem, which sets the idol of self-made opinion on too firm a base to be easily shaken by the rudeness of facts. But, if you watched these men, you would find them changing their idols. Such too profound belief in mere drugs is apt, especially in the lazy thinker, to give rise to neglect of more natural aids, and these tendencies are ...
— Doctor and Patient • S. Weir Mitchell
... tall thin man of the eagle-nosed soldier type, wearing pince-nez, but youthful-looking for the forty-four years Burke gave him, could not help thinking her a satisfactory cousin to pick up: and Nelson Smith was far from being in appearance the rough, self-made man he ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... right. We used to talk about her often, and often fretted for her as, I suppose, few little boys before or since have fretted for a mother. After her death we were sent to school. Our father even then was a rich man: he was a self-made man; he started a business in a small way in the City, but small beginnings often make great endings, and the little business grew, and grew, and success and wealth came almost without effort. Jasper and I never knew what poverty meant. I loved learning better than my brother did, ...
— How It All Came Round • L. T. Meade
... more than himself, had ever thought of the possibility of a matrimonial connection between the families. He doubted if he would consent to it. And unfortunately it was this very doubt that, touching his own pride as a self-made man, made him first seriously consider his wife's proposition. He was as good as Don Ramon, any day! With this subtle feminine poison instilled in his veins, carried completely away by the logic of his wife's illogical premises, he almost ...
— A Millionaire of Rough-and-Ready • Bret Harte
... a sense, a self-made man, having begun as stoker of one of the annealing furnaces when both he and the Works were young. He had climbed steadily, serving his apprenticeship in each department, and studying at a night-school, when such were in ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... flight of time on school mornings, strangled her into dumbness. But she clasped the paper in her breast as a drowning man might a spar from the wreck. At least Number 4 was intact. She had been mercifully spared the fracture of this one of her self-made commandments. ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... The one thing lacking to the millionaire's perfect joy was that he would never have the chance to treat the tall, imposing Don Ramon on equal terms for once,—the crowning triumph of a self-made man. ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Anglo-Saxon peasantry as you could wish to behold. And while I use the word "peasantry" let it be clearly understood that I do so in no sense as expressing Mr. Bumpkin's present condition. He had risen from the English peasantry, and was what is usually termed a "self-made man." He was born in a little hut consisting of "wattle and dab," and as soon as he could make himself heard was sent into the fields to "mind the birds." Early in the November mornings, immediately after the winter sowings, he would be seen with his little bag of brown bread ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... had to offer. Admitting that he would be all the more efficient for possessing some practical capacity, some experience of great affairs, was it not probable that a man of average intelligence, who had been trained from his youth to fill the kingly office, would acquit himself better than some self-made adventurer of genius, who had paid more attention to the arts of winning place and popularity than to the work that would be thrown upon him when he reached the goal of his ambition? When we further recollect that hereditary kingship was sanctioned by use and wont, was the most intelligible symbol ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... redound eternally to his honour that he began in newspaper English, and by the production of an imitation of the novela picaresca—a string of adventures as broken and disconnected as the adventures of Lazarillo de Tormes or Peregrine Pickle, and went on to become an exemplar. A man self-made and self-taught, if he knew anything at all about the 'art for art' theory—which is doubtful—he may well have held it cheap enough. But he practised Millet's dogma—Dans l'art il faut sa peau—as resolutely as Millet himself, and that, too, under conditions that might have proved ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... debarred from inclusion in a so-called Hall of Fame! Walt Whitman and Mark Twain, the two great interpreters and embodiments of America, represent the supreme contribution of democracy to universal literature. In so far as it is legitimate for anyone to be denominated a "self-made man" in literature, these men are justly entitled to such characterization. They owe nothing to European literature—their genius is supremely original, native, democratic. The case of Mark Twain, which is our present concern, ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... the women would have gone nearer the mark. And yet, as it seemed to me typical of much that is evil in Scotland, Maybole is also typical of much that is best. Some of the factories, which have taken the place of weaving in the town's economy, were originally founded and are still possessed by self-made men of the sterling, stout old breed—fellows who made some little bit of an invention, borrowed some little pocketful of capital, and then, step by step, in courage, thrift, and industry, fought their way upward to an ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... merely because my selection of characters from such a set of people gives the play a certain mellowness and a certain air which it otherwise would not have. If Jack and Cynthia were both completely self-made, or the son and daughter of powerful, self-made people, their tone ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The New York Idea • Langdon Mitchell |
