"Egoist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... training, and is valued as a professional asset. But his supernaturalism at its best is devoid of spiritual quality. His "spiritual facts" are collections of miraculous coincidences raked together by the anteater's tongue of a cool egoist, who ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... if I forgot "The Egoist." It is art, if you like, but it belongs purely to didactic art, and from all the novels I have read (and I have read thousands) stands in a place by itself. Here is a Nathan for the modern David; here is a book to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... passions. But that does not prevent me from being a good friend, and a constant one, as you will find, if you care to test me in that capacity. Now you may sit down here," she patted her slab of rock invitingly, "and discourse about anything you please, except myself. Egoist though I am, I have had enough of ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... head of such an establishment might well be called, without contradiction, the master of Nemours. Though he never thought of God or devil, being a practical materialist, just as he was a practical agriculturist, a practical egoist, and a practical miser, Minoret had enjoyed up to this time a life of unmixed happiness,—if we can call pure materialism happiness. A physiologist, observing the rolls of flesh which covered the last vertebrae and ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... well sunned and ripened, and perhaps toughened, who can thus stand apart from a man and say the true thing with a kind of genial cruelty. Still there are some—and I doubt if there be any man who can return the compliment. The class of man represented by Vernon Whitford in "The Egoist" says, indeed, the true thing, but he says it stockishly. Vernon is a noble fellow, and makes, by the way, a noble and instructive contrast to Daniel Deronda: his conduct is the conduct of a man of honour; but we agree with him, against our consciences, when he remorsefully considers ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... it is composed have distinct and independent lives within certain limits, they are, outside of those limits, interdependent and inter-related. Man is governed by two great forces. On the one hand, he is essentially an egoist, ever striving to attain individual freedom; on the other hand, he is a social animal, ever seeking association and avoiding isolation. This duality expresses itself in the life of society. There is a struggle between its ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... have taken positive pleasure in Admetus, much as Meredith did in his famous Egoist; but Euripides all through is kinder to his victim than Meredith is. True, Admetus is put to obvious shame, publicly and helplessly. The Chorus make discreet comments upon him. The Handmaid is outspoken about ...
— Alcestis • Euripides
... perhaps toughened, who can thus stand apart from a man and say the true thing with a kind of genial cruelty. Still there are some - and I doubt if there be any man who can return the compliment. The class of man represented by Vernon Whitford in THE EGOIST says, indeed, the true thing, but he says it stockishly. Vernon is a noble fellow, and makes, by the way, a noble and instructive contrast to Daniel Deronda; his conduct is the conduct of a man of honour; but we agree with him, against our ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... There was a Meredith cult as distinct as that of Browning. Possibly it exists to-day, but, if so, it is less militant. Mrs. Clemens and her associates were caught in the Meredith movement and read Diana of the Crossways and the Egoist with reverential appreciation. ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... intensifies its glory. You will never enjoy as might a pagan, perhaps never as might a saint. But you will enjoy as a generous-blooded woman with a heart that only your friends—I should like to dare to say only one friend—know in its rare entirety. There is an egoist here, in the shadow of the mosques, who turns his face towards Mecca, and prays that you may never leave ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... would die out. Miriam, for her part, boasted that she could read him like a book, could place her finger any minute on the chapter and the line. He, easily taken in, believed that Miriam knew more about him than anyone else. So it pleased him to talk to her about himself, like the simplest egoist. Very soon the conversation drifted to his own doings. It flattered him immensely that he was of ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... (reputation) is a precious possession. 3. The man seemed to be without conscience (consciousness). 4. The counsel (council) was not wise. 5. It is John's custom (habit) to speak slowly. 6. Her deceit (deception) amazed me. 7. This man is an egoist (egotist). 8. The government does not encourage immigration (emigration). 9. In Mr. E.'s estimate (estimation) the cost of lumber and paint is low. 10. It was only yesterday that I heard of the identification (identity) of ...
— Practical Exercises in English • Huber Gray Buehler
... I told you that he was an egoist. Only selfish men really love women. After the death of his mother, he had a long liaison with a well-known actress, ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... didn't know how funny his father was, and he had to show her. It wasn't decent of him. Barbara didn't approve of young Horace; yet she couldn't resist him; his eyes and mouth were full, like Ralph's, of such intelligent yet irresponsible joy. He wanted her to share it. He was an egoist like his father; but he had something of his mother's charm, something of ...
— Mr. Waddington of Wyck • May Sinclair
... Meredith on the male egoist's demand for "innocence" (The Egoist, p. 105): "The capaciously strong soul among women will ultimately detect an infinite grossness in the demand for purity infinite, spotless bloom." The frequency with which young widows remarry suggests that the demand ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... "None of us like to think of a thing like that, but, as you say, it's happened. You know, this man Rainsford is just the type to do something like that, too. Fundamentally an individualistic egoist; badly adjusted personality type. Say he wants to make some sensational discovery which will assure him the position in the scientific world to which he believes himself entitled. He finds this lonely old prospector, into whose isolated camp some little animals have strayed. The old man ...
— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper
... social interests of Voltaire or Renan, or Anatole France, give to these great writers quite a different psychological tone. The three I have just mentioned are all too inveterately spirits of mockery even to take seriously their own "sensations and ideas"; and however ironical and humorous an egoist may be with regard to other people's impressions, with regard to his own he is grave, ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... unoffending heroine, unjustly humiliated in her own eyes and in the eyes of others; he had stood out, in unpardonable guise, the cause—the instrument—of that humiliation. In the bitter knowledge she had confronted him unrelentingly. A spoiled child—an unreasoning feminine egoist. ...
— The Mystics - A Novel • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... enraptured Coqueville was that the casks did not cease. When there were no more, there were still more! The ship that had been lost must truly have had a pretty cargo aboard; and Coqueville became egoist and merry, joked over the wrecked ship, a regular wine-cellar, enough to intoxicate all the fish of the ocean. Added to that, never did they catch two casks alike; they were of all shapes, of all sizes, ...
— The Fete At Coqueville - 1907 • Emile Zola
... mean that he is ugly to others? Then he is not an absolute egoist. Does he mean that he is ugly to himself? Then he makes an open confession of moral sense. And, once more, if he really possessed no moral sense, we should never have heard those soliloquies which so clearly betray his uneasiness and his ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... comprehension. To me it was interesting, but I could not tell why. I stood outside and had not the fairy gold to pay for my entrance. Here at all events she could buy her way where I could not. Without cruelty, which honestly was not my besetting sin—especially where women were concerned, the egoist in me felt I would use her, would extract the last drop of the enchantment of her knowledge before I went on my way. What more natural than that Vanna or any other woman should minister to my thirst for information? Men are like that. I pretend to be no better than the rest. She pleased ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... that we need to know of indignant honesty and the false fervour of sanctimonious animalism, so in the person of Sir Willoughby Patterne has Mr. Meredith succeeded in expressing the qualities of egoism as the egoist appears in his relations with women and in his conception and exercise of the passion of love. Between the means of the two men there is not, nor can be, any sort of comparison. Moliere is brief, ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... the book's worst defect that Armand makes none. His recurring despairs and passions grow tedious; his final but rather incomplete change of heart left me sceptical as to how long it would have lasted had the book carried his history any further. Armand as a study of a certain type of egoist is supreme; my difficulty was that I had no desire to study him. Even Maria-Therese Colbert, the decadent wife of his publisher, a very monster among women, is more interesting. Miss PATTERSON is on the side of the angels, but she makes her way ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 12, 1920 • Various
... egoistically; that even the most morally scrupulous man must conduct himself usefully (economically), if he does not wish to be inconclusive and, therefore, not truly moral. If utility were egoism, how could it be the duty of the altruist to behave like an egoist? ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce |
