"Self-righteous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Freeborn, "though there be no way. There are many self-deceivers in the world. Some men are self-righteous, trust in their works, and think they are safe when they are in a state of perdition; no formal rules can be given by which their reason might for certain detect their mistake. ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... manger must not be too sweepingly condemned by the self-righteous white man as long as drinking bouts are a part of civilized customs; and at least one civilized nation has the gross proverb, "Better ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... self-righteous texts come principally from the three first gospels, and are greatly counteracted by the deeper spirituality of the apostolic epistles. I therefore by no means charge this tendency indiscriminately ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... "Blessed are the self-righteous," mused Farquaharson half aloud, "for they shall supply their own absolution." To himself he was saying, "The wretched ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... in the choir-seats behind the trustees on the platform. Bea had never liked Miss Whiton. It seemed to her now, as she studied the immobile face, that she had always recognized there a suggestion of the self-righteous Pharisee. There could be nothing but misunderstanding and antagonism between the possessor of such a countenance and Miss More with those eyes of hers, that nose and that mouth. Bea's labors over the ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... "let us have done with these dexterities. I have the vanity to believe I am not unreasonably obtuse—nor, I submit, unreasonably self-righteous. Love is a monstrous force, as irrational, I sometimes think, as the force of the thunderbolt; it appears neither to select nor to eschew, but merely to strike; and it is not my duty to asperse or to commend its victims. You have loved unworthily. From the bottom ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... words made her feel that she had been indulging in self-righteous and uncharitable feelings, and she felt humbled at the lesson which she had thus received from one who did not profess to be a Christian, in one of a Christian's most important graces. But she accepted the rebuke, and she added to her evening prayer ...
— Lucy Raymond - Or, The Children's Watchword • Agnes Maule Machar
... in Berkshire. This lady was long remembered both by friends and neighbours with veneration. She was sensible and intelligent, polite, agreeable, and of unbounded charity; but Miss Burney, who knew her, depicts her as ostentatious in her exertions, and somewhat self-righteous and vainglorious. She was, however, fervently beloved by her daughter, who afterward made several pecuniary sacrifices to ensure her mother's comfort. The earliest years of Lady Georgiana (as she became after her father was created an earl) were passed in the large house at ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... The universalism as reached by the Stoics is certainly again threatened by the self-righteous and self-complacent distinction between men of virtue, and men of pleasure, who, properly speaking, are not men. Aristotle had already dealt with the virtuous elite in a notable way. He says (Polit. 3. 13. p. 1284), that men who are distinguished by perfect virtue should not be ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... and Francis of Assisi and a few others. But the rest of us have caught the patter and it makes us 'feel good'. We wallow in it. We feel warm and self-righteous—comfy, mother says, when she wants to tuck me up at night same as she used to after I'd been in swimming and got licked. Yes, we're ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... whole need not a physician, but they that are sick," was the significant answer of our Lord to the self-righteous Pharisees who took offence at his companions,—the poor, the degraded, the weak, and the sinful. "Go ye and learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice; for I am not come to call the righteous, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... the guilty man, the man to be shunned, the man from whose contaminating touch all other men might fairly shrink. It never occurred to Sim that there lay buried at his own heart a secret that could change the relations in which he stood towards this younger and more self-righteous son of ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... audience was quite entranced. He enlarged upon the experiences of a year he had spent in Alaska. "Mining up there in them days made gambling slow business," he said. (He had told Bertha that he had made an attempt to get out of "the trade," but she was content to have him put it on less self-righteous grounds.) He contrived to make his hearers feel very keenly the pitiless, long-drawn ferocity of that sunless winter. He made it plain why men in that far land came together in vile dens to drink and gamble, and Moss glowed with ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... scene, all looked a little self-righteous. Occasionally they relieved their feelings by spitting outside the door. Sam did not look greatly concerned; his conscience was clear. True, he felt the degradation of the bound wrists, but must he not presently be triumphantly vindicated? ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner
... meted out to Job by his so-called friends was measured to the servant, and at the Impulse of the same heartless doctrinal prepossession. He must have been had to suffer so much; that is the rough and ready verdict of the self-righteous. With crashing emphasis, that complacent explanation of the Servant's sufferings and their own prosperity is shivered to atoms, by the statement of the true reason for both the one and the other. You thought that He was afflicted because He was bad and you were spared because you were good—no, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... been a follower of strange gods, and a lover of this world and its vanities. I was self-righteous, and thought I had religion of my own which was better than that of the Bible. I did not know God, and did not serve him. Prayer was forgotten, public worship neglected; and worldly morality was the tree which brought ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... moments during her brief visit when her face was very sad, but no doubt her predominant feeling escaped her in regard to the criticism quoted from somebody on Jerry Hollowell's methods and motives. "People are becoming very self-righteous," she said. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... which love was absent? Kindness was the test, kindness the aim and soul; and judged by such a standard, the discarded prodigal - now rapidly drowning his sorrows and his reason in successive drams - was a creature of a lovelier morality than his self-righteous father. Yes, he was the better man; he felt it, glowed with the consciousness, and entering a public-house at the corner of Howard Place (whither he had somehow wandered) he pledged his own virtues in a glass - perhaps the fourth since his dismissal. Of that he knew nothing, keeping no account ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... remarkable that a work of its character, should have been so much read and admired! We may boast of our intelligence and virtue to our hearts content, the reception of this work is a sad commentary on the age in which we live. We may boast of our religion; it is little else at last, but self-righteous phariseism! We throw around ourselves religion as a cloak; the more effectually to conceal our dark designs! Yes, verily, while we stab an erring, or unerring brother in the dark! We are all prostrate before the god of mammon, ...
— A Review of Uncle Tom's Cabin - or, An Essay on Slavery • A. Woodward
... animadversions on violin-playing and liquor-drinking, and Brother Peter Vickers's mild and merciful attitude toward sinners in those un-spiced sermons of his, that held out such affluence of hope to the repentant rather than to the self-righteous. The blood surged unseen into Nehe-miah's face. For shame, for very shame he could not confess himself one with these outcasts. He made a feint of searching in the semi-obscurity for the rickety chair on which he had ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... the price for this, as he knew he would pay; but without a word, and with as few outward signs as possible. For Miss Liz could not have been termed in sympathy with the easy-going Colonel, nor, in her self-righteous moods, sympathetic with any man. From long practice and research she had at her fingers' tips the measurements of every male transgressor from Cain to Judas Iscariot, and could work up about as unhappy ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... June, 1465. Louis almost alone, deserted by his brother the Duke of Berry, and his nobles banded together in apparent unity, hedged in by their pompous and self-righteous assertions that all their thoughts were for the poor oppressed people whose burdens needed lightening. Of all the great vassals, Gaston de Foix was the single one loyal to ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... to whom the easy-going habit of the world, the perfectly self-righteous indifference to a woman's happiness or honour of the well-bred people of that day, gave over as a partner for life a half-educated, worldly-ignorant and absolutely will-less young girl of nineteen and a half, who doubtless considered herself extremely ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... now; though we do not hear Him, the heaven and the earth hear Him and obey Him. His message is pardon, mercy, deliverance to the sorrowful, and the oppressed, and the neglected; and to the proud, the tyrannical, the self-righteous, the hypocritical, tribulation and ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... is the card of a strong-willed, self-righteous young Pharisee, who had no use for religion in peace time, but who was driven to God by his awful conflict with sin in this war. Next comes the card of a young man who formerly had lived a proper conventional life without bad habits. The war taught him to drink and he finally ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... little way on the path of| |the Magdalenes. | | | |She was an interloper who had no gospel sanction in | |the world, no visible parents other than a | |foster-father and a foster-mother. Perfectly | |respectable little girls began to inform her so with| |self-righteous airs and with the expertness of | |surgeons to dissect her from the social scheme that | |governs puss-wants-a-corner with the same iron rule | |that in later life determines who shall be asked to | |play ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer
... devil dwelt at penny readings, at fairs and festivals, in the brushes of the artists, in a walk on a Sunday afternoon undertaken without a definite object, sometimes in a primrose given by a boy to a girl. Of all these bitter, self-righteous, censorious little sects which raise each its own ladder to the Throne of Grace at Newlyn, the Luke Gospelers was the most bitter, most self-righteous, most censorious. And of all those burning lights which reflected ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... disreputable one, will gather up their skirts and keep on the safe side of the pavement, and there an end of it. But Jesus Christ had no aversions. His white purity was a great deal nearer to the blackness of the woman that was a sinner, than was the leprous whiteness of the whited sepulchre of the self-righteous Pharisee. He had neither aversion, nor anger, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... "What a stupid and self-righteous fool I have been! I never thought there could be any canyon in her life. How short our sight is!" and all that night I could get ...
— The Sky Pilot • Ralph Connor
... favour he courted. As his talents and industry gained him grace in the eyes of the dons of his college, so his good life and good understanding made him friends among the more worthy of his companions. He was conceited and self-righteous, but not ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... and perhaps more the christian to exercise patience, but patience is sometimes tried with the bigotry and nonsense of the self-righteous, self-wise, and self-knowing, who profess the religion of Christ, yet stand tiptoe, like James and John, to call fire from heaven to consume all who do not receive their master. But the true spirit of our religion rebukes such blind zeal and foolish arrogance, by showing ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou |
