"Individualistic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... philosophers, they thought that their own philosophy was the final word on the universe, and they did not contemplate the possibility that important advances in knowledge might be achieved by subsequent generations. And, in any case, their scope was entirely individualistic; all their speculations were subsidiary to the aim of rendering the life of the individual as tolerable as possible here and now. Their philosophy, like Stoicism, was a philosophy of resignation; it was thoroughly pessimistic and therefore incompatible ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... highly imaginative theory that underlies the reality of an individualistic society," he says (The Future in America, p. 168), "there is such a thing as honest trading. In practice I don't believe there is. Exchangeable things are supposed to have a fixed quality called their ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... saying that this war is to be the end of Individualism. "Go as you please" has had its death-blow. Out of this war, whatever else emerges, there will emerge a more highly organised State than existed before—that is to say, a less individualistic and more socialistic State. And there seems a heavy weight of probability on the side of this view. But there are also a number of less obvious countervailing considerations that may quite possibly ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... success throughout the whole lifetime of its founder, and it broke down with the advent of a new generation, with the onset of theological differences, and the loss of its guiding intelligence. The Anglo-Saxon spirit, it has been said by one of the ablest children of the experiment, is too individualistic for communism. It is possible to regard the temporary success of this complex family as a strange accident, as the wonderful exploit of what was certainly a very exceptional man. Its final disintegration into frankly monogamic couples—it is still a ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... seniors or advisers as the truest and purest earthly wisdom. Among certain small religious sects, again, such as the Quakers, the duty of 'marrying in' has been strenuously inculcated, and only the stronger-minded and more individualistic members have had courage and initiative enough to disregard precedent, and to follow the internal divine monitor, as against the externally-imposed law of their particular community. Even among wider bodies it is commonly held that Catholics must not marry Protestants; and the ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... grass that had grown for centuries untouched, and let his pigs feed on the acorns; then the more robust agriculturist who aggressively pushed back the shadows of the forest, planted the wilderness with seeds of a magic learned in the valleys of Europe and Asia, put up the fences of individualistic struggle, and built his log cabin, the wilderness castle, the birthplace of the new American; then the speculator and promoter (the hunter and explorer of the urban occupation); and finally in their wake the builders ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... injunction upon him to love all the parts of that unity. But the Bhagavad Gita does not teach clearly even this Vedantic doctrine. Selfishness is too much stamped upon the Hindu faith. It is too exclusively an individualistic religion. It is every one for himself in the great struggle of man for redemption. It pre-eminently tends to cultivate in man both pride in his own achievement and an exclusively selfish devotion to the ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... Larry Woolford decided. She could be an attractive item if it wasn't for obviously getting her kicks out of being individualistic. ...
— Status Quo • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... materialistic rewards of economic activities often prove more attractive than the emotional satisfactions of family life, so, too, the intellectual ambitions of the professional woman may deter her from the exercise of her reproductive functions. Thus the egoistic and individualistic tendencies which modern social organization fosters in the personality of its feminine members makes them unwilling to sacrifice their ambitious plans in the performance of their ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard
... this law of the spirit. In a true and real sense it is our own law; we make it. Being what we are, we cannot let ourselves off. Pain is at once the consequence of sin and the token of our divine lineage. But there is nothing individualistic about this sinning and suffering. All the love in the universe comes to the help of the soul that tries to rise. It will even enter the prison house along with it and accept the cross in the endeavour to hasten the emancipation of the sinbound soul. In fact, it must do so, for ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... Browning differs not only from Tennyson but from the prevailing thought of his age, differs in that his emphasis is individualistic. Like all the other Victorians he dwells on the importance of individual devotion to the service of others, but he believes that the chief results of such effort must be in the development of the individual's character, ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... like sea sands between his fingers, and not a grain of them remained in his grasp. A little money was there, a little knowledge, a little experience—but what toward the final satisfaction, the justification of a man's life? Bob was still too young, too individualistic to consider the doctrine of the day's work well done as the explanation and justification of all. The coming years would pass as quickly, leaving as little behind. Never so poignantly had he felt the insistence of the carpe diem. ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... most vigorously discountenanced and outlawed. The interests of religion and its officials are wholly antagonistic to those of magic and magicians. In civilised communities and in historical times magic is in the main individualistic, not social; magical ceremonies for the good of the community seem to be confined to races in a very early stage of development. The examples on which Dr. Frazer relies for his theory of the development of the public ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... you are a rebellious, individualistic Englishwoman. You have lost that sense of family union, which makes good Japanese, brothers and cousins and uncles and aunts, all love each other publicly, however much they may hate ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... conclusions. If matter be held to possess no other properties than those known to the physicist, it might be possible to account for what may be termed the utilitarian side of human development, social and individualistic. Nature makes demands upon man's energies and capacities before she will yield him food and shelter, and his material requirements generally. The enormously important and far-reaching range of facts here brought to view have largely determined the chequered course of industrial and social ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... one's faith is kept alive as one occasionally meets a realized ideal of better human relations. At least traces of successful cooperation are found even in individualistic America. I recall my enthusiasm on the day when I set forth to lecture at New Harmony, Indiana, for I had early been thrilled by the tale of Robert Owen, as every young person must be who is interested in social reform; I was delighted ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... at the beginning; then you'll see who's right. I'm a biochemist by profession. A damned good one, but too individualistic to please the big research centers. They like docile teams—scientific Percherons to pull the big red wagon. So I taught at one jerkwater college after another. Sooner or later my superiors, all dodderers who stopped thinking with sighs of relief once they had ...
— Revenge • Arthur Porges
... obedient and devoted subjects. For Dickie, happily for him, was as yet given over to that wholly pleasant vanity, the aristocratic idea. The rough justice of democracy, and the harsh breaking of all purely personal and individualistic dreams that comes along with it, for ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... the first place that Taoism, like its legitimate successor Zennism, represents the individualistic trend of the Southern Chinese mind in contra-distinction to the communism of Northern China which expressed itself in Confucianism. The Middle Kingdom is as vast as Europe and has a differentiation of idiosyncrasies marked by the two great river systems which traverse it. The Yangtse-Kiang ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... true, stout-hearted, individualistic liberty of believing—an excellent thing and wholesome, though it by no means covers the whole ground, or meets all difficulties. The logical consequence is a strong distaste for theology, and no very high opinion of the priesthood, wherein we may probably find the root of Thackeray's proclivity, ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... philosophers, poets, soldiers, socialists and priests, by the wisest and by the madmen beyond the Rhine. Unfortunately France, Russia and even Great Britain have not been quite exempt from this pernicious theory of individualistic education. ...
— The New Ideal In Education • Nicholai Velimirovic
... argument he went wearily with Garry in a taxi, particularly individualistic in his attire. And he told the judge in a richer brogue than usual that he was a painter subject to irresistible fits of dreaminess and must be excused. Garry, aghast, stared at the judge and ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... child adequately for its entrance into life both parents are usually needed. The State on its side—that is to say, the community of which parents and child alike form part—is bound to know who these persons are who have become sponsors for a new individual now introduced into its midst. The most Individualistic State, the most Socialistic State, are alike bound, if faithful to the interests, both biological and economic, of their constituent members generally, to insist on the full legal and recognized parentage of the father and mother of every child. That is ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... praying when he had nothing better to do. And so to-night Esther fared to the kitchen, with her red pitcher, passing in her childish eagerness numerous women shuffling along on the same errand, and bearing uncouth tin cans supplied by the institution. An individualistic instinct of cleanliness made Esther prefer the family pitcher. To-day this liberty of choice has been taken away, and the regulation can, numbered and stamped, serves as a soup-ticket. There was quite a crowd of applicants outside the stable-like doors of ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... of public buildings, the perfection of community utilities such as transportation, streets, lighting, and communication, from the absence of individual homes and the housing of people in huge dormitories, that some different, less individualistic type of social organization than ours was involved. It was obvious that as an organization, the Science Community must also be wealthy. If any of its individual citizens were wealthy, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... the best state of society is one which will allow each of these so-called equal beings to work out his own happiness as best he can for himself, with the minimum of interference from his fellow-citizens or from the law. Now if, says our author, men were born equal in reality, such an individualistic democracy might perhaps work well enough. But men are not born equal. The root of the difficulty lies here. In the economic sense, as in all others, some men are incomparably more able than the great majority of their fellows, ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... evolution of man's opposition to this law. The ordinary evolutionist hypothesis, that the tribe would prosper most whose members were least self-seeking, is contradicted by all history. The overbearing, "grabbing," aristocratic, individualistic, unscrupulous races beat the others out of the field. Mr. Huxley, indeed, alleged that the "influence of the cosmic process in the evolution of society is the greater the more rudimentary its civilisation. ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... omission. There was perhaps a time when Mr. Rawjester was more widely known than Mr. Rochester. And certainly Mr. Rochester (to adopt the diction of that other eminent country gentleman, Mr. Darcy) was simply individualistic not only in practice, but in theory. Now any one may be so in practice: but a man who is simply individualistic in theory must merely be an ass. Undoubtedly the Brontes exposed themselves to some misunderstanding by thus perpetually making the masculine creature ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... It was this individualistic religion that made T. D., democrat as he nevertheless was, so hostile to all socialisms and administrative panaceas. Life must be flexible. You ask for a free man, and these Utopias give you an "interchangeable part," with a fixed number, in a rule-bound organism. The real thing to aim ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... position of liberalism untainted by socialism—is that it is the duty of the State to see that as far as possible the social inequalities which arise through the individualistic organisation of society are removed or remedied, and that equality of opportunity is secured to each to make the best of his own individual life. In the educational sphere this implies that any obstacles in the way of a man's educating ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... on the ragged edges of the law, an indigestible bit for the civilization which had become too ordered and "adjusted" to absorb his kind. But in the Project he had discovered others like himself—men born out of time, too ruthless, too individualistic for their own age, but able to operate with ease in the dangerous paths of the ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... us like to think of a thing like that, but, as you say, it's happened. You know, this man Rainsford is just the type to do something like that, too. Fundamentally an individualistic egoist; badly adjusted personality type. Say he wants to make some sensational discovery which will assure him the position in the scientific world to which he believes himself entitled. He finds this lonely old prospector, into whose isolated camp ...
— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper
... individual can only secure his own rights as he labors to secure those of others. But while the teaching has included an ever-broadening range of obligation and has insisted upon the recognition of the claims of human brotherhood, the training has been singularly individualistic; it has fostered ambitions for personal distinction, and has trained the faculties almost exclusively in the direction of intellectual accumulation. Doubtless, woman's education is at fault, in that it has failed to recognize certain needs, and has failed to ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... North Queensland jungles which have marked individualistic characters is that known as the koel cuckoo, which the blacks of some localities have named "calloo-calloo"—a mimetic term imitative of the most frequent notes of the bird. The male is lustrous black, the female mottled ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... to maintain and develop and multiply lives. It does not follow that life is consciously a fabric woven of births and the struggle to maintain and develop and multiply lives. I do not suppose a cat or a savage sees it in that light. A cat's standpoint is probably strictly individualistic. She sees the whole universe as a scheme of more or less useful, pleasurable and interesting things concentrated upon her sensitive and interesting personality. With a sinuous determination she evades disagreeables ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... as a matter of fact the "Legalist theory" which provided the philosophic basis for dictatorship in the third century B.C. was attributable to Lao Tzu. He was not thinking, however, of dictatorship; he was an individualistic anarchist, believing that if there were no active government all men would be happy. Then everyone could attain unity with Nature for himself. Thus we find in Lao Tzu, and later in all other Taoists, ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... Tories during and after the Revolution had given him a taste of the sweets of confiscation. The spirit of his democracy was self-reliant, undisciplined, suspicious of authority, equalitarian, and individualistic. ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... abrupt. But though he formulated no system of philosophy, and seemed to show the influence now of Plato, now of Kant, or of German thought as filtered through the brain of Coleridge, he was, like his American master, associate and friend, steadily optimistic, idealistic, individualistic. The teachings of William Ellery Channing a little before, as to the sacred inviolability of the human conscience—anticipating the later conclusions of Martineau—really lay at the basis of the work of ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia |
