Self-repression

“ At the same time an inborn instinct of self-control, accompanied, doubtless, by a refined unwillingness to intrude his personal feelings upon the notice of other people, led him into such habits of self-repression that his friends sometimes felicitated him on "having no nerves." ”

“ That instinctive refinement which she has acquired in centuries of self-repression is not a quality to be undervalued, or lightly thrust aside. If she loses "the strength that lies in delicacy," she is weaker in her social emancipation than in her social bondage. ”

“ But what helped to make the desire for justice so attractive was the violence, the escape from self-repression that the demand gave opportunity for, to many who, all their lives, had been corked or wired down in comfort, which no woman cares about, or sealed up in spinsterhood and decorous emptiness of days. ”

“ Your self-repression known will yield you glory's gain.
Knowing that self-control is knowledge, if a man should control himself, in the prescribed course, such self-control will bring him distinction among the wise. ”

“ The modern psychologists who have thought most deeply about human nature do not share at all the {151} supercilious contempt for mortification and even the habit of performing frequent acts of self-repression, though they may cost effort and suffering, which so many thoughtless people are ready to express. ”

“ If we instanced the self-restraint in which so many pass their lives from day to day, it might perhaps be answered that there is a persistent idea of duty, or love of reputation, or fear of social stigma, the repression of which would be more painful than the restraint it puts upon other impulses. ”

“ It concentrates terribly on repression, throwing up about itself temporary breastworks, developing cruel red rays of personal will which at best is but a defiant pugnacity. Its eyes grow red and voice savage. For the time the gargoyles of the ancient self are locked in the lower room, but they are not mastered. All personal will is but a confession of inordination within. Where there is inner order and beauty, it is not needed, becomes indeed an affront to the most high. ”

“ The men who have real self-control do exist, and they are the leaven that saves the race. It is good to know that this habitual repression comes, in many cases, from want of knowledge of the fact that self-repression is not self-control. ”

“ And this, although wide opportunity for personal and individual development was so sadly lacking, and the self-abnegation expected from women was so excessive, that the intellectual and emotional life must often have been a silent tragedy of repression. ”

“ It is only false strength that supports the personal will,—a false appearance of strength which might be called wilfulness and which leads ultimately to the destruction of its owner. Any true observer of human nature will recognize the weakness of mere selfish wilfulness in another, and will keep entirely free from its trammels by refusing to meet it in a spirit of resentment or retaliation.
Real self-control, as compared to repression, is delightful in its physical results, when we have any difficult experience to anticipate or to go through. ”

“ A bad-tempered person can thus, if he chooses, become good-tempered; a coward, a brave person; a person governed by the instinct of self-subjection can repress it by the cultivation of sentiments of self-assertion, and so on. 461The complete repression of unchristian instincts and sentiments is the acquired characteristic of the saintly character. The cultivation and repression of character traits and tendencies along these lines obviously belong to the domains of the psychology of character, social psychology, and criminology. ”

“ But must not the nature and the disposition suffer from the depression, and will the moral vigour take no scathe? Ah! What if one were to give way to the pressure—to settle down into a hypocrite—to become an object of contempt to one's self and the rest of mankind. ”

“ It was the first time in his life that he had with deliberation acted against his convictions, and there followed the reaction and remorse inseparable from such conditions.
Is there any depression so deep as this? is there any night so dark as this first eclipse of the soul, this first conscious stilling of the instinct for right? He had conspired to obscure truth, he had made himself partaker in another man's wrong-doing, and, as the result, he had lost his moral foothold, his self-respect, his self-reliance. ”

“ From time to time we avenge ourselves for all our enforced concealment and compulsory self-restraint. We emerge from our cells with terrible faces, our words and deeds are then explosions, and it is not beyond the verge of possibility that we perish through ourselves. ”

“ Before that, it would also happen many times that a people, who have the courage and ability for a complete and thorough self-examination, finally finds that the inner secret cause of the weakening of its power, of the changeability of its principles, of the correctness of its temper, is the oppressive and overwhelming feeling of an impotent desire for revenge. ”

“ Where the body is enfeebled by the depressing influences of vitiated air and bodily defilement, the mind, almost of necessity, takes the same low, unhealthy tone. Self-respect is lost; a stupid, inert, languid feeling overpowers the system; the character becomes depraved; and too often—eager to snatch even a momentary enjoyment, to feel the blood bounding in the veins,—the miserable victim flies to the demon of strong drink for relief; hence misery, infamy, shame, crime, and wretchedness. ”

“ Are they afraid to go to such extremes? Ah, why then go in that direction at all, if only by such extremes the desired result can be obtained? It is humiliating to degrade one's-self; but is it not still more humiliating to degrade one's-self in vain? ”

“ I had imagined, and indeed I had convinced myself, that I was so schooled in adversity I could defy fortune. I thought that mere bodily privations and sufferings could never seriously affect me, and that, with the freedom of my own thoughts unfettered, no real slavery could oppress me. In this calculation I had forgotten to take count of those feelings of self-esteem which are our defences against the promptings of every mean ambition. ”

“ If, then, at any time it was fatal and blâmable to manifest despair like yours, and to teach men such doctrines as the absolute necessity of their wretchedness, the vanity of life, the insignificance of their race, and the evil of their nature, much more is it so in the present day. Such conduct can only result in depriving us of courage, and that feeling of self-esteem which is the foundation of an honest, useful, and glorious life ”

“ It becomes a magnet, a loadstone to draw you. Your constant habit of associating it in your mind with the past, creates around it an atmosphere which is a part of your being and welds you to it, so that you, the house, and the deed, become one mighty monster, inseparable. The idea that you can expiate the deed by this self-torture is vain. You can neither confer good upon yourself nor your victim. ”

“ Bitter experience teaches that the imprisoning net clings too tightly to be stripped from our limbs by our own efforts. Nay rather, the net and the captive are one, and he who tries to cast off the oppression which hinders him from following that which is good is trying to cast off himself. The desperate problem that fronts every effort at self-emendation has two bristling impossibilities in it: one, how to annihilate the past; one, how to extirpate the evil that is part of my very self, and yet to keep the self entire. ”

“ But what I do deprecate, is to hear people preaching resignation to social, self-created evils; fitting, or trying to fit, their own natures by "a process of degradation" to circumstances which they ought to resist, and which they do inwardly resist, keeping up a constant, wearing, impotent strife between the life that is within and the life that is without. ”

“ The point is that our will, in flowing outwards, at its capricious pleasure, met with opposition—met with resistance. We do not really recover our self-esteem until every memory of such an event has been obliterated by a complete revenge. ”

“ I could feel it glooming ever and ever upon me from behind my back, and never turn my head;—such an impetus of hate was upon me, driving me forward after the wretch fleeing in self-complacency and triumph into a future of wealth and social consideration. ”

“ Suddenly, or perhaps gradually, the change comes; self-feeling drops into an abyss. "I am the most miserable of persons, the vilest sinner, hated and rightly by God and man, cause of suffering and misery. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But, if we watch the influence upon the will itself, of its own wrong decisions, its own yielding to temptations, we shall discover that the voluntary faculty may be ruined from within; may be made impotent to good by its own action; may surrender itself with such an intensity and entireness to appetite, passion, and self-love, that it becomes unable to reverse itself, and overcome its own wrong disposition and direction. ”

“ At bottom, is it not a mere boundless self-love, the purism of perfection, an incapacity to accept our human condition, a tacit protest against the order of the world, which lies at the root of my inertia? It means all or nothing, a vast ambition made inactive by disgust, a yearning that cannot be uttered for the ideal, joined with an offended dignity and a wounded pride which will have nothing to say to what they consider beneath them. ”

“ She was gnawed by that false fever which riots in those who seek by outward seemings and distinctions to console themselves for the want of their own self-esteem, or who, despising the world with which they are brought in contact, sigh for those worldly advantages which alone justify to the world itself their contempt. ”

“ And if you can succeed in breaking this pride, and destroying this sensitiveness, then he is a lost being. He can never recover his self-esteem, and you have chucked him half way—a stolid, inert, sullen victim—to the perdition of the prison or the convict-ship. ”

“ Deceit, then, whether it take the form of a fictitiously high estimation of oneself or the reverse, is the seed that produces an ill crop of Suffering. And we, if we would escape from Suffering and gain peace of mind, must rid ourselves of this self-deceit by all means in our power. It is above all things necessary that we possess an honest and up right heart. ”

“ In fact, though we may rebel against discipline and its various social modifications, most of us are quite anxious that others shall be disciplined and raise the hue and cry at once when they rebel. Behind this dislike of the rebel is certainly the feeling that he predicates a superiority for himself by so doing, and this injures our self-esteem. ”

“ Self-esteem, developed into a passion, becomes, when it turns upon great things, false pride; when upon small, vanity.
The love of liberty degenerates into a spirit of revolt; the legitimate love of power, into ambition; the instinct of property becomes greed, cupidity, passion for gain, and tends to run into the passion for gambling or the desire to gain by means of chance. The desire for gain engenders the fear of loss, and this latter passion developing into a vice and mania, becomes avarice. ”

“ This secret self-tyranny, this cruelty of the artist, this delight in giving a form to one's self as a piece of difficult, refractory, and suffering material, in burning in a will, a critique, a contradiction, a contempt, a negation; this sinister and ghastly labour of love on the part of a soul, whose will is cloven in two within itself, which makes itself suffer from delight in the infliction of suffering ”

“ The human mind in its normal condition moves and works by law. When self-will, blinded by passion or lust, enters her realm, and breaks her protecting laws, mind then loses her sweet liberty of action, and becomes a transgressor. ”

“ So that they cry out at the suggestion that it is no more than a selfish vice; and finding truth where they had looked for the materials of another debauch of self-delusion, they moan aloud: they protest, and they demand as their sacred right that the bitter cup be taken from before them. ”

“ And all the while possibly the cause of this sudden outbreak, in the man from whom one would least have expected it, is simply the poignant hysterical craving for self-expression, the unconscious yearning for himself, the desire to assert himself, to assert his to assert his crushed personality, a desire which suddenly takes possession of him and reaches the pitch of fury, of spite, of mental aberration, of fits and nervous convulsions. ”

“ In sheer self-defense she was obliged to move, to say something, to break the tensity of the strain. One step—the single step by which she had dared to draw nearer him, stretching out yearning hands toward him—one step sufficed to take her back to the world of conventionalities and commonplaces, where the heart's aching is taboo. ”

“ All the loftiest spirits of that time were burning to raise Man up, to give him self-respect, to shake him out of his habit of grovelling before the ideals created by his own imagination, of attributing the good that sprang from the ceaseless energy of the life within himself to some superior power in the clouds, and of making a fetish of self-sacrifice to justify his own cowardice. ”