"Egotist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ability in this line himself when the game was worth the candle, but he was too much the egotist to reach the polish which Hurstwood possessed. He was too buoyant, too full of ruddy life, too assured. He succeeded with many who were not quite schooled in the art of love. He failed dismally where the woman was slightly ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... and post-impressionists who are as silly as human beings can be, because they hope to attain to artistic salvation by rushing to extremes. They are religious egotists, in fact, and nothing can be more disagreeable than a religious egotist. But there were no doubt many of them among the early Christians. Yet Christianity was a great creative religious effort which came because life and truth had died out of the religions of the past, and men could not endure to live without ...
— Progress and History • Various
... an egotist and a fool. My surprise was so great at such a conquest, and at so fortunate a discovery, that I went no further in my inquiries. Besides, I did not think that your majesty would attach any very ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... for myself, for you told me in one of your letters from London that I must be more of an egotist or you should be less of one in your letters to me, ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... head in order to conceal the serious baldness that was already coming upon him, although he was scarcely two-and-thirty. Frock-coated the first thing in the morning, he was already smoking a big cigar; and his loud voice, his peals of gayety, his bustling ways, all betokened an egotist and good liver still in his prime, a man for whom money—capital increased and increased by the labor of others—was the ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... self of dual me Found pleasure in this danger play of yours. (An egotist, man always thinks to be The victor, if his patience but endures, And holds in leash the hounds of fierce desire, Until the silly woman's heart ...
— Poems of Purpose • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... not retained the self-possession of an egotist, I should have reflected that it was not the thing to notice the vulgar wit of a circus-clown. Unfortunately self-possession is the last possession of a bashful man. I half rose from ...
— The Blunders of a Bashful Man • Metta Victoria Fuller Victor
... ORDER: being some Account of the Journeyings of an Irresponsible Egotist, and of How ...
— The Autobiography of Sergeant William Lawrence - A Hero of the Peninsular and Waterloo Campaigns • William Lawrence
... sure," said Dale, who stood looking down on the Liliputian egotist with polite wonder. Lola Brandt ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... "Hideous egotist," said O-Tar, "prepare to die and assume not to dictate to O-Tar the jeddak. He has passed sentence and all three of you shall feel the jeddak's naked steel. I ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... transcendentalist, is precious because it is his own work, a mirror in which he looks at himself and says (like a poet relishing his own verses), "What a genius I am! Who would have thought there was such stuff in me?" And the philosophical egotist finds in his doctrine a ready explanation of whatever beauty and commodity nature actually has. No wonder, he says to himself, that nature is sympathetic, since I made it. And such a view, one-sided and even fatuous as it may ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... be, the most successful egotist, the most deluded hypocrite must inevitably meet up with himself some day and begin to ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... corner sent you these," he said; and Winifred smiled as if it were the most natural thing in the world for that cross-grained egotist to do a thing like that. He did it rather gracefully, I admit; but a Boston man would have done it just as well, if he had ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... Prussian state, autocratic from its inception, received philosophic justification in a series of thinkers, culminating in Hegel, who regarded the individual as a capricious egotist, the state, incarnate in its sovereign, as the supreme spiritual entity. He justified war, regarding it as a permanent necessity, and practically made might, right, in arguing that a conquering nation is justified by its more fruitful ...
— The Soul of Democracy - The Philosophy Of The World War In Relation To Human Liberty • Edward Howard Griggs
... both tiny hands in his. "At best, your poet is an egotist. I must die presently. Meantime I crave largesse, madame, and a great almsgiving, so that in his unending sleep your poet may rehearse our present love." And even in Rigon's dim light he found her ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... seems to me I am growing to be a dreadful egotist. I put nothing down now in this little book but just what concerns myself—nothing of the great subjects of universal interest which have always absorbed most of my thoughts, but just my own doings and sayings. At this ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... we are not only introduced to the scientist who is ever in quest of new worlds to conquer, we are also made acquainted with the pagan epicure ever engaged in amorous experiments! We are not only introduced to the sublime poet and prophet, we are also introduced to the incurable egotist, who could only find time to visit his old mother once every ten years, whilst, as boon companion of a petty German Prince, he always found time for his pleasures. We are not only admitted to contemplate the pomp and majesty of his world-wide fame, we ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... trying interval, she set up a diary—for the first time in her life; for she was no egotist. And she noted down what we have just related, only in a very condensed form, and ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... his nerves, no apprehension reached his mind. He had no imagination; he loved the things that his eyes saw because they filled him with enjoyment; but why they were, or whence they came, or what they meant or boded, never gave him meditation. A vast epicurean, a consummate egotist, ripe with feeling and rich with energy, he could not believe that when he spoke the heavens would not fall. The stinging sweetness of the morning was a tonic to all his energies, an elation to his mind; he swaggered through the lush grasses and boskage ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... are an egotist and can't project yourself. I have the power the giftie gi'e me, and see myself as others see me. How's that ...
— Moriah's Mourning and Other Half-Hour Sketches • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... without atmosphere, with all its lines sharply defined.... he made free to lecture the great ones of the earth, and was very round with them, even ridiculing them at his pleasure. He held the field for Confucius—not the Taoist, but the Mencian Confucius—against all comers; smote Yang Chu the Egotist hip and thigh; smote gentle Mo Ti, the Altruist; preached fine and practical ethics; and had no patience with those dreamers of the House of Laotse.—A man sent from the Gods, I should say, to do a great ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... speak only of myself and my own happiness. Ah, the egotist—the cursed egotist! Can I make you happy also, Eva? Is it not audacity in me to desire—ah, Eva, ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... outward as well as inward observation; not by that habit of intense brooding over individual consciousness, of making the individual mind the centre and the circumference of every thing, a habit which only makes of the writer an egotist, and limits the reach of his mind.' Mr. JAMES has certain types of character which he generally reproduces in each successive novel. His heroine is idealized into something which is neither spirit, nor flesh and blood. 'His women, like his men, ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... ample sanction; he knew he was living in sin with Catherine because his children had all died but one, and that was a manifest token of the wrath of Providence. The capacity for convincing himself of his own righteousness is the most effective weapon in the egotist's armoury, and Henry's egotism touched the sublime. His conscience was clear, whatever other people might think of the maze of apparent inconsistencies in which he was involved. In 1528 he was in some fear of death ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... us. Northwick's a type, a little differentiated from thousands of others by the rumor of his death in the first place, and now by this unconsciously hypocritical and nauseous letter. He's what the commonplace American egotist must come to more and more in finance, now that he is abandoning the career of politics, and wants to ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... absorption that made him seem a part of them—the desert, the petrified trees, the Grand Canon, Yosemite, and Mr. Burroughs inseparably linked with them, but seldom standing out in sharp contrast to them, as the "Beloved Egotist" stood out on ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... Cardinal Wolsey's direction to "love thyself last." It is, to say the least of it, unseemly for a man to be constantly making himself the subject of conversation. At times it lays a man open to the attacks which his style certainly invites—as was the case with the egotist who dared to talk much of himself in the presence of Dr. Johnson, whom he had greatly irritated by his conceited talk. The Doctor availed himself of an opportunity ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... of this journal, which I copy word for word from the manuscript lying before me, I give the reader. Call the dead writer an egotist, if you will: wonder at Callender's love for this self-centred nature; I think she was an artist, and as an artist, her experience is of ...
— A Village Ophelia and Other Stories • Anne Reeve Aldrich
... She still suspected Mrs. Pasmer of design, though she developed none beyond manoeuvring Alice out of the way of people whom she wished to avoid; and she still found the girl, as she always thought her, as egotist, whose best impulses toward others had a final aim in herself. She thought her very crude in her ideas—cruder than she had seemed at Campobello, where she had perhaps been softened by her affinition with the gentler and kindlier nature ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... candour about the reply that even from an egotist like Stead meant infinitely more than the soothing-syrup idealism dispensed by some of the visiting prophets to this country. Stead did not mean that in establishing independence of the United States, Canada should cut the painter from the Great British Commonwealth. But he was a trifle ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... feelings Gordon left the study. He valued the Chief's opinion amazingly, but he could not help knowing that he did not deserve it. He felt as though he had deceived the Chief. If only the Chief knew how he had plunged along in his own way, an egotist, an iconoclast! And then suddenly there came over him the shock of discovery, that everything in life was so distorted and hidden by superficial coverings, that even the wisest failed to discern between the true ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... not a very long time ago—to speak of political society with a certain distaste, as a necessary evil, an irritating but inevitable restriction upon the "natural" sovereignty and entire self-government of the individual. That was the dream of the egotist. It was a theory in which men were seen to strut in the proud consciousness of their several and "absolute" capacities. It would be as instructive as it would be difficult to count the errors it has bred in political thinking. ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... is all. Temptation is sweet only because the impulse comes from the depths of our being, not because it is difficult to be tempted. If we overcome, the satisfaction is deep and enduring,—which only goes to show that man is but a petty egotist, always drawing pictures of himself on a pedestal. The man who emancipates himself from traditions and yields to his impulses is debarred from happiness by the blunders of the blindfolded generations preceding ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... with stoical indifference. The mere pleasure of existence seemed to keep him in perpetual good humour with himself and others; and his never-failing flow of animal spirits exhilarated even the most phlegmatic. To persons of a cold and reserved temper he sometimes appeared rather too much of an egotist: for he talked with fluent enthusiasm of the excellent qualities and beauties of whatever he loved, whether it were his dog, his horse, or his country: but this was not the egotism of vanity; it was the overflowing of an affectionate ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... alone outside the cafe. It was not his nature to dwell on his own sensations. He would diagnose them quickly and acutely, and then throw them aside. He was quickly bored with himself; he was no egotist. But today, he thought, he would analyse his state, to see what ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... "natural boundaries"—the Rhine, the Alps, and the Pyrenees; and Napoleon might continue to rule over a region which would have gladdened the heart of a Richelieu or of a Louis XIV. But it was still victory and not peace upon which the supreme egotist had bet his mind. He still dreamed of ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... "It is a cowardly thing for an egotist with an egotist's early and lively knowledge of the world and of himself to come clamouring to a girl for charity. It is true that almost any man can make a young girl think she loves him if he is selfish enough ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... sort o' weather and jes' the sort o' sky Which seem to suit my fancy, with the white clouds driftin' by On a sea o' smooth blue water. Oh, I ain't an egotist, With an "I" in all my thinkin', but I'm willin' to insist That the Lord that made us humans an' the birds in every tree Knows my special sort o' weather an' He made this ...
— All That Matters • Edgar A. Guest
... books. Lewis Carroll was as unlike any other man as his books were unlike any other author's books. It was a relief to meet the pure simple, innocent dreamer of children, after the selfish commercial mind of most authors. Carroll was a wit, a gentleman, a bore and an egotist—and, like Hans Andersen, a spoilt child. It is recorded of Andersen that he actually shed tears, even in late life, should the cake at tea be handed to anyone before he chose the largest slice. Carroll was not selfish, but a liberal-minded, liberal-handed philanthropist, but his ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... the face that had returned wrath for wrath, remorse for remorse, passion for passion to that dark egotist Jane in the looking-glass. Yet who, thought I, could be else than beautiful with eyes that seemed to hide in fleeting cloud a flame as pure as amber? The arch simplicity of her gown, her small, narrow hands, the exquisite cleverness of mouth and chin, the lovely courage and sincerity of that yet-childish ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... which you mention in your kind letter are not exactly of the kind that I could wish for you, yet I am egotist enough to be much pleased at its friendly contents towards myself. Accept my warmest thanks for them—and let me tell you how anxious I am that you should like me very much, and how desirous I am to deserve this—as far as it can be deserved; for ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... Miss Maude, but this is a very old-fashioned and a very simple entertainment I'm going to give. Just the things that I play to myself when I'm weary of listening to humanity tell of its ills and aches—the egotist! Then I look down into the beautifully clean inside of my fiddle, its good old mechanism without a flaw, and listen to the things it has to tell.... Thank you, just the same, Miss Maude; this is not ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... colossal egotist that he was, heard Phil's protests with mild amusement and quiet pride in his independence, for he loved this ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... know this. I now remember that, when you bound me, a thoughtless, selfish, indolent boy, you said that you would have torn your heart out rather than marry my father had you foreseen what was coming. This miserable egotist, Jeff Davis, and his scheme of empire, cost what it may, are more to you than husband or child. A mother would have said: 'You have reached manhood and have the rights of a man. I will advise you and ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... year if he would take out his wages in talking. I could not have more of it in that case than I have had the last six months. After money, the thing that man loves best is certainly the sound of his own voice; and a most insufferable egotist! No I have been talking with a man who wants to take the whole farm for two years upon shares that will clear me of ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... very grave; world-spoiled as he was, reckless in everything, and egotist though he had long been by profession, he ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... matters, i.e., to minute scandal and infinitesimal politics; to the county cricket match and archery meeting; to the past ball and the ball to come. In the drawing-room, when a cold fit fell on the coterie, she would glide to one egotist after another, find out the monotope, and set the critter Peter's, the Place de Concorde, the Square of St. Mark, Versailles, the Alhambra, the Apollo Belvidere, the Madonna of the Chair, and all the glories of nature and the feats of art could ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... risk the stake and the cross; starve, when necessary, in a garret all his life; study women and live on their work and care as Darwin studied worms and lived upon sheep; work his nerves into rags without payment, a sublime altruist in his disregard of himself, an atrocious egotist in his disregard of others. Here Woman meets a purpose as impersonal, as irresistible as her own; and the clash is sometimes tragic. When it is complicated by the genius being a woman, then the game is one for a king ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... economy to pay them off. Then, as to Dard getting no supper up at Beaurepaire, a complaint that appeared to sting her particularly, she assured him she was alone to blame: the baroness would be very angry if she knew it. "But," said she, "Dard is an egotist. Perhaps you may have noticed ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... all his undertakings. He was not exactly handsome, but he had a perfect manner and an air of gaiety which seemed infectious, with a thorough knowledge of the laws of good society. He was by no means an egotist, and seemed never at a loss for something to talk about. I led the conversation to the subject of his country, and he gave me an amusing description of it, talking of his fief-part of which was within the domains of the sultan-as a place where gaiety was unknown, and ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... genuinely, if shyly, for his own sake. He had known vulgar women, who had flattered him because he was the son of an earl; and prudent ones who gave him but a carefully measured civility, because he was a portionless younger son. Here he knew that both facts were absolutely nothing; and egotist as he was, this knowledge stirred most powerfully such depths as his nature possessed. In Lucia's presence he became almost as unworldly as herself; he gave himself up half willingly, half unconsciously to the enjoyment of feelings which no woman less thoroughly ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 1 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... Cows;" While slung against the upland with his team The ploughman dimly like a phantom glides: What time that noisy spot of life, the lark, Climbs, shrill with ecstasy, the trembling air; And "Cuckoo, Cuckoo," baffling whence it comes, Shouts the blithe egotist who cries himself; And every hedge and coppice sings: What time The lover, restless, through his waking dream, Nigh wins the hoped-for great unknown delight, Which never comes to flower, maybe; elsewhere, The worshipped Maid, a folded ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... confidence that their own tastes and experiences were enough to interest their readers; they mastered the gift of putting themselves on paper. But there is one wide difference between them and their predecessors. Robert Burton was an egotist but he was an unconscious one; the same is, perhaps, true though much less certainly of Sir Thomas Browne. In Lamb and Hazlitt and De Quincey egotism was deliberate, consciously assumed, the result of a compelling and shaping art. If one reads Lamb's earlier essays and prose pieces ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... of red or black; and a high, smooth forehead, full of sense. Across it ran one deep wrinkle that did not belong to her youth. That wrinkle was the brand of trouble, the line of agony. It had come of loving above her, yet below her, and of loving an egotist. ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... yourself. With me it is different. I alone am the author of this plot. I stood in need of my inseparable companion; I called upon you, and you came to me in remembrance of our ancient device, 'All for one, one for all.' My crime is that I was an egotist." ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Nagaya, whose relentless Will hath caused empires to totter and thrones to fall! HIS life a glory to the world? ..." and she pointed to Sah-luma's recumbent figure with a gesture of loathing and contempt, . . "HIS? ... the life of a drunken voluptuary? ... a sensual egotist? ... a poet who sees no genius save his own, and who condemns all vice, save that which he himself indulges in! A laurelled swine! ... a false god of art! ... and for him thou dost reject Me! ... ah, thou fool!" and her splendid eyes shot forth resentful ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... immense. He is that rarest of birds, a wholly delightful egotist. He is the sun, but we all bask and shine with reflected glory. The men are splendid, because they are his men. I am a great success because I am his subaltern. Fortunately we all have a sense of humour and so are highly pleased with ourselves and each ...
— A Student in Arms - Second Series • Donald Hankey
... aid me and form a mighty factor in the cause. In the past I used that wealth solely for my own selfish ends, but now all is different; I have no thought of self—the philanthropist has replaced the egotist; I have aided the poor, relieved the stricken and brought joy to many a sorrowing home, but hitherto I have acted only in isolated cases; now I meditate a grand, a sublime stroke—to give freedom to man throughout the entire length and breadth of the Continent of Europe. If I succeed, and succeed ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... story of Kitty, we have many other incidents and characters which often contribute nothing to the progress of the novel. They are a part of life, however, so Tolstoi includes them. One might say there is an attempt at unity, in the person of that sleek egotist, Stepan—his relation by blood and marriage to both Anna and Kitty makes him in some sense a link between the two couples. But he is more successful as a personage than as the keystone of an arch. The ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... movement—"Pardon me, my brother," replied he. "I have neither a mother nor a sister who are suffering. My throne is hard and naked, but I am firmly seated on my throne. Pardon me that expression, my brother; it was that of an egotist. I will retract it, therefore, by a sacrifice,—I will go to monsieur le cardinal. Wait for me, ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the Revolution of 1789 have been avoided? The loans of Louis XIV. prepared the way for it. Louis XV., an egotist, a man of narrow mind (didn't he say, 'If I were lieutenant of police I would suppress cabriolets'?), that dissolute king—you remember his Parc aux Cerfs?—did much to open the abyss of revolution. Monsieur de Necker, an evil-minded Genovese, set the thing a-going. Foreigners have always tried ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... perhaps right," replied Claude, shaking his head; "I'm an egotist. I can't even say that I paint for the good of my country; for, in the first place, my sketches frighten everybody, and then, when I'm busy painting, I think about nothing but the pleasure I take in it. ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... afraid of life; think of that! afraid of life! Yes, a hard and avaricious egotist! If he banished woman from his existence, it was only through fear of having to pay for her shoes. And he has known only the children of others, who have made him suffer—hence his hatred of the child—that flesh made to be flogged. The fear of life, the fear of burdens and of duties, of ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... recall all that meandering haze of words, indeed I recall scarcely any of it, though its circumstances and atmosphere stand out, a sharp, clear picture in my mind. I posed after my manner and behaved very foolishly no doubt, a wounded, smarting egotist, and Parload played his part of the philosopher ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... treated with a callous, yet polite indifference, which, to one whose heart was as tender as her judgment was weak, was more painful perhaps than absolute ill-usage. Sir Philip was a voluptuary, that is, a completely selfish egotist, whose disposition and character resembled the rapier he wore, polished, keen, and brilliant, but inflexible and unpitying. As he observed carefully all the usual forms towards his lady, he had the art to ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... gentlemen," said Felton, no anger showing in his tone. "I will not force myself upon anybody, but I'm no egotist, even if I do say you're the losers. My knowledge of the region and my friendship with the Sioux would be of great advantage to you, would be of so much advantage, in fact, that it would make me worth more than a fourth share in all the gold we might find. But, as I said, I will not stay ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler
... saying of Doctor Baruch de Spinosa, concerning the Divine Love:—That whoso loveth God truly must not expect to be loved by him in return. In mere reaction against an actual surrounding of which every circumstance tended to make him a finished egotist, that bold assertion defined for him the ideal of an intellectual disinterestedness, of a domain of unimpassioned mind, with the desire to put one's subjective side out of the way, and let pure ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater
... My reputation has long been at the mercy of all the lying braggarts in the country. Men label me socialist one day, individualist the next. I become communist or egotist, as is most convenient to the speaker and most damaging to myself. But there," he exclaimed, regaining the tranquil serenity which characterized him, "why should I rail at the world when I might be talking to you? How is my ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... Delobelle, Gardinois, "all the personages of 'Fromont' have lived," Daudet declares; and he adds a regret that in depicting old Gardinois he gave pain to one he loved, but he "could not suppress this type of egotist, aged and terrible." ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... in itself, springing from essential selfishness, and in turn nourishing selfishness and fatally tainting every thing with that central vice. To desire to live everlastingly as an identical individual, it has been said, is the ecstasy and culmination of avaricious conceitedness. Man, the vain egotist, dives out of sight in God to fish up the pearl of his darling self. He makes his poor individuality the measure of all things, his selfish desire the law of endless being. Such a rampant proclamation of self will and enthronement of pure egotism, flying in the face of the solemn and all submerging ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... ineffable mental charm was formed the first moment of acquaintance, about Eighteen Hundred Seventy-seven, and it never lessened or became modified. Stevenson's rapidity in the sympathetic interchange of ideas was, doubtless, the source of it. He has been described as an "egotist," but I challenge the description. If ever there was an altruist it was Louis Stevenson; he seemed to feign an interest in himself merely to stimulate you to be liberal in your confidences. Those who have written about him from later impressions than those of which I speak seem to me ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... Gherardi. "And we of the Church choose you as the tool wherewith to work our vengeance. And why? Because you are a born liar!—because you can look straight in the eyes of man or woman, and swear to a falsehood without flinching!—because you are an egotist, and will do anything to serve yourself—because you have neither heart nor conscience—nor soul nor feeling,—because you are an animal in desires and appetite,-because of this, I say, we yoke you to our chariot wheels, knowing you may be ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... to understand the affair; what evil genius possessed Warren; what possessed Magsie? She tried to think kindly of Magsie; poor child, she had had no ugly intention, she was simply spoiled, simply an egotist undeveloped in brain ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... children are unforeseen as nothing is—no, nothing feminine—in this adult world. "I've got a lotter than you," is the word of a very young egotist. An older child says, "I'd better go, bettern't I, mother?" He calls a little space at the back of a London house, "the backy-garden." A little creature proffers almost daily the reminder at luncheon—at tart-time: "Father, I hope you will remember ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... ambitions in his rise to power, but on the whole Bismarck stood for self-possession and for manly audacity, certainly not the French Revolution type of audacity. It is a fact that Bismarck, as a human being, was a vast egotist, and had his own, ofttimes unscrupulous, way of gaining his ends, but his conception of Militarism, the force he did eventually use, was at bottom a virtuous effort to support, liberate and unify the Fatherland, not drag it into the ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... good-humour—an apology for what has been called his "effrontery"—perhaps a modest man, and undoubtedly a man of genius—his humorous defence of his deficiency in Tragedy, both in acting and writing—Pope more hurt at being exposed as a ridiculous lover than as a bad man—an account of "The Egotist, or Colley upon Cibber," a kind of supplement to the "Apology for his life," in which he has drawn his own character with great ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... terror menacing his path. Also, as M. Mornay had said, his philosophy was now in his bones and marrow rather than in his words. It had, after all, tinctured his blood and impregnated his mind. He had babbled and been the egotist, and played cock o' the walk; and now at last his philosophy was giving some foundation for his feet. Yet at this auction-sale he looked a distracted, if smiling, whimsical, rather bustling figure of misfortune, with a tragic air of exile, of isolation ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... a very different plan of life. If he is not an egotist, he is, at any rate, an individualist, for he considers expense, seeks only moderate and reasonable enjoyments, thinks of his children's prospects, and, in ...
— Essays on Political Economy • Frederic Bastiat
... agony of speechless grief. Through his life he kept the blood-stained uniform in which the young officer received his death-wound in a glass case in his bedroom, a piece of enduring sentiment which shows how unlike Cavour was the coldly calculating egotist whose ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... traveller went on talking about himself, without noticing that this did not interest the others as much as it did him. A man is never such an egotist as at moments of spiritual ecstasy. At such times it seems to him that there is nothing on earth more splendid ...
— The Cossacks • Leo Tolstoy
... crown his labours. Such little matters of detail never troubled him much. His teaching was as the German philosophy calls it, 'subjective'; it was to benefit himself, not others. He was a learned egotist. He was a well of science, and the pulleys worked uneasily when you wanted to draw anything out of it. In a word, he was ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... I am become an egotist to-night, for self is the only theme of which I can discourse. My spirit, too, is like the minstrel harp of which you have to-night been reading, 'twill "echo nought but sadness;" but if it please you, ...
— Sketches And Tales Illustrative Of Life In The Backwoods Of New Brunswick • Mrs. F. Beavan
... egotist. If it ever occurred to her that possibly Arthur would like to see me sometimes, and I him, she would not think it mattered. She wanted to come to my flat, and she didn't want to meet Arthur; therefore Arthur mustn't come. Life's little ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... Miss Dix is a woman endowed with warm feelings and great kindness of heart. It is only those who do not know her, or who have only met her in the conflict of opposing wills, who pronounce her, as some have done, a cold and heartless egotist. Opinionated she may be, because convinced of the general soundness of her ideas, and infallibility of her judgment. If the success of great designs, undertaken and carried through single-handed, furnish warrant for such conviction, she ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... all invitations, preferred a good Indian to highly cultivated people, and said he would rather go to Oregon than to London.' The world has room for every type, so that it be not actively noxious, and this whimsical egotist may well have his place in the catalogue. He was, after all, in his life only a compendium, on a scale large enough to show their absurdity, of all those unsocial notions which Emerson in other manifestations found it needful to rebuke. Yet we may agree that many ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... be served by the office, no real prime minister notices the transformation. The ego and the country soon become interblended in his mind. A prime minister under the party system as we have had it in Canada is of necessity an egotist and autocrat. If he comes to office without these characteristics his environment equips him with them as surely as a diet of royal jelly transforms a worker ...
— Laurier: A Study in Canadian Politics • J. W. Dafoe
... for? That sounds either as if he were an egotist or a slacker." Her sister's words rasped Patricia's most sensitive heart string. She visibly squirmed, eagerly waiting a chance to reply. "Jack is neither," continued Adrien slowly. "I understand the thing perfectly. He has been up against big things, so big ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... an egotist, nor blinded by female partialities, saw his own grief in poor proud Pietro; and the more he thought of it the more he resolved to share his humble means with that unlucky artist; Pietro's sympathy would repay him. He tried to ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... agreed that she must have loved her cousin all the time, and that clearly the marriage with the deceased millionaire had been forced on by Garvington, for family reasons connected with the poverty of the Lamberts. It was believed that the fat little egotist had obtained his price for selling his sister, and that his estates had been freed from all claims through the generosity of Pine. Of course, this was not the case; but the fact was unknown to the general public, and Garvington ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... DOMINIE. The egotist is seldom capable of giving efficient instruction: that lies in the nature of the case. Even a child will soon perceive whether the teacher has a sole eye to its interest, or has other and personal aims in view. The former bears good fruits, the latter very doubtful ones. ...
— Piano and Song - How to Teach, How to Learn, and How to Form a Judgment of - Musical Performances • Friedrich Wieck
... blundering old egotist, just as he had loved her mother. Ann always knew it, and her own love for him warmed all the world about them both. She got up and went to him to kiss him, and pat him, and stuff a ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the Staff, And we're sure that no one will grudge him the meed of this epitaph: "He went through the fiery furnace, but never a hair was missed From the heels of our most colossal Arch-Super-Egotist." ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 152, March 21, 1917 • Various
... advance no excuse. It was not that she had failed Blondin, or that she had failed Richard, but the extent of her failure toward herself appalled her. She was not the good, brave, cultivated woman she had liked to think herself; she was one more egotist, with Nina, and Isabelle, and Ida, unscrupulously playing her own game ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... spontaneity, and seem to hamper the imagination; but as facility is acquired joy comes back, and the joy of conquest with the adustment of means to ends is a stage of self-consciousness dangerous for the egotist, but is inspiration and incitement to larger effort. This is a stage where many artists remain—most of the time. But the super-conscious stage is that state in which with perfected facility and power of self-mastery the doing becomes lost in supreme realization; ...
— Expressive Voice Culture - Including the Emerson System • Jessie Eldridge Southwick
... of that possible former self, the less he admired its manifestations. A Corsican upstart, an assassin, no gentleman! It was all too true. Very well, for that vaunted force of will, but to what base ends had it been applied! He was merciless to himself, an egotist and a vulgarian. How it would shock that woman, as yet unidentified, who was one day to be the mother of the world's greatest left-handed pitcher. Take the flapper—impossible, of course, but just as an example—suppose ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... few seconds. Do you imagine I was saddened by the painful spectacle of Diaz' collapse in life? No! I only knew that he needed sympathy, and that I could give it to him with both hands. I could give, give! And the last thing that the egotist in me told me before it expired was that I was worthy to give. My longing to assuage the lot of ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... BLACKWOOD and Mr. BERTRAM FORSYTH (assisted by Mr. DONALD CALTHROP) present to us in The Crossing a certain Mr. Anthony Grimshaw, a princely egotist of the poetic-idealist type who gets up on the hearth-rug and says to his family, "I am a humanitarian before everything," and things like that, and then wonders why his wife is estranged from him. He has a daughter, Nixie, who is not old enough to know how bad ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, October 6, 1920 • Various
... lightly had been a matter of days or weeks, not months, as in her case. He might have cared but for the coming of this Frenchman. She hurled Saint Hubert's book across the room in a fit of girlish rage and buried her head in her arms. He would be odious—a smirking, conceited egotist! She had met several French writers and she visualised him contemptuously. His books were undoubtedly clever. So much the worse; he would be correspondingly inflated. His novel revealed a passionate, emotional temperament ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... the one woman of my life. You are free, you know that there is no other man who could make you happy as I could, yet you will not come to me—for the sake of an idea. If I am heartless and callous, an infidel, an egotist, whatever you choose, at least I love you. You need never fear me. ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... pushed to strangely confused issues, a society somewhat distraught by an artificial aesthetic culture; and filled with wild passions, wildly-dramatic personalities, a scene already singularly attractive by its artistic beauty. A heady religious fanaticism was worked by every prominent egotist in turn, pondering on his chances, in the event of the extinction of the house of Valois with the three sons of Catherine de Medici, born unsound, and doomed by astrological prediction. The old manors, which had exchanged their towers for summer-houses under the softening ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... you to Harrow to study, not books nor games, but boys, who will be men when you are a man. And, above all, study their weaknesses. Look for the flaws. Teach yourself to recognize at a glance the liar, the humbug, the fool, the egotist, and the mule. Make friends with as many as are likely to help you in after life, and don't forget that one enemy may inflict a greater injury than twenty friends can repair. Spend money freely; dress well; swim with the tide, not ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... not do otherwise than hunt up the only relative he had in America. Subsequent events did not convict him of being a mere egotist, swayed only by the current of base success. He did not despise prosperity, but he cared yet more to find out truths about things and men. This is not the story of a fortune-hunter; not, at all events, of a hunter of such fortunes ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... But I am prudent. I have to bring up this child; she is much too young to be married now. No! I am not an egotist, but I must certainly keep her with me for a few years more— keep her alone with me. She can surely wait until I am dead! Fear not, Antigone, old Oedipus will find ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... egotist as to suppose my experiences to be altogether unique; but I know them to be curious and in places surprising. Adventures, as Mr. Disraeli said a good many years ago, are to the adventurous, and in a smallish kind of way I have sought and found enough ...
— The Making Of A Novelist - An Experiment In Autobiography • David Christie Murray
... details of Palmerston's policy was in reality merely a symptom of the fundamental differences between the characters of the two men. In Albert's eyes Palmerston was a coarse, reckless egotist, whose combined arrogance and ignorance must inevitably have their issue in folly and disaster. Nothing could be more antipathetic to him than a mind so strangely lacking in patience, in reflection, in principle, and in the habits of ratiocination. For to him it was intolerable to think in a hurry, ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... a woman," said Desire, suddenly losing patience. The garden party was stupid. The egotist was stupid. She was probably stupid too, because she knew that a few weeks ago she would have found both the party and the egotist entertaining. She would have been delighted to peep in at a window where every-thing was labelled ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay |
