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More "Self-esteem" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... number of strangers or recent comers, there is nothing new to strike the eye. But the talk everywhere is of a new railroad and other improvements. One needs only to shut one's eyes and listen, to imagine that the town is already a real city. Mr. Elkins seems to be the center of this new civic self-esteem. The air is full of it, and I admit that I am ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... been feeling a good deal of a fellow already, but at the sight of her welcoming smile his self-esteem almost caused him to explode. What magic there is in a girl's smile! It is the raisin which, dropped in the yeast of male ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... won him over to his side. For years he had to take the utmost pains, over and over again, to conquer the displeasure and lack of confidence of his stern father. His nature always revolted against such humiliation, and he tried by bitter mockery to give expression to his injured self-esteem. His heart, which warmed toward everything noble, prevented him from becoming a hardened egoist; but he did not grow any the milder or more conciliatory, and long after he had become a great man and wise ruler, there remained in him from this time of servitude some trace of petty cunning. The lion ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... told. Nanteuil, with fiery cheeks, held back her tears. Too young to possess or even to desire the prudence which comes to celebrated actresses when of an age to graduate as women of the world of fashion, she was full of self-esteem, and since she had known what it was to love another she was eager to efface everything unfashionable from her past; she felt that Chevalier, in killing himself for her sake, had behaved towards her publicly with a familiarity which made her ridiculous. Still unaware that ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... the testiness with which a youngster is at times prone to assert himself against what he fancies interference, and I had appreciated the rebuke. The Congress disaster was a very big and striking incident in the career of any person, and it both ministered to his self-esteem and provided the evening of his life with material for talk. Unhappily, I have to confess, as even Boswell at times did, I took no notes, and cannot reproduce that which to me is of absorbing interest, the individual impressions of ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... done nothing but fill out and confirm. Psychology and physics still repeat their ideas, often with richer detail, but never with a more radical or prophetic glance. Nor does the transcendental philosophy, in spite of its self-esteem, add anything essential. It was a thing taken for granted in ancient and scholastic philosophy that a being dwelling, like man, in the immediate, whose moments are in flux, needed constructive reason to interpret his experience and paint ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... bladdery swell of management.' It is already passing away. He does not speak from jealousy, for nobody ever courted fame 'with less solicitude than I.' But for all that, there will come a time! He knows it on a surer ground than vanity. Let us hope that this little salve to self-esteem never lost its efficacy. Surely of all prayers the most injudicious was that of Burns, that we might see ourselves as others see us. What would become of us? Richardson, as we might expect, was highly esteemed by Young of the 'Night Thoughts,' and by Johnson, to both of ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... passion which makes such havoc in the brain, and produces so much disorder in the imagination. For this reason I have endeavored to keep down the secret swellings of resentment, and stifle the very first suggestions of self-esteem; to establish my mind in tranquillity, and over-value nothing in my own or ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... self-esteem than myself—or who had led a more honest early life—might have doubted his own reasoning at that moment. I didn't. The ship on the ways still resembled a warship to six places. And knowing human nature the way I do, that was too much of a coincidence to expect. Occam's razor ...
— The Misplaced Battleship • Harry Harrison (AKA Henry Maxwell Dempsey)
... unconsciously assisted their operations. Society is so constituted that it requires no little talent and no slight energy to repel the intimacy even of those whose acquaintance is evidently not desirable; and there are many people in this world mixing, apparently, with great spirit and self-esteem in its concerns, who really owe their constant appearance and occasional influence in circles of consideration to no other qualities than their own callous impudence, and the indolence and the irresolution of their victims. They, who at the same time have no delicacy and no shame, ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... grandiloquent; in dealing with a delicate situation, he becomes involved and obscure. We perceive in him a born courtier, a proud noble, a statesman of high purpose and no little sagacity; therewith, many gracious and attractive qualities, coloured by weaknesses, such as agreeable pedantry and amiable self-esteem, which are in part personal, partly the note ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... injured in his self-esteem, and, turning his back upon the hen, addressed himself to a brood of ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... "that she'd better be payin' up the calls she owes in the neighbourhood than entertainin' strangers." This shaft pierced a vulnerable spot in Matilda's armour of self-esteem, for she still smarted ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... yeomanry at the "Manchester massacre." "By an ordinary display of spirit and resolution," observed the brilliant egotist to his brother peers (who were so impressed by his complacent volubility and good-humoured self-esteem, that they were for the moment ready to take him at his own valuation), "insurrection may be repressed without violating the law or the constitution. In the riots of 1780, when the mob were preparing to attack the house of Lord Mansfield, I offered to defend it with a small ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... and services of O'Connell have never been fully appreciated in this country. Engrossed in our own peculiar interests, and in the plenitude of our self-esteem; believing that "we are the people, and that wisdom will perish with us," that all patriotism and liberality of feeling are confined to our own territory, we have not followed the untitled Barrister of Derrynane ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... cried Roger, savagely. He saw that he had allowed his view of the matter to be wrongly colored by the impressions of his father and the representations of Belden; and Truesdale's comments lacerated his self-esteem as with griffins' claws. "Haven't I told you that they have taken legal advice, ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... broke out: he pushed her away; his petty jealousy and injured self-esteem poured out ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... making no charge for his services; and yet his occasional refusal to appear at certain of these concerts has been attributed—generally by ignorant persons, but sometimes also by others, who, as they knew better, must have been influenced alone by bad motives—to his possession of undue self-esteem, &c. But these unjust criticisms, although often causing him pain, could never swerve him from his chosen path. He would never lower his standard, and he always sought to enter the lists with those who contended for the highest prizes in art. The prominent position he holds to-day as an artist is ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... Not that I have any hope of causing you to desist. For to desist would be to cease to exist, and I cannot fairly expect you to commit suicide, however much I may desire it. Moreover, your subjects—for, to be candid, you are a despot—seem to like you. You minister so craftily to their self-esteem, you flatter their vanity with an adroitness so remarkable, that, after a few feeble struggles, they resign themselves, body and soul, to your thrall. Even then you proceed warily. Your first labour is to collect, with patient care, all the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, July 11, 1891 • Various
... highly the worth of things and of persons, so that if afterward divine love should, with irresistible power, erect itself upon and tower above this foundation, there can then be no fear but that such a love has its origin, not in an exaggerated self-esteem, in pride, or in an unjust contempt for our neighbor, but in a pure and holy contemplation of ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera
... crossed the open down to meet the next incurving of the coast, and Siegmund was happy. But the sense of humiliation, which he had got from her the day before, and which had fixed itself, bled him secretly, like a wound. This haemorrhage of self-esteem tortured ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... altogether ignore a certain qualm of gratified vanity. Had the matter risen to the realm of his consciousness, he would have hated himself for this. But it went no further than a vaguely felt increase of self-esteem. He seemed to feel more important in his own eyes; he would have liked to have his friends see him just now talking with this man. "Crookes was saying to-day—" he would observe when next he met an acquaintance. For C. H. Crookes was ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... at all, the while that he changed nouns to "fork" and "dish," and carefully annotated each verb in the book as meaning "to eat." Thereafter he carried off the book along with his garbage, and with—which was the bewildering part of it—self-evident and glowing self-esteem. And all that watched him spoke the Dirghic word of derision, which ...
— Taboo - A Legend Retold from the Dirghic of Saevius Nicanor, with - Prolegomena, Notes, and a Preliminary Memoir • James Branch Cabell
... long letters," he said. "They hardly rise above the common herd. That d might be an a, and that l an e. Men of character always differentiate their long letters, however illegibly they may write. There is vacillation in his k's and self-esteem in his capitals. I am going out now. I have some few references to make. Let me recommend this book,—one of the most remarkable ever penned. It is Winwood Reade's 'Martyrdom of Man.' I shall be ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle
... should be his age—to find himself really taken on trust, really desired and loved. Honoria's friendship was a pure and precious thing, but in its very purity carefully restrained. Praddy's kindness, and the office boy's worship had both been gratifying to Vivie's self-esteem, but both had to be kept at bay. Somehow the love of a father and of an old nurse were of a different category to these ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... earl was a little surprised at this: however, it was not his habit easily to take offense at his friends. He was quite without that morbid self-esteem which is always imagining affronts or injuries. If people liked him, he was glad; if they showed it, he believed them, and rested in their affection with the simple faith of a child. But if they seemed to neglect him, he still was ready to conclude the slight was accidental, ...
— A Noble Life • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... received in his gathering arraignment against English social life. By way of contrast he pictured certain successful gentlemen of his acquaintance in America, and the vision was not flattering to his national self-esteem. ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... age had been dropped half a mile back in the sand, certain phrases flung at him had been barbed and had bitten deep into Casey Ryan's self-esteem. They stung and rankled there. He had squirmed at the picture his new friend had so ruthlessly drawn with crude words, but bold, of doddering old age. Casey resented the implication that he might one day fill ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... and holy mission whose ends are the diffusion of Truth and Knowledge and the suppression of Ignorance and Falsehood. "Sacrilege," with this profession, means the breaking of its two great commandments and all sins of commission and omission suggested and prompted by vain love of fame, by sordid self-esteem or by ignoble rancour. What then shall we say of a paper which, professedly established to "counteract the immorality of The Times," adds to normal journalistic follies, offences and mistakes an utter absence ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... believing faculty and become incapable of trusting for ever after. And such a man must, in virtue of his very innocence, know that the worst weariness and the worst load is evil and crime, and must know himself able, in full righteousness, with no jugglery of oblivion or self-esteem, to take off the heavy load and ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... lordship feel that perhaps he had committed a blunder in not having secured her, during her first season, for himself. He feared that he had lost an opportunity; and this reflection, while it lowered temporarily his self-esteem, placed Sara on a dangerous eminence. She would be a duchess—one of the great duchesses. ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... gratified and flattered self-esteem the girl was unconscious; that he was really happy with her, proud of her appearance, kind to her beyond reason and even beyond propriety perhaps,—invariably courteous and considerate, she was vividly aware. And it made her intensely happy to know that ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... at the first word of apology and self-condemnation that I uttered she silenced me by laying the whole blame upon the anxiety and fatigue to which I had been of late exposed; and when at length she had salved the wound inflicted upon my self-esteem by my recent loss of self-control, she set about the task of coaxing me to yield with at least an apparent good grace to the demands of the men— seeing that we were completely in their power, and could do no otherwise—in ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... around it cheering flowers of truth, bathe it in the water-brooks of gentleness and self-sacrifice. "Young men," according to Chesterfield, "are apt to think themselves wise enough, as drunken men are to think themselves sober enough," yet joined with this self-esteem, we find that "youth is ever confiding; and we can almost forgive its disinclination to follow the counsels of age, for the sake of the generous disdain with which it rejects suspicion." "How charming the young would be," writes Arthur Helps, "with their ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... in the first number, to that of Paul himself in the fifth, which, as a writer of genius with hardly exaggeration said, threw a whole nation into mourning. But see how eagerly this fine writer takes every suggestion, how little of self-esteem and self-sufficiency there is, with what a consciousness of the tendency of his humour to exuberance he surrenders what is needful to restrain it, and of what small account to him is any special piece of work in his care and his ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... methought Prometheus' flame Waved o'er a bust of deathless fame, And woke to life Childe Harold: The Bard aroused me from my dream Of pity, alias self-esteem, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, Issue 353, January 24, 1829 • Various
... too; that he is greatly embarrassed over his opening lesson, that emotion has caused him to forget his Latin, that his throat is parched and his legs are trembling beneath him. She does not know this, and I tell you between ourselves, it is not her self-esteem that suffers least at this conjecture. She suffers at finding herself, after so many signatures, contracts, and ceremonies-still a ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... he said (and he wetted his lips with his tongue before the words came). "Small affair! Hell's flame! is there anything smaller than the self-esteem of a man who by some infernal quirk of his nature turns his back on his most manifest duty—leaves the blood of his blood and the skin of his skin to perish for want of his guidance and encouragement, and wakens at morning ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... of persons, possessed of strong self-esteem, arrive at independence of thought through pride of intellect, and this is even more dangerous than to depend upon others for our opinions; for of all idolatry, there is none so interior and hard to overcome as the worship of self. If we would arrive at ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... thing upon which I can ask anyone's advice,' he muttered to himself. 'The trouble with Kenyon is, he is entirely too modest; a little useful self-esteem would be just the thing for him.' At last he stopped suddenly in his walk. 'By Jove!' he said to himself, slapping his thigh, 'I shall do it, let the consequences ...
— A Woman Intervenes • Robert Barr
... my acquaintance." He loved an argument, and, though always good-tempered in it, was tenacious of his own convictions when he thought the facts bore out his way of interpreting their significance. When told by a phrenologist that he had an unusual amount of self-esteem, he replied: "It is true, I have; I have full confidence in myself and in my judgment"—a trait of supreme importance to a man called to high command. But against the defects of this quality he was guarded by the openness of mind which results from the effort to improve and to keep ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... a boy of fifteen. Having composed the ballad and set in type and printed it, he was then sent to hawk it through the streets. This was certainly a remarkable achievement for a lad of his years. The eagerness with which both of the ballads were seized by the public must have greatly gratified the self-esteem of the ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... to find between the covers of this little book words of extraordinary potency or accents of irresistible heroism. However humiliating for my self-esteem, I must confess that the counsels of Marcus Aurelius are not for me. They are more fit for a moralist than for an artist. Truth of a modest sort I can promise you, and also sincerity. That complete, praiseworthy sincerity which, while it delivers one into the hands of one's enemies, is as likely ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... been always on the watch to take him down a peg when he was pleased with himself—to hold him cheap and overpraise some duffer in his hearing—so that I might save my own self-esteem; to pay him bad little left-handed compliments, him and his, whenever I was out of humor; and I should have been always out of humor, having failed ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... defects. Of what we do not gain for ourselves we have only a faint and imperfect fruition, because we cannot compare the difference between want and possession, or at least can derive from it no conviction of our own abilities, nor any increase of self-esteem; what we acquire by bravery or science, by mental or corporeal diligence, comes at last when we cannot communicate, and, therefore, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... whole, it may be said that Lyall passed through this supreme test in a manner which would not have been possible to any man unless endowed not merely with great abilities, but with the highest degree of moral courage and honesty of purpose. He preserved his own self-esteem, and by his unswerving honesty and loyalty gained that of the partisans on ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... not only the excellence but also the limitations of his method. For example, Scott was rather too much given to accepting popular favor as the test of merit in literary work, and though the clamorously eager reception of his own books was never able to raise his self-esteem to a very high pitch, it seems to have been the only thing that induced him to respect his powers in anything like an appreciative way.[19] His instinct and his judgment agreed in urging him to avoid ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... Petra, and brag about it afterward; after you have well discounted the lies they made their sculptors tell on huge stone monoliths when they got back home, they remain a pretty peppery line of potentates. But for imagination, self-esteem, ambition, gall, and picturesque depravity they were children—mere chickens—compared to the modern gentleman whom Grim and I ...
— The Lion of Petra • Talbot Mundy
... the while, he began to make a rough inventory. He sorted out his injuries, catalogued them. It was perhaps his self-esteem that had suffered least of all, for he was by nature modest. He had a savage humility, valuable in a crisis of ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... stringent orders were issued respecting the behaviour of the Englishmen to the natives. The men of both services were warned to be very careful, especially as it was the custom for the Malays to carry the deadly kris. The character of the people too was enlarged upon, their pride and self-esteem; and strict orders were given, to be followed by severe punishment if disobeyed, that the people and their belongings were to be ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... no remarkable degree of that constitutional quality called physical courage; but he had all those moral qualities which supply its place. He was proud—he was vindictive—he had high self-esteem—he had the destructive organ more than the combative;—what had once provoked his wrath it became his instinct to sweep away. Therefore, though all his nerves were quivering, and hot tears were in his eyes, he approached Lenny with the sternness of ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... was one of the few who could afford to remain in Chicago for its public supported him handsomely, but those of us who wrote had no organizations to help sustain our self-esteem. Nevertheless I permitted him to imagine my pessimism to be only a mood which, in some degree it was, for I had many noble friends in the city who invited me to dinner even if they did not read ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... she was beautiful or not, it is hard to say. It is almost impossible to appreciate properly the beauty of the rich, the very rich. The unfettered development, the limitless choice of accessories, the confidence, the self-esteem, the sureness of expression, the simplicity of purpose, the ease of execution,—all these produce a certain effect of beauty behind which one really cannot get to measure length of nose, or brilliancy of the eye. This much can be said; there was nothing ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... bad man flogged for unpardonable conduct, and many a good man for a glass of grog too much. My firm conviction is that the bad man was very little the better; the good man very much the worse. The good man felt the disgrace, and was branded for life. His self-esteem was permanently maimed, and he rarely held up his head or did his best again. Besides which, - and this is true of all punishment - any sense of injustice destroys respect for the punisher. Still I am no sentimentalist; I have a contempt for, and even a dread of, sentimentalism. ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... ridiculous charges against her. General questions were proposed to her on points of casuistical divinity; two-edged questions which not one of themselves could have answered without, on the one side, landing himself in heresy (as then interpreted), or, on the other, in some presumptuous expression of self-esteem. Next came a wretched Dominican that pressed her with an objection, which, if applied to the Bible, would tax every one of its miracles with unsoundness. The monk had the excuse of never having read the Bible. M. Michelet has no such excuse; and it makes one blush for him, as a ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... himself could hope to be, but because he understood him better. John knew that there were two tender spots in that moody King, and he knew which was the tenderer, pardieu! So Conrad's gross finger, guided by John's, probed the raw of Philip's self-esteem, and found a rankling wound, very proud flesh. Oh, intolerable affront to the House of Capet, that a tall Angevin robber should take up and throw away a daughter of France, and then whistle you to a war in the East! Prince ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... another with wise nods and smiles. They did not like Fred very well; but he was always pushing himself forward: and when a boy has a great deal of self-esteem, and a brave suit of clothes right from Boston, how are you going to help yourselves, pray? So Fred was captain, and Willy ...
— Little Grandfather • Sophie May
... rather a singular one; and being alone, she needed the counsel of some person of experience, and of extensive knowledge. She sent for me, and I came," added Mr. Wittleworth, rubbing his chin and pouting his lips, as was his habit when his bump of self-esteem was rubbed; though it was a notable fact that he always rubbed it himself—nobody else ...
— Make or Break - or, The Rich Man's Daughter • Oliver Optic
... Frank comes as a wanderer from his own remote, settlement (somewhere or other at the world's end,) to see the lords of the earth, the true believers. He is a poor ignorant stranger who cannot speak a word of intelligible language. It is kind, and gratifying to self-esteem, to receive such an one, and show him those good things that shall make him sigh to return to his own forlorn fatherland. Besides all this, the outward modifications affecting the European Turk spoil his nationality. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... and one that ministered greatly to his self-content. No cloud stood upon the horizon of his self-esteem nor did shadows darken his glowing hopes. He had promised Richard Gessner to arrest the girl Lois Boriskoff, and arrested she would be before twelve o'clock to-morrow. As for this amiable English lad, so full of fine resolutions, ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... people, with hope and self-esteem once more in their hearts! These people, with a new, a unique place in the community's respect! It was all like a beautiful miracle; and, thinking of its maker, Luke ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... probable that you will get the chance of a few lessons; do not by preference accept the easier and more lucrative, but rather the more difficult, even when the subject is one of which as yet you know nothing. The self-esteem which will not allow one's true character to be seen is a powerful aid to the will. Do not forget the method of Jules Janin, running from house to house in Paris for a few wretched lessons in Latin: 'Unable to get anything out of my stupid pupils, with the besotted ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... an ex-ambassador to act as a hall-porter, or a celebrated prose-writer to clean the knives. I confess I do not think so. I shrewdly suspect a great deal of what we are pleased to call philosophy is only a well-regulated self-esteem, and that the man who feels himself immeasurably above another in mind, capacity, and attainments, and yet sees that other vastly superior in station and condition, has within his heart a pride all the more exalting that it is stimulated ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... presumption, self-respect, conceit, reserve, superciliousness, disdain, self-complacency, vainglory, haughtiness, self-conceit, vanity. insolence, self-esteem, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... him with such a world of longing in her eyes that the skipper, despite a somewhat large share of self-esteem, was almost startled. ...
— Sailor's Knots (Entire Collection) • W.W. Jacobs
... reminded of the one fact by the attempts of men to use flattery of the other as a key to her heart and her fortune. From early girlhood she had been sought by the brilliant impecunious of two continents. The continued experience had varnished her self-esteem with a glaze of cynicism sufficiently consistent to protect it against any but the strongest attack. She believed in no man's protestations. She distrusted every man's motives as far as herself was concerned. This attitude of mind was not unbecoming in her for the simple ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... II, is the deepest in feeling. It is a lament upon the decay of England, 'this dear, dear land'. Since we began to be a nation we have always lamented our decay. I am afraid that the Germans, whose self-esteem takes another form, were deceived by this. To the right English temper all bragging is a thing of evil omen. That temper is well expressed, where perhaps you would least expect to find it, in the speech of King Henry V to the ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... own pain; but several months had elapsed since, and the turning-point was come. He did not, unfortunately, love Sibylla one shade less; love such as his cannot be overcome so lightly; but the keenness of the disappointment, the blow to his self-esteem—to his vanity, it may be said—was growing less intense. In a case like this, of faithlessness, let it happen to man or to woman, the wounding of the self-esteem is not the least evil that must be borne. Lucy Tempest was, in Lionel's estimation, little ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... that the practical or financial aspect of the affair came to scourge him. For an appreciable time he suffered in his self-esteem alone. It seemed to him that all these bustling persons who passed knew him, that they were casting sidelong glances at him and laughing derisively, that those who chewed gum chewed it sneeringly and that those who ate their cigars ate them with thinly-veiled ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... his diminished self-esteem, however, most successfully, as he proceeded to the desk of the auctioneer's clerk, filled in a cheque for the amount of his purchase, and gave instructions for ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... little," the Doctor said. "The one sensitive place in that woman's nature is the place occupied by her self-esteem." ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... And as for yon impudent witling in the cage, we shall transport him beyond the seas, if convenient; if not, a knife in his gullet will make him forget the Dragon of Wantley. Truly, I am master of the situation!" And as his self-esteem grew, the Grand Marshal rubbed his hands, and went out of the hall, too much pleased with himself to notice certain little drops of wine dotted here and there close by the closet, and not yet quite dry, which, ...
— The Dragon of Wantley - His Tale • Owen Wister
... he was ill, but he did not let Hermione know, and she thought he was sulking; there was a complete estrangement between them. She became rapt, abstracted in her conviction of exclusive righteousness. She lived in and by her own self-esteem, conviction of her own ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... succeed in; wealthy, honoured, and powerful, and—what is frequently more ardently sought for than all—feared; yet would he rather have sacrificed every advantage he had gained—every desire for which he had unhesitatingly bartered his own self-esteem—every distinction he had considered cheaply purchased at the price of conscience, than have lost the good opinion, the confiding love of his only child. Even now he looked upon her with mingled feelings of dread and affection, though her ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... his stuff (an infallible symptom of authentic modesty), Henry gradually lost the pristine virginity of his early diffidence. His demeanour grew confident and bold. His glance said: 'I know exactly who I am, and let no one think otherwise.' His self-esteem as a celebrity, stimulated and fattened by a tremendous daily diet of press-cuttings, and letters from feminine admirers all over the vastest of empires, was certainly in no immediate danger of inanition. Nor did the fact that he was still outside ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... the English fashion. When we are confronted with great issues, it is our habit, or so we are fond of saying, to 'muddle through'. Foreign nations, and especially enemy nations, do not so describe our activities. But we are great self-critics, and not free from that kind of inverted self-esteem which makes a man speak of his own achievements with deceitful and extravagant modesty. The business of history is to tell the truth; the truth is that we muddle through with amazing success. This success we affect to regard as an undeserved reward bestowed by Providence on improvidence. ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... distinguished from comic story telling. His author is not throwing a stone at a creature of another and inferior order, but making a confession, with the effect that the stone hits everybody full in the conscience and causes their self-esteem to smart very sorely. Hence the failure of Lever's book to please the readers of Household Words. That pain in the self-esteem nowadays causes critics to raise a cry of Ibsenism. I therefore assure them that the sensation first came to me from Lever ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... fully to appreciate how long it was that she had rested there, moveless upon that secluded marble seat, spellbound in the preoccupation of those thoughts, at once long and sweet with the comfort of a solaced self-esteem, for which she had to thank the author of her ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... ship for the ice with the sealing fleet. Pausing on the crest of Black Cliff to survey the crossing to Scalawag Run, he came to a conclusion in relation to Peggy Lacey's letter that was not at all flattering to his self-esteem. ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... who did not lack self-esteem, exacted this oath firmly believing that there was not her equal in the world, and so felt assured that the King would never marry again. Be this as it may, at length she died, and never did husband make so much lamentation; the King wept and sobbed day and night, and the ...
— The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault • Charles Perrault
... however, knows that this is not so. The true zero hour, desolate, gloom-ridden, and specter-haunted, occurs immediately before dinner while we are waiting for that cocktail. It is then that, stripped for a brief moment of our armor of complacency and self-esteem, we see ourselves as we are,—frightful chumps in a world where nothing goes right; a gray world in which, hoping to click, we merely get the raspberry; where, animated by the best intentions, we nevertheless ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... the Almshouse, to see me on the gallows. If such thoughts do not assail the brave—if restless nights, wakeful dawns, dull days are not their portion—I must own that all these were mine, not often, perhaps, but too frequent to flatter self-esteem. And, fight them as I might, it was useless; for such moments came without warning—often when I had been merry with friends, at times when, lulled by long-continued security, I had nigh forgotten through eventless months that ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... fell into all the mistakes that a man could. Emperor by divine right, he had done his best to sting the self-esteem of the revolutionary emperor in Paris. By his language to the British ambassador about dividing the inheritance of the sick man, he had quickened the suspicions of the English cabinet. It is true the sick man will die, ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... themselves with the refined and wise leaders of the North. Lincoln, it argued, was not an extremist in any sense. His plan of action lay within the limits of statesmanlike moderation[36]. The Saturday Review was less sure that England should rejoice with the North. British self-esteem had suffered some hard blows at the hands of the Democratic party in America, but at least England knew where Democrats stood, and could count on no more discourtesy or injustice than that inflicted in the past. The Republican party, however, ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... just self-esteem, that powerful lever which sustains us, which elevates us, which compels us to respect in ourselves that nobility of race which we derive from God, what becomes of it in solitude? For Selkirk, vanity itself has lost its power to stimulate. Formerly, when in the ...
— The Solitary of Juan Fernandez, or The Real Robinson Crusoe • Joseph Xavier Saintine
... his battles, wounds, and post-office address. When he met that girl again, he wanted to meet her as Don Miguel Jose Farrel, of Palomar. He was not so unintelligent as to fail to realize that in his own country he was a personage, and he had sufficient self-esteem to desire her to realize it also. He had a feeling that, should they meet frequently in the future, they would become very good friends. Also, he looked forward with quiet amusement to the explanations that would ensue when the supposedly ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... There are some who give their friends trouble by imagining that they are held in low esteem, which, however, is not apt to be the case except with those who think meanly of themselves. Those who feel thus ought to be raised to a just self-esteem, not only by kind words, but by substantial service. But what you do for any one must be measured, first by your own ability, and then by the capacity of him whom you would favor and help. For, however great your influence may be, you cannot raise ...
— De Amicitia, Scipio's Dream • Marcus Tullius Ciceronis
... interests to conflict with study, no vices—such vices as it offered were coarsely stripped of any imaginative glamourfull drunkenness, clumsy leering shameful lust, no social intercourse even to waste one's time, and on the other hand it would minister greatly to the self-esteem of a conspicuously industrious student. One was marked as "clever," one played up to the part, and one's little accomplishment stood out finely in one's private reckoning against the sunlit small ignorance of that agreeable place. One went with an intent rush across the market square, one took one's ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... have cut him deeply in a man's tenderest spot—his self-esteem. But just how well she had gauged the look and possibilities of Mr. Andrew ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... learned that such a thing as favoritism between master and pupil existed, and that the poorest scholar often stood nearest the teacher's heart. The master, Mr. Webber, he discovered, had a monstrous bump of self-esteem. He was a small man, not larger than the boy, who was sixteen, and large for his age, and who, as big boys will, cherished a sort of contempt for small men. It is possible that the boy was entirely wrong in his estimate ...
— Pocket Island - A Story of Country Life in New England • Charles Clark Munn
... yourself deceived; but no: Caroline lacks intellect, she is dull, she can neither joke nor reason, sometimes she has little tact. You are frightened. You find yourself forever obliged to lead this darling through the thorny paths, where you must perforce leave your self-esteem ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Part First • Honore de Balzac
... Mervin in that hunting trip had been entirely accidental, and he had been astounded by the marriage contract which Mervin shortly after proposed between the two families. Ordinarily even Jude Cartwright, with all his self-esteem, would never have aspired to a star so remote as Mervin's daughter. The miracle, however, happened. He saw himself in the way to be the richest man on the range, the possessor of the ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand
... loved to send sharp arrows of sarkasm and argument through his coat armor of dignified complacency and self-esteem, for truly his idees wuz to her like a ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... But it were wiser to refrain. After all, one cannot conceal from one's self that things are like that—and if the hyaena's howl, from the filthy marshes of earth's weird edge and the thick saliva on his oozing jaws, nauseates our preciosity, and besmirches our self-esteem, we must remember that this is the way the Lord of "the Prologue in Heaven" has willed that the scavengers of life's cesspools go ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... the middle ago, with an air of corresponding arrogance and assumption. The other, who was still more elderly, was a thick-set and rather portly personage, of that quiet, reserved, and somewhat haughty demeanor, which usually belongs to men of much self-esteem, and of an unyielding, opinionated disposition. The ladies were both young, and in the full bloom of maidenly beauty. But their native characters, like those of their male companions, seemed to be very strongly contrasted. The one seated on the left was fair, ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... not a little flattered at his imaginary conquest. He debated, therefore, in his self-complacent reveries, whether he should take prompt advantage of the weakness of his victim, or pique her by the malice of suspense. He chose the latter tactique, and, with a happy self-esteem, reserved the transports of his confession to reward the longings and agitations of ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... up the garden path with her self-esteem thus agreeably restored, she had not the faintest idea that she had just passed by that rarest thing in life—a ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... they don't," she returned. "It depends on how good a time I'm having. But I hate to think I'm weak and selfish and vain, and that the only person I really care for is myself. I value my self-esteem, and it often gets an awful jar. Sometimes I feel like a girl that has run away from home— diamonds and dyed hair, you know—and then wakes up at night and cries to think of what a price she has paid for all her fine things!" Florence waved her hand towards ...
— Love, The Fiddler • Lloyd Osbourne
... 'literal ovation' by an unintelligent audience of both sexes, and so marked was the effect that he was next year elected honorary president of the institution, an office of less than no emolument—since the holder was expected to come down with a donation—but one which highly satisfied his self-esteem. ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... consulted together, and while they were so engaged, Mrs Jarley with her hands behind her walked up and down the caravan, as she had walked after tea on the dull earth, with uncommon dignity and self-esteem. Nor will this appear so slight a circumstance as to be unworthy of mention, when it is remembered that the caravan was in uneasy motion all the time, and that none but a person of great natural stateliness and acquired grace could have ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... Shame, Ignominy, and whatever is dishonourable, there is an Intention, or Something imply'd, to displease and mortify those it concerns, on Account of that same Passion of Self-liking, and an Endeavour to lessen, contradict or destroy Self-Esteem, which is that good Opinion which Man ...
— An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour, and the Usefulness of Christianity in War • Bernard Mandeville
... tracks will be obliterated—every vestige of them. The wind, the rain, and dust will do this. How is their trail to be taken up? "That will be easy enough," says one, whose self-esteem is greater than his prairie experience. He adds: "As they're going due west, we can't make any mistake ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... cherished a lingering hope that young Bultitude had those rabbits somewhere, but (like Mr. Barkis and his wooden lemon) found himself unable to part with them when the time came to fulfil his contract. And as contempt is a frame of mind highly stimulating to one's self-esteem, even those who had no personal interest in the matter joined in the execrations with ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... to shut him out of her heart. She had tried to forget him. In a defensive, innocent way she had deliberately encouraged Kettering. She liked him, and he helped her to forget; it restored her self-esteem to read the admiration in his kind eyes, it helped to soothe the hurt she had suffered from Jimmy's hands; and yet, in spite of it all, he was not Jimmy, and nobody could ever take Jimmy's place. She kept away ...
— The Second Honeymoon • Ruby M. Ayres
... laughed long and incontinently. "I imagine Reverend Pat wouldn't thank you for referring to him that way," he said. "He is a very high Anglican, and his dignity is marvelous—to say nothing of his self-esteem. Well, we'll see, we'll see. But, don't go yet! ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... this Christmas mess already bought and paid for; and he was all flattered up with self-esteem over his idea; and we had in a way flew the flume with that fizzy wine I speak of; so ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... not remember where she had left the link-chain or goad-whip, though but a few minutes out of her hand. I must confess that, looking on that labour-crooked group, I felt a dislike, strong and definite, to that system which takes away even the hope of improvement, crushing down the principle of self-esteem in the man, until it reaches the passive and unambitious existence of the oxen which he drives. And looking on those women, negroes though they were, so unnaturally masculine, so completely unsexed, so far removed from all those attributes ...
— From Slave to College President - Being the Life Story of Booker T. Washington • Godfrey Holden Pike
... indulgently.) "He likes to go everywhere, and see everything. He can sit down to a good dinner, and enjoy it." (Shouldn't have thought that a rare characteristic—but it delights the audience.) "His Self-Esteem is large." (There he is quite wrong—I haven't nearly enough!) "Acquisitiveness also large; this gentleman believes in getting the full value for his money." (Don't believe I shall get it here, at all events!) "He is very cheerful and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 93, September 24, 1887 • Various
... had a great deal to say about himself in answer to the inquiries of Lady Annabel. He spoke with so much feeling and simplicity of his first days at Eton, and the misery he experienced on first quitting Cherbury, that his details could not fail of being agreeable to those whose natural self-esteem they so agreeably mattered. Then he dwelt upon his casual acquaintance with London society, and Lady Annabel was gratified to observe, from many incidental observations, that his principles were in every ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... of court furniture. Any one who is familiar with the appalling frankness and unvarnished brusquerie of grown-up Danes can judge whether the hazing and horse-play on a Danish man-of-war was agreeable, and whether it was medicinal in a case of congenital self-esteem. Prince Karl lived the life of an ordinary middy, scrubbed decks, mended his own clothes, slept in a hammock, and ate provender which was anything but fit to set before a king. It is recorded of him that he was an expert in polishing a certain brass binnacle lantern. We wonder if he ever thinks ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... feverish dream; Yet dare arraign the whole stupendous plan, If but that little part incongruous seem. Nor is that part, perhaps, what mortals deem, Oft from apparent ill our blessings rise. O then renounce that impious self-esteem That aims to trace the secrets of the skies; For thou art but of dust, be humble and ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... at Bunker Hill until the whites of the enemy's eyes were visible in order to insure a good aim against troops firing in volleys, lived again in the hunters of the South at New Orleans. Small wonder that dwelling in memory on these facts aroused an intense American confidence and even undue self-esteem. ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... like you, to think of me—of me, at such a time, as if I was not the cause of all our present unhappiness—but not wilfully, not intentionally. Oh, no, no—your attentions—the flattery of your notice, took me at once, and, in the gratification of my self-esteem, I forgot all else. I heard, too, that you were engaged to another, and believing, as I did, that you were trifling with my affections, I spared no effort to win your's. I confess it, I wished this with all ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... have been mentioned by you, in such a manner, would have been a proud memorial at any time, but at such a time, 'when all the world and his wife,' as the proverb goes, were trying to trample upon me, was something still more complimentary to my self-esteem. Had it been a common criticism, however eloquent or panegyrical, I should have felt pleased, undoubtedly, and grateful, but not to the extent which the extraordinary good-heartedness of the whole proceeding must induce in any mind ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... listen to such praises, Mr. Powis," she asked; "praises which only contribute to a self-esteem that is ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... quite sure, my lord. What must she not have felt, when she saw you at the theatre with another woman!—If she loved you only a little, she must have been deeply wounded in her self-esteem; if she loved you with passion, she must have been struck to the heart. At length, you see, wearied out with suffering, she ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... far the greatest of these penalties is a restraint on Man's development. Man is an animal, Man is a mind: and since the wing of mind is Pride, Assurance, or Self-esteem, and since the home of an animal is a Planet, and an animal without a home is a thing without Assurance or Pride, so Man without Earth is a mind without wing. Even so, a few, having Assurance, make what we call "Progress", i.e., the discovering of truth—a crawling ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... saved a fortune for his descendants, who promptly spent it. Evidently it was a family trait. More and more he lived on his nerves, grew imperious, exacting, till he separated from his wife and made wreck of domestic happiness. The self-esteem of which he made comedy in his novels was for him a tragedy. Also he resumed the public readings, with their false glory and nervous wear and tear, which finally ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... exacting sport of turtle and dugong catching, but all acknowledged his special superiority. Though custom had made him a king, Nature had designed him for a canoe-maker, while with that invincible irony with which she rebukes the self-esteem and baffles the ambitions of mortals, she discounted her gift by the bestowal of frank distrust of the sea. He was so impelled to the exercise of the one talent that during youth and manhood his chief occupation and never-ending ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... Spurzheim—Organs and faculties overlooked—True locations of the faculties they recognized, Amativeness, Philoprogenitiveness, Adhesiveness, Inhabitiveness, Destructiveness, Combativeness, Secretiveness, Acquisitiveness, Constructiveness, Cautiousness, Approbativeness, Self-Esteem, Firmness, Religion, Benevolence, Hope, Marvellousness, Poetry, Ideality, Imitation, Wit or Mirthfulness, Eventuality, Individuality, Perceptive Organs, Time, Comparative Sagacity, Causality, Tune, Constructiveness, Language—Comments ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various
... colleagues, if they felt it, were obliged to conceal. He performed his duties with conscientious precision. He never missed an opportunity to thrust the sharp point of his dialectic rapier through the joints of the clumsy and hide-bound senatorial self-esteem. He delighted in skilfully exposing to Madeleine's eyes some new side of Ratcliffe's ignorance. His conversation at such times sparkled with historical allusions, quotations in half a dozen different languages, ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... pride, though it made him bitterly disliked by individuals, inspired the great body of his followers in Parliament and throughout the country with respect and confidence. They took him at his own valuation. They saw that his self-esteem was not that of an upstart, who was drunk with good luck and with applause, and who, if fortune turned, would sink from arrogance into abject humility. It was that of the magnanimous man so finely described by Aristotle ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... and gentle people, more merciful to prisoners than any other Asiatics. Their freedom from gross debauchery is the point in which they appear to most advantage; and their superiority in purity of manners is not flattering to our self-esteem."[56] ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... Selfishness and self-esteem to a certain point are virtues. Beyond that point they become vices. Certainly we should think well of ourselves, and then act so that this good opinion is merited. Self-interest and selfishness are the main-springs of progress. Most of us need some inducement ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... as a clear-eyed, intelligent, perfectly honest, and well-meaning child will frequently jar one's self-esteem by innocent questions, so did these women, without the slightest appearance of malice or satire, continually bring up points of discussion which we spent our best ...
— Herland • Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman
... things which she saw others enjoying. It was not for want of being invited to the feast, for several of her father's curates had been ready to grace their frugal boards by her presence, and to crown her with the fillets of their dignity and self-esteem. The prospect held up to her by these worthy men had not allured her in any way; she had not loved their wine and oil, and thus she had remained rich, according to the promise of the seer, with the bread and salt of ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... break the reserve! Openness, good-heartedness, generosity, will then be detected where they were at first not suspected. It may now be understood that the intercourse with Rembrandt was far from easy, because he was a typical Hollander, good-natured, but with an extra amount of impulsiveness and self-esteem, as may be gathered from his biography and from his work. Consequently, if he had numerous acquaintances, his real friends were not many. We find for instance few traces of intimate friendship with other painters, excepting ...
— Rembrandt's Amsterdam • Frits Lugt
... indeed, Mr. President; you never said a truer word than that in your life. The fact is the Germans have all gone mad with self-esteem, and are convinced that every criticism of their actions must have its foundations in envy and malignity. And yet they feel bitterly, too, that, in spite of their successes here and there, the War on the whole has been an enormous disappointment ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 152, February 21st, 1917 • Various
... to be honest with ourselves, that this sad old world is a snobocracy. The very fact that man is prone to regard himself as superior to his brother is the leaven in the load of civilization; without that quality, whether we elect to classify it as self-conceit or self-esteem, man would be without ambition and our civilization barren of achievement. The instinct for the upward climb—the desire to reach the heights—is too insistent to be disregarded. If all men are born equal, as the framers of our Constitution so solemnly declared, that is because the ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... thoughts have carried me beyond the humility of my real hopes. Believe me, believe in the submission, the patience, the mute adoration which I only ask you not to wound uselessly. I know, Beatrix, that you cannot love me without the loss of your self-esteem; therefore I ask for no return. Camille once said there was some hidden fatality in names, a propos of hers. That fatality I felt for myself on the jetty of Guerande, when I read on the shores of the ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... school-room, and after lecturing the astonished dame upon the enormity of such an insult to his son and to himself, demanded his account, determined that the child should not again be subject to such tyranny. Who can estimate the effect of this puerile triumph upon the growth of that morbid self-esteem which characterized ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... by this that you ever want to drive your men, because the lash always leaves its worst soreness under the skin. A hundred men will forgive a blow in the face where one will a blow to his self-esteem. Tell a man the truth about himself and shame the devil if you want to, but you won't shame the man you're trying to reach, because he won't believe you. But if you can start him on the road that will lead him to the truth he's mighty apt to try to reform himself ...
— Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... the beginning that would have been quite simple. All he could do now was to let bygones be bygones and in the pleasure of to-day forget the mistakes of yesterday. Consoled by this reflection he managed to recapture such a degree of his self-esteem that by the time he rejoined the family he was once more holding his head in the air and smiling with ...
— Steve and the Steam Engine • Sara Ware Bassett
... of conceit and overweening self-esteem may be shown emphatically by the use of such selections ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... he could hardly have permitted two friends to walk into the fire in his stead, as they were about to do in the stupendous and horrible farce enacted in the Piazza Gran Duca. There was no lack of self-esteem either in the man or his head. Without it, he would scarcely have thought so highly of his rather washy scheme for reorganizing the democratic government, and so very humbly of the genius of Dante, Petrarch, and others, whose works he condemned to the flames. A fraternal regard, too, for such great ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... life the passage bars; Then, in the wonted tumult of my breast, I hail boon Nature, and the genial day That gave me being, and a fate so blest, And her who bade hope beam Upon my soul; for till then burthensome Was life itself become: But now, elate with touch of self-esteem, High thoughts and sweet within that heart arise, Of which the warders are ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... on the cruel force which keeps us to the act of breathing.—Though I could draw wild blissful breath if I were galloping across the moors! her worn heart said to her youth: and out of ken of the world, I could regain a portion of my self-esteem. Nature thereat renewed her old sustainment with gentle murmurs, that were supported by Dr. Themison's account of the virtuous married lady who chafed at the yoke on behalf of her sex, and deemed the independent union the ideal. Nataly's brain ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... in America would be absurd; why should it not? But in taste and learning they are woefully deficient; and it is this which renders them incapable of graduating a scale by which to measure themselves. Hence arises that over weening complacency and self-esteem, both national and individual, which at once renders them so extremely obnoxious to ridicule, and ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... streets, Holmes met some cordial greeting at every turn. What a just, clever fellow he was! people said: one of those men improved by success: just to the defrauding of himself: saw the true worth of everybody, the very lowest: hadn't one spark of self-esteem: despised all humbug and show, one could see, though he never said it: when he was a boy, he was moody, with passionate likes and dislikes; but success had improved him, vastly. So Holmes was popular, though the beggars shunned him, and the lazy Italian organ-grinders ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... heart's confessor, a heart within that heart, And all dear things summ'd up in her alone. As Margaret smil'd or frown'd John liv'd or died; His dress, speech, gesture, studies, friendships, all Being fashion'd to her liking. His flatteries taught me first this self-esteem, His flatteries and caresses, while he loved. The world esteem'd her happy, who had won His heart, who won all hearts; And ladies envied ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... in all the insolence of her young beauty and vigorous self-esteem, had shown for him had been mutual. He had instinctively felt that she was an enemy, and more than that—a danger to him. This danger was now removed from his path, and by no intervention or even desire ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... nothing for no other purpose Dreamless sleep after a day brimful of enjoyment Man must subjugate matter and not become subject to it No one believes anything that can diminish his self-esteem Praise out of all proportion to our merit Save them the trouble of thinking for themselves She no longer thought these things—she was possessed by them Taken it upon herself to be always strong, and self-reliant The most terrible of all the gods, are women The sun seems to move ...
— Quotations From Georg Ebers • David Widger
... Smile as he might at the smallness of the social conditions which allowed him to play the role of a Croesus in the fancy of love-sick maids, he could not deny that he found it a pleasant thing to be the object of such tender rivalry. It seemed to add a cubit to his height and two to his self-esteem. He revelled in the sense of his desirability and watched with amusement the innocent manoeuvres by which his fair entertainers checkmated each other, and in their zeal occasionally forgot that he, too, was a rational being, endowed with the faculty ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... his grandfather Maximilian at Frankfort as of his grandfather Ferdinand at Madrid. Such was the adversary, with such advantages of nationality and of person, against whom Francis I., without any political necessity, and for the sole purpose of indulging an ambitious vision and his own kingly self-esteem, was about to engage in a struggle which was to entail a heavy burden on his whole life, and bring him not in triumph to Constantinople, but in ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... his mistress leaves her without writing to her. I made and remade twenty letters in my head. I had had to do with a woman like all other women of the kind. I had been poetizing too much. She had treated me like a school-boy, she had used in deceiving me a trick which was insultingly simple. My self-esteem got the upper hand. I must leave this woman without giving her the satisfaction of knowing that she had made me suffer, and this is what I wrote to her in my most elegant handwriting and with tears of rage and sorrow ...
— Camille (La Dame aux Camilias) • Alexandre Dumas, fils
... to the revenue; and on the question of public economy, whether or not the price paid by miscalculating ingenuity is a fair and politic source of revenue, we shall not enter; but on the reasons which lead so many to be dupes of their own self-esteem, a few words may not be misspent. The chief reason why a vast number of patents are unsuccessful, is, that it takes a long time (longer generally than fourteen years, the statutable limit of patent grants) to make the workmen of a country familiar with ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... with a certain affected bluntness, so successful when it was a question of flattering Louis's self-esteem, "what use is there in being agreeable to your majesty, if one can no ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... nothing more than that no one understands what the books say, not even the professors themselves perhaps; and these five to ten years have to offset the daily preachment of the whole life, that preachment which lowers the dignity of man, which by degrees brutally deprives him of the sentiment of self-esteem, that eternal, stubborn, constant labor to bow the native's neck, to make him accept the yoke, to place him on a level with the beast—a labor aided by some persons, with or without the ability to write, which if it does not produce in some individuals the desired effect, in others it has ...
— The Indolence of the Filipino • Jose Rizal
... father's family, it was remembered, came originally from Belgium. It was not surprising, therefore, that this immigrant should decry the national glories. That explained everything and German vanity found reasons therein for greater self-esteem, and at the same time for despising ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... has its peculiar and appropriate temper, that profession or employment is selected for the exemplification which seems best fitted, in each case, to embody the characteristic or predominating quality. Thus, because impetuosity, self-esteem, and animal or irreflective courage, are qualities most intense in youth, next it is considered in what profession those qualities find their most unlimited range; and because that is obviously the military profession, ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... office should be at his service tomorrow. Such a Minister might strip me of my situation, in some respects of considerable emolument, but he could not strip me of the proud conviction that I was right; he could not strip me of my own self-esteem; he could not strip me, I think, of some portion of the confidence and good opinion of the people. But I am noticing the calumnious threat I allude to more than it deserves. There can be no peril, I venture to assert, under the present Government, in the ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... last word she had said to me, for the next moment the gate was banged behind her and shut me out of her life. I was hurt, badly hurt in my self-esteem, but my rising anger, burning hot within me, kept me from feeling as bad as I might have felt. In two months' time I landed at Tulagi on Florida Island, and for the next four years or so the civilised world knew me not. I reached ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... of detection. It was certainly grateful to the feelings of a husband to be able in this manner to lay bare the spotless soul of his wife, and to find that his own image lay enshrined amid its purest and holiest aspirations. His self-esteem was too much flattered not to induce him to overlook the immediate object of the petitioner. While she prayed that she might become the humble instrument of bringing him into the flock of the faithful, she petitioned for forgiveness, on her own behalf, if presumption or indifference ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... it it whispered about the Baltic and the Nile and Cape St. Vincent, and not about his unfaithfulness to his wife. A man who robs little children when no one is looking can hardly have much self-respect or even self-esteem; but an accomplished burglar must be proud of himself. In the play to which I am at present preluding I have represented an artist who is so entirely satisfied with his artistic conscience, even to the point of dying like a saint with its support, that he is utterly selfish and unscrupulous ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... said Partab Singh, turning the lantern to show first the huge lioness, almost black in colour, which had betrayed her presence by snarling, and then her mate, looking indescribably sulky and wounded in his self-esteem owing to the failure of his leap. "The gate is open; does my friend ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... us—that Potts is a piece of really scientific natural history as distinguished from comic story telling. His author is not throwing a stone at a creature of another and inferior order, but making a confession, with the effect that the stone hits everybody full in the conscience and causes their self-esteem to smart very sorely. Hence the failure of Lever's book to please the readers of Household Words. That pain in the self-esteem nowadays causes critics to raise a cry of Ibsenism. I therefore assure them that the sensation ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... you don't have so bad headaches as me," said Fel, recovering her self-esteem. "Your mamma never has to put mustard pace on your feet, and squeeze up burdock leaves and tie 'em on your ...
— Aunt Madge's Story • Sophie May
... assumption, presumption, self-respect, conceit, reserve, superciliousness, disdain, self-complacency, vainglory, haughtiness, self-conceit, vanity. insolence, self-esteem, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... over your Sabbath-day dinner at this text when it was first spoken. Lay this down for a law, all my brethren,—a New Testament and a never-to-be-abrogated law,—that the best and the safest religion for you is that way of religion that is hardest on your pride, on your self-importance, on your self-esteem, as well as on your purse and on your belly. You are not likely to err by practising too much of the cross. You may very well have too much of the cross of Christ preached to you, and too little of your own. Why! did not Christ ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... II. This time Lanoue thought he perceived that his confiding young friend was not intended by nature for the drama, and he declared it to him without disguise. Bailly heard the fatal sentence with more resignation than could have been expected from a youth whose budding self-esteem received so violent a shock. He even threw his two tragedies immediately into the fire. Under similar circumstances, Fontenelle showed less docility in his youth. If the tragedy of Aspar also disappeared in the flames, it was not only in consequence of the criticism of a friend; ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... their ambition. I admire their blasphemous, consignatory, obscenity attitude of acting as if the Great Creator had concocted the whole glorious Universe for their own playground. Yes," said the chief wearily, "singly they aren't bad traits. Boiled down into the self-esteem of a single race, I don't admire them ...
— Instinct • George Oliver Smith
... prefer themselves to others, that if they preserve for their own country that love which is the fruit of personal interest, at least they will lose that enthusiasm which is the fruit of an exclusive self-esteem." ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... profits more Than self-esteem, grounded on just and right Well-managed; of that skill the more thou know'st, The more she will acknowledge thee her head And to realities yield all ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... Concini, and his wife Galligai, who subsequently shone at the French court, sought to Italianize the fashion, and introduced some Florentine tailors; but Percerin, touched to the quick in his patriotism and his self-esteem, entirely defeated these foreigners, and that so well that Concino was the first to give up his compatriots, and held the French tailor in such esteem that he would never employ any other, and thus wore a doublet of his on ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... divinity; two-edged questions which not one of themselves could have answered without, on the one side, landing himself in heresy (as then interpreted), or, on the other, in some presumptuous expression of self-esteem. Next came a wretched Dominican that pressed her with an objection, which, if applied to the Bible, would tax every one of its miracles with unsoundness. The monk had the excuse of never having read the Bible. M. Michelet has no such excuse; and it makes ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... a complete success in our Centennial Exposition or suppress it in its infancy, acknowledging our inability to give it the international character to which our self-esteem aspires. ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Ulysses S. Grant • James D. Richardson
... embarrassed over his opening lesson, that emotion has caused him to forget his Latin, that his throat is parched and his legs are trembling beneath him. She does not know this, and I tell you between ourselves, it is not her self-esteem that suffers least at this conjecture. She suffers at finding herself, after so many signatures, contracts, and ceremonies-still a ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... distended, inflated themselves in a really unaccountable manner. So that, frankly, he fought shy of finding himself alone with Damaris again. She seemed so constantly to betray him into ill-regulated feeling, ill-considered speech and action, which tended to endanger the completeness of his self-esteem. Therefore, although admitting his attitude to be scantily heroic, he welcomed the prospect of the ferryman's chaperonage until such time as her father or her discarded lady-in-waiting, the innocent and pink-nosed Bilson, should effect ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... yourself, lady," returned he, "by these petitions, and for what? You plunge your soul in guilty wishes-you sacrifice your peace, and your self-esteem, to a phantom; for I repeat, I am dead to woman; and the voice of love sounds like the funeral knell of her who will never breathe it to me again." He arose as he spoke, and the countess, pierced to the ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... depression of the sinciput, he could hardly have permitted two friends to walk into the fire in his stead, as they were about to do in the stupendous and horrible farce enacted in the Piazza Gran Duca. There was no lack of self-esteem either in the man or his head. Without it, he would scarcely have thought so highly of his rather washy scheme for reorganizing the democratic government, and so very humbly of the genius of Dante, Petrarch, and others, whose works he condemned to the flames. A fraternal regard, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... wife had not submitted either to his will or to his ways. He had that great desire to enjoy his full rights, so strong in the minds of weak, ambitious men, and he had told himself that a wife's obedience was one of those rights which he could not abandon without injury to his self-esteem. He had thought about the matter, slowly, as was his wont, and had resolved that he would assert himself. He had asserted himself, and his wife told him to his face that she would go away and leave him. He could detain her legally, ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... when the shopkeeper-poet, with his jokes and his quips, and his good-humoured self-esteem, and certainty of his own power, settled down in Ramsay Lodge. It would be well if all poets had as prosperous and as fair a retirement for their old age. He lived for some time in his quaint self-contained (according ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... which he almost extorted, she threw her arms round his neck, and implored him, "by all he loved and honored, to be careful of her peace; to remember that she put into his charge all that was most precious to woman—the modesty of her sex and her own self-esteem !" ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... of good humour in life. One friend mentioned by Boswell was, he said, acid, and another muddy. At last, stretching himself and turning with complacency, he observed, "I look upon myself as a good-humoured fellow"—a bit of self-esteem against which Boswell protested. Johnson, he admitted, was good-natured; but was too irascible and impatient to be good-humoured. On reaching Cambridge's house, Johnson ran to look at the books. "Mr. Johnson," said Cambridge politely, "I am going with your pardon to accuse myself, for I have the ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... of age had been dropped half a mile back in the sand, certain phrases flung at him had been barbed and had bitten deep into Casey Ryan's self-esteem. They stung and rankled there. He had squirmed at the picture his new friend had so ruthlessly drawn with crude words, but bold, of doddering old age. Casey resented the implication that he might one ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... to be partially restored to our self-esteem, if not entirely comforted for our losses, when we sat down to dinner in the Hotel Washington, and the urbane head-waiter, catching the drift of our ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... together, and while they were so engaged, Mrs Jarley with her hands behind her walked up and down the caravan, as she had walked after tea on the dull earth, with uncommon dignity and self-esteem. Nor will this appear so slight a circumstance as to be unworthy of mention, when it is remembered that the caravan was in uneasy motion all the time, and that none but a person of great natural stateliness and acquired grace ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... Audacious self-esteem, with good ground for it, is always imposing. What resplendent beauty that must have been which could have authorized Phryne to "peel" in the way she did! What fine speeches are those two: "Non omnis mortar," and "I have taken all knowledge to be my province"! Even in common ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... that time; he loved part of it, he hated part; but he was no friend to either. By and by he grew older. Age removed a good deal of his vanity, and I suppose it forced him to part with some portion of his self-esteem. But I was growing older myself and no doubt getting physically a little helpless. I suppose I made senile noises when I dressed and undressed, expressive of my decorative labors. This may have been the reason; possibly ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen
... is ready to set sail in a light skiff on a rough sea, having laid in a good store of imagination and of courage, of childlike ignorance and self-esteem. ...
— Jacqueline, v3 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... must have cut him deeply in a man's tenderest spot—his self-esteem. But just how well she had gauged the look and possibilities of Mr. ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... drew a little nearer, and leaned forward over his spade. "Go your way," he said, resentfully and timidly at the same time, because he was always afraid of being laughed at. Every mental state, even madness, has its equilibrium based upon self-esteem. Its disturbance causes unhappiness; and Captain Hagberd lived amongst a scheme of settled notions which it pained him to feel disturbed by people's grins. Yes, people's grins were awful. They hinted at something wrong: ...
— To-morrow • Joseph Conrad
... he was then sent to hawk it through the streets. This was certainly a remarkable achievement for a lad of his years. The eagerness with which both of the ballads were seized by the public must have greatly gratified the self-esteem of the young writer. ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... and in return do their bidding, however humiliating this may be. The shipper, realizing that the manager's displeasure or good will toward him finds practical expression in his daily freight bills, finally loses, like the serf, all self-esteem in his efforts to propitiate an overbearing master. He is intimidated to such an extent that he never speaks openly of existing abuses, lest he lose the special rates which have been given him, or, if he is not a participant of such privileges, lest additional ...
— The Railroad Question - A historical and practical treatise on railroads, and - remedies for their abuses • William Larrabee
... improve it, unconsciously assisted their operations. Society is so constituted that it requires no little talent and no slight energy to repel the intimacy even of those whose acquaintance is evidently not desirable; and there are many people in this world mixing, apparently, with great spirit and self-esteem in its concerns, who really owe their constant appearance and occasional influence in circles of consideration to no other qualities than their own callous impudence, and the indolence and the irresolution of their victims. They, who at the same time have no delicacy and no shame, count fearful ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... coupled with the masculine virtues of physical courage and straightness in matters of sport, made him not only popular but in a small way a personage! Pargeter, no doubt, would suffer, especially in his self-esteem; on the other hand, he, the husband, would feel that so had his own conduct, his coarse infidelity, his careless neglect of his wife, ...
— The Uttermost Farthing • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... dark medium of life's feverish dream; Yet dare arraign the whole stupendous plan, If but that little part incongruous seem. Nor is that part perhaps what mortals deem; Oft from apparent ill our blessings rise. O, then, renounce that impious self-esteem, That aims to trace the secrets of the skies: For thou art but of dust; be humble, and ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... everyone attracted gained that he sought nothing for himself; he was entirely free from any desire to be admired, or love of being thought much of, as he was from love of commanding for the sake of being obeyed. The great temptations to missionaries among savage people, as it seems, are to self-esteem, from a comparison of themselves with their European advantages and the natives among whom they live; and to a domineering temper, because they find an obedience ready, and it is delightful to be obeyed. Bishop Patteson's natural disposition was averse to either, and the principles ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... was unworthy of an ex-ambassador to act as a hall-porter, or a celebrated prose-writer to clean the knives. I confess I do not think so. I shrewdly suspect a great deal of what we are pleased to call philosophy is only a well-regulated self-esteem, and that the man who feels himself immeasurably above another in mind, capacity, and attainments, and yet sees that other vastly superior in station and condition, has within his heart a pride all the more exalting that it is stimulated by the sense of a great injustice, ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... a question the curate had never asked himself; but it came upon him at this moment with disconcerting force that she was right. Luckily for his self-esteem, it did not occur to him at the same time that it was this very lack of the conventional virtues, a certain freshness and originality born of her defiant neglect of them, which formed the stronger part of her ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden
... deliverance, but the fact that she was free; and not so much (she had begun to be aware) that freedom had released her from Tillotson as that it had given her to Gannett. This discovery had not been agreeable to her self-esteem. She had preferred to think that Tillotson had himself embodied all her reasons for leaving him; and those he represented had seemed cogent enough to stand in no need of reinforcement. Yet she had not left him till she met Gannett. It was her love for Gannett that had made ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... saloon-keepers and district leaders, the control of police-courts and magistrates, of municipal administrations and boards of education, of legislatures and governors; with a few higher offices now and then, to flatter our sacred self-esteem, a senator or a justice on the Supreme Court Bench; and on state occasions, to keep up our necessary prestige, some cabinet-members and legislators and justices to attend High Mass, and be blessed in public ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... hoped that the building would not be too magnificent for I felt very small and very poor on alighting at the station, and every rod of my advance sensibly decreased my self-esteem. Starting with faltering feet I came to the entrance of the grounds in a state of panic, and as I looked up the path toward the towering portico of the hotel, it seemed to me the palace of an emperor and my resolution ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... street she no longer looked as if she belonged to any respectable person. She had not the appearance of a virtuous woman's maid. She lost the aspect of a servant who, by dint of displaying her self-esteem and self-respect even in her garb, reflects in her person the honor and the pride of her masters. From day to day she sank nearer to the level of that abject, shameless creature whose dress drags in the ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... mean by this that you ever want to drive your men, because the lash always leaves its worst soreness under the skin. A hundred men will forgive a blow in the face where one will a blow to his self-esteem. Tell a man the truth about himself and shame the devil if you want to, but you won't shame the man you're trying to reach, because he won't believe you. But if you can start him on the road that will lead him to the truth ...
— Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... carefully enumerated, it is because they comprised all that was specially droll or quaint in these social gatherings, the members of which were a very commonplace set of men, who discussed their little local topics in very ordinary fashion, slightly elevated, perhaps, in self-esteem, by thinking how little the outer world knew ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... POINTS: The GENERAL APPEARANCE of the West Highland White Terrier is that of a small, game, hardy-looking terrier, possessed with no small amount of self-esteem, with a "varminty" appearance, strongly built, deep in chest and back ribs, straight back and powerful quarters, on muscular legs and exhibiting in a marked degree a great combination of strength and activity. COLOUR—White. COAT—Very important, ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... or Gideon Vetch, or the man who could not look at anything but the hole in the carpet. Never again could he take his inherited place in the world of which he had once been a part. For an instant a nervous impulse to protest, to startle by some violent gesture that look of gentle self-esteem from the faces before him, jerked over him like a spasm. Then the last habit that he would ever break in his life, the very law of his being, which was the law of order, of manners, of self-control, the inbred horror, older than himself or his parents, of giving himself away, ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... manliness of the profession to which he belonged, however, overcame the reluctance natural to self-esteem; and he ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... appreciation and ready intelligence. His heart sank when he thought that he might have been tied for life to such a woman as Mildred. One evening he told Norah the whole story of his love. It was not one to give him much reason for self-esteem, and it was very pleasant ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... made you fighting mad," she bantered; but under her seeming levity he perceived a change in her manner towards him immensely gratifying to his humbled self-esteem. ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet
... was beautiful or not, it is hard to say. It is almost impossible to appreciate properly the beauty of the rich, the very rich. The unfettered development, the limitless choice of accessories, the confidence, the self-esteem, the sureness of expression, the simplicity of purpose, the ease of execution,—all these produce a certain effect of beauty behind which one really cannot get to measure length of nose, or brilliancy of the eye. This much can ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... the finding of a new topic to you," replied the other, with graciousness which did a little more to restore Helen's self-esteem. "I have a very humble opinion of ...
— King Midas • Upton Sinclair
... smallness of the social conditions which allowed him to play the role of a Croesus in the fancy of love-sick maids, he could not deny that he found it a pleasant thing to be the object of such tender rivalry. It seemed to add a cubit to his height and two to his self-esteem. He revelled in the sense of his desirability and watched with amusement the innocent manoeuvres by which his fair entertainers checkmated each other, and in their zeal occasionally forgot that he, too, was a rational being, endowed with the faculty of criticism. There was another, ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... safely on a little table beside the bed, and Katy sat watching Cousin Helen eat her supper with a warm, loving feeling at her heart. I think we are scarcely ever so grateful to people as when they help us to get back our own self-esteem. ...
— What Katy Did • Susan Coolidge
... Snyder in his choice. He had a strong suspicion that the conduct of this case was going to have the beneficial result of lowering Oakes' self-esteem. If failure achieved this end, Mr. Snyder felt that failure, though it would not help the Agency, would not ...
— Death At The Excelsior • P. G. Wodehouse
... the ear, not the eye, nor, through them, the understanding, but through its matching quality in the auditor, captivating the will and enslaving it That is how persuasion is effected; the spoken words merely supply a pretext for surrender. They enable us to yield without loss of our self-esteem, in the delusion that we are conceding to reason what is really extorted by charm. The words are necessary, too, to point out what the orator wishes us to think, if we are not already apprised of it. When the nature of his power is better understood and frankly recognized, ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... mostly or often humorously direct, whereas with men they seem to adopt an ironical or patronising attitude. American women seem also to have a curious power of attracting to themselves other women who admire them and foster their self-esteem. And, for all that I know, these satellites have satellites too. Their federacy almost amounts to a solid secret society; not so much against men, for men must provide the sinews of war and other comforts, but for their own ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... Hamlyn's Purlieu was near the sea and separated by forest land from other places. The seclusion in which its owners were thus forced to dwell differentiated their characters from those of the neighbouring gentlemen. They found much cause for self-esteem in the number of their acres, and, though many of these consisted of salt marshes, and more of wild heath, others were as good as any in Hampshire; and the grand total made a formidable array in works of reference. But they found greater reason still ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... herself a kind Cassandra. His haste, she replied, would ruin his cause. He had to deal with Philistines. The father was a man of no small self-esteem—he had been the honored tutor of Maximilian II., and was now in high favor at the Bavarian court, even controlling university and artistic appointments. A Socialist would be especially distasteful ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... is that Iago is keenly sensitive to anything that touches his pride or self-esteem. It would be most unjust to call him vain, but he has a high opinion of himself and a great contempt for others. He is quite aware of his superiority to them in certain respects; and he either disbelieves in or despises the qualities in which they are superior to him. ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... past without regret. Every thinking man, however, knows that this is not so. The true zero hour, desolate, gloom-ridden, and specter-haunted, occurs immediately before dinner while we are waiting for that cocktail. It is then that, stripped for a brief moment of our armor of complacency and self-esteem, we see ourselves as we are,—frightful chumps in a world where nothing goes right; a gray world in which, hoping to click, we merely get the raspberry; where, animated by the best intentions, we nevertheless succeed ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... O'Connell have never been fully appreciated in this country. Engrossed in our own peculiar interests, and in the plenitude of our self-esteem; believing that "we are the people, and that wisdom will perish with us," that all patriotism and liberality of feeling are confined to our own territory, we have not followed the untitled Barrister of Derrynane Abbey, step by step, through the development of one ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... with a certain niceness of nature, an honest haughtiness and self-esteem, either of what I was or what I might be, which let envy call pride, and lastly that modesty, whereof, though not in the title-page, yet here, I may be excused to make some beseeming profession, all these uniting the supply of their natural aid together, kept ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... an amiable reflection and one that ministered greatly to his self-content. No cloud stood upon the horizon of his self-esteem nor did shadows darken his glowing hopes. He had promised Richard Gessner to arrest the girl Lois Boriskoff, and arrested she would be before twelve o'clock to-morrow. As for this amiable English lad, so full of fine resolutions, ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... buffalo was within a dozen yards of us, and I could see that he had singled out Moshesh as the particular object of his attack, attracted, no doubt, by His Majesty's scarlet tunic. The king might of course have escaped by promptly wheeling his horse and galloping away; but his pride and self-esteem would have suffered a mortal wound had he been driven to flight in the presence of a white man, although there was a certain quality in his hurried glances to right and left that seemed to tell me that he meditated something of the sort, rather than stand his ground and take his chance. Fortunately ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... she now thought that she had seen something in his face that she did not like! But her lazy independence reasserted itself soon, and half an hour later, when she had left Aunt Chloe's cabin, she had regained her self-esteem. Yet, to avoid meeting him again, she took a longer route home, across the dried ditch and over the bluff, scarred by hydraulics, and so fell, presently, upon the old garden at the point where it adjoined the abandoned diggings. She was quite sure she had escaped a meeting with Starbuck, and was ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... little to be thankful for. Personally, she was, without any exception, the ugliest white girl I ever saw. She measured about twice as long from the chin to Self-Esteem as from Benevolence to Amativeness; not one feature of her face was even middling; her skin was of a neutral creamy tint; and she had a straggly goatee of dirty white, with woolly side-boards of the same ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... It exaggerates its own energy and spirit of enterprise, its sense of humour and its chivalrousness towards women. That it should be aware that it possesses each of these qualities in a considerable degree would do no harm, for self-esteem is good for a nation; but it believes that it possesses them to the exclusion of the rest of mankind. And that is unfortunate; for it makes the individual American assume the lack of these qualities in the English and thereby decreases his estimate of the English character. I am not endeavouring ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... most intelligent naval officers of my acquaintance." He loved an argument, and, though always good-tempered in it, was tenacious of his own convictions when he thought the facts bore out his way of interpreting their significance. When told by a phrenologist that he had an unusual amount of self-esteem, he replied: "It is true, I have; I have full confidence in myself and in my judgment"—a trait of supreme importance to a man called to high command. But against the defects of this quality he was guarded by the openness of mind which results from the effort to improve and to keep ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... was shocked to hear his mother say that she had left his father to come to him. It affected his self-esteem in a strange and subtle way. The thought that tongues might wag about her revolted his manhood and his sense of form. It seemed strange, incomprehensible, and wholly wrong; the thought, too, gashed through his mind: 'She is trying ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... is an easy one,' says an amiable lady-friend of mine, who has just become a grandmother. 'Gudbrand's wife is the one to imitate, not only on account of her prudence, but for her worth. You men are much more amusing than you fancy: when your own self-esteem is at stake, you love truth and justice about as much as bats love a glare of light. The greatest enjoyment these gentlemen experience is in pardoning us when they are guilty, and in generously offering to overlook our errors when they alone are in the wrong. The wisest thing we ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... let a cutting be made from a lower level than the brink, and through it to a part below the surface of the water, and water flows perennially. Several of these ancient fountains have been resuscitated by the Bechuanas near Kuruman, who occasionally show their feelings of self-esteem by laboring for months at deep cuttings, which, having once begun, they feel bound in honor to persevere in, though told by a missionary that they can never force water to run ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... accordingly. One cannot successfully go against natural tendencies, and it is folly to fail to recognize them. It is not easy for so impressionable and imaginative a people as we Americans are to come down to plain, hard facts, yet we are doing it without loss of self-esteem or prestige ...
— Random Reminiscences of Men and Events • John D. Rockefeller
... an ascerbity in this speech which caused the outlaw to feel ill at ease, for it re-opened the wounds of his self-esteem. ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... by the approval of their neighbours. It is not difficult to be unconventional in the eyes of the world when your unconventionality is but the convention of your set. It affords you then an inordinate amount of self-esteem. You have the self-satisfaction of courage without the inconvenience of danger. But the desire for approbation is perhaps the most deeply seated instinct of civilised man. No one runs so hurriedly ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... with what assurance he maintains that there is nothing new in our astronomy, nothing in the knowledge of the human body, unless perhaps, he says, the circulation of the blood. Love of his own opinion, founded on his vast self-esteem, makes him forget the discovery of the satellites of Jupiter, of the five moons and the ring of Saturn, of the rotation of the sun on its axis, of the calculated position of three thousand stars, of the laws given by Kepler and Newton for the heavenly orbs, of the causes of the precession ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... mistake in setting any absolute limit to our mental capacity. It is quite within our own power to dwarf or extend it. If we are content to rest satisfied with a small amount of knowledge we can do so, and even cease to suffer in our own self-esteem by feeling we are stupid, or indolent, or ignorant. Our perceptions are gradually blunted, and society is kind enough to case most of its remarks and opinions in a sugar-coating, so that the real truth never reaches us. We gradually find, then, that an ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... it, Elizabeth, for I had heard otherwise," said Fru Beck, with some embarrassment—and there was another pause. She felt from Elizabeth's manner and bearing that she had wounded her self-esteem; and this last unlucky speech, she was afraid, had ...
— The Pilot and his Wife • Jonas Lie
... watered at the red tank by the creek, there would be a five-minute stop, during which the prospective President would stand upon the rear platform and deliver a three-minute address—a few gracious words to tickle the self-esteem of his listeners—and would employ the other two minutes in shaking the hand of every man, woman, and child who could reach him before the train pulled out. There would be a cheer or two given as he ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... blood, or the possession of dignities and wealth—but pride, founded upon nothing. I am one of three children. I had two sisters—both are dead. My father was a workhouse boy, and his parentage was unknown. I told you that I had little reason to build a self-esteem upon my family descent; yet there was a period in my life when I would have given all I had in the world for an honourable pedigree—to know that I had bounding in my veins a portion of the blood that ages since ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... His self-esteem was at a very low ebb when Bob, dismissed from the infirmary, returned to his old quarters. Van was seldom depressed—so seldom, in fact, that the sight aroused in his chum nothing but an anxiety lest he be ill. Surely nothing ...
— The Story of Sugar • Sara Ware Bassett
... was a little surprised at this: however, it was not his habit easily to take offense at his friends. He was quite without that morbid self-esteem which is always imagining affronts or injuries. If people liked him, he was glad; if they showed it, he believed them, and rested in their affection with the simple faith of a child. But if they seemed to neglect him, he still was ready to conclude the slight was accidental, ...
— A Noble Life • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... astonished dame upon the enormity of such an insult to his son and to himself, demanded his account, determined that the child should not again be subject to such tyranny. Who can estimate the effect of this puerile triumph upon the growth of that morbid self-esteem which characterized the ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... of recognized Authority proclaims him? But Authority moves slowly in these matters; years have to pass before the music of the new voice can wind its way through the convolutions of the general ear—so many years, indeed, that unless the poet is blessed with the sublime self-esteem of Wordsworth he generally has to die in the belief that his is another name “written in water.” And was it ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... Wingfield, Sr.'s boast to himself that he had never been beaten, which average mortals with the temerity to say "Nonsense!"—that most equilibratory of words—might have diagnosed as a bad case of self-esteem finding a way to forget the resented incidental reverses of success. Yet, even average mortals noted when John Wingfield, Sr. arrived late at the store the morning after Jack's departure for the West that he had not slept well. His haggardness suggested that ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... gone from the visit to the Siebensternstrasse; only the determination remained. Wounded to the heart of her self-esteem, her pride in tatters, she took her way to the old lodge and climbed ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... dispute, hated every sort of contention; this characteristic gave a certain refinement to his otherwise commonplace existence. Vulgar vanity would have displayed itself in precisely the acts and words from which his self-esteem nervously shrank. And of late he had been thinking over the list of landladies, with a half-formed desire to settle down, to make himself a permanent home. Doubtless as a result of this state of mind, he ...
— Victorian Short Stories of Troubled Marriages • Rudyard Kipling, Ella D'Arcy, Arthur Morrison, Arthur Conan Doyle,
... the mistakes that a man could. Emperor by divine right, he had done his best to sting the self-esteem of the revolutionary emperor in Paris. By his language to the British ambassador about dividing the inheritance of the sick man, he had quickened the suspicions of the English cabinet. It is true the sick man will die, said Lord John Russell, ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... conscience whispered to him at all in the silent watches of the night, you may depend on it it whispered about the Baltic and the Nile and Cape St. Vincent, and not about his unfaithfulness to his wife. A man who robs little children when no one is looking can hardly have much self-respect or even self-esteem; but an accomplished burglar must be proud of himself. In the play to which I am at present preluding I have represented an artist who is so entirely satisfied with his artistic conscience, even to the point of dying like a saint with its support, that he is utterly selfish and ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... which we may well be proud—we of whom Wordsworth wrote that we must be free or die. Whatever the failures of unsympathetic self-esteem, Macaulay's spirit could point to this contribution as sufficient counterbalance. From the works of such teachers as Mill, Cobbett, Bagehot, and Morley, the mind of India has for the first time derived the principles of free government. But of all its teachers, I suppose ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... shafts told. Nanteuil, with fiery cheeks, held back her tears. Too young to possess or even to desire the prudence which comes to celebrated actresses when of an age to graduate as women of the world of fashion, she was full of self-esteem, and since she had known what it was to love another she was eager to efface everything unfashionable from her past; she felt that Chevalier, in killing himself for her sake, had behaved towards her ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... English fashion. When we are confronted with great issues, it is our habit, or so we are fond of saying, to 'muddle through'. Foreign nations, and especially enemy nations, do not so describe our activities. But we are great self-critics, and not free from that kind of inverted self-esteem which makes a man speak of his own achievements with deceitful and extravagant modesty. The business of history is to tell the truth; the truth is that we muddle through with amazing success. This success we affect to regard as an undeserved reward bestowed by ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... the least sign of his old weakness pass. At times she felt that she was cruel, but she allowed herself to be harrowed, finding, perhaps, in the pain that she inflicted on both of them, something that was flattering both to her conscience and to her self-esteem. ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... have its day, and comfortest thyself that the Elfrida and the Pirro will live forever. Perhaps a mistake, but it is by such mistakes that true genius conquers envy. "To be immortal," says Schiller, "live in the whole." To be superior to the hour, live in thy self-esteem. The audience now would give their ears for those variations and flights they were once wont to hiss. No!—Pisani has been two-thirds of a life at silent work on his masterpiece: there is nothing he ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... authors, diligent in the abstract sciences, caring little for the others,[11] thoroughly trained in mathematics and geography; quiet, fond of solitude, capricious, haughty, extremely inclined to egotism, speaking little, energetic in his replies, prompt and severe in repartee; having much self-esteem; ambitious and aspiring to any height: "the youth is worthy of protection." There is, unfortunately, no documentary evidence to sustain the genuineness of this report; but whatever its origin, it is so nearly contemporary that ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... for me the first hint of his attitude towards this adventure. In his exaggerated delicacy of sentiment he felt that nobody's self-esteem need be affected by what a madman may choose to do to one. It became apparent, however, that the Count was to be denied that consolation. He enlarged upon the abominably savage way in which that young man rolled his glistening eyes and gnashed ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... his occasional refusal to appear at certain of these concerts has been attributed—generally by ignorant persons, but sometimes also by others, who, as they knew better, must have been influenced alone by bad motives—to his possession of undue self-esteem, &c. But these unjust criticisms, although often causing him pain, could never swerve him from his chosen path. He would never lower his standard, and he always sought to enter the lists with those who contended for the highest prizes in art. The prominent position he holds to-day as an ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... have been always on the watch to take him down a peg when he was pleased with himself—to hold him cheap and overpraise some duffer in his hearing—so that I might save my own self-esteem; to pay him bad little left-handed compliments, him and his, whenever I was out of humor; and I should have been always out of humor, ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... which is the Godhead, may we not analogically suppose, in the same manner, life within life, the less within the greater, and all within the Spirit Divine? In short, we are madly erring through self-esteem in believing man, in either his temporal or future destinies, to be of more moment in the universe than that vast "clod of the valley" which he tills and contemns, and to which he denies a soul, for no more profound ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... ever seen, and that he was filled with grief at losing the delights of her society, might have been disagreeable to her, or it might not. But to have him even in the lightest way intimate that her housekeeping was preferable to that of his own sister nettled her self-esteem. ...
— The Girl at Cobhurst • Frank Richard Stockton
... therefore, is to provide a relationship of firmness and tolerance within which a child may become autonomous and acquire a sense of self-control, self-esteem, and relationship with others. Otherwise he may suffer loss of confidence in himself and become skeptical of others, a result which can be the fruit of either restrictive discipline or ...
— Herein is Love • Reuel L. Howe
... Francis' opinion that scruples have their origin in a cunning self-esteem. I call it cunning because it is so subtle and crafty as to deceive even those who are troubled by it. As a proof of this assertion he evidenced the fact that "those who suffer from this malady will not acquiesce in the judgment of their directors, ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... generous sentiments, and the train of conduct which such sentiments inspire, we must provide ourselves with the soil in which such things grow, and engage in the species of husbandry by which they are matured; in other words, we must be no strangers to self-esteem and self-complacency. ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... same men who, on one field, are among the freest from prejudice, and who hold him lightly who does not think as liberally as themselves, are, on another field,—the moment the interests of their rank and class, or their vanity and self-esteem are concerned—found narrow to the point of stupidity, and hostile to the point of fanaticism. The men of the upper classes look down upon the lower; and so does almost the whole sex upon woman. The majority of men ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... preparation. The nucleus of a public library had been recently established by Joel Flagg and placed at the disposal of Benham. Here, by means of an encyclopaedia and two hand-books, Selma was able in three forenoons to compile a paper satisfactory to her self-esteem on the dynasties of Europe and their inferiority to the United States, but her other task was illumined for her by a happy incident, the promise of Littleton to lend her books. Indeed he seemed delightfully interested in both of her classes, which ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... you think them worth the price. But if you do, you rate them even more highly than they rate themselves; and English colonists are not much behind the citizens of the model Republic in honest self-esteem." ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... with my friend Levi Stewart at the houses of his relatives in Overton and Jackson counties, and preached several times. My friend Stewart was blessed with a large bump of self-esteem. He imagined that he could convert all of his relatives at once; that all he had to do was to present the gospel, and they would gladly embrace it. He appeared to forget that a prophet was not without honor, save in his own country and ...
— The Mormon Menace - The Confessions of John Doyle Lee, Danite • John Doyle Lee
... them, to the sight of what the believer is called to be, and may be, day by day, as he rejoices in the Lord, and recollects His presence, and tells Him everything as it comes, and so lives "in rest and quietness," deep in His peace; and finds his happy thoughts occupied not with the miseries of self-esteem and self-assertion, but with all that is pure and good, in the smile ...
— Philippian Studies - Lessons in Faith and Love from St. Paul's Epistle to the Philippians • Handley C. G. Moule
... Frankfort as of his grandfather Ferdinand at Madrid. Such was the adversary, with such advantages of nationality and of person, against whom Francis I., without any political necessity, and for the sole purpose of indulging an ambitious vision and his own kingly self-esteem, was about to engage in a struggle which was to entail a heavy burden on his whole life, and bring him not in triumph to Constantinople, but in captivity ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... she spoke so positively when taken out of herself by the interest and importance of a subject, she had no very high opinion of her own judgment and power to decide. A little more self-esteem would have been good for her; she was too diffident, "I have not come across people on whose knowledge I could rely," she told me. "I have been obliged to study alone, and to form my opinions for myself out of such scraps of information ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... of his genius. It is strange how much the lack of a single ingredient in a man's moral constitution—and that, too, an ingredient in itself of a low and vulgar cast—may affect one's whole destiny. It was the grand defect of this gifted man, that that sentiment of self-esteem, which seems in many instances so absurd and ridiculous a thing, and which some, in their little wisdom, would so fain strike out from among the components of human character, was almost wholly awanting. As the minister of an attached provincial congregation, a sense of duty led him to study ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... Self-esteem was abounding in the young Hebrew, and he did not hesitate to compare himself with others to his own advantage. At twenty-nine he wrote his sister after an evening in the gallery of the House of Commons, "Heard Macaulay's best speech.....but between ourselves I could floor them all!" Egotism ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... well as that which he derives from the contemplation of the world to come, and the cultivation of his relation to it, (pure religion.) The other sentiments may be briefly enumerated, their names being sufficient in general to denote their functions— firmness, hope, cautiousness, self-esteem, love of approbation, secretiveness, marvellousness, constructiveness, imitation, combativeness, destructiveness, concentrativeness, adhesiveness, love of the opposite sex, love of offspring, alimentiveness, and love of life. Through these faculties, man is connected ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... this time. Dr. Hedge, James Freeman Clarke, and William Henry Channing were among them. With Emerson she made acquaintance a little later, through Miss Martineau, then visiting in this country. She was not at this time an agreeable person. She was much derided for her self-esteem by people who knew her slightly, and was also accused of hauteur and arrogance. Even Lowell was thus impressed by her, and put her in the pillory in the "Fable for Critics." He proposes to establish new punishments for ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... jugs and pots in the tray left standing on the library table. It was summer, but a cold rain was falling forbiddingly without. No one else could come, and no one could wish to go. The conditions all favored a just self-esteem, and a sense of providential preference in the accidental assemblage of those people ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... the same mood of cheerful resolution when, after an exceptionally busy day, which had also ministered in an exceptional degree to his self-esteem (it had included an interview with one of the whips of his party, as well as a satisfactory conversation with his agent on the temper of the constituency whose member was so seasonably deceased), he had dressed at his club, and dawdled ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... Indeed, place this reversed skull (scaled down to the human magnitude) among a plate of men's skulls, and you would involuntarily confound it with them; and remarking the depressions on one part of its summit, in phrenological phrase you would say—This man had no self-esteem, and no veneration. And by those negations, considered along with the affirmative fact of his prodigious bulk and power, you can best form to yourself the truest, though not the most exhilarating conception of what the ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... flesh-wounds; that remorse is the least permanent of sentiments. But then Westray might not yet wish to forget. He had run full counter to his principles. It might be that he was resolved to take the consequences, and wear them like a hair-shirt, as the only means of recovering his self-esteem. No; whatever penance, voluntary or involuntary, Westray might undergo, Lord Blandamer could only look on in silence. His object had been gained. If Westray felt it necessary to pay the price, he must be let pay it. Lord Blandamer could neither inquire nor remonstrate. ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... Christmas mess already bought and paid for; and he was all flattered up with self-esteem over his idea; and we had in a way flew the flume with that fizzy wine I speak of; ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... should succeed in attracting his notice, after this. Even in these private pages, my self-esteem finds it hard to confess what happened. I succeeded in reminding Philip that he had his reasons for requesting ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... Knowledge and the suppression of Ignorance and Falsehood. "Sacrilege," with this profession, means the breaking of its two great commandments and all sins of commission and omission suggested and prompted by vain love of fame, by sordid self-esteem or by ignoble rancour. What then shall we say of a paper which, professedly established to "counteract the immorality of The Times," adds to normal journalistic follies, offences and mistakes an utter absence of literary honour, systematic misrepresentation, malignity ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
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