"Self-assertion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... who had a combative though not unamiable disposition, took down the rifle as an act of self-assertion, and walked out into the twilight with it on his shoulder. It was simply a contradictious action, as there was no warranty for it in vert and venison. But he had to garnish his action with an appearance of plausibility, and nothing suggested itself. The only course open to him was to get ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... beautiful discourses, the effect of which was always observable upon youthful imaginations and consciences morally pure, here fell upon stone. He who was so much at his ease on the shores of his charming little lake, felt constrained and not at home in the company of pedants. His perpetual self-assertion appeared somewhat fastidious.[1] He was obliged to become controversialist, jurist, exegetist, and theologian. His conversations, generally so full of charm, became a rolling fire of disputes,[2] an interminable train of scholastic battles. His harmonious genius was wasted in insipid argumentations ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... in strongest contrast to the knight. He fills up, as it were, by his gentleness and self-sacrifice, what is wanting in the manhood of the knight, the slave too often of his own fierceness and self-assertion. The hermit rebukes him when he sins, heals him when he is wounded, stays his hand in some mad murderous duel, such as was too common in days when any two armed horsemen meeting on road or lawn ran blindly at each other in the mere lust of fighting, as boars or stags ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... those old Greek sages still brooded over them. Their charm lies in the fact that they are civilized without being commercialized. Their politeness is unstrained, their suaveness congenital; they remind me of that New England type which for Western self-assertion substitutes a yielding graciousness of disposition. So it is with persistent gentle upbringing, at Taranto and elsewhere. It tones the individual to reposeful sweetness; one by one, his anfractuosities are worn off; he becomes ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... an opinion or a measure on a man whose belief in his own wisdom was infinite, to risk not only being set down as a dreamer, but the King's displeasure, and the ruin of being given over to the will of his enemies, this Bacon had not the fibre or the stiffness or the self-assertion to do. He did not do what a man of firm will and strength of purpose, a man of high integrity, of habitual resolution, would have done. Such men insist when they are responsible, and when they know that they are right; ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... not be silent," cried Indolence, roused to momentary self-assertion. "I have no enjoyment left in life. You ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 25, January 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... hands fumbled their way into the tops of Toby's trousers, and, with a sudden self-assertion, which fitted him badly, he lurched over to the table, beyond which Birdie was standing. It was his intention to seat himself thereon, but his tormentor had not yet reached the point where she could allow ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... Friedrich Schlegel joined his brother at Jena, where Fichte was then expounding his philosophy. It was a system of radical idealism, teaching that the only reality is the absolute Ego, whose self-assertion thus becomes the fundamental law of the world. The Fichtean system had not yet been fully worked out in its metaphysical bearings, but the strong and engaging personality of its author gave it, for a little ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... manliness. Nothing little, weak, whining, or sentimental can be detected in any page of the six volumes of his works. A certain strength and grandeur of personality is prominent in all his speeches. When he says "I," or "my," he never appears to indulge in the bravado of self-assertion, because the words are felt to express a positive, stalwart, almost colossal manhood, which had already been implied in the close-knit sentences in which he embodied his statements and arguments. He is an eminent instance of the power which ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... too evident contempt for his adversary, or by the over-statement of a good cause, habitually throws the minds of his hearers into an attitude of opposition. There are the many men who, by ill-timed or too frequent levity, lose all credit for their serious qualities, or who by pretentiousness or self-assertion or restless efforts to distinguish themselves, make themselves universally disliked, or who by their egotism or their repetitions or their persistence, or their incapacity of distinguishing essentials from details, or understanding the dispositions of others, or appreciating times and ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... its balance by the events of the day, his mind was full of that sourly savage resistance to the inevitable self-assertion of wealth, so amiably deplored by the prosperous and the rich; so bitterly familiar to the unfortunate and the poor. "The heather-bell costs nothing!" he thought, looking contemptuously at the masses of rare and beautiful flowers that surrounded him; "and the buttercups ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... manifestly getting the better of him! When he had married her, not yet nine months since, she had been a little girl, altogether in his hands, not pretending to any self-action, and anxious to be guided in everything by him. His only fear had been that she might be too slow in learning that self-assertion which is necessary from a married woman to the world at large. But now she had made very great progress in the lesson, not only as regarded the world at large, but as regarded himself also. As for his family,—the ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... she and Gertrude had bitter words and a parting. Now the same thing stared her in the face again. This lover was too obtuse to be stung by the fine arts of coquetry that lengthened practice had brought to perfection. In all the bravery of self-assertion, he did not know when he was beaten; and so he fought against the intangible spear-points with which ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... not infrequently browbeats cautious wisdom. When applied to a man like Hawke, strong in natural temper and in conscious mastery of his profession, the tone characteristic of Pitt provokes an equally resolute self-assertion, as far removed from subjection as it is from insubordination; but friendship becomes impossible, and ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... young laird; for if he had no lands, neither had he any pride, they said, and was as happy sitting with any old woman, and sharing her tea, as at a lord's table. Nor was he less of a favourite at school, though, being incapable of self-assertion, his inborn consciousness of essential humanity rendering it next to impossible for him to claim anything, some of the bigger boys were less than friendly with him. One point in his conduct was in particular distasteful ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... tender than Lopez. Every word and every act, every look and every touch, had been loving. Had she known the world better she might have felt, perhaps, that something was expected where so much was given. Perhaps a rougher manner, with some little touch of marital self-assertion, might be a safer commencement of married life,—safer to the wife as coming from her husband. Arthur Fletcher by this time would have asked her to bring him his slippers, taking infinite pride in having his little ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... written a book that teaches, of all others, self-renunciation, but the way they taught it was self-assertion. The Bible begins with a meek Moses who teaches by saying "The Lord said unto Moses," and it comes to its climax in a lowly and radiant man who dies on a cross to say "I and the Father are one." The man Jesus seems ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... the transformed character of the gods, and of the parallel disciplining of men's valuations. In the words of Fosdick, prayer may be considered as dominant desire. But it is also a way of securing domination over desire. It is indeed self-assertion; sometimes it is the making of one's supreme claim, as when life reaches its most tragic crisis; yet it is, even in the same act, submission to an over-self. Here, then, is our greater problem as to the function of prayer. It starts as the ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... hope; for, let a man only give himself to anything, wreak himself on the world in the intensity of his hate, set all sail before the gusts of passion and "range from Helen to Elvire, frenetic to be free," let him rise into a decisive self-assertion against the stable order of the moral world, and he cannot fail to discover the nature of the task he has undertaken, and the meaning of the power without, against which he has set himself. If there be sufficient strength in a man to vent himself ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... most important; Whistler taught him that men of genius stand apart and are laws unto themselves; showed him, too, that all qualities—singularity of appearance, wit, rudeness even, count doubly in a democracy. But neither his own talent nor the bold self-assertion learned from Whistler helped him to earn money; the conquest of London seemed further off and more improbable than ever. Where Whistler had missed the laurel how could he or indeed ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... unsmiling cottages, fronting on cinder sidewalks, and alternating irregularly with about as many larger homesteads that sat back in their well-shaded gardens with kindlier dignity and not so grim a self-assertion. Behind, on the west, these gardens dropped swiftly out of sight to a hidden brook, from the farther shore of which rose the great wooded hill whose shelter from the bitter northwest had invited the old Puritan founders to choose the spot for their farming village of one street, with a Byington ...
— Bylow Hill • George Washington Cable
... anybody's respect or love either. Neither does willful opposition, any more. Proper self-respect and a fair share of self-love is more sure of winning admiration, from men or women, than too little self-assertion ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... More and Bishop Fisher and their committal to the Tower a few days later caused nothing less than consternation in England and of furious indignation on the Continent. It was evident that greatness would save no man; the best hope lay in obscurity, and men who had been loud in self-assertion ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... pouted. Her beauty gave her some power of self-assertion, although in reality she was of an exceedingly ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... mother did not agree with him about the teacher's behavior in putting him back. No boy's father and mother agreed with him on this point; every boy returned in just the same way; but somehow the insult had been wiped out by the mere act of self-assertion, and a boy kept his standing in the world as he could never have done if he had not left school when ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... small compensation for any of this literary work, for he lacked the knowledge of business and the self-assertion necessary to obtain even the moderate remuneration vouchsafed to writers fifty years ago." [Footnote: ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... excellences as courage, temperance, and justice did not attain to their true meaning or yield their full implication. Paul, as we have seen, did not disparage heroism, but he thought that it was exhibited as much, if not more, in patience and forgiveness as in self-assertion and retaliation. What Christianity really revealed was a new type of manliness, a fresh application of temperance, a fuller development of justice. It showed the might of meekness, the power of gentleness, ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... Life his own life clogged his feet; to act was like wading in treacle. He had an impulse of utter wild rebellion, of ferocious self-assertion. Then: ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... of State who said the final convincing word about it, summing it all up, saying what everyone else had been trying to say but no one else had entirely succeeded in saying, simplifying it, and all with an air of service, not of self-assertion. ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... a number of recorded cases causes sudden death at its acme, from the strain it imposes upon the system. Its cause is always some form of thwarting wish or will or of reduction of self-feeling, as anger is the acme of self-assertion. The German criminalist, Friedrich, says that probably every man might be caused to commit murder if provocation were sufficient, and that those of us who have never committed this crime owe it to circumstances and not to superior power of inhibition. Of course it may be associated ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... life is not a portion of the life of Universal Spirit, whence comes it? We are because that is. No other explanation is possible. The unqualified affirmation of our own livingness is not an audacious self-assertion: it is the only logical outcome of the fact that there is any life anywhere, and that we are here to think about it. In the sense of Universal Being, there can be only One I am, and the understanding use of ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... a needs-be for this exhortation? Are not self-indulgence and self-assertion temptations to which we are ever exposed, and to which we constantly give way, without even a thought of the un-Christliness of such conduct? That we owe something to GOD all Christians admit; and it may be hoped that the number of those is ...
— A Ribband of Blue - And Other Bible Studies • J. Hudson Taylor
... recognized by a man of apparently equal importance and distinction, who had quietly and unconsciously taken a seat by his side, and the recognition appeared equally unexpected and awkward. The new-comer was the older and more decorous-looking, with an added formality of manner and self-assertion that did not, however, conceal a certain habitual shrewdness of eye and lip. He wore a full beard, but the absence of a moustache left the upper half of his handsome and rather satirical mouth uncovered. His dress was less pronounced than his companion's, but of a type of older and ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... cannot exert power or give direction. Nothing can be responsible for the world except the world itself. It has created, or is creating, itself perpetually by its own arbitrary act, by a groundless self-assertion which may be called (somewhat metaphorically) will, or even original sin: the original sin of existence, particularity, selfishness, or separation from God. Existence, being absolutely contingent and ungrounded, is perfectly free: and if it ties itself up in its own ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... title. I like, too, to parallel the anecdote of Caius Marius, when, after his ruin, he concealed himself in the marshes, and astonished his captors, who expected to find him weak of heart, by the magnificent self-assertion of "I am Caius Marius," with the story which is told of Stefano Colonna. After this great captain met with his sad reverses, and, deprived of all his possessions, fled from Rome, an attendant asked him,—"What fortress ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... having regained her normal position by one single natural impulse of self-assertion, not as a religionist, but as Tyler Sud-ley's wife, and hence entitled to all the show of respect which that fact unaided could command, sat looking at him with a changed face—a face that seemed twenty years younger; ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... unstudied ease in his well-fitting garments bespoke the dweller of cities. Good-looking and well-dressed, without the consciousness of being either; self-possessed through easy circumstances, yet without self-assertion; courteous by nature and instinct as well as from an experience of granting favors, he might have been a welcome addition to even a more critical company. But Red Jim, hurriedly seizing his outstretched hand, instantly dragged him away from ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... the fear of Negro domination, one of the causes of the backwardness of the South and its peculiar civilization. Many of the expensive precautions which the southern people have taken to keep the Negroes down, much of the terrorism incited to restrain the blacks from self-assertion will no longer be considered necessary; for, having the excess in numbers on their side, the whites will finally rest assured that the Negroes may be encouraged without any apprehension that they may develop enough power to subjugate or embarrass ...
— A Century of Negro Migration • Carter G. Woodson
... that the sarcasms aimed by public writers at his infirmity inclined him to justify their attacks rather than to disprove them by his subsequent demeanor, and that some of his most extravagant outbursts of self-assertion were designed in a spirit of bravado and reckless good-nature to increase the laughter which satirists had raised against him. However this may be, his conduct drew upon him blows that would have ruffled the composure of any less self-complacent or less amiable man. The Tory prints habitually ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... to present him to society; but he was as serenely terrible as a well-aimed rifle, and the old man looked upon his results with pride. He had cultivated him up to that pitch where he scorned to practise any vice, or any virtue, that did not include the principle of self-assertion. A few touches only were wanting here and there to achieve perfection, when suddenly the old man died. Yet it was his proud satisfaction, before he finally lay down, to see Ursin a favored companion and the peer, both in courtesy and pride, of those polished gentlemen famous in history, ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... possibly also to wait for others' deeds before her own doing. In her small, delicate mouth, which had perhaps hardly settled down to its matured curves, there was a gentleness that might hinder sufficient self-assertion for her own good. She had well-formed eyebrows which, had her portrait been painted, would probably have been done in ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... flamboyant automne. Something of the colour and fever of autumn is in all he wrote. Another writer since Cladel, who has probably never heard of him, has made heroes of peasants and vagabonds. But Maxim Gorki makes heroes of them, consciously, with a mental self-assertion, giving them ideas which he has found in Nietzsche. Cladel put into all his people some of his own passionate way of seeing 'scarlet,' to use Barbey d'Aurevilly's epithet: un rural ecarlate. Vehement ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... own portrait as well as that of his friend Pirkheimer, and of making the fullest claim to his work by introducing into his religious and historical pictures his own figure holding a flag or tablet, inscribed with his name in the quiet self-assertion of a man who was neither ashamed of himself, nor of anything he did.) In that last portrait, Albrecht is a thoughtful, care-worn man, with his fair locks shorn. Some will attribute the change to Agnes Duerer, but I imagine it proceeds ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... his masculine judgment. It must be always so. The man must needs retain for many years to come the personal hegemony he has usurped over the woman; and the woman who once accepts him as lover or as husband must give way in the end, even in matters of principle, to his virile self-assertion. She would be less a woman, and he less a man, were any other result possible. Deep down in the very roots of the idea of sex we come on that prime antithesis,—the male, active and aggressive; the female, ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... the most curious episodes in the career of Disraeli was that he insisted on sitting on the front Opposition bench before he had ever held office—an act of unprecedented and unjustifiable daring which throws a significant light on that habit of self-assertion to which he owed a good deal of his success in life. For what a seat on the front Opposition bench means is, that the holder thereof has once held office in an administration, and so is justified for the remainder of his ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... intense and ever growing rivalry for that supremacy on the ocean towards which the monarchy and the republic were so earnestly struggling, with a common passion for civil and religious freedom, and with that inveterate habit of self-assertion—the healthful but not engaging attribute of all vigorous nations—which strongly marked them both, was rapidly producing an antipathy between the two countries which time was likely rather to deepen than efface. And the national divergences were as potent as the traits of resemblance ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... not a virtue of youth; it is not one of the virtues which ripen quickly, but is of slow development and delayed maturity. Modesty we should expect in a maiden, and lack of self-assertion; and perhaps obedience of a sort. But those do not constitute the virtue of humility. We are humble when we have lost self; and Mary's wondering answer reveals the fact that she is not thinking of herself at all, ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... and whose pen has already been powerful in exposing its absurdity. "In our general literature," says Bayne, "the principle we have enunciated undergoes modification, and, for the most part, is by no means expressed as pantheism. We refer to that spirit of self-assertion, which lies so deep in what may be called the religion of literature, to that wide-spread tendency to regard all reform of the individual man as being an evolution of some hidden nobleness, or an appeal to a perfect internal light or law, together with what may be called ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... is a great virtue even in a Julius II. There is a vast deal of humbug in the use we make of the word humility. We talk about Christ's humility, but whose self-assertion has ever been more unmitigated? "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Light." "Learn of Me that I am meek and lowly, and ye shall find rest to your souls." No doubt it is the quality of the self asserted that justifies ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... policy having represented, as is believed by some, the self-assertion of a proud Imperialism, it has ...
— Native Races and the War • Josephine Elizabeth Butler
... the transition is obvious and direct. Be the explanation what it may, the whole atmosphere of this school is evidently fatal to selfishness and self-assertion; and in such an atmosphere good manners will spring up spontaneously among the children, and will scarcely need to be inculcated, for the essence of courtesy is forgetfulness of self and consideration of others in the smaller ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... respectfully, although he did not fawn over the dignitary or lose his own quiet self-assertion. He was an American. He told of finding the tortured prospector and of the plight of ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens
... NICOLA (with dogged self-assertion). Yes, me. Who was it made you give up wearing a couple of pounds of false black hair on your head and reddening your lips and cheeks like any other Bulgarian girl? I did. Who taught you to trim your nails, and keep your hands ...
— Arms and the Man • George Bernard Shaw
... usher said with a tone of self-assertion which grated a little on the Doctor's ear, in spite of his good-humour towards the speaker. "I don't want to go into that," he said. "A man never can say what his intentions ...
— Dr. Wortle's School • Anthony Trollope
... taught by Paul of Tarsus and Augustine, through Calvin and the divines of New England; from the avenging fierceness of the Puritans, who dashed the mitre on the ruins of the throne; from the bold dissent and creative self-assertion of the earliest emigrants to Massachusetts; from the statesmen who made, and the philosophers who expounded, the revolution of England; from the liberal spirit and analyzing inquisitiveness of the eighteenth century; from the cloud ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... of the clothes—back of the ruffles, or the bright neckcloth, or the high pickardil—which may vary with the time or the individual, you will ever find clearly displayed to your eyes the obvious and unmistakable spiritual reason for and cause of the dandy—and it is always self-assertion pushed beyond the ...
— The Story of a New York House • Henry Cuyler Bunner
... exceedingly difficult to do so, at school especially, as in many cases their whole family consents to regard them as extinct, and only when startled at the over-growth of their girls' unmannerly roughness and self-assertion they send them to school "to have their manners attended to"; but then it is too late. The only way to form manners is to teach them from the beginning as a part of religion, as indeed they are. Devotion to Our Lady will give to the manners both of boys and girls ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... "that generous forbearance, patience, fortitude, and self-renunciation, belong almost naturally to the true wife and mother, and are her great glory; but would she not be stripped of them by self-assertion as the ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... favor. To this we have the concurrent testimony of those who knew him slightly, and of those who knew him well. It was due to a variety of causes. He had infinite pride, and there was in his manner a self-assertion that often bordered, or seemed to border, upon arrogance. His earnestness, moreover, was often mistaken for brusqueness and violence; for he was, in some measure, of that (p. 080) class of men who appear to be excited when they are only interested. The result was that at first ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... fastening the anchor—I remember, I say, what a figure she made. There is a certain purity in this Cragthorpe air which I have never seen approached,—a lightness, a brilliancy, a crudity, which allows perfect liberty of self-assertion to each individual object in the landscape. The prospect is ever more or less like a picture which lacks its final process, its reduction to unity. Miss Blunt's figure, as she stood there on the beach, was almost criarde; but how lovely it was! Her light muslin dress, gathered up over ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... a character, or to promote its development, rightly insists on desertion. To find itself in solitude, and still more to find itself thrown upon that state of abandonment by sudden treachery, crushes the feeble mind, but rouses a terrific reaction of haughty self-assertion in that order of spirits which matches and measures itself against difficulty and danger. There is something corresponding to this case of human treachery in the sudden caprices of fortune. A danger, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... experiences, need just the precipitation and tincture of this entirely different fancy world of lulling, contrasting, even feudalistic, anti-republican poetry and romance. On the enormous outgrowth of our unloos'd individualities, and the rank, self-assertion of humanity here, may well fall these grace-persuading, recherche influences. We first require that individuals and communities shall be free; then surely comes a time when it is requisite that they shall not be too free. Although to such results in the ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... American case the balance of effectual public opinion hitherto is to all appearance quite in doubt, but it is also quite unsettled. The first response has been a display of patriotic emotion and national self-assertion. The further, later and presumably more deliberate, expressions of opinion carry a more obvious note of apprehension and less of stubborn or unreflecting national pride. It may be too early to anticipate a material shift of base, to a more neutral, ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... is steadily diminishing. Other nations feel a universal distrust and dislike toward Germany. So great is this antipathy that the Germans imagine there is a malignant conspiracy against them. An upstart nation, suddenly wealthy and powerful, Germany has developed an inordinate self-conceit and self-assertion. The German glories in being a realist. He thinks only of political power and colonial expansion. Might is the supreme test of right. He constantly emphasizes the indelible character of the German race. Germans are suffering from "acute megalomania." They ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... their worship. These two influences will, I believe, forever make it impossible for Jewish women in any numbers to accept the egoistic view of marriage and the duties of women that has been set up in England, as also in other European lands and in America, indeed wherever Self-assertion has been admitted as ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... of the presentation as if a gradual revival of memory had brought with it the clear conviction of its own accuracy. His explanation of the phenomenon was, that, in some cases, all that prevents a vivid conception from assuming objectivity, is the self-assertion of external objects. The gradual approach of darkness cannot surprise and isolate the phantasm; but the suddenness of the lightning could and did, obliterating everything without, and leaving that over which it had no power standing ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... nails were not rust, and really held it tight—instead of, as now, merely countenancing its wish to remain from old habit? It may have been so frightened in its timid youth; but if so, surely the robust self-assertion of its straight start for Gattrell's had in it something of contempt for the poor old board, coupled with its well-known intention of turning to the left and going slap through the wood the minute you (or it) got there. It may even have ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... complications, its infinite possibilities of beauty and joy. Your life is, as ever, a sacrifice; all life is, as ever, a sacrifice; but it is a sacrifice to man—a sacrifice to the best. Once your task was self-abnegation, and that was easy; now it is self-assertion, and that is hard. Knowing what you are, you will dare to live, not for your own sake, but that strength and beauty may be in the world. Knowing what you might be, you choose infinite toil for your portion, ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... their own power. Tyranny palls. Mrs. Harrington was longing to be thwarted by some one stronger than herself. The FitzHenrys even in their boyhood had, by their sturdy independence, their simple, seamanlike self-assertion, touched some chord in this lone woman's heart which would ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... remembered and understood.... It was Pentecost then! And with memory a shred of reflection came back. Where then was the wind, and the flame, and the earthquake, and the secret voice? Yet the world was silent, rigid in its last effort at self-assertion: there was no tremor to show that God remembered; no actual point of light, yet, breaking the appalling vault of gloom that lay over sea and land to reveal that He burned there in eternity, transcendent and dominant; ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... remedy for that sort of thing. And yet there is no remedy. Behind this minute instance of life's hazards Heyst sees the power of blind destiny. Besides, Heyst in his fine detachment had lost the habit of asserting himself. I don't mean the courage of self-assertion, either moral or physical, but the mere way of it, the trick of the thing, the readiness of mind and the turn of the hand that come without reflection and lead the man to excellence in life, in art, in crime, in virtue and for the matter of that, even in love. Thinking is the great enemy ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... herself. "Other people never will understand. Now, I know better than to try anybody." If that hasty breath was a sigh, there was little sound of sorrow in it. It was a little gust of impatience, indignation, intolerance even, and hasty self-assertion. She alone knew what she could do, and must do. Not one other soul in the world beside could enter into her inevitable work ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... He was there, with his neatly arranged papers, and made no more account of his trouble than anybody else did. Down to yesterday's post outward, my clergyman alone had written one thousand and seventy-five letters to relatives and friends of the lost people. In the absence of self-assertion, it was only through my now and then delicately putting a question as the occasion arose, that I became informed of these things. It was only when I had remarked again and again, in the church, on the awful nature of the scene of death he had been required so closely ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... observe children. It is fascinating to watch the individuality in them struggling for self-assertion. I could see that the other children's things had tremendous charm for the red-haired boy, especially a toy theatre, in which he was so anxious to take a part that he resolved to fawn upon the other children. ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... did all he could, and the counsel for the defense not much—at least Dawtie's friends thought so—and the judge summed up with the greatest impartiality. Dawtie's simplicity and calmness, her confidence devoid of self-assertion, had its influence on the jury, and they gave the uncomfortable verdict of "Not Proven," so that ...
— The Elect Lady • George MacDonald
... ready to tease any child who simply looks teasable, and so provokes the act. Now the Bruces were not good children, as was natural; and they despised Annie because she was a girl, and because she had no self-assertion. If she had shown herself aggressively disagreeable, they would have made some attempt to conciliate her; but as it was, she became at once the object of a succession of spiteful annoyances, varying ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... was lowered—for her ear; there was deference in his smile. But somehow Lydia was conscious of a note of stormy self-assertion in him, which was new to her; something strong and stubborn, which refused to take her ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... thought is termed rationalism, and the slight stigma which is still attached to the word reflects the bitterness of the struggle between reason and the forces arrayed against her. The term is limited to the field of theology, because it was in that field that the self-assertion of reason was most violently and pertinaciously opposed. In the same way free thought, the refusal of thought to be controlled by any authority but its own, has a ...
— A History of Freedom of Thought • John Bagnell Bury
... and invigorating the whole service until a zealous activity of the most promising kind was displayed by officers and men alike. By September twenty-ninth fourteen guns were mounted and four mortars, the essential material was gathered, and by sheer self-assertion Buonaparte was in complete charge. The only check was in the ignorant meddling of Carteaux, who, though energetic and zealous, though born and bred in camp, being the son of a soldier, was, after all, not a soldier, but a very fair artist (painter). For his battle-pieces ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... is overcome when he does wrong, and he afterwards repents (VIII.). Here, again, Aristotle denies that sticking to one's opinions is, per se, continence. The opinion may be wrong; in that case, if a man sticks to it, prompted by mere self-assertion and love of victory, it is a species of incontinence. One of the virtues of the continent man is to be open to persuasion, and to desert one's resolutions for a noble end (IX.). Incontinence is like sleep or drunkenness as opposed to wakeful knowledge. The incontinent man is like a state having ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... aroused, perhaps, to self-assertion by the presence of another man, walked three abreast with Abby and Granville, but on the other side of Granville. Now and then he peered around the other man at the girl, with soft, wistful blue eyes, but Abby never seemed to see him. She talked fast, in a harsh, ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... bleak loneliness. A sense of insignificance fell heavily upon her, bearing down her high sufficiency, making her feel that she was a purposeless spectator on the outside of life. She struggled against it, struggled back toward cheer and self-assertion, and in her effort to get back, found herself seeking news of less ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... their old quaint expressions. Though these essays are all criticisms or appreciations of the life of his age, they are all intensely personal. In other words, they are an excellent picture of Lamb and of humanity. Without a trace of vanity or self-assertion, Lamb begins with himself, with some purely personal mood or experience, and from this he leads the reader to see life and literature as he saw it. It is this wonderful combination of personal and universal interests, together with Lamb's rare ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... valuable in this new country. The entrance of old society upon free lands meant to him opportunity for a new type of democracy and new popular ideals. The West was not conservative: buoyant self-confidence and self-assertion were distinguishing traits in its composition. It saw in its growth nothing less than a new order of society and state. In this conception were elements of evil ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... motive was more considered by the mothers, and must be sought in the organisation of the maternal clan. But since individual desires can never be wholly subdued, and the male nature is ever directed towards self-assertion, the clan, organised on the rights of the mothers, had always to contend with an opposing force. At one stage the clan was able to absorb the family, but only under exceptional conditions could such a system be maintained. ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... turned sixty, handsome, grey-haired, healthy, somewhat florid, and carrying in his face and person external signs of prosperity and that kind of self-assertion which prosperity always produces. But they who knew him best were aware that he did not bear trouble well. In any trouble, such as was this about the necklace, there would come over his face a look of weakness which betrayed the want of real inner strength. How many ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... interests, in assimilating English thought and traditions, and exercising an important influence at a critical time on one extremely important side of English life and opinion. He was less felicitous in allying the German with the Englishman, perhaps from personal peculiarities of impatience, self-assertion, and haste, than one who has since trodden in his steps and realised more completely and more splendidly some of the great designs which floated before his mind. But few foreigners have gained more fairly, by work and by sympathy, the ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... of Esther, giddy, flirting, useless Esther, as Tom's wife, was almost more than she could bear. The sting of it put even into her crushed humility a certain honest self-assertion. ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... positive and negative reaction from the primary centers of consciousness. From the first great center of sympathy the child is drawn to a lovely oneing with the mother. From the first great center of will comes the independent self-assertion which locates the mother as something outside, something objective. And as a result of this twofold notion, a twofold increase in the child. First, the dynamic establishment of the individual consciousness in the infant: and then the first shadow of ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... quarrel. The quarrel grows broader and deeper. Number one restates his case somewhat differently. Number two takes it up on its new ground. Argument is followed by vociferation and abuse; a momentary self-restraint by a fresh outbreak of self-assertion. All tempers come into play, all modes of attack are employed, from pounding with a crowbar to pricking with a pin. And where all this time is music? Where is the gold of truth? Spun over and blackened by the tissue of jangling sounds, as is the ceiling ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... easy to Hafiz. It gives him the opportunity of the most playful self-assertion, always gracefully, sometimes almost in the fun of Falstaff, sometimes with feminine delicacy. He tells us, "The angels in heaven were lately learning his last pieces." He says, "The fishes shed their pearls, out of desire ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... would not be particularly suited for married life, where self-sacrifice and strong-minded patience may be severely tested. In addition his three wives were themselves artists, one an authoress, the other two actresses, all of them pronounced characters, endowed with a degree of will and self-assertion, which, although it could not be matched against Strindberg's, yet would have been capable of producing friction with rather more pliant natures than that of the ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... hear him say anything very bright or illuminating, but every one felt, I think, that he was a cheerful and dependable person. I always felt, when I observed him, that he understood the Russian character far better than any of us. He had none of the self-assertion of the average Englishman and, at the same time, he had his opinions and his preferences. He took every kind of chaff with good-humoured indifference, but I think it was above everything else his tolerance that pleased the Russians. Nothing shocked him, which ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... situations in which love and human worth had their way in spite of a thousand obstacles. They were challenged by prophets of a better world, the Ruskins and Carlyles who soundly rated the ethics of selfishness and the political economies of competition and the politics of self-assertion and who stirred deeply the more sensitive of their time. And finally they were challenged, and here we begin to approach again the genesis of New Thought, by a philosophic movement which found its point of departure in certain great aspects of earlier thinking which had been much obscured by ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... be added. Hand in hand with this rationalizing tendency, indeed only another phase of the same phenomenon, is the striving for self-assertion of the individual, which is the mark of all progress towards higher civilization. The contrapuntal mass or motet expressed the commonwealth of the Church, where the individual disappears, absorbed in the community. The nuove musiche sought to emancipate the ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... engage him, it would hold him. If, perhaps, he did not let it swallow him up. If he worked with an eye open for opportunities of self-assertion.... ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... desertion from the British army and his reckless disregard for the rights of his creditors; for then the debtor was not allowed to retain his respectability, if he failed dishonestly. Furthermore, his self-assertion was recognized as too often a display of arrogance and vanity. Brown's sister Elizabeth had married Oliver Arnold, attorney-general of Rhode Island, a cousin of Benedict, and it is reasonable to suppose that he was well informed of Arnold's ...
— Colonel John Brown, of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, the Brave Accuser of Benedict Arnold • Archibald Murray Howe
... six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull. His voice was deep, loud, and his manner displayed a kind of dogged self-assertion which had nothing aggressive in it. It seemed a necessity, and it was directed apparently as much at himself as at anybody else. He was spotlessly neat, apparelled in immaculate white from shoes to hat, and in the various Eastern ports where he got his living as ship-chandler's water-clerk ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... Unitarians in possession. So it is in many of the oldest towns founded by the American colonists of the seventeenth century. In their centres the parish churches, 'First,' 'Second,' or otherwise, stand forth challenging everybody's attention. There is no lack of self-assertion here, nothing at all like the shrinking of the Old English Presbyterian into obscure alleys and corners. Spacious, well appointed, and secure, these Unitarian parish churches, in the words of a popular ...
— Unitarianism • W.G. Tarrant
... P." after his name; another is remembered as an elder in the little Dutch Reformed Church at Hamburg Four Corners. But Charley Millard did not boast of these lights of his family, who would hardly have availed him in New York. Nor did he boast of anything, indeed; his taste was too fastidious for self-assertion of the barefaced sort. But if people persisted in fitting him out with an imaginary pedigree, just to please their own sense of congruity, why should he feel obliged to object to an amusement ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... days of his power was that of a despot. He was doing great things for ministers, and took care that they should know it. He was proud of his self-assertion, proud of being rude. Great men, and great ladies too, who wished for his acquaintance, had to make the first advances. He caused Lady Burlington to burst into tears by rudely ordering her to sing. 'She should sing or he ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... unheard, or translated itself into the remembrance of far-off woodpeckers. When at last it asserted itself more distinctly, she started up with a flushed cheek and opened the door. On the threshold stood a woman the self-assertion and audacity of whose dress were in singular contrast to ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... right to find fault with me," cried Katherine, stung to self-assertion. "I did well and generously by your children and yourself, Ada (I must say so, as you seem to forget it). There is more cause to sympathize with me in the reverse that has befallen me than to throw the blame of what is inevitable on one who is a greater sufferer than yourselves. Do you not know that ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... to be able to please this pitman by the way in which he drew him out of the pit; and Nelson swore at him grossly because of the alleged clumsiness of his brakeing. George defended himself, and appealed to the testimony of the other workmen. But Nelson had not been accustomed to George's style of self-assertion; and, after a great deal of abuse, he threatened to kick the brakesman, who defied him to do so. Nelson ended by challenging Stephenson to a pitched battle; and the latter accepted the challenge, when a day was fixed on which the fight was to ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... soul is a motive force, self-assertion and self-preservation are heaven's first law. Self-assertion, however, is nothing but the operation of communicated and committed animation, and self-preservation nothing but the postponement of the day of surrender. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... explanation of the change in her friend, of whom she now saw less and less. They had had arguments, in which neither gained any ground. For the first time in their intercourse, ideas had come between them, Eda having developed a surprising self-assertion when her new convictions were attacked, a dogged loyalty to a scheme of salvation that Janet found neither inspiring nor convincing. She resented being prayed for, and an Eda fervent in good works bored her more than ever. Eda was deeply pained by Janet's increasing ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... mark characteristic of the German. He reproduces the young German that I have seen the world over—in Germany, in the Crown Prince's coterie (don't I know them?), in South Africa, in West Africa, in China. He has every mark, the same military style, the same arrogant self-assertion, the same brutal ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... outdirtied in his clothes—lounges, lowering and brutal, at the street corner and the gin-shop door; the public disgrace of his country, the unheeded warning of social troubles that are yet to come. Here, the loud self-assertion of Modern Progress—which has reformed so much in manners, and altered so little in men—meets the flat contradiction that scatters its pretensions to the winds. Here, while the national prosperity ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... 'mamma,' to the outpouring of confidence to the almost unknown friend she had learned to trust. But common-sense and a certain docility, which was strongly developed in her, in spite of her superficial self-assertion and blunt, even abrupt outspokenness, made her yield to ...
— Robin Redbreast - A Story for Girls • Mary Louisa Molesworth
... being overwhelmed with awe and shame at his unexpected appearance, was haughty and even defiant. One of the strongest impulses of this man was to crush out of those in his employ a spirit of independence and individual self-assertion. The idea of a part of his business machinery making such a jarring tumult in his own house! He proposed to instantly cast away the cause of friction, and insert a more stolid human ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... came this declaration was repeated times innumerable, and as it happened that Miss Rodney made no demand for her landlady's attendance, the good woman enjoyed a sense of triumphant self-assertion. On Monday morning Mabel took in the breakfast, and reported that Miss Rodney had made no remark; but, a quarter of an hour later, the bell rang, and Mrs. Turpin was summoned. Very red in the face, she obeyed. ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... barrister, of what is called a good family, she had opportunity of knowing something of what is called life before she married, and from mere dissatisfaction had early begun to withdraw from the show and self-assertion of social life, and seek within herself the door of that quiet chamber whose existence is unknown to most. For a time she found thus a measure of quiet—not worthy of the name of rest; she had not heeded a certain low knocking as ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... corresponding effect upon his corrupt and fallen nature, which asserts itself as vigorously now, after nearly two thousand years of Christianity, as in the past. Pride and self still sway men's hearts. The spirit of independence and self-assertion and egotism, in spite of all efforts at repression, continue to stalk abroad. And human nature, even to-day, is almost as impatient of restraint, and as unwilling to bear the yoke of obedience, as in the time when Gregory resisted ...
— The Purpose of the Papacy • John S. Vaughan
... laughed at courts and ceremonies, and her mother said that the first presentation in the family would be of Allen's wife when he was a member of parliament. But Janet was no longer at war with Kenminster. She laughed good-humouredly, and was not always struggling for self-assertion, since the humiliations of going about as the poor, plain cousin of the pretty Miss Brownlow were over. Now that she was the rich Miss Brownlow, she was not likely to feel that she was the ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of man and his duties leaves but little room for individualism or insolent self-assertion. No one can divorce himself from his fellow-men and their interests without lowering and debasing his own vocation in life, and becoming enfeebled and stunted in his own development. "The supreme object of the college," says President M. E. Gates, "is to give an education ...
— Colleges in America • John Marshall Barker
... arguments are familiar to every reader, and the conclusion at which he arrived is almost taken for a postulate in the present essay.[31] The object of these chapters is to reiterate the importance of self-assertion, tenacity, and positiveness of principle. The partisan of coercion will argue that this thesis is on one side of it a justification of persecution, and other modes of interfering with new opinions and new ways of living by force, and the strong arm ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... when he did care, sitting up to demand food with a great deal of his old self-assertion. The doctor looked him over, permitting him to get out of bed and try out his legs. They were exceedingly uncooperative at first, and Ross was glad he had tried to move only from his bunk to ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton
... to displace men in many of the simpler mechanical jobs. Many individual women wage earners have risen to tasks of responsibility and direction. This number will be greatly added to by improvement in the education of women for industry and by their continued self-assertion. Nevertheless, it is likely that the great bulk of women wage earners will continue to be employed as at present upon relatively simple, light and ...
— The Settlement of Wage Disputes • Herbert Feis
... to try and hold them in Savannah, when the lot had said "go". But Toeltschig possessed the rare art of seeing a disputed question through the eyes of those who did not agree with him, as well as from his own standpoint, and now, with no petty self-assertion, he quietly awaited developments, and told Spangenberg all that had happened ...
— The Moravians in Georgia - 1735-1740 • Adelaide L. Fries
... one other member of the party of whom we will make mention just now, because she appears again somewhat prominently in our tale. This was a little elderly female who seemed utterly destitute of the very common human attribute of self-assertion, and in whose amiable, almost comical, countenance, one expression seemed to overbear and obliterate all others, namely that of gushing good-will to man and beast! Those who did not know Reni-Mamba thought her an ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne
... an unnecessary amount of embarrassment and ridicule. Yet there is one quality always possessed by such persons, among a savage people as elsewhere—namely, great perseverance and tenacity in their self-assertion. So the blessing of ignorance kept Slow Dog always cheerful; and he seemed, if anything, to derive some pleasure from the endless insinuations and ...
— Indian Boyhood • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... transcendental business, the profits of which supported his inner man rather than his family. Apparently his deep interest in spiritual physics, rather than metaphysics, gave a kind of hypnotic mellifluous effect to his voice when he sang his oracles; a manner something of a cross between an inside pompous self-assertion and an outside serious benevolence. But he was sincere and kindly intentioned in his eagerness to extend what he could of the better influence of the philosophic world as he saw it. In fact, there is a strong didactic ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... statement just made, that the interest of the United States in them surpasses that of Great Britain, and dependent upon a natural cause, nearness, which has been admitted always as a reasonable ground for national self-assertion. It is unfortunate, doubtless, for the wishes of British Columbia, and for the communications, commercial and military, depending upon the Canadian Pacific Railway, that the United States lies between them and the South Pacific, and is the state nearest to ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... in advance of his troop, who followed him with mingled self-assertion and timidity. They were specially frightened of Nastasia ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... while he recoiled from the monstrous form which had revealed itself, could hardly have dreamed of the work which that royal courage and yet more royal appetite was to accomplish in the years to come. As yet however Henry was far from having reached the height of self-assertion which bowed all constitutional law and even the religion of his realm beneath his personal will. But one of the earliest acts of his reign gave an earnest of the part which the new strength of the crown was to enable an English ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... share of the local thirst for knowledge, and the determination to get it in one way or another. So with the self-assertion without which a Scot ceases to be a Scot, he had fastened upon those winter months with Julian Wemyss to fill in the lacunes of Dominie McAll's instruction. A good good deal of classics, daily readings in ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... petulance as could be. Hubert's emotions were never feebly coloured; his nature ran into extremes, and vehemence of scorn was in him the true voice of injured tenderness. Of humility he knew but little, least of all where his affections were concerned, but there was the ring of noble metal in his self-assertion. He would never consciously act or speak a falsehood, and was intolerant of the lies, petty or great, which conventionality and warped habits of thought encourage ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... cloud seemed to veil and extinguish them. At the first glance she did not appear beautiful, but as you gazed at her she became more and more perturbing, till she conquered you and inspired you with passionate admiration. It should be said though that she shrank from all self-assertion, comporting herself with much modesty, ever keeping in the background, striving to hide her lustre, invariably clad in black and unadorned by a single jewel, although she was the ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... prevailing discouragement, a pessimism, that certainly was absent in former days. The very character of a French table d'hote is changed. Instead of Gallic vivacity, merriment, and general conversation, such as one was wont to find there, one encounters silence, reserve, and a marked absence of self-assertion. It is the Germans who are now boisterous and self-assertive at table. The French are quiet and subdued. As I have already said, I may be mistaken; I may have hit on exceptional cases, but it is a fact that those Frenchmen I have ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... Hodson, and sitting down on Cornelius's chair as an act of social self-assertion] N are ...
— John Bull's Other Island • George Bernard Shaw
... us would want to be born at all, if we should be told in advance, You shall never control anything? You shall never have the slightest chance of self-assertion, of impressing your own individuality upon the world? One might as well be ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown |
