"Misanthropical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... election had gone down. Every faction must have been alike an object of aversion to Junius. His opinions on domestic affairs separated him from the ministry; his opinions on colonial affairs from the opposition. Under such circumstances, he had thrown down his pen in misanthropical despair. His farewell letter to Woodfall bears date the nineteenth of January, 1773. In that letter, he declared that he must be an idiot to write again; that he had meant well by the cause and the public; that ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... tossed between wind and wave may still be lovers, she knew: but they are, or the weaker of the two is, hard upon any third person who tugs at them for subsistence or existence. The condition, if they are much beaten about, prepares true lovers, through their mutual tenderness, to be bitterly misanthropical. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... 'Tom is misanthropical to-day, as all bored people are now and then,' said Mr. Harthouse. 'Don't believe him, Mrs. Bounderby. He knows much better. I shall disclose some of his opinions of you, privately expressed to me, unless ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... all faults except those which are committed against society, but he looks upon a bore with unconcealed aversion. He is attached to a few persons whose talents he respects and whose society he covets, but towards the world in general he is rather misanthropical, and prides himself upon being free from the prejudices which he ridicules and despises more or less in everybody else. Detesting the importance and the superiority which are assumed by those who have only riches or rank to boast of, he delights in London, where such men find ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... in a postscript, as in the case of Beethoven's touching communication to his brothers Carl and Johann in the matter of his deafness. In the body of the letter he has been begging them not to think him hostile, morose, or misanthropical, and making clear to them how little they know of the secret cause of his apparent indifference. Then, on the outside of the packet, comes ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... have said, and it would be misanthropical to disbelieve or discredit their judgment, that our Prose is original—nay, has created a new era in the history of Periodical Literature. Only think of that, Christopher, and up with your Tail like a Peacock! Why, there is some comfort in that reflection, ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... When Swift wished to express his disgust for his race, he showed how absurd our passions appear in a creature six inches high; and the mountains make us all Liliputians. In other mouths Rousseau's sentiment, more fully interpreted, became unequivocally misanthropical. Byron, if any definite logical theory were to be fixed upon him, excluded the human race at large from his conception of nature. He loved, or talked as though he loved, the wilderness precisely because it was a wilderness; ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... gardens to prefer nature to art? A garden is essentially a product of art? and supplants the moor and desert made by unassisted nature. The love of Nature as understood in a later period, by Byron for example, went to this extreme, in words at least, and becomes misanthropical in admiring the savage for its own sake. But the landscape gardener only meant that his art must be in some sense subordinate to nature; that he must not shut out the wider scenery but include it in his designs. He was apt to look upon mountains as ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... sentiments expressed in her letters paled before the pleasure of seeing three such different minds at war with one another,—three men who, taken separately, would each have done honor to the most exacting family. Yet this luxury of self-love was checked by a misanthropical spitefulness, resulting from the terrible wound she had received,—although by this time she was beginning to think of that wound as a disappointment only. So when her father said to her, laughing, "Well, Modeste, do you want to be a duchess?" she ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... they could make each other through the passing changes of a long and useful life. Aside from my speculative fancies, I do wonder what the future has in store for him? How bravely he bears himself! He does not seem inclined to be gloomy or misanthropical under ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... our hostess was still bright and full of animation, and I never saw a keener look than she fastened on the mate, as he delivered himself in this, one of his usual fits of misanthropical feeling. ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper
... no time to continue so abstruse a subject with this misanthropical freebooter. She clapped her hand to her side and gave a little ...
— Stories by English Authors: England • Various
... shown more art: the wonder is, that he should have produced such magnificent effects with so little. He could not have made the satiated and meditative Harold so darkling and excursive, so lone, "aweary," and misanthropical, had he treated him as the hero of a scholastic epic. The might of the poet in such creations lay in the riches of his diction and in the felicity with which he described feelings in relation to the aspect of scenes amid the reminiscences ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... tabard. A cap of rough shag served to hide the upper part of a visage which, like that of a screech owl, seemed desirous to conceal itself from light, the lower part of the face being obscured by a huge red beard, mingling with shaggy locks of the same colour. What features were seen were stern and misanthropical. The man's figure was short, strongly made, with a neck like a bull, very broad shoulders, arms of great and disproportioned length, a huge square trunk, and thick bandy legs. This truculent official leant on a sword, the blade of which was nearly ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... felt consolation from its excess; which persuaded me that I was now on my death bed. I remembered all the wrongs, which I conceived myself to have suffered, with a sort of misanthropical delight; arising from the persuasion that, in my loss, the world would be punished for the vileness of its injustice toward me. Perhaps every human being conceives that, when he is gone, there will be a chasm, which no other ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... had submitted, there were two misanthropical foes on board the Richard which would not so easily succumb—fire and water. All night the victors were engaged in suppressing the flames. Not until daylight were the flames got under; but though the pumps were kept continually ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... by the clergy. In the preceding poem, Swift gives the same trait of his own character: "A clergyman of special note For shunning those of his own coat." His feeling towards his order was exactly the reverse of his celebrated misanthropical expression of hating mankind, but loving individuals. On the contrary, he loved the church, but disliked associating with individual clergymen.—Scott. See his letter to Pope, Sept. 29, 1725, in Pope's Works, edit. Elwin and Courthope, vii, 53, ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... abroad into the world, and observes the universal depravity of morals, and the narrow selfishness that every where prevail, according to his particular temper or circumstances, he is either contaminated by the example, or contracts a misanthropical disposition, and hates or despises the greatest part of his species. There may be, and no doubt there are, men who have seen the world, who have been conversant, even in courts, during their whole lives, who yet have retained and exercised humane and benevolent dispositions; ...
— Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa, and Pamela (1754) • Anonymous
... cheese-farm! Eleanor could not help being moved with a little curiosity on her part. This lady had no children; no near relations; for she was ignored by her brother's family. She lived alone; was she not lonely? Would she not wear misanthropical or weary traces of such a life? None; none were to be seen. Clear placidness dwelt on the brow, that looked as if nothing ever ruffled it; the eye was full of business and command; and the mouth,—its corners told ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume I • Susan Warner
... of misanthropic irony in most of what Anthony Thurston said, but the other man had the same blood in ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... injunctions and prohibitions controlling all the positions and relations of life, curious, quaint tales, ideal maxims and proverbs, uplifting legends, charming lyrical outbursts, and attractive enigmas side by side with misanthropic utterances, bewildering medical prescriptions, superstitious practices, expressions of deep agony, peculiar astrological charms, and rambling digressions on law, zoology, and botany, and when all this has been said, not half its contents have been told. It is ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... lessons, at the age of sixty-four, to improve his elocution. Junot and Bernadotte were her ardent, lasting friends, and always delighted to serve her. Her rare graces, and her generous goodness to Madame Desbordes-Valmore, disarmed the prejudices and won the heart of the gifted but misanthropic Latouche. The Duke de Noailles, who, under the envelope of a chill manner, concealed a conscientiousness of judgment, a constancy and delicacy of feeling, in strong sympathy with her own nature, was admitted to the rank and ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... woman—a noble woman, yet one who went forth into the world broken- hearted and friendless, with no belief in anyone and no pleasure in life. She, however, was of too fine a nature ever to sink into the base, cynical indifference of a misanthropic life, and the wealth which she possessed was nobly used by her to alleviate the horrors of poverty and to help those who needed help. Like Midas, the Greek King, from whence her quaint name was derived, she had ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... that no one knows so little of his fellow-men, as the cynical, misanthropic man, who walks in darkness, because he hates his brother. Be sure that the truly wise and understanding man is he who by sympathy puts himself in his neighbours' place; feels with them and for them; sees with their eyes, hears with their ears; and therefore understands ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... infested by hippopotami, and, as certain elderly males are expelled the herd, they become soured in their temper, and so misanthropic as to attack every canoe that passes near them. The herd is never dangerous, except when a canoe passes into the midst of it when all are asleep, and some of them may strike the canoe in terror. To avoid this, it is generally recommended to travel by day near the bank, and ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... above passages are quoted gives the same portrait of the writer, only seen in profile, as it were, which we have already seen drawn in full face in the story of "Morton's Hope." It is charged with that 'saeva indignatio' which at times verges on misanthropic contempt for its objects, not unnatural to a high-spirited young man who sees his lofty ideals confronted with the ignoble facts which strew the highways of political life. But we can recognize real conviction and the deepest feeling beneath his ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... least depend upon any harshness or stinginess of fate. Indeed, perhaps, no man had ever prepared for him an easier existence; no man had ever less misfortune sent to him by Providence, or less unkindness shown towards him by mankind, than this constantly struggling, this pessimistic and misanthropic man. The only son of Count Alfieri of Cortemiglia, of one of the richest and noblest families of Asti in Piedmont, his early childhood was spent under the care of his mother, a woman of almost saintly simplicity ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... The sounds jarred upon his nerves. Mirth such as theirs was debarred him for ever, and he had now become gloomy and misanthropic. He sat fingering those big oval matrices of bronze, listening to Gabrielle's voice deciphering the inscriptions, and explaining what was meant and what was possibly their history. One which Sir Henry declared to be the gem of them all bore the manus Dei for device, and was the seal of Archbishop ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... entered only by passing through his bedroom. In this apartment he spent most of his time, though he went out to walk every day, while I was at school; but, if he saw me coming, he always retreated to the house. He was gloomy and misanthropic; he never went to church himself, though he always compelled me to go, and also to attend the Sunday school. He did not go into society, and had little or nothing to do with, or to say to, the people of Parkville. He never troubled them, and they were ...
— Breaking Away - or The Fortunes of a Student • Oliver Optic
... opportunity of entering the social world; but his visit to Sydney gave him an opportunity of entering a good society to which his commission in the navy was a sufficient introduction. He was eager to find friendships if he could, for his reserve was anything but misanthropic. It was not long before he made the acquaintance of William Macleay, a naturalist of wide research and great speculative ability; and struck up a close friendship with William Fanning, one of the leading merchants of the town, a ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... my friend Bill, from being the pleasantest and most genial of fellows, he became a morose, misanthropic man. Dr. Franklin has a significant proverb,—"Silks and satins put out the kitchen fire." Silks and satins—meaning by them the luxuries of housekeeping—often put out not only the parlor fire, but that more sacred flame, the fire of domestic love. ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... N. misanthropy, incivism; egotism &c. (selfishness) 943; moroseness &c. 901a; cynicism. misanthrope, misanthropist, egotist, cynic, man hater, Timon, Diogenes. woman hater, misogynist. Adj. misanthropic, antisocial, unpatriotic; egotistical &c.(selfish) 943; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... but his fame rests chiefly on his poetry, and his Gulliver's Travels, marked and disgraced by his savage sarcasm on woman, and his vilification of human nature. He was a great master of venomous satire. He spared neither friends nor enemies. He was ambitious, misanthropic and selfish. His treatment of woman was disgraceful and heartless in the extreme. But he was witty, learned, and natural. He was never known to laugh, while he convulsed the circles into which he was thrown. He was rough to his servants, insolent to inferiors, and sycophantic to men ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... What charming prospects the name opens, does it not? I assure you the name fits the place exactly. My goodness! how I do hate the place. You'll ask why then we live here? Simply because we must. Some misanthropic relation left us the house we live ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... to pile themselves upon. Nevertheless, ere long, the warm, warbling persuasiveness of the pleasant, holiday weather we came to, seemed gradually to charm him from his mood. For, as when the red-cheeked, dancing girls, April and May, trip home to the wintry, misanthropic woods; even the barest, ruggedest, most thunder-cloven old oak will at least send forth some few green sprouts, to welcome such glad-hearted visitants; so Ahab did, in the end, a little respond to ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... nor mingled with the throng; But viewed them not with misanthropic hate; Fain would he now have joined the dance, the song, But who may smile that sinks beneath his fate? Nought that he saw his sadness could abate: Yet once he struggled 'gainst the demon's sway, And as in Beauty's bower he pensive ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... who have reached the remote Opera House, fought their way past the misanthropic door-keeper, and gained their seats, are first reduced to a state of mental chaos by the performance of a maddening overture, and are then fitted to appreciate the play, which ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 6, May 7, 1870 • Various
... in the senate, he was the commander of the pretorian guard,—that is, of the only military force stationed in Italy,—and he had terrified with his implacable persecutions all those whom he had failed to win over through his promises or his favors. Could the duel between this misanthropic old man and this vigorous, energetic, ruthless climber end in any other way than with the defeat of ...
— The Women of the Caesars • Guglielmo Ferrero
... God! how had he not only done evil with all his might, but had pleasure in those who did the same! And now, now he was reaping the fruit of his own devices. For years past, merely to please his lust of power, his misanthropic scorn, he had been malting that wicked Orestes wickeder than he was even by his own base will and nature; and his puppet had avenged itself upon him! He, he had prompted him to ask Hypatia's hand.... He had laid, half in sport, half in ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... cared for the post. Only a misanthropic person indeed would have been satisfied with it. The henwife's cottage and the poultry settlement might have been many miles from a human habitation, so lonely were they. They were in a glen of red sandstone, and half the wood lay ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... as to his brethren and superiors, in the monastery, a stern unbending spirit, a rigid austerity, and unchanging severity of mental and physical discipline, characterized his whole bearing and daily conduct. Yet, his severity proceeded not from the superstition and bigotry of a weak mind or misanthropic feeling. Though his whole time and thoughts appeared devoted to the interest of his monastery, and thence to relieving and guiding the poor, and curbing and decreasing the intemperate follies and licentious conduct of the laymen, in its immediate neighborhood; yet his extraordinary knowledge, not ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... a portrait of human depravity as the gloomiest misanthrope could wish for. But it has much wider claims on public attention than the gratification of the misanthropic few who mope in corners or stalk up and down leafless and almost solitary walks during this hanging and drowning season. Nevertheless, all men are more or less misanthropes, or they affect to be so; for only skim off the bile of a true critic, or the minds of the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume XII, No. 347, Saturday, December 20, 1828. • Various
... also a great difference between individuals in this respect. Some are naturally bright and jocund, and others are misanthropic and manufacture out of very trite materials a sort of snap-dragon wit, which flares up in an instant, is as soon out, and generally burns somebody's fingers. It may be urged on the contrary that many celebrated wits as Mathews, Leech, and others, ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... is not even so great in men as it is declared to be. It[265] is only people of a malicious disposition or those who have become somewhat misanthropic through misfortunes, like Lucian's Timon, who find wickedness everywhere, and who poison the best actions by the interpretations they give to them. I speak of those who do it in all seriousness, to draw ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... commenced thinking on this point, when the luxuriant nature of the Pacific Islands arrested his attention. In fact, he had made up his mind for a voyage to the South Seas, when a night's reflection induced him to abandon the idea. "Were I misanthropic," he said, "such a locale would suit me. The thoroughness of its insulation and seclusion, and the difficulty of ingress and egress, would in such case be the charm of charms; but as yet I am not Timon. I wish ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... "I became misanthropic; felt myself badly used. Packing up my books and a few other traps, I started for the mountains with what stock I had left, built myself a fort, ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... the leaner on old rubbed and smoothed parapets at the sunset hour, a country not exactly blighted or deserted, but that had had its life, on an immense scale, and had gone, with all its memories and relics, into rather austere, in fact into almost grim and misanthropic, retirement. This was a manner and a mood, at any rate, in all the land, that favoured in the late afternoons the divinest landscape blues and purples—not to speak of its favouring still more my practical contention that the whole guarded headland ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... His style of composition was very charming. No tales that have ever appeared in our popular journals have been so generally admired as his. But a sadness was on his spirit; and this, added to the shrinking sensitiveness of his nature, rendered him not misanthropic, but singularly averse to social intercourse. Of the disease, which was slowly sapping the springs of his life, he first became fully conscious after one of those long abstractions in which lie was wont to indulge. It is remarkable, however, that his first idea of this ...
— Fragments From The Journal of a Solitary Man - (From: "The Doliver Romance and Other Pieces: Tales and Sketches") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... one of the things which no fellow can understand. Thousands come to it, thousands go from it. Porters grow gray-headed beneath its roof. Buns, once fresh and tender, become hard and misanthropic in its refreshment rooms, and look as if they had seen the littleness of existence and were disillusioned. But there the station stands, year after year, wrapped in a discreet gloom, always the same, ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... her father's chair and laid a timid hand on his shoulder. An immense gush of pity for him flooded her heart. If she had known this story before, she would have understood, and instead of thinking him unkind and misanthropic she would have tried to be a better daughter to him. The new-found knowledge illuminated all the past and seemed to draw them ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... misleading title of 'My Brother Jack.' 'Le Petit Chose' was a commercial success, but it is doubtful whether it will rank as high among Daudet's productions as the 'Lettres de Mon Moulin.' He began to compose it in February 1866, during one of those misanthropic fits to which he was subject at periodical intervals, and which either paralyzed altogether, or quickened into fever, his creative faculties. He finished the work two years later in a very different mood, immediately after his marriage. As might ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... With which misanthropic words Mr. Rushton nodded in a surly way to the smiling Squire, and took his way down the road ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... said I could not explain to you, and I have uncovered the old wound, laying it quite bare. Now you know what it is that has made me the old cankered, harsh, misanthropic being you know—bitter, soured, evil-tempered, and so harsh; so wanting in love for my kind that even you, my boy, my poor dead sister's child, can't bear to ...
— The Lost Middy - Being the Secret of the Smugglers' Gap • George Manville Fenn
... in a misanthropic state of mind, hating myself and every one about me. The company of Talbot had long been endured, not enjoyed; and I would gladly have availed myself of any plausible excuse for a separation. True, he was my friend, had proved himself so; but I was in ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... suppose," said she, severely, and became so misanthropic that she would hardly vouchsafe a glance to the hand some square they turned into, and merely observed of the tall houses, taller than any Hilary had ever seen, that she "wouldn't fancy running ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... most malicious personage, his name will be enough—it was Bixiou! Not (alas!) the Bixiou of 1825, but the Bixiou of 1836, a misanthropic buffoon, acknowledged supreme, by reason of his energetic and caustic wit; a very fiend let loose now that he saw how he had squandered his intellect in pure waste; a Bixiou vexed by the thought that he had not ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac
... wainscots, behind which the mice were always scampering and squeaking and rattling down the plaster, and enacting family scenes and parlor theatricals. It had a cellar where the cold slug clung to the walls, and the misanthropic spider withdrew from the garish day; where the green mould loved to grow, and the long white potato-shoots went feeling along the floor, if haply they might find the daylight; it had great brick pillars, always in a cold sweat ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... are wont to refer so contemptuously to the Chinese might profitably recall that when, in Dickens' "Christmas Carol,'' the misanthropic Scrooge says of the poor and suffering: "If he be like to die, he had better do it and decrease the surplus population,''—the Ghost ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... of his property, insulted, degraded, without power, without liberty, Abouna Salama succumbed to the too common temptation of men who suffer much. Almost without society, leading a dull misanthropic life, he did not remember that sobriety in all respects was essential to his health and that over-indulgence at table was not consistent with his forced seclusion. Constant annoyances, added to intemperate habits, could ...
— A Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia - With Some Account of the Late Emperor Theodore, - His Country and People • Henry Blanc
... deal more that mothers do for children, there had been only the gruff, passionate Doctor, without sense of religion, with only a fitful tenderness, with years' length between the fits, so fiercely critical, so wholly unradiant of hope, misanthropic, savagely morbid. Yes; there was little Elsie too; it must have been that she was the boy's preserver, being childhood, sisterhood, womanhood, all that there had been for him of human life, and enough—he being naturally of such good stuff—to ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... to brand calves lonely an' forlorn that a-way, without stoppin' to herd 'em over to some well-known corral, an' the punishment it threatens, bein' several years in Huntsville, makes a gent when he's violatin' it a heap misanthropic, an' he don't hunger none for folks to come ridin' up to see about whatever he reckons he's at. Mebby later them visitors gets roped up before a co't, or jury, to tell whatever they may know. So, ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... that it was time to be out of town. Coristine said: "Let us go together; I'll see one of the old duffers and get a fortnight's leave." Wilkinson had his holidays, so he eagerly answered: "Done! but where shall we go? Oh, not to any female fashion resort." At this Coristine put on the best misanthropic air he could call up, with a cigar between his lips, and then, as if struck by a happy thought, dug his elbow into his companion's side and ejaculated: "Some quiet country place where there's good fishing." Wilkinson demurred, for he was no fisherman. The sound ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... that all are bound to play, whether they will or no, with fate. Mrs. Ormiston, still young and beloved, had died in bringing this, her only daughter, into the world; and her husband had looked somewhat coldly upon the poor baby in consequence. There was an almost misanthropic vein in the autocratic land-owner and iron-master. He had three sons already, and therefore found but little use for this woman-child. So, while pluming himself on his clear judgment and unswerving reason, he resented, most unreasonably, her birth, ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... of robber exploitation by which our soil and forests have been despoiled, for he foresaw the bitter fruits which such a policy must produce, and indeed was already producing on the fields of Virginia. He was no misanthropic cynic to exclaim, "What has posterity ever done for us that we should concern ourselves for posterity?" His care for the lands of Mount Vernon was evidence of the God-given trait imbedded in the best of men to transmit unimpaired to future generations what has been ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth
... confidence by doubt, faith by despair. We must chill our demonstrativeness, restrain our affections, blunt our sensibilities. We must cultivate conscience until we have too much of it, and become monkish, savage and misanthropic. The asceticism of manhood is apparent from the studied air with which everybody is on his guard against his neighbor. In a crowded car, men instinctively clutch their pockets, and fancy a pickpocket in a benevolent-looking old gentleman opposite. ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various
... talkative. He drank that he might forget unpleasant memories, and drank without accomplishing his object. When the pair proceeded to the room where Mrs. Frere awaited them, Frere was boisterously good-humoured, North silently misanthropic. ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... the earth would crowd back upon their minds, and wring from their ascetic hearts tributes of anguish and despair; and so we find the writings and letters of the old monks full of vain regrets and misanthropic thoughts, but sometimes overflowing with the most touching pathos of human misery. Yet the monk knew full well what his duty was, and knew how sinful it was to repine or rebel against the will of God. If he vowed obedience ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... strongly, as you will feel it bye and bye. Mind, I am not a disappointed man; and have met as generous appreciation as I ought to wish. I am not misanthropic, nor in the least soured. I say all this, not against the public, ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... characterisation. The people are mere masqueraders, who amuse us by their costume and mannerisms, but reveal no individuality. The plot is a wild extravaganza, crammed with high-flown, mock-romantic episodes. Cherry Wilkinson, as the result of a surfeit of romances, perhaps including The Misanthropic Parent or The Guarded Secret (1807), by Miss Smith, deserts her real father—a worthy farmer—to look for more aristocratic parents. As he is not picturesque enough for a villain, she repudiates him with scorn: ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... with my misanthropic guardian. I had lived at the cottage with uncle Amos from early childhood. I could faintly remember a weary waste of waters before I came to Parkville,—in which the cottage was located,—but nothing more. During the preceding ...
— Seek and Find - or The Adventures of a Smart Boy • Oliver Optic
... hands a year ago, but M. Topinard is still the cashier. M. Topinard, however, has grown gloomy and misanthropic; he says little. People think that he has something on his conscience. Wags at the theatre suggest that his gloom dates from his marriage with Lolotte. Honest Topinard starts whenever he hears Fraisier's name ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... ugly, and the miserablest dogs under the sun. If I have a right to choose my acquaintance, and—at the club, let us say prefer the company of a lively, handsome, well-dressed, gentleman like young man, who amuses me, to that of a slouching, ill-washed, misanthropic H-murderer, a ceaselessly prating coxcomb, or what not; has not society—the aggregate you and I—a right to the same choice? Harry was liked because he was likeable; because he was rich, handsome, jovial, well-born, well-bred, brave; because, with jolly topers, he liked a jolly song and a bottle; ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... successes to Liszt. The ball of the marvellous was fairly set rolling. Gall, the inventor of phrenology, took a cast of the little Liszt's skull; Talma, the tragedian, embraced him openly with effusion; and the misanthropic Marquis de Noailles became his mentor, and initiated him into the ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... Lawrence on a gloomy winter's day, with the thermometer at zero! The water looks so black and cold, and the sky so gray, that it makes one shudder, and turn to look upon the land. But there no cheering prospect meets the view. Rocks—cold, hard, misanthropic rocks—grin from beneath volumes of snow; and the few stunted black-looking pines that dot the banks here and there only tend to render the scene more desolate. No birds fly about to enliven the traveller; and the only sound that meets the ear, besides the low sighing ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... because he was deprived of the possibility of providing for the pursuit of the fugitive. Antony had honoured him with the commission to win Herod back to his cause. He was to leave Alexandria that very night. As nothing could be expected in this matter from the misanthropic Imperator, he hoped that the Queen would avenge such an offence to her dignity, and adopt severe measures towards the singer and her last lover, Dion, who with sacrilegious hands had wounded the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... was but a grim old bull, roaming the prairie by himself in misanthropic seclusion; but there might be more behind the hills. Dreading the monotony and languor of the camp, Shaw and I saddled our horses, buckled our holsters in their places, and set out with Henry Chatillon in search of the game. Henry, not intending ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... isolated habits, some persons supposed him misanthropic. Let me give one instance of his good-nature. One of the elder professors of Yale had fallen into a temporary misappreciation with the students, who received his instructions, to say the least, with an ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... the goats, occasionally you come across a black, misanthropic ram, nibbling the scant herbage of some height inaccessible to man, in preference to the sweet grasses of the valley below. The ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... uncertain light, the solitary boatman could be seen sitting erect at the bows, as if looking out for the shore. But as his little bark came shooting inwards on the long roll of a wave, it was found that there was no speculation in his stony glance: the misanthropic fisherman was a cold and rigid corpse. He had died at sea, as English juries emphatically express themselves in such cases, under "the visitation ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... I call it and misanthropic: all that teaching about the one, and the plenum, and the unmoved, and the sufficient, ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... reverses and disappointments had been much greater. Many and severe trials during an active, embittered, and often unscrupulous partisan experience, had tempered his enthusiasm if they had not brought him wisdom. Defeats can hardly be said to have made him misanthropic; but having little philosophy in his composition, he vented his spleen when there was occasion on his opponents in ironical remarks that made him dreaded, and which were often more effective than arguments; but his sagacity and knowledge of men taught him ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... Hazlitt is too serious to be playful. Nor is it like the amusing egotism of Boswell, combined with a vanity which evades our contempt, because it asks so frankly for sympathy. Hazlitt is too proud and too bitter. Neither is it the misanthropic egotism of Byron, which, through all its affectation, implies a certain aristocratic contempt of the world and its laws. Hazlitt has not the sweep and continuity of Byron's passion. His egotism—be it said without offence—is dashed with something of the feeling common amongst his dissenting ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen |
