"Unsocial" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... secluded, sequestered, retired, delitescent[obs3], private, bye; out of the world, out of the way; " the world forgetting by the world forgot " [Pope]. snug, domestic, stay-at-home. unsociable; unsocial, dissocial[obs3]; inhospitable, cynical, inconversable|, unclubbable, sauvage[Fr], troglodytic. solitary; lonely, lonesome; isolated, single. estranged; unfrequented; uninhabitable, uninhabited; tenantless; abandoned; deserted, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... the advice of the Spartan leader Eurybiades been adopted, the victory of Salamis would never have been achieved? He was for retreat to the Isthmus; he was for defending the Peloponnese, because in the Peloponnesus was the unsocial selfish Sparta, and leaving the rest of Hellas to the armament of Xerxes. Themistocles spoke against the ignoble counsel; the Spartan raised his staff to strike him. Ye know the Spartan manners. 'Strike if you will, but hear me,' cried Themistocles. ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... into a position of importance, which the split prevented it from ever fully realizing. The question of the fifty years with which the period began was that which fixed the Cameronian body, not merely in a condition of unsocial seclusion in its relation with all other churches, but even detached it from its allegiance to the State, and placed it in circumstances of positive rebellion. Perhaps the history of this latter body, as embodied in its older testimony, and the controversial writings of its Fairlys and Thorburns, ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... unsocial character of Thoreau's theory of life has been one of the most serious charges against it, his fine series of thoughts on love and marriage in this volume become peculiarly interesting. "Love must be as much a light as a flame." "Love is a severe critic. Hate can pardon more than love." ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... pupils thought it strange that she should choose to remain alone instead of becoming acquainted with those who were to be her schoolmates for the year, but believing that she was determined to be unsocial, they made no effort ...
— Dorothy Dainty at Glenmore • Amy Brooks
... church himself, and everybody else ought to go. It was as much a social gathering as the dinner at the market ordinary, or the annual audit dinner of their common landlord. The dissenter, who declined to pay church-rates, was an unsocial person. He had left the circle. It was not the theology that they cared about, it was the social nonconformity. In a spiritual sense, too, the clergyman was the father of the parish, the shepherd of the flock—it was a part of the great system. To go a step farther, in political affairs the one ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... to go and love Mary. I was twice her age, an awkward, unsocial man, that would have blighted her youth. I was as wrong as wrong can be. But I never meant to tell her. I locked the grammar in my desk and the secret in my heart for a year. I could n't bear to meet her in the village, and kept away from every place where she was likely ...
— Quite So • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... has been related, this had a tendency to cement the tribe together and enhance political unity. This custom must have had its influence on social order and must have, in a measure, arrested the tendency of the people to an unsocial and selfish life. ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... My life was changed; my experience had been varied since I left X——, but Hunsden could not know this; he had seen me only in the character of Mr. Crimsworth's clerk—a dependant amongst wealthy strangers, meeting disdain with a hard front, conscious of an unsocial and unattractive exterior, refusing to sue for notice which I was sure would be withheld, declining to evince an admiration which I knew would be scorned as worthless. He could not be aware that since then youth and loveliness had been to me everyday objects; that I had ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... till you reach her secret height. This is, supposing the master or mistress of the house to be at home. If they are not in, she answers your "Amici!" with "No ghe ne xe!" (Nobody here!) and lets down a basket by a string outside the window, and fishes up your card.] or by the unsocial domestic habits of Europe. You bow and give good-day to the people whom you meet in the common hall and on the common stairway, but you rarely know more of them than their names, and you certainly care nothing about them. The sociability of Europe, and ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... affection conciliated, but by softer accomplishments, and qualities more easily communicable to those about us. He that can only converse upon questions, about which only a small part of mankind has knowledge sufficient to make them curious, must lose his days in unsocial silence, and live in the crowd of life without a companion. He that can only be useful on great occasions, may die without exerting his abilities, and stand a helpless spectator of a thousand vexations which fret away happiness, and which nothing is required to remove ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... and leave behind him children's children to be the servants of God in his place for ever. All this and much more may be truly said by way of prelude about the duty of marriage. But if a man will not listen, and remains unsocial and alien among his fellow-citizens, and is still unmarried at thirty-five years of age, let him pay a yearly fine;—he who of the highest class shall pay a fine of a hundred drachmae, and he who is of ...
— Laws • Plato
... achieved a deathless place in the annals of the religious history of the eighteenth century, and, more particularly, determined the beginnings and the essential character of the world-wide Methodist movement. His gentle life presents very little of dramatic incident: he was a reserved, somewhat unsocial boy, greatly devoted to study and to the reading of poetry. He was given a most thorough education, and, while completing his university career, became acquainted with Friedrich Schlegel, and remained his most intimate friend. He also came to know Fichte, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... indecent. It is unsocial and uneconomic. It is immoral and unpatriotic. Toward women the Progressive party proclaims the chivalry of the State. We propose to protect women wage-earners by suitable laws, an example of which is the minimum wage for women workers—a wage which shall be high enough to at least buy ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... Should you see the isle on a sunny day; Then it is simple enough in its way,— Two rocky bulges, one at each end, With a smaller bulge and a hollow between; Patches of whortleberry and bay; Accidents of open green, Sprinkled with loose slabs square and gray, Like graveyards for ages deserted; a few Unsocial thistles; an elder or two, 50 Foamed over with blossoms white as spray; And on the whole island never a tree Save a score of sumachs, high as your knee. That crouch in hollows where they may, (The cellars where once stood a village, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... on the Unsocial Passions. These necessarily divide our sympathy between him that feels them and him that is their object. Resentment is especially hard to sympathize with. We may ourselves resent wrong done to another, but the less so that the sufferer ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... of his misery and discomfort must be sought farther back in his life. His surly speech, his unsocial temper, spoke of a mind ill at ease,—the remembrance of the ...
— Famous Islands and Memorable Voyages • Anonymous
... primitive ourselves that we were incapable of a cooperative effort strong enough to kill him or cast him out. Rude as was our social organization, he was, nevertheless, too rude to live in it. He tended always to destroy the horde by his unsocial acts. He was really a reversion to an earlier type, and his place was with the Tree People rather than with us who were in the process ...
— Before Adam • Jack London
... trained dog in the circus; he yelped continuously, as if it agonized him to see the lion safe out of his reach. Sounder had lost his identity. Joy had unhinged his mind and had made him a dog of double personality. He had always been unsocial with me, never responding to my attempts to caress him, but now he leaped into my arms and licked my face. He had always hated Jones till that moment, when he raised his paws to his master's breast. And perhaps more remarkable, time and time again he sprang up at Satan's nose, whether to bite ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... bad riding. Dr. Johnson said, 'When we take into computation what we have saved, and what we have gained, by this agreeable sail, it is a great deal.' He observed, 'it is very disagreeable riding in Sky. The way is so narrow, one only at a time can travel, so it is quite unsocial; and you cannot indulge in meditation by yourself, because you must be always attending to the steps which your horse takes.' This was a just and clear ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... hatred of all exaggeration, his resolute refusal to be either sentimental or optimistic, led him to insist upon the gloomy side of things. Moreover, he was still indolent; given to be slovenly in his work, and rather unsocial in his ways, though warmly attached to a few friends. My father, impressed by these symptoms, came to the conclusion that Fitzjames was probably unsuited for the more active professions for which a sanguine temper and ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... was ordered to appear for his final examination. Whether it was because his teachers pitied his poverty, and wished him to have a chance for himself, or whether because, as some would have us believe, they wished to be rid of a scholar who criticised their methods, and was fault-finding, unsocial, and "exasperating," it is at least certain that the boy took his examinations, and passed them satisfactorily, standing number forty ...
— The Boy Life of Napoleon - Afterwards Emperor Of The French • Eugenie Foa
... difficulties in his own way. He is let alone in a way so terrible, that similar treatment would be social death to a man of culture. We repeat, there is nothing like absolute individuality, except among isolated and unsocial savages. In an advanced state of society, human interests become interrelated—a complete network of complexity; and what any particular individual does becomes a matter of interest to many, since the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... and unsocial. My uncle rarely spoke; he pointed for whatever he wanted, and the servant perfectly understood him. Indeed, his man John, or Iron John, as he was called in the neighborhood, was a counterpart of his master. He was a tall, bony old fellow, with a dry ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... flocks. The farms are large, usually of at least six thousand acres, so one seldom sees a farmhouse. The farmers are all of Boer stock. They lead a lonely life in a silent and melancholy nature, but their habitual gravity has not made them unsocial, for they are fond of riding or driving in their waggons to visit one another on all occasions of festivity or mourning. Every ten or fifteen miles there is a station, and here the British element in the population appears, chiefly occupied in store-keeping. At Matjesfontein one ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... by one of the windows talking with Matteo, who had just came up from the Campagna. He had an unsocial habit of eating alone, and, as he ate nothing when down in the vineyard, always wanted his supper as soon as he came up. The table was set for him with snow-white cloth and napkin, silver knife, fork and spoon, a loaf of bread and a decanter of golden-sparkling wine icy ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... great personal charm, take infinite pains to cultivate all the little graces and qualities which go to make up popularity. If people who are naturally unsocial would only spend as much time and take as much pains as people who are social favorites in making themselves popular, they would ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... those worthy, humane sentiments of peace and kindness and that noble resolution to forego even the kingdom rather than to acquire it through the shedding of the blood of his relatives. How incongruous to build up the lofty structure of a faith upon so unethical, unsocial, and cruel ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... some slight solace for the arduous trip), but never more than once a day, and never in another man's house. Let us hope that on their lonely journeys they conscientiously obeyed the law, though we can but suspect that the one unsocial smoke may have been a long one. In some communities the colonists could not plant tobacco, nor buy it, nor sell it, but since they loved the fascinating weed then as men love it now, they somehow invoked or ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... social ministry. The unsocial lives come out of unsocial homes. The home that exists for itself alone trains lives that exist only for themselves; these are the homes that throw the sand of selfishness into the wheels of society; they ultimately effect social suicide through selfishness. ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... find that my friends are not quite satisfied with the account you have given of them in your clever novel entitled "An Unsocial Socialist." You already understand that I consider it my duty to communicate my whole history, without reserve, to whoever may desire to be guided or warned by my experience, and that I have no sympathy whatever with the ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... father's death, William B. Astor, the chief heir of John Jacob Astor's twenty million dollars, was fifty-six years old. A tall, ponderous man, his eyes were small, contracted, with a rather vacuous look, and his face was sluggish and unimpressionable. Extremely unsocial and taciturn, he never betrayed emotion and generally was destitute of feeling. He took delight in affecting a carelessly-dressed, slouchy appearance as though deliberately notifying all concerned that one with such wealth as he was privileged to ignore the formulas of punctilious ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... to suppose that I am lonely or without companions. Though I have ceased to follow my profession of the sea, and returned home to spend the remainder of my days in a quiet, peaceful way, I am by no means of an unsocial disposition or morose habits. On the contrary, I am fond, as I have ever been, of social intercourse; and old man though I be, I take great delight in the society of young people, especially little boys. I can boast, too, that ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... dark-featured man, the poet's descendant, whom I saw when visiting the place in company with honest John Jones—he had now a spade in his hand and was doubtless going to his labour. As I knew him to be of a rather sullen unsocial disposition, I said nothing to him, but proceeded on my way. As I advanced the valley widened, the hills on the west receding to some distance from the river. Came to Tregeiriog a small village, which takes its name from the brook; Tregeiriog signifying the hamlet or ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... clear than that the infliction of punishment in general, in a degree which the reformation and the restraint of those who transgress the laws does not render indispensable, and none more than death, confirms all the inhuman and unsocial impulses of men. It is almost a proverbial remark, that those nations in which the penal code has been particularly mild, have been distinguished from all others by the rarity of crime. But the example is to be admitted to be equivocal. A more decisive argument is afforded by a consideration of ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... saints of this period do not belong to that third sex after which, according to some, the human race has ever striven—the constructive and purposeful third sex. They are wholly sexless, unsocial and futile beings, the negation of every masculine or feminine virtue. Their independence fettered by the iron rules of the Vatican and of their particular order, these creatures had nothing to do; and like the rest of us under such conditions, became vacuously ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... I might have been successful in other quarters, but I did not care to try. I left New York in disgust, and, going West, I buried myself in the forest, where I built a rude cabin, and there I have lived since, an unsocial, solitary life. Years have passed since I ...
— Try and Trust • Horatio Alger
... at all played the part of Cinderella in the house. Her mother was exceedingly fond of her—partly, perhaps, because Nan alone took the trouble to humour all her mysterious nerve-miseries; while her sisters tolerated her, though they thought her unsocial. Even this dress, when it did appear—and a thousand times Nan had inwardly prayed that it might not be ready in time—was quite as pretty as theirs. It was very pretty indeed; but somehow, Nan, as she regarded herself in the ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... his full energies would never be developed till he was in the highest place, and had the sole direction of affairs; and his brother Lawrence, who told this to Henry de Ros, said that in early youth he evinced the same obstinate and unsocial disposition, which has since been so remarkable a feature of his character. I wish he was not hampered with the Irish Church fetters, which ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... of the dramatic poets, on virtue and decency, Jeremy Collier, a non-juring clergyman, attacked the stage. His charge against the authors was unquestionably right; but his attack upon the stage itself, exhibited a disposition splenetic almost to misanthropy, and an austerity of principle urged to unsocial ferocity. In his fury he renounced the idea of reforming the stage; he was for abolishing it entirely. He attacked the poets with "unconquerable pertinacity, with wit in the highest degree keen and sarcastic, ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... through the throbbing eyeball to the brain, With a hot sense of heaviness and pain; 10 And bare, at once, Captivity displayed Stands scoffing through the never-opened gate, Which nothing through its bars admits, save day, And tasteless food, which I have eat alone Till its unsocial bitterness is gone; And I can banquet like a beast of prey, Sullen and lonely, couching in the cave Which is my lair, and—it may be—my grave. All this hath somewhat worn me, and may wear, But must be borne. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... furnish regarding its inhabitants is so uniformly meagre, as to attest the absence of intercourse; and the writers of all nations, Romans, Greeks, Arabians, Chinese and Indians, concur in their allusions to the unsocial and uncivilised customs ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... guardian of Peggy Thrift, an heiress, whom he brings up in the country, wholly without society. John Moody is morose, suspicious, and unsocial. When 50 years of age, and Peggy 19, he wants to marry her, but is out-witted by "the country girl," who prefers Belville, a young man of ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... circumstances similar to each other; and their consequent rivalship prevented any disproportionate refinement from appearing in any particular region. The principles of government, firmly rooted in the Feudal System, unsocial and unphilosophical as they were, laid the foundation of that balance of power which discourages the Cesars and Alexanders of modern ages from attempting the ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... occur during dining hours, so that, as Mr. Adams informed me, it was difficult to arrange a dinner that would not be broken up somewhat by an unexpected debate, or a division in the House of Commons. The precedence of rank had to be carefully observed. The unsocial habit of not introducing guests to each other tended to restrain conversation and make the dinner dull and heavy. Still the forms and usages in social life in London are much like those in Washington. But here the ordinary sessions ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... atmosphere, would be a purely anarchistic course. It would mean a fatherless home, and since the woman will have to play the double part of income-earner and mother, an impoverished and struggling home. It would mean also an unsocial because ostracized home. In most cases, and even assuming it to be right in idea, it would still be on all fours with that immediate abandonment of private property we have already discussed, a sort of suicide that helps the ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... time old Martin came and went in his own strange manner, or sat among the rest absorbed within himself, and holding little intercourse with any one. Although he was unsocial, he was not willful in other things, or troublesome, or morose; being never better pleased than when they left him quite unnoticed at his book, and pursued their own amusements in his presence, unreserved. It was impossible to discern ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... not till Saturday, June 25, when happening to dine at Clifton's eating-house, in Butcher-row I was surprized to perceive Johnson come in and take his seat at another table. The mode of dining, or rather being fed, at such houses in London, is well known to many to be particularly unsocial, as there is no Ordinary, or united company, but each person has his own mess, and is under no obligation to hold any intercourse with any one. A liberal and full-minded man, however, who loves to talk, will break through this churlish and ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... either vanished or shrank to shadowy simulacra. In contemporary history currents and cross-currents, eddies and whirlpools, became so numerous and bewildering that it is not easy to determine the direction of the main stream. Unsocial tendencies coexisted with collectivity of effort, both being used as weapons against the larger community and each being set down as a manifestation of democracy. Against every kind of authority the world, ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... my reflections, however, I could not but perceive that his condition, though eligible when compared with what it once was, was likewise disastrous and humiliating, compared with his youthful hopes and his actual merits. For such a one to mope away his life in this unsocial and savage state was deeply to be deplored. It was my duty, if possible, to prevail on him to relinquish his scheme. And what would be requisite, for that end, but to inform him ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... was always some butterfly or another flitting about, and when Philip showed by his manner that he was not pleased, Ruth laughed merrily enough and rallied him on his soberness—she declared he was getting to be grim and unsocial. He talked indeed more with Alice than with Ruth, and scarcely concealed from her the trouble that was in his mind. It needed, in fact, no word from him, for she saw clearly enough what was going forward, ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... unites their willing hands. 'Behold, he cries, Earth! Ocean! Air above, 'And hail the DEITIES OF SEXUAL LOVE! 'All forms of Life shall this fond Pair delight, 'And sex to sex the willing world unite; 'Shed their sweet smiles in Earth's unsocial bowers, 'Fan with soft gales, and gild with brighter hours; 'Fill Pleasure's chalice unalloy'd with pain, 'And give SOCIETY his golden ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... fellow naturally as unsocial as the cadet now in arrest, it was no joke to be confined to his tent even for the space of a week, except when engaged in official duties; and to be obliged, two afternoons in a week, to march in full equipment and carry his piece, for three hours in the barracks ...
— Dick Prescotts's Fourth Year at West Point - Ready to Drop the Gray for Shoulder Straps • H. Irving Hancock
... servitude to a preacher whom the people had not chosen, and who fed them with garbage instead of wholesome food. Even his own tithe-holder, farmer Humphreys, was led away by the delusion. He was a man of rough manners and gloomy unsocial disposition, but he had hitherto never ventured to rebel, farther than occasionally to absent himself from church, on the Sunday after every admonition which Dr. Beaumont from time to time privately gave him to abstain ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... shoulders in displeasure. "I thought to have lodged him in the solere chamber," said he; "but since he is so unsocial to Christians, e'en let him take the next stall to Isaac the Jew's.—Anwold," said he to the torchbearer, "carry the Pilgrim to the southern cell.—I give you good-night," he added, "Sir Palmer, with small ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... the early Grecian style. They seem rather to be repelling extremes. But extremes meet more often than is supposed. And there really are some remarkable features of conformity even as to this point between the tendencies of Christian monachism and the unsocial sociality of Paganism. However, it is not with this view that we have pressed the parallel. Not by way of showing a general affinity in virtues and latent powers, and thence deducing a probable affinity in results, but generally for the sake of fixing ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... she continued, blushing slightly, 'that tales of the weird kind were made to be told, not written. The action of a teller is wanted to give due effect to all stories of incident; and I hope that a time will come when, as of old, instead of an unsocial reading of fiction at home alone, people will meet together cordially, and sit at the feet of a professed romancer. I am going to tell my tales before a London public. As a child, I had a considerable power in arresting the attention of other children by recounting adventures ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... said little; but I didn't mind that. I had known him for years, and had always found something soothing and companionable in his long abstentions from speech. His silence was never unsocial; it was bland as a natural hush; one felt one's self included in it, not left out. He stroked his beard and gazed absently at me; and when we had finished our coffee and liqueurs we strolled ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... nations be so, otherwise it is not nature but custom, and the offence frequently originates with the accuser. England is as truly the natural enemy of France, as France is of England, and perhaps more so. Separated from the rest of Europe, she has contracted an unsocial habit of manners, and imagines in others the jealousy she creates in herself. Never long satisfied with peace, she supposes the discontent universal, and buoyed up with her own importance, conceives herself the only object pointed at. The ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... she did, and the proposition remained uncontroverted. Therewith the discourse died; and the miles that remained were made in unsocial silence. Dolly feared she had given some pain, but doubted it could not be very great; and she was glad to have the explanation over. Perhaps the pain was more than she knew, although Lawrence certainly ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... first human beings so advanced in mental stature that tribal unions were found good. Among insects especially the biologist finds many types of organized living things, ranging widely from the solitary individual—a counterpart of something even more primitive than the most unsocial savage now existing—up to communities that rival human civilization, as regards the concerted effect of the diversified lives of the component units. The student of the whole of living nature is favored still more in that he learns how the make-up ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... Prescott describes Philip as being habitually grave in manner, unsocial and sombre, and always dressed in black. The Order of the Golden Fleece was the ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... mine, and am ravenous. The idea of talking reason to a hungry man! I know of a nice quiet restaurant which, at this hour, we'll have almost to ourselves. You surely won't be so unsocial as to ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... reasonable, but out of female pride! 'I suffer not,' saith St. Paul, 'the woman to usurp authority over the man.' If the Apostle could not suffer it," he naturally remarks, "into what mold is he mortified that can?" He had a sincere desire to preserve men from the society of unsocial and unsympathizing women; and that was his ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... found himself incapable of any intellectual or physical exertion. He could not work. He could not even loaf alone. Brady was an indifferent companion, subject to fits of absence of mind,—more unsocial than absence of body. ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... thy little drunken eyes unclose, And now thou feelest for thy little nose, And, finding it, thou rubbest thy two hands Much as to say, "I'm glad I'm here again." And well mayest thou rejoice—'tis very plain, That near wert thou to Death's unsocial lands. ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... was settled in his new purchase another stranger arrived, and took up his abode in the best apartments of the house. The new-comer, a man of about fifty years of age, and evidently, from his dress and gait, a sea-faring person, was as reserved and unsocial as his landlord. His name, or at least that which he chose to be known by, was Wilson. He had one child, a daughter, about thirteen years of age, whom he placed at a boarding-school in the adjacent town. He seldom saw her; the intercourse between the father and daughter being principally carried ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... expression. He still maintained, from some considerations of health or abstinence, his former habits of taking his repasts alone; and this inhospitable custom, [45] which his enemies imputed to pride, contributed, at least, to nourish the infirmity of a morose and unsocial humor. Separated from that familiar intercourse, which facilitates the knowledge and the despatch of business, he reposed an unsuspecting confidence in his deacon Serapion; and seldom applied his speculative knowledge ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... whole community may suffer. The refusal of one man to put a sewer in front of his house may block the improvement of a whole street. The heedlessness of one family may bring an epidemic upon an entire city. There must be a plan, and by law the will of the majority must be imposed upon the unsocial few. Where voluntary cooeperation fails, compulsory cooeperation often is necessary. Thus health laws, tax laws, and improvement laws regulate many of the acts of citizens, limit the use of property, and compel men to better social ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... in truth, present to the mind a long series of the most direful objects, assassinations, rebellions, anarchy, tyranny, and religion itself, either cruel, or gloomy and unsocial. An historian who would paint it in its true colours must take the pencil of Guercino or Salvator Rosa. But the most agreeable imagination can hardly figure to itself a more pleasing scene of private and public felicity than will naturally result ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... you can have no influence unless you are social. An unsocial man is as devoid of influence as an ice-peak is of verdure. It is through social contact and absolute social value alone that you can accomplish any great social good. It is through the invisible lines which ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... England. The gloomy and dreary grandeur of the building, the almost savage aspect of the domain, the many melancholy and time-honored memories connected with both, had much in unison with the feelings of utter abandonment which had driven me into that remote and unsocial region of the country. Yet although the external abbey, with its verdant decay hanging about it, suffered but little alteration, I gave way, with a child-like perversity, and perchance with a faint hope of alleviating my sorrows, to a display of more than regal magnificence within. For such ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... birth an event occurred which had contributed much to induce and to confirm my father's unsocial habits; it was the fact that a suspicion of murder had fallen upon his younger brother, though not sufficiently definite to lead to any public proceedings, yet strong enough to ruin him in public opinion. This ...
— Two Ghostly Mysteries - A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family; and The Murdered Cousin • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... horror created in the general mind by the perverse and unsocial government from which they had so fortunately escaped, that the people appear to have anxiously avoided all retrospect, and, with Prynne and Vicars, to have lost sight of Shakspeare and "his fellows." Instead, ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... course of two or three days, people ceased to take interest in a feud so coldly conducted; and if they thought of it at all, it was but to wonder that both the parties should persevere in residing near the Spa, and in chilling, with their unsocial behaviour, a party met together for the purposes of health ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... the subject was dismissed, and her guests returned to their ordinary conversation. Except the doctor and Daisy. She was overwhelmed, and he was gravely unsocial. ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell
... has been a great deal of what I have called philosophic pharisaism. Perhaps it would be better called aeonic pharisaism. I mean the spirit in the present age which seems to say 'I thank thee, O God, that I am not as former ages: ignorant, barbaric, cruel, unsocial; I read books, ride in aeroplanes, eat my dinner with a knife and fork, and cheerfully pay my taxes to the State; I study human science, talk freely about humanity, and spend much of my time in making speeches on social questions'. Now there is truth ...
— Progress and History • Various
... man was near happiness that morning,—unbelievably near. By nature unsocial, by habit, city inbred, artificially taciturn, there came with the primitive happiness of the moment the concomitant primitive desire for companionship. He smiled self-tolerantly when, obeying an ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... a cordon round. depopulate; dispeople^, unpeople^. Adj. secluded, sequestered, retired, delitescent^, private, bye; out of the world, out of the way; the world forgetting by the world forgot [Pope]. snug, domestic, stay-at-home. unsociable; unsocial, dissocial^; inhospitable, cynical, inconversable^, unclubbable, sauvage [Fr.], troglodytic. solitary; lonely, lonesome; isolated, single. estranged; unfrequented; uninhabitable, uninhabited; tenantless; abandoned; deserted, deserted in one's utmost need; unfriended^; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... by the religious manners of Mary; partly by the cold and unsocial temper of William, who shunned excess, not perhaps because it was criminal, but because it was derogatory; partly by the political fashion of the day, which was to disown the profligacy that marked the partisans of the Stuarts; but, most of all, by the general increase of ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... two sets of relations which have still to be regulated in some degree by the primitive and pathological principle of repression and main force. The first of these concern that unfortunate body of criminal and vicious persons, whose unsocial propensities are constantly straining and endangering the bonds of the social union. They exist in the midst of the most highly civilised communities, with all the predatory or violent habits of barbarous tribes. They are the active and unconquered remnant of the natural state, and ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... turned into the England we know to-day, "of which at least one-third is indigent, of which nineteen-twentieths are dispossessed of capital and of land, and of which the whole industry and national life is controlled upon its economic side by a few chance directors of millions, a few masters of unsocial and irresponsible monopolies." ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... varied by all forms, and pushed on to all excesses, it may become a question whether by them our happiness is as much improved, or our individual character as well formed as in a society not so heterogeneous and unsocial as that crowd termed, with the sort of modesty peculiar to our times, "a small party:" the simplicity of parade, the humility of pride engendered by the egotism which multiplies itself in proportion to the ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... I lodged with told me his history. He had lived there many years, and everybody knew him, but nobody liked him,—a cunning, foxy, grabbing old rascal; unsocial, suspicious, unutterably mean. Never in all the years of his life in the village had he given a sixpence or a penny to anyone; nor a cabbage, nor an apple, nor had he ever lent a helping hand to a neighbour nor shown any ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... with an individual caress. He is almost the sufficient type of virtue, so far as virtue can ever be loved; for there is not a weakness in him which is not the bastard of some good quality, and not an error which had an unsocial origin. His jests add a new reverence to lovely and noble things, or light up an unsuspected 'soul ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... becomes less social, less rational, less manly; if he falls from the highest type, which seeks self-realization through a critical intelligence and emotional control, to one of those lower types which manifest only the primitive virtues of power; if he becomes unsocial, the social organization, whatever its apparent merits, is failing to achieve its supreme object. If, on the contrary, the man is becoming ever better as a human being, more rational, more sympathetic, with an ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson
... in childhood association and affection. It is interesting to think what the effect would have been upon the characters of both if they had been reared in close companionship. How would John's stern, rugged, unsocial nature have affected the gentle spirit of Jesus? What impression would the brightness, sweetness, and affectionateness of Jesus have made on the temper and disposition ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... hopelessly preoccupying anxiety. He stared out of the window at the exploitation roads of suburbs, and rows of houses all very much alike, either emphatically and impatiently to let or full of rather busy unsocial people. Near Wimbledon he had a glimpse of golf links, and saw two elderly gentlemen who, had they chosen, might have been gentlemen of grace and leisure, addressing themselves to smite little hunted white balls great distances with the utmost bitterness and dexterity. ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... rural Pan, who chooses rather to foot it along the sheep track on the limitless downs or the thwart-leading footpath through copse and spinney, not without pleasant fellowship with feather and fir. Nor does it follow from all this that the god is unsocial. Albeit shy of the company of his more showy brother-deities, he loveth the more unpretentious humankind, especially them that are adscripti gleb, addicted to the kindly soil and to the working thereof: perfect in no way, only simple, cheery sinners. For he is only half a god after all, and the ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... all and sundry, individually and collectively, on the economic unsoundness, the illogic, and the unsocial influence of War, took to her bed and stayed there until she found herself totally neglected. Arising and demanding an interview with the Commandant, she called him to witness that she entered a formal protest ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... typical instances from Lancaster must here suffice. Savonarola was solitary, pondering, meditating, felt profoundly the evils of the world and need of reform, and at twenty-two spent a whole night planning his career. Shelley during these years was unsocial, much alone, fantastic, wandered much by moonlight communing with stars and moon, was attached to an older man. Beecher was intoxicated with nature, which he declared afterward to have been the inspiration of his life. George Eliot at thirteen ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... Valerie, in a very low voice. Then, not to seem indifferent or unsocial, and also, if the truth must be told of her, to gratify a gnawing ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... gloomy and unsocial; but, considering himself as master of a secret stock of happiness, which he could enjoy only by concealing it, he affected to be busy in all schemes of diversion, and endeavoured to make others pleased with the state, of which he himself was weary. But pleasures never can be ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... morality entirely out of sight, the watering-places of Germany are benefited or injured by the continuance of gambling. We are inclined to the latter opinion; for, though it may be said that it brings a deal of money into circulation, yet your true gambler is a most unsocial and inhospitable fellow, and one of the worst visitors an hotel-keeper can have. Besides encouraging, as they do, all the riffraff of Europe to pay periodical visits to Germany, they thereby prevent many respectable persons from ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... most unhappily for St. Pierre, he looked upon the useful and necessary etiquettes of life as so many unworthy prejudices. Instead of conforming to them, he sought to trample on them. In addition, he evinced some disposition to rebel against his commander, and was unsocial with his equals. It is not, therefore, to be wondered at, that at this unfortunate period of his existence, he made himself enemies; or that, notwithstanding his great talents, or the coolness he had exhibited in moments of danger, he should have been ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... were pleasing, because she seemed pleased. Alone, the scene would have been dull and insipid: the participation of it with her gave it relish. Let the gloomy monk, sequestered from the world, seek unsocial pleasures in the bottom of his cell! Let the sublimated philosopher grasp visionary happiness, while pursuing phantoms dressed in the garb of truth! Their supreme wisdom is supreme folly: and they mistake for happiness the mere absence of pain. Had they ever ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... requires a stretch of charity to which I am wholly unequal, to believe that beings who ever conceived, for one short moment, of the height to which their natures may be elevated, should sink back" without a single struggle, to a mere selfish, unsocial, animal life;—to lying in bed ten or twelve hours daily, rising three or four hours later than the sun, spending the morning in preparation at the glass, the remainder of the time till dinner in unmeaning calls, the afternoon in yawning over a novel, and the evening ...
— Golden Steps to Respectability, Usefulness and Happiness • John Mather Austin
... most of the household work. She always got up first in the morning and did the roughest part of the day's labour before frail old Tabby came down; since kindness and thought for others were part of the nature of this unsocial, rugged woman. She did the household ironing and most of the cookery. She made the bread; and her bread was famous in Haworth for its lightness and excellence. As she kneaded the dough, she would glance now and then at an open book propped up before her. It was her German ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... said; "do you remember the tall, slender man whom we observed on board the 'Campania' as being rather unsocial and taciturn?" ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... Maister Ralph," pursued the grave-digger, "I'm by inclination a social man, an' the nature o' my avocation, so to speak, is a wee unsocial. Fowk are that curious. Noo, when I gang into the square o' a forenicht, the lads 'll cry oot, 'Dinna be lookin' my gate, Saunders, an' wonnerin' whether I'll need a seven-fit hole, or whether a six-fit yin will pass!' ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... regular army had been the first step. Several causes had contributed to this. In the first place, the Socialists had condemned the army system as unsocial. Privates, they pointed out, were forbidden to hob-nob with colonels, though the difference in their positions was due to a mere accident of birth. They demanded that every man in the army should be a general. Comrade Quelch, in an eloquent speech at Newington ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse
... shepherd, is the person of all others to give an adequate idea of the shepherd's dog, and I use very nearly his own words. "My dog Sirrah, was beyond all comparison the best dog I ever saw; he was of a surly, unsocial temper; disdaining all flattery, he refused to be caressed; but his attention to my commands and interests will never again, perhaps, be equalled by any of the canine race. I thought I discovered a sort of ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... is particular and unsocial, in a country where the common diet is of another nature. But I am sure sickness, lowness, and oppression, are much more so. These difficulties, after all, happen only at first, while the cure is about; for, when good health comes, all these oddnesses and specialities will ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... dog Sirrah," says he, in a letter to the Editor of 'Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine', "was, beyond all comparison, the best dog I ever saw. He had a somewhat surly and unsocial temper, disdaining all flattery, and refusing to be caressed, but his attention to my commands and interest will never again be equalled by any of the canine race. When I first saw him, a drover was leading him with a rope. He was both lean and hungry, ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... political life he had been so generally feared that he was thought unsocial, and it is not difficult to explain the causes of that opinion. The life, morals, and fidelity of Piombo made him obnoxious to most courtiers. In spite of the fact that delicate missions were constantly intrusted to his discretion which to any other man ...
— Vendetta • Honore de Balzac
... Travis; which certainly was not strange, for nature had not gifted him with many charms, either of personal appearance or manners. The rejection of his friendly proffers had caused him to take a dislike to Dick and Henry, whom he considered stiff and unsocial. ...
— Ragged Dick - Or, Street Life in New York with the Boot-Blacks • Horatio Alger
... anxious to attend Swanenburch's classes. He was a hesitating, awkward youth, and on this account was regarded as unsocial. For a year the boy looked on, listened, and made straight marks and curves and all that. He did not read, and the world of art was a thing unknown ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... he used to dine sometimes with Lord Oxford, privately, in a velvet cap. His dress of ceremony was black, with a tie-wig, and a little sword. The indulgence and accommodation which his sickness required, had taught him all the unpleasing and unsocial qualities of a valetudinary man. He expected that everything should give way to his ease or humour, as a child, whose parents will not hear her cry, has an unresisted dominion ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... part, people who live in cities are not moved by oratory; they are unsocial, unimaginative, unemotional. They see so much and hear so much that they cease to be impressed. When they come together in assemblages they are so apathetic that they fail to generate magnetism—there is no common soul to which the speaker can address himself. They are so cold that the orator ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... and soaking with the riff-raff of the neighbourhood until turned out at midnight to roll homeward to his lonely lodgings. She connected drunkenness with uproarious mirth, boon companionship, set orgies. Of secret unsocial tippling she had ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... wonder what happens to the modern pirates; I mean the men who, had they lived 200 years ago, would have been pirates. What do they find to exercise their undoubted, if unsocial, talents and energies to-day? Many, I think, find openings of an adventurous financial ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse
... superior soon ended; when the former, beckoning to Griffith, passed the wondering group who had collected around the capstan, awaiting his leisure to greet him more cordially, and led the way to the wardroom, with the freedom of one who felt himself no stranger. As this unsocial manner formed no part of the natural temper or ordinary deportment of the man, the remainder of the officers suffered their first lieutenant to follow him alone, believing that duty required that their interview should be private. Barnstable was determined that it should be so, at all events; ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... holding them within 'delegated limits of power.' And in my opinion, they are as much entitled to a character of consistency as the generality of tribes on our continent. The secret of their shyness, and their unsocial and vindictive disposition, may better be accounted for, from the probable fact that they were inhumanly treated by the early discoverers of the island, the Portuguese and Spaniards. These monsters without doubt butchered and made havock of these ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various |
