"Egoistical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... year 1800, from the Volga to the Irish Sea, from the sunlit valleys of Calabria to the tormented Norwegian fiords, there was in every European heart capable of interests other than egoistical and personal one word, one hope, ardent and unconquerable. That word was "Freedom"—freedom to the serf from the fury of the boyard, to the thralls who toiled and suffered throughout the network of principalities, ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... amicorum'—might have been a very safe principle to go upon in the sixteenth century, but it would most certainly fail in the nineteenth, when one's dearest friends are the most unmitigated book-thieves. But perhaps even the too frequent loss of books is an evil to be preferred to the egoistical meanness of the selfish collector. Balzac gives in his 'Cousin Pons' a vivid delineation of such a person. The hero is a poor drudging music-teacher and orchestra-player, who has invested every franc of his hard-won earnings in the collecting of exquisite paintings, prints, ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... our best preachers preached their best sermons to themselves! 'I preached the following Lord's Day,' says Boston in his diary, 'on "Why art thou cast down, O my soul?" and my sermon was mostly on my own account.' And it was just because Boston preached so often in that egoistical way that the people of Ettrick were able to give such a good account of what they heard. Weep yourselves, if you would have your readers weep, said the shrewd old Roman poet to the shallow poetasters ...
— Samuel Rutherford - and some of his correspondents • Alexander Whyte
... which a plant must pass before it attains to perfection and becomes what it is; but it had never occurred to me to apply these laws and facts to our own lives; this had never entered my mind. I had demanded too much; I had been in too much of a hurry. Egoistic impatience had placed false weights and measures in my hands. What I have learned during these seventeen years of trial and hardship is patience. Everything moves so slowly. Humanity is still a child, and yet we demand justice of it, expect right and righteous ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... to talk, when the humor seized him, and he did talk, brilliantly, wittily, freely, and impersonally. The egoistic "I" was conspicuous by its absence. And while he talked you could see the agile antennae of The Author's winged mind feeling after the soul-string that might lead him through the mazes of this unusual character. That he could be deftly ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... patients and not by flattering them; some brewers have been known to sell beer. But among the Very Rich you will never find a really generous man, even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egoistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... "An egoistic Hedonist," Parry was beginning, but Ellis cut him short. "It's best explained," he said, "by an example. Here, for example, is Bentham's definition of the pleasures of friendship; they are, he says, 'those which accompany the persuasion of possessing the goodwill ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... from the above that God had a purpose in creating the world. For an act without a purpose is vain and hence bad. This purpose cannot have been egoistic, since God is without need, being above pleasure and pain. The purpose must therefore have been the well-being of ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... to her mother. The first ten minutes passed off favourably. Masha recovered herself, and gradually began to watch Lutchkov. To the questions addressed to him by the lady of the house, he answered briefly, but uneasily; he was shy, like all egoistic people. Nenila Makarievna suggested a stroll in the garden to her guests, but did not herself go beyond the balcony. She did not consider it essential never to lose sight of her daughter, and to be constantly hobbling after her with a fat reticule in her hands, after the fashion of many ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... altruistic considerations and include egoistic considerations only, I may still look back from these declining days of life with content. One drawback indeed there has been, and that a great one. All through those years in which work should have had the accompaniment of wife and children, my means were such as ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... acquire possessions and power simply for himself. In the child this impulse is perfectly natural. In the normally developed individual, during the years of early adolescence (the years of 14 to 16) the social and altruistic impulses begin to develop and to take the place of those which are purely egoistic or selfish. When the fully developed man fails, as did Jacob, to leave behind childish things and retains the ambitions and impulses of the child, his ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks
... passionate and egoistic, while his is waning and waning, and that's why we're drifting apart." She went on musing. "And there's no help for it. He is everything for me, and I want him more and more to give himself up to me entirely. And he wants more and more to get away from me. We walked to ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... Artist's Story," and which he was very eager to buy. Indeed from this time he began thinking of buying a country place of his own, not in Little Russia, but in Central Russia. Petersburg seemed to him more and more idle, cold and egoistic, and he had lost all faith in his Petersburg acquaintances. On the other hand, Moscow no longer seemed to him as before "like a cook," and he grew to love it. He grew fond of its climate, its people and its bells. He always delighted in bells. Sometimes in earlier days he had gathered ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... to its motor pole than to its sensitive pole, and that there is a tendency for phenomena belonging to the early period of development to be prominent, motor memory functioning more than representative memory, attention more than apperception, imagination more than logical thinking, egoistic more ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... succeed that the hero pulls himself together, shaves off his beard, becomes our OWEN NARES again, and sallies forth, habited for conquest, to pay calls on all the three. From all the three he retires disillusioned, having found them as egoistic as himself, and in the end finds solace rather shamelessly, in the love of a devoted slave who might have been his for the taking any time ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, February 11, 1920 • Various
... place, moral conduct, which is nothing but the expression of Buddha-nature in action, implies the assertion of self and the furtherance of one's interests. On this point is based the half-truth of the Egoistic theory. Secondly, it is invariably accompanied by a feeling of pleasure or satisfaction when it fulfils its end. This accidental concomitance is mistaken for its essence by superficial observers who adhere ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... without hesitation that the direct inculcation of morality is wholly foreign to Egeria's conception of education. How, then, has the emancipation of the child from the first enemy of Man's well-being—from all those narrowing, hardening, and demoralising influences which we speak of collectively as egoistic or selfish—been effected in Utopia? By no other means than that of allowing the child's nature to unfold itself, on many sides of its being and under thoroughly favourable conditions. The twofold desire which we all experience,—to ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... Stirner. But what will, what can be the true basis of any given combination of their interests? Stirner says nothing about it, and he can say nothing definite since from the abstract heights on which he stands, one cannot see clearly economic reality, the mother and nurse of all the "Egos," egoistic or altruistic. Nor is it surprising that he is not able to explain clearly even this idea of the class struggle, of which he nevertheless had a happy inkling. The "poor" must combat the "rich." And after, when they have conquered these? Then every one of the former "poor," like every one of the ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff
... the course of modern philosophy the ethics of naturalism has undergone a transformation and development that equip it much more formidably for its competition with rival theories. If the Cynic and Cyrenaic philosophies of life seem too egoistic and narrow in outlook, this inadequacy has been largely overcome through the modern conception of the relation of the individual to society. Man is regarded as so dependent upon social relations that it is both ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... scorn, was a lash to her old egoistic belief in her fairness. She had preached a beautiful principle that she had failed to live up to. She understood his rebuke, she wondered and wavered, but the affront to her pride had been too great, the tumult within her breast had been too startlingly ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... antithesis to communalism; it was felt that the two were mutually destructive. It inevitably followed that communalism as a principle was accepted and individualism condemned. In their minds not only social order, but existence itself, was at stake. And they were right. Egoistic individualism is necessarily atomistic. No society can long maintain its life as a unified and peaceful society, when such a principle has been widely accepted by its members. The social ills of this and of every ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... moving smoothly. I think I told you that the Emperor of Russia drank to your health with great kindness. He and the King of Prussia dine with me every day. I want you to be contented. Good by; much love." And July 6: "I have yours of June 25. I am sorry you are so egoistic, and that my success gives you no pleasure. The beautiful Queen of Prussia is to dine with me to-day. I am well and anxious to see you again when fate permits. Still it will probably ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... Samuel finally made up his mind about Jeremy. In spite of his dislike, even hatred of children, he had been coming slowly, during the last two years, to an affection for, and interest in, his nephew that was something quite new to his cynical, egoistic nature. It had leapt into activity at Christmas time, then had died again. Now as, flung first into his sister's bony arms, then on to the terrified spectacles of his niece Mary, he tried to recover himself, he was caught and held by that picture of his small nephew, seated, ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... stress of inward storm by writing Delphine, the story of a woman of genius, whose heroic follies bring her into warfare with the world. The lover of Delphine, violent and feeble, sentimental and egoistic, is an accomplice of the world in doing her wrong, and Delphine has no refuge but death ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... they break down the barriers of civil communities and create out of tribes a nation and out of the nations a world. As in the present day by means of our cosmopolitan literature the distinctions of civilized nations are done away, so Greek poetic art transformed the narrow and egoistic sense of tribal relationship into the consciousness of Hellenic nationality, and this again into the consciousness of a common humanity. But in Latium nothing similar occurred. There might be poets in ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... the one egoistic and the other altruistic, actuated all the Roman emperors in varying degrees. The activity of Augustus in such matters comes out clearly in the record of his reign, which he has left us in his own words. This remarkable bit of autobiography, known as the "Deeds of the Deified Augustus," ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... obscure votary of science to override his hobby, Francis Bacon, Lord High Chancellor of England, in ascribing to scientific discoverers a higher merit than to legislators, emperors, or patriots, cannot be open to the charge of egoistic partiality. What, then, says this illustrious witness?—"The introduction of noble inventions seems to hold by far the most excellent place among all human actions. And this was the judgment of antiquity, which attributed divine honours to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... wheel and the made road, spelt increased trade perhaps for a time, but very speedily a more extensive form of war, and in the end either the wearing away of differences and union, or conquest. Man is the creature of a struggle for existence, incurably egoistic and aggressive. Convince him of the gospel of self-abnegation even, and he instantly becomes its zealous missionary, taking great credit that his expedients to ram it into the minds of his fellow-creatures do not include physical force—and if that is not self-abnegation, he asks, what ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... her father—her father, who was lying there in a sort of living death—neutralized all her pity for griefs about tablecloths and china; and her anger on her father's account was heightened by some egoistic resentment at Tom's silent concurrence with her mother in shutting her out from the common calamity. She had become almost indifferent to her mother's habitual depreciation of her, but she was keenly alive to any sanction of it, however passive, ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... patent that such restraint finds its motive directly or indirectly in religion. When the religious influence with which irreligious society is saturated, has exhausted itself, and idealism is no more, the unrestrained egoistic pursuit of enjoyment must tend to its steady diminution in quantity, and its depreciation in kind. The sorrow and pain entailed by fidelity to the Christian ideal is, on the whole, immeasurably less in the vast majority of cases than ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... as you say, young; we are good men, let us suppose; each of us desires happiness for himself.... But is that word, happiness, one that could unite us, set us both on fire, and make us clasp each other's hands? Isn't that word an egoistic one; I mean, isn't it a source ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... egoistic infallible 'Brain Town'—that self-complacent and pretentious 'Hub,' can show a more ambitious covey ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... of the cardinal virtues has to-day all the exhilaration of a vice. Moral truisms have been so much disputed that they have begun to sparkle like so many brilliant paradoxes. And especially (in this age of egoistic idealism) there is about one who ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... poetry of primitive races has no distinguishing characteristics except metre or rhythm. It is usually an oft-recurring expression of the same idea. Yet there are many fragmentary examples of lyric poetry, though it is mostly egoistic, the individual reciting his deeds or his desires. From the natives of Greenland we have the following about the hovering of the clouds about ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... powder-weaned Hill-tribesmen—inheritors of egoistic independence and a love of loot—laughed loud and long and openly at System that prevented officers from taking arms against them until authority could come by delegate from somebody who slept. By that time they would ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... women—particularly youth when combined with beauty and ambition in a girl—touched him. He responded keenly to her impulse to do or be something in this world, whatever it might be, and he looked on the smart, egoistic vanity of so many with a kindly, tolerant, almost parental eye. Poor little organisms growing on the tree of life—they would burn out and fade soon enough. He did not know the ballad of the roses of yesteryear, but if he had it would ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... is furnished by the fact that although all the successes of Japan have been so far due to unselfish collective action, sustained by the old Shinto ideals of duty and obedience, her industrial future must depend upon egoistic individual action of a totally opposite kind! * ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... persons; and from that onward, through translunar gradations, to the love of the supreme Beauty itself. Shelley's "spirituality" is a living, growing, creative thing. In its intrinsic nature it is not egoistic at all, but profoundly altruistic. It uses Sex to leave Sex behind. In its higher levels it is absolutely Sexless. It may transcend humanity, but it springs from humanity. It is, in fact, humanity's dream of its own transmutation. For all its ethereality ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... a classification of Weltschmerz with regard to its essence, or, better perhaps, with regard to its origin, we shall find that the various types may be classed under one of two heads: either as cosmic or as egoistic. The representatives of cosmic Weltschmerz are those poets whose first concern is not their personal fate, their own unhappiness, it may be, but who see first and foremost the sad fate of humanity and regard their own misfortunes merely as a part of the ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... you know it these things will also be your outward portion. No one can fail of the regenerative influence of optimistic thinking, pertinaciously pursued. Every man owns indefeasibly this inlet to the divine. Fear, on the contrary, and all the contracted and egoistic modes of thought, are inlets to destruction. Most mind-curers here bring in a doctrine that thoughts are "forces," and that, by virtue of a law that like attracts like, one man's thoughts draw to themselves as allies all ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... Ellen, though she became alternately crimson and pale, at once exclaimed that she would rather die than marry me. 'Would not those arrogant men who deny us women any sense of the ideal, any capacity for real effort, and look upon us as the slaves of our egoistic impulses—would they not triumphantly assert that my pretended enthusiasm for our social undertaking was merely passion for a man; that it was not for the sake of an idea, but for the sake of a man, that I had run off to Equatorial Africa? No—I don't love ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... egoistic and self-contained, to take the trouble of hurting anybody, or get himself into trouble for love or hatred. He fell into disfavor not long after that unsuccessful little mission in the first Silesian War, of which the reader has lost remembrance. ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... to the sum total of wealth: monopoly estimating things, not in their relation to society, but in their relation to itself, value loses its social character, and is nothing but a vague, arbitrary, egoistic, and essentially variable thing. Starting with this principle, the monopolist extends the term PRODUCT to cover all sorts of servitude, and applies the idea of CAPITAL to all the frivolous and shameful ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... came back to Banneker's desk from time to time, and once took him to dinner at "Katie's," the little German restaurant around the corner. Burt was given over to a restless and inoffensively egoistic pessimism. ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... There is a definite though slender story interest and idea, yet since the framework of story is really for the purpose of hanging thereon the genial essayist's dissertations on life, we may decide that the book is primarily essay, the most charmingly personal, egoistic of literary forms. The essay "slightly dramatized," Mr. Howells happily characterizes it. This form then must be reckoned with in the eighteenth century and borne in mind as contributory all along in the subsequent development, as we try to get a clear idea ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... "quality" is a contracting, compacting tendency which runs through the entire universe, outer and inner. It is in its inmost essence desire, the egoistic tendency, the focusing of will upon a definite aim so that consciousness contracts from its universal and absolute possibilities to a definite, limited, concrete something in particular, and thus negates everything else. Desire always disturbs the "Quiet" and brings contraction, negation ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... certain sense, we are healthier to-day than the Europeans; but our health is that of the slave and not the master: it is of more benefit to others than it is to ourselves. We are doomed to be the drudges of neurasthenic, psychopathic, egoistic masters, if we do not open our minds to the light of science and truth. 'Every age has its Book,' says the Prophet. But every book, if it aspires to be a guide to life, must contain of the eternal truth what was in the one that preceded it. We can not afford to let aught of ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... and then the faithful service. Probably it happens so with the majority of men; for it is, I think, especially to the artist nature that it comes thus late. Living so vividly within the circle of its own experience, by its very constitution so necessarily egoistic, the latter, more particularly in its early years, is always a Narcissus, caring for nought or none except in so much as they reflect back its own beauty or its own dreams. The face such a youth looks for, as he turns the coy captured head to meet his glance, is, quite unconsciously, his own, ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... independent of, the exercise of his reason, and which supply all the possible motives for that exercise. There are, in his view, two sets of "innate" feelings or desires, between which man's life is divided—the egoistic and the altruistic tendencies, each separate from the others as well as from the intelligence, and having its "organ" in a separate part of the brain. The egoistic feelings at first exist in man in far greater strength than the altruistic; but ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... the little island and her sudden outburst, longing to return at once to the subject which secretly obsessed her, yet fearing to seem childish, too egoistic, perhaps naively indiscreet. Susan looked at ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... wicked morals of their times. For the kingdoms of this earth are organized for those who devote themselves chiefly, though of course not wholly, to the consideration of self. The world is still vastly egoistic in its balance. And the unbroken struggle of progress from Abel to yesterday's reformer, has been, is, and shall be the battle with the spirit that chains us to the selfish, accepted order of the passing day. So ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... a success. I don't mean to be brutal, but it was. He was glad to have me, and showed it.... A deathbed is so terribly egoistic; it can't be helped, but he forgot himself more than ever before. I was touched profoundly, but all the time I saw that he was rising to the occasion without knowing it himself. Not that he was emotional; ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... we may trace not only the confidence we are all apt to feel in our intimate knowledge of a familiar subject we have never studied, but also the inevitable influence of sexual bias. Of such bias there is more than one kind. There is the egoistic bias by which we are led to regard our own sex as naturally better than any other could be, and there is the altruistic bias by which we are led to find a charming and mysterious superiority in the opposite sex. These different kinds of sexual ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... have given you. I never deceived you as to that. I told you I had not that love to give; not—as you have so unjustly hinted—because I had given it to another man, but because I was then incapable of love. I had no thought of any one beyond myself. I was miserably ignorant and egoistic. It was in ignorance and egoism that I took the position of your wife, but I think from the first that I have tried, as I could, to fulfil its obligations. I have tried to be and to appear what you would wish. And I am not ...
— A Manifest Destiny • Julia Magruder
... other books. She told me she could put her finger on it as marking a well-defined transition in her life. In her own words, "I began it a young woman—I finished it an old woman."' She calls upon herself to make 'greater efforts against indolence and the despondency that comes from too egoistic a dread of failure.' 'This is the last entry I mean to make in my old book in which I wrote for the first time at Geneva in 1849. What moments of despair I passed through after that—despair that life would ever be made precious to me by the consciousness that I lived to some good purpose! ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 3 of 3) - The Life of George Eliot • John Morley
... individuality on which none may trespass. But in this case the barriers are thrown down; and thus the love of unrestrained activity is gratified. Finally, there is an exaltation of the sympathies. Egoistic pleasures of all kinds are doubled by another's sympathetic participation; and the pleasures of another are added to the egoistic pleasures. Thus, round the physical feeling forming the nucleus of the whole, ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... thoroughly egoistic ancestry on his father's side, and a morbidly sensitive one on his mother's; brought up by his paternal grandmother, whose every thought had been centred upon him as the only living descendant of ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt
... ministered to, and daily the shafts of her beauty rebounded from his dull bosom pointless and ineffectual. Unworthy pique brightened her eyes. Pride-hurt she glowed upon him in a way that would have sent her higher adorers into an egoistic paradise. The candy man's hard eyes looked upon her with a half-concealed derision that urged her to the use of the sharpest arrow ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... the head, which has brought forth so many pernicious and destructive fantasies in the history of social thought, represented in his case no more than a reaction against the great detractors of humanity. Rochefoucauld had surveyed mankind exclusively from the point of their vain and egoistic propensities, and his aphorisms are profoundly true of all persons in whom these propensities are habitually supreme, and of all the world in so far as these propensities happen to influence them. ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3) - Essay 1: Vauvenargues • John Morley
... that men do not, and should not, marry from a sense of duty to the state or to mankind, but simply and solely from an egoistic inclination to marry, I now proceed to the individual case of the man who is "in a position to marry" and whose affections are not employed. Of course, if he has fallen in love, unless he happens to be a person of extremely powerful will, he will not weigh the pros and cons of marriage; he will merely ...
— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett
... Certain conduct is intrinsically pleasurable or painful, and the future pleasure only acts through the present foretaste. When, however, we regard the pleasure as future and as somehow a separable thing, we can only express these undeniable facts by accepting a purely egoistic conclusion. We are, of course, moved by our own feelings, as we breathe with our own lungs and digest with our own stomachs. But when we accept the doctrine of 'ends' this harmless and self-evident truth is perverted into the statement that our 'end' must be our own ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... is the immediate stultification of intellects. Art, science, public works, everything, is consumed by a horribly egoistic feeling, the leprosy of the time. Three hundred of your bourgeoisie, set down on benches, will only think of planting poplars. Tyranny does great things lawlessly, while Liberty will scarcely trouble herself to do petty ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... "the natural crop of a human mind where the soil is chiefly made up of egoistic passions and dogmatic beliefs." Then she deals with that belief in ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... America have steadily changed during the last three decades in the same direction. Editorial pages and news columns have been steadily modified in the direction of fragmentary, egoistic, personal and sensational, or at least emotional, appeals. These are the qualities of children's minds and of undeveloped minds everywhere. The change is, of course, a part of the larger democratic movement of our time, and many causes have contributed to bring it about. ...
— Woman in Modern Society • Earl Barnes
... Armand with all the egoistic ardour of the lover who believes that the attention of the entire world is concentrated upon ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... likely to nourish egoistic complacency and pretension, a hard and condemnatory spirit toward one's fellow-men, and a busy occupation with the minutiae of events, instead of a reverent contemplation of great facts and a wise application of great principles. It ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... shrinks from pity, and fears most of all that it should be known: it was that proud narrow sensitiveness which has not mass enough to spare for transformation into sympathy, and quivers thread-like in small currents of self-preoccupation or at best of an egoistic scrupulosity. And Mr. Casaubon had many scruples: he was capable of a severe self-restraint; he was resolute in being a man of honor according to the code; he would be unimpeachable by any recognized opinion. ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... mathematics, and finally landed me in a partnership. Still I have always been a race-horse burdened with a pack, alas! I don't mean my hump, but the factory still steals a good deal of my time and brains, and if I didn't rise at five—But you have made me quite egoistic—it is the resemblance of our young days that has touched the spring of memories. But come! let me introduce you to my wife and my son Abraham. Ah, see, poor Fromet is signalling to me. She is tired of being left to battle single-handed. Would you not like to know M. de Mirabeau? Or let me ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... will be disaster ahead. Democracy has brought with it great hopes; it also stirs unwonted fears. The people at large must be lifted on to a higher plane of living; they must win for themselves wider horizons; they must kindle their imaginations, and allow play to their non-egoistic and nobler emotions. How better secure these ends than by bringing "the masses" into touch with the elemental forces and phenomena of nature? "Democracy" (says Walt Whitman) "most of all affiliates with the open air, is sunny and hardy and sane only with Nature—just as much as Art is. Something ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... even to himself, for the world) there had been something very repugnant about the dying woman. Though still young in years, she might have been any age; and she was so fretful and so selfish, hardly allowing her husband out of her sight, while utterly devoted to him, of course, in her queer, egoistic way—and to Miss Brabazon, her kind new friend. The doctor had soon realized that it was the pity which is akin to love which had made Helen become so attached to poor Milly Varick—intense pity for the unhappy soul who was going to ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... her house at Highgate—and immediately regretted it. She took her adventures in a youthful, egoistic fashion: saw herself as a lovely woman made the prey of man and robbed of her right to her own life, a tender, confiding soul deceived and tortured into despair. The Lincoln's Inn Fields became the abomination of desolation, ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... regretted by the troops who, although they disliked him personally, gave him credit for his courage and his outstanding military talent. Saint-Cyr could have been a first class army commander if he had been less egoistic and if he had taken the trouble to gain the affection of officers and men by caring for their welfare. No ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... fourth chapter Darwin deals with the MORAL SENSE or CONSCIENCE, which is the most important of all differences between man and animals. It is a result of social instincts, which lead to sympathy for other members of the same society, to non-egoistic actions for the good of others. Darwin shows that social tendencies are found among many animals, and that among these love and kin-sympathy exist, and he gives examples of animals (especially dogs) which may exhibit characters that we should call moral in man (e.g. disinterested ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... intelligent matter; and matter is egoistic, having its own innate selfhood and the capacity to evolve mind. God is in matter, and matter reproduces God. From Him come my forms, near or remote. This is my honor, that God is my author, authority, governor, disposer. I am proud to be in His outstretched hands, and I ...
— Unity of Good • Mary Baker Eddy
... no personal life at all, no excitements, dreads, angers, dejections. Upon her the war made no impression at all. She spoke sometimes to us of her husband and her children. She was not greedy, nor patriotic, neither vain nor humble, neither egoistic nor unselfish. She was ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... incidental and the intentional, modes of education. When the acquiring of information and of technical intellectual skill do not influence the formation of a social disposition, ordinary vital experience fails to gain in meaning, while schooling, in so far, creates only "sharps" in learning—that is, egoistic specialists. To avoid a split between what men consciously know because they are aware of having learned it by a specific job of learning, and what they unconsciously know because they have absorbed it in the formation of their characters by intercourse with others, becomes an increasingly ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... though always disciplined violence—she clearly felt more for others than they felt for themselves; and in observing certain households and life partnerships, she may have been afflicted with a dismay which the unreflecting sufferers did not share. No writer who was carried away by egoistic anger or disappointment could have told these stories of unhappiness, infidelity, and luckless love with ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... people, without his consent, to make use of the land he considers his, troops are called out to subject them to punishment and murder. One would have thought that it was obvious that a man living in this way was an evil, egoistic creature and could not possibly consider himself a Christian or a liberal. One would have supposed it evident that the first thing such a man must do, if he wishes to approximate to Christianity or liberalism, ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... you are a woman after my own heart. (He holds out his arms. She retreats to the other end of the table.) I did not think that there existed in all the world a woman as profoundly egoistic, as unscrupulously ambitious, as myself. You are my true mate. Come, we ...
— King Arthur's Socks and Other Village Plays • Floyd Dell
... poet, then, no guarantee for the genuineness of his inspiration? Must he wait as ignorantly as his contemporaries for the judgment of posterity? One cannot conceive of the grandly egoistic poet saying this. Yet the enthusiast must not believe every spirit, but try them whether they be of God. ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... is so active is because it is so egoistic. Psychologically interpreted, a gas consists of particles having the utmost aversion to one another. Each tries to get as far away from every other as it can. There is no cohesive force; no attractive impulse; nothing to draw them together except the all too feeble power of gravitation. ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... experiences would be favourable to such conjoint acts of aesthetic contemplation, and to the mutual sharing of aesthetic experiences; for, as disinterested and universal modes of enjoyment detached from personal interests, they are clearly free from the egoistic exclusiveness which characterizes our private enjoyments which at best can only be participated in by one or two closely attached friends. Our aesthetic enjoyments are thus eminently fitted to be social ones; and as ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... philosophical consistencies which consumes the soul of others. The feeling of the inward dignity of certain spiritual attitudes, as peace, serenity, simplicity, veracity; and of the essential vulgarity of others, as querulousness, anxiety, egoistic fussiness, etc.,—are quite inexplicable except by an innate preference of the more ideal attitude for its own pure sake. The nobler thing tastes better, and that is all that we can say. {188} 'Experience' of consequences may truly teach us what things are wicked, ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... her were at an end? Doubtless she was posing as a martyr before all who knew anything of her story; why had she refused his money, if not that her case might seem all the harder? It were difficult to say whether he really believed this; in a nature essentially egoistic, there is often no line to be drawn between genuine convictions and the irresponsible charges of resentment. Mutimer had so persistently trained himself to regard Emma as in the wrong, that it was no wonder if he had ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... boys at his back. He was received by the inhabitants with cool contempt. Next day Ferdinand made his royal entry. The populace went mad with delight, and displayed a passionate devotion which augured ill for the schemes of Prince Joachim of Berg. A less egoistic man would have seen that a national uprising was imminent. But Murat was neither modest nor penetrating; he was a great and dashing cavalry general, at times an excellent commander-in-chief, but he was not a statesman. His conduct entangled the skeins of Spanish intrigue ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... selecting, I have omitted those pieces which hang upon other people's books, plays, or pictures—a process of exclusion which, while giving unity to a possible collection of my critical writings in another volume, leaves the first selection exclusively egoistic. ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... afterwards on the Morskaia she had come upon a dead man huddled up in the snow like a piece of offal. These things terrified her and she did not care about the larger issues. Her life had been always intensely personal—not selfish so much as vividly egoistic through her vitality. And now she was miserable, not because she was afraid for her own safety, but because she was face to face, for the first time, with the unknown and ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... "I am deeply, humbly, a thousand times sorry. You cannot know how your talk of Lawrence made me wild. I am a fool, I will admit, but I cannot think of your loving him, blind, selfish, egoistic, intolerant of other people, ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... a certain justification for the hidden cults that run beneath the fair appearances of life, those social secrecies by which people—how could one put it?—people who do not agree with established institutions, people, at any rate not merely egoistic and jealous as the crowd is egoistic and jealous, hide and help one another to mitigate the inflexible ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... The bad child, egoistic, undisciplinable, destructive, and quarrelsome, or the child who cannot be taught honesty, or the one who continually runs away, is an unending source of "nervousness" to his mother. As time goes on and the difficulty is seen to be fundamental, a battle between hostility ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... do men love their neighbors as themselves, and move forward to fraternity and equality in kingdoms and commonwealths. The special province of moral reformers, like Garrison and the Abolitionists, seems to be to set these egoistic and altruistic elements of human society at war, the one against the other, thereby compelling its members and classes, willy nilly, to choose between the belligerents. Some will enlist on one side, some on the ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... accountable for it, too. We now have the right perspective, and you know that pictures grow more beautiful when viewed from the right distance. But above all, Professor, we need that. In our old age we wish to have beautiful youth about us, we demand beauty of youth. That is very egoistic. We enjoy it at our ease. But poor youth. Do you think 'being beautiful' is easy? Beauty complicates destiny, imposes responsibilities, and above all it disturbs our seclusion. Imagine, Professor, that you were very beautiful. With every human ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... ceased all productive activity. Every stroke of the pen appeared ridiculous, inasmuch as he could no longer deceive himself in regard to his prospects. He spent these May-days of 1849 in the open air, basking in the sunshine of the awakening spring and casting away all egoistic desires. ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl
... love had been as egoistic as love generally is, it would have been greater than the egoism of his vanity—or of his generosity, if you like—and all this could not have happened. He would not have hit upon that renunciation at which one does ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... there were times when he would feel an uncontrollable impatience with the regime under which he lived. One of these was on the second Sunday of term. It was Rogers' turn to preach, and, as always, Gordon prepared himself for a twenty minutes' sleep till the outburst of egoistic rhetoric was spent. But this time, about half-way through, a few phrases floated through his mist of dreams and caught his attention. Rogers was talking about the impending confirmation service. With one ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... convulsed B, and B may stare blankly when he hears what has rolled A off his chair. Jokes are so diverse that no one man can see them all. The very fact that he can see one kind is proof positive that certain other kinds will be invisible to him. And so egoistic in his judgment is the average man that he is apt to suspect of being humourless any one whose sense of humour squares not with his own. But the suspicion is always false, incomparably useful though it is in the ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... fact that it is now impossible for many to enjoy this mode of locomotion gives rise to the desire for the forbidden fruit. But when the enjoyment of it shall be free (and there could be restrictions based on the necessity for such transportation) another egoistic motive will come into play—the physiological need of walking, especially for well-fed people who have been engaged in ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... day's work had gone well. He was beginning to have the sense the writer sometimes has, in a fortunate hour, of divine intention in his task. Jeff was enjoying an egoistic interlude of feeling that the things which had happened to him had been personally intended to bring him to a certain deed. The richness of the world was crowding on him, the bigness of it, the dangers. He could scarcely choose, among such diversities, ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... is also centuries old. There have been in later years glowing tributes to human rights even more than to justice, though the sentiment of rights is egoistic, while that of justice is in some measure altruistic. There have also been diverse opinions in the past, as now, as to the source, foundation, and nature of what are called Rights, as there were and are of justice. A brief review of ...
— Concerning Justice • Lucilius A. Emery
... familiar with the theory of Egoistic Altruism would not let my statement go uncontradicted. She tried to make a virtue of my devotion ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... apotheosis of Property which our modern commercial slavery essentially is? Then, with Schiller, you desired, as a basis of political society, something better than a doctrine of personal rights, something more noble, human, unitary, something more opposed to egoistic self-assertion, namely, a doctrine of powers and their consequent duties; now, a scheme of society which is the merest riot or insurrection of property-egotism reckons you among its chiefest advocates. Then, you struck heroically out for a society more adequate to the spiritual ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... undeserved insults at each other. I believe that never in their lives, even in delirium, had they uttered so much that was unjust, cruel, and absurd. The egoism of the unhappy was conspicuous in both. The unhappy are egoistic, spiteful, unjust, cruel, and less capable of understanding each other than fools. Unhappiness does not bring people together but draws them apart, and even where one would fancy people should be united by the similarity ...
— The Schoolmaster and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov |
