"Egotist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... life, and we have risen from its perusal with a new idea of the humility, sincerity, and saintliness of Dr. Channing's character. In him self-distrust was admirably blended with a sublime conception of the capacity of man, and a sublime confidence in human nature. He was not an egotist, as passages in his writings may seem to indicate, for he was more severe upon himself than upon others, and numberless remarks in the present volumes show how sharp was the scrutiny to which he subjected the most elusive appearances of pride ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... as chalk, and Sarka smiled a little as he watched him. Then, wondering what new resolve stirred the depths of this master egotist of the earth, he watched emotions flash to and fro across the face of Dalis, watched the color return to his cheeks. The cold of death gripped at ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... romance; but was it not one for him? The selfish egotist! He stood on the threshold of his little home, with one hand on Charlotte's shoulder, the roses in bloom all about him, and he himself in a pose pretentious enough for a photograph, and so radiant at having ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... I might have had companions, and I chose solitude. Each of the teachers in turn made me overtures of special intimacy; I tried them all. One I found to be an honest woman, but a narrow thinker, a coarse feeler, and an egotist. The second was a Parisienne, externally refined—at heart, corrupt—without a creed, without a principle, without an affection: having penetrated the outward crust of decorum in this character, you found a slough beneath. She had a wonderful ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... The second mistake, as it seems to me, in a novel which is in many ways a very clever piece of realism, is a strong feminist or, at any rate, anti-masculine bias. Against the cunning dissection of the character of Charles Giddey, a worthless and conceited egotist, I have no complaint to make. It is one of the best things of its kind that I have read for a long time. But it seems unlikely, to say the least, that the heroine, after being deserted by the man she really loves, should, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 25, 1914 • Various
... like a child, and as his eyes took in the big room in which he had slept for a year, surrounded by such luxury as he had never dreamed of having (even for a day), life seemed very easy of continuance, and Steele a mistaken egotist, a foul destroyer of men's peace; but as he rose to dress and saw himself in the glass, the figure he presented decided his hand. Was this Mart Haney—this unshaven, haggard, and ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... sort o' weather and jes' the sort o' sky Which seem to suit my fancy, with the white clouds driftin' by On a sea o' smooth blue water. Oh, I ain't an egotist, With an "I" in all my thinkin', but I'm willin' to insist That the Lord that made us humans an' the birds in every tree Knows my special sort o' weather an' He made this day ...
— All That Matters • Edgar A. Guest
... tastes and experiences were enough to interest their readers; they mastered the gift of putting themselves on paper. But there is one wide difference between them and their predecessors. Robert Burton was an egotist but he was an unconscious one; the same is, perhaps, true though much less certainly of Sir Thomas Browne. In Lamb and Hazlitt and De Quincey egotism was deliberate, consciously assumed, the result of a compelling ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... delayed. Napoleon was beset alike by the revolutionary spectre and by the gaunt King of Terrors; he knew the throw was desperate, but with the gambler's instinct, which had always been so strong in him, he was magnetised by it because it was desperate. Pitiful egotist though he was, history may forgive him sooner than it forgives the selfish Chauvinism of Thiers, who had been goading his countrymen to war ever since Sadowa, or the insane bigotry of the party which, having triumphed ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... is a cowardly thing for an egotist with an egotist's early and lively knowledge of the world and of himself to come clamouring to a girl for charity. It is true that almost any man can make a young girl think she loves him if he is ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... transcendentalist, is precious because it is his own work, a mirror in which he looks at himself and says (like a poet relishing his own verses), "What a genius I am! Who would have thought there was such stuff in me?" And the philosophical egotist finds in his doctrine a ready explanation of whatever beauty and commodity nature actually has. No wonder, he says to himself, that nature is sympathetic, since I made it. And such a view, one-sided and even fatuous as it may be, undoubtedly ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... I was up and dressed early in the morning, and on deck whenever the weather permitted. I made many pleasant acquaintances with whom I played chess and whist; wrote letters to all my foreign friends, ready to mail on landing; read the "Egotist," by George Meredith, and Ibsen's plays as translated by my friend Frances Lord. I had my own private stewardess, a nice German woman who could speak English. She gave me most of my meals on deck or in the ladies' saloon, and at night she would open the ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... office, no real prime minister notices the transformation. The ego and the country soon become interblended in his mind. A prime minister under the party system as we have had it in Canada is of necessity an egotist and autocrat. If he comes to office without these characteristics his environment equips him with them as surely as a diet of royal jelly transforms a worker into ...
— Laurier: A Study in Canadian Politics • J. W. Dafoe
... misanthrope one must also be an egotist, dwarfing the objects of his spite, and exaggerating the small atom that has arrayed itself against the universe. It is a species of insanity, wherein a mind has lost perception of the correct relationship between different existences. The poor hypochondriac who imagined himself ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... "Hi Strawberry and Blossom, hither Cows;" While slung against the upland with his team The ploughman dimly like a phantom glides: What time that noisy spot of life, the lark, Climbs, shrill with ecstasy, the trembling air; And "Cuckoo, Cuckoo," baffling whence it comes, Shouts the blithe egotist who cries himself; And every hedge and coppice sings: What time The lover, restless, through his waking dream, Nigh wins the hoped-for great unknown delight, Which never comes to flower, maybe; elsewhere, ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... who exclaims 'pshaw,' when he glances his eye on the praises of Deity, is an egotist; an old man, when he speaks contemptuously of love verses is an egotist; and the sleek favourites of fortune are egotists when they condemn all 'melancholy discontented' verses. Surely it would be candid not merely to ask whether the poem pleases ourselves, but to ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... the purer it is, the more temperate, tranquil, reposeful. Truth is not to be run down with fox-hounds; she is a divinity, and divinely must he draw nigh who will gain her presence. Go to, thou bluster-brain! Dost thou think to learn? Learn docility first, and the manners of the skies. And thou egotist, thinkest thou that these eyes of thine, smoky with the fires of diseased self-love, and thronged with deceiving wishes, shall perceive the essential and eternal? They shall see only silver and gold, houses and lands, reputes, supremacies, fames, and, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... crown his labours. Such little matters of detail never troubled him much. His teaching was as the German philosophy calls it, 'subjective'; it was to benefit himself, not others. He was a learned egotist. He was a well of science, and the pulleys worked uneasily when you wanted to draw anything out of it. In a word, he ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... and was lost sight of in England nine years ago. He has been traveling ever since, and where-ever he went he flirted; we gather so much from his accomplishment in the art; fluent, not to say voluble at times, but no egotist, for he never tells you anything about himself, nor even about his family, still less about the numerous affaires de coeur in which he has been engaged. Perhaps he is reserving it all for ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... an egotist, M. Favoral understood so well what passed in the mind of his wife, that he dared not complain too much of what the little fellow cost. He made up his mind bravely; and when four years later, his daughter Gilberte was born, ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... blending with the scene, a quiet, brooding absorption that made him seem a part of them—the desert, the petrified trees, the Grand Canon, Yosemite, and Mr. Burroughs inseparably linked with them, but seldom standing out in sharp contrast to them, as the "Beloved Egotist" stood out ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... I am not egotist enough to suppose all this significance should be given because I was the object of it. But the war between the States was a very bloody and a very costly war. One side or the other had to yield principles ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... appearance of interest to county matters, i.e., to minute scandal and infinitesimal politics; to the county cricket match and archery meeting; to the past ball and the ball to come. In the drawing-room, when a cold fit fell on the coterie, she would glide to one egotist after another, find out the monotope, and set the critter Peter's, the Place de Concorde, the Square of St. Mark, Versailles, the Alhambra, the Apollo Belvidere, the Madonna of the Chair, and all the glories of nature and the feats of art could not warm. So, then, the fine gentleman began ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... Leghorn, but thrown permanently on the sculptor's hands by the waning of his proud star. The statue of Heber, to Christian vision, hallows Calcutta. The Perseus of Cellini breathes of the months of artistic suspense, inspiration, and experiment, so graphically described in that clever egotist's memoirs. One feels like blessing the grief-bowed figures at the tomb of Princess Charlotte, so truly do their attitudes express our sympathy with the love and the sorrow her name excites. Would not Sterne have felt ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... this, and should not even believe Wagner when he speaks badly about himself. No one speaks badly about himself without a reason, and the question in this case is to find out the reason. Did Wagner—in the belief that genius was always immoral—wish to pose as an immoral Egotist, in order to make us believe in his genius, of which he himself was none too sure in his innermost heart? Did Wagner wish to appear "sincere" in his biography, in order to awaken in us a belief in the sincerity of his music, which ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... right," replied Claude, shaking his head; "I'm an egotist. I can't even say that I paint for the good of my country; for, in the first place, my sketches frighten everybody, and then, when I'm busy painting, I think about nothing but the pleasure I take in it. When I'm ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... and futurists and post-impressionists who are as silly as human beings can be, because they hope to attain to artistic salvation by rushing to extremes. They are religious egotists, in fact, and nothing can be more disagreeable than a religious egotist. But there were no doubt many of them among the early Christians. Yet Christianity was a great creative religious effort which came because life and truth had died out of the religions of the past, and men could not endure to live without life and truth in their religion. So now they cannot endure ...
— Progress and History • Various
... man not a colossal egotist could hear such a prophesy with indifference. He did not at once answer, and then he ...
— The Beauty and the Bolshevist • Alice Duer Miller
... say the least of it, unseemly for a man to be constantly making himself the subject of conversation. At times it lays a man open to the attacks which his style certainly invites—as was the case with the egotist who dared to talk much of himself in the presence of Dr. Johnson, whom he had greatly irritated by his conceited talk. The Doctor availed himself of an opportunity ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... passionately attached to her husband, by whom she was treated with a callous, yet polite indifference, which, to one whose heart was as tender as her judgment was weak, was more painful perhaps than absolute ill-usage. Sir Philip was a voluptuary, that is, a completely selfish egotist, whose disposition and character resembled the rapier he wore, polished, keen, and brilliant, but inflexible and unpitying. As he observed carefully all the usual forms towards his lady, he had ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... outside the cafe. It was not his nature to dwell on his own sensations. He would diagnose them quickly and acutely, and then throw them aside. He was quickly bored with himself; he was no egotist. But today, he thought, he would analyse his state, to see what could ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... been that that scoundrel, the captain of the Transcendant, gave me the information which induced me to come round to the back of the island. Little did I think what happiness awaited me. So much for myself. Do not think me an egotist for speaking of myself, I am only clearing away the less important information to arrive at that which most interests you. The Amy arrived safe with her valuable cargo. The captain reported that he had ...
— The Privateer's-Man - One hundred Years Ago • Frederick Marryat
... mastered. This may be at first a hindrance to spontaneity, and seem to hamper the imagination; but as facility is acquired joy comes back, and the joy of conquest with the adustment of means to ends is a stage of self-consciousness dangerous for the egotist, but is inspiration and incitement to larger effort. This is a stage where many artists remain—most of the time. But the super-conscious stage is that state in which with perfected facility and power of self-mastery the doing becomes lost in supreme realization; ...
— Expressive Voice Culture - Including the Emerson System • Jessie Eldridge Southwick
... you, O noble emenders On egotist nations! Ye shall lead The plough of the world, and sow new splendours Into the furrow of things for seed,— Ever the richer ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... sanction; he knew he was living in sin with Catherine because his children had all died but one, and that was a manifest token of the wrath of Providence. The capacity for convincing himself of his own righteousness is the most effective weapon in the egotist's armoury, and Henry's egotism touched the sublime. His conscience was clear, whatever other people might think of the maze of apparent inconsistencies in which he was involved. In 1528 he was in some fear of death from the plague; fear of death ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... to the bottom, I reasoned in this way: The latter half of his evidence was a complete contradiction of the first, purposely so. In the first, he made himself out a cold-hearted egotist with not enough interest in his wife to make an effort to determine whether she and the murdered woman were identical; in the latter, he showed himself in the light of a man influenced to the point of folly by a woman to whom he had been utterly ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green
... he had heard. Rafinesque had a hope that Audubon might buy some of his colored drawings; but when he saw the wonderful pictures which Audubon had made, he acknowledged that his own were inferior—a sore confession for Rafinesque, who was an egotist of the first water. Audubon had but humble quarters, for it was hard work in those days for him to keep the wolf from the door; nevertheless, he entertained the distinguished traveler, whom he was himself destined to far eclipse. One night, a bat flew into Rafinesque's ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... me I am growing to be a dreadful egotist. I put nothing down now in this little book but just what concerns myself—nothing of the great subjects of universal interest which have always absorbed most of my thoughts, but just my own doings and sayings. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... a prince is a happy husband or not? When a king sets up pretensions to conjugal felicity, he is either an egotist or a fool. If the King of Rome cannot love his good, stupid, ugly wife, he can make love to the dowry she brings him. A goodly inheritance comes with her; what matters it if a woman be ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... that a word from you now and then would be welcome. I am not an egotist. I am open to suggestions: as, for instance, now, if you could conveniently inform me of all you have yourself seen and heard in regard to this matter, I should be ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green
... undergo that man's tongue for another year if he would take out his wages in talking. I could not have more of it in that case than I have had the last six months. After money, the thing that man loves best is certainly the sound of his own voice; and a most insufferable egotist! No I have been talking with a man who wants to take the whole farm for two years upon shares that will clear me ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... the pages of this journal, which I copy word for word from the manuscript lying before me, I give the reader. Call the dead writer an egotist, if you will: wonder at Callender's love for this self-centred nature; I think she was an artist, and as an artist, her experience is of value ...
— A Village Ophelia and Other Stories • Anne Reeve Aldrich
... I think, meant to exhibit such a tragic conflict in his tale of AEneas and Dido, only poetwise the inner impulse which worked within AEneas he expressed dramatically as a messenger from the gods. It shows but little understanding of the poem or of human nature to censure AEneas as a cold egotist. Did he not sail away carrying anguish in his heart, multa gemens? For him there was destined toil and warfare, for Dido only terror and death. The tragedy fell hardest upon the woman, for so ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... egotist one day in a large company indirectly praising himself for a number of good qualities which it was well known he had not, asked Macklin the reason why he should have this propensity of interfering in the good of others when ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... final appeasement of the convert in the perfect fierceness of conviction. She had seen—often had only divined—scores of these young men and young women going through an emotional crisis. This young man looked like a moody egotist. And besides, it was a special—a unique case. She had never met an individuality which interested and puzzled her ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... Immortality—Ode as it was simply called when it was first published—or I wandered lonely as a cloud, or the sonnet composed on Westminster Bridge. Nor does the portrait of a stern, unbending egotist satisfy us when we remember the life-long devotion that existed between him and Dorothy, and the fact that Coleridge loved him, and that Lamb and Scott were his friends. He may have been a niggard of warm-heartedness to the outside world, but it is clear from his biography that ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... genuinely, if shyly, for his own sake. He had known vulgar women, who had flattered him because he was the son of an earl; and prudent ones who gave him but a carefully measured civility, because he was a portionless younger son. Here he knew that both facts were absolutely nothing; and egotist as he was, this knowledge stirred most powerfully such depths as his nature possessed. In Lucia's presence he became almost as unworldly as herself; he gave himself up half willingly, half unconsciously to the enjoyment of feelings which no woman less thoroughly simple ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 1 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... honesty put him in the light of a blackmailer—one that threatened mischief if his demands were not complied with. The next sentence went to show that he was an egotist, because he thought his labors required wear and tear of brain. The third called him a sound cog-wheel. The latter part of the same said that a villain could do no evil if he wished to, for they (the directors) had protected themselves against villains. Then it went on to say ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 1 • Various
... the belief of narrow minds in the supreme significance of a mortal self: conscious power is the belief in certain immortal attributes, emanating from, and productive of, Truth and Beauty. I should not call Landor an egotist. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... take away the power of conscience and what would become of our world? What is a man without a conscience? He is a usurper, a tyrant, a libertine, a spendthrift, a robber, a miser, an idler, a trifler,—whatever he is tempted to be; a supreme egotist, who says in his heart, "There is no God." The Almighty Creator placed this instinct in the soul of man to prevent the total eclipse of faith, and to preserve some allegiance to Him, some guidance in the trials and temptations of life. We lament a perverted conscience; yet ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord
... a blunt candour about the reply that even from an egotist like Stead meant infinitely more than the soothing-syrup idealism dispensed by some of the visiting prophets to this country. Stead did not mean that in establishing independence of the United States, ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... treat as to read his books. Lewis Carroll was as unlike any other man as his books were unlike any other author's books. It was a relief to meet the pure simple, innocent dreamer of children, after the selfish commercial mind of most authors. Carroll was a wit, a gentleman, a bore and an egotist—and, like Hans Andersen, a spoilt child. It is recorded of Andersen that he actually shed tears, even in late life, should the cake at tea be handed to anyone before he chose the largest slice. Carroll was not selfish, but a liberal-minded, ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... self-consciousness, the more desolate will the void become which surrounds him. For self is, after all, but one term in a primitive dichotomy and would lose its specific and intimate character were it no longer contrasted with anything else. The egotist must therefore people the desert he has spread about him, and he naturally peoples it with mythical counterparts of himself. Sometimes, if his imagination is sensuous, his alter-egos are incarnate in the landscape, and he creates ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... for? That sounds either as if he were an egotist or a slacker." Her sister's words rasped Patricia's most sensitive heart string. She visibly squirmed, eagerly waiting a chance to reply. "Jack is neither," continued Adrien slowly. "I understand the thing perfectly. He has been up against big things, so big that everything else seems ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... always miserable companions in life, and they are especially unnatural in youth. The egotist is next-door to a fanatic. Constantly occupied with self, he has no thought to spare for others. He refers to himself in all things, thinks of himself, and studies himself, until his own little self becomes ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... the good and respectable sense of insisting on her own way of doing things, of settling for herself what it was that she was living for, and of treading the path with a firm and self-reliant step, yet Harriet Martineau was as little of an egotist as ever lived, in the poor and stifling sense of thinking of the perfecting of her own culture as in the least degree worthy of ranking among Ends-in-themselves. She settled in the Lake district, because she thought that there she would be most ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 6: Harriet Martineau • John Morley
... Rhine, the Alps, and the Pyrenees; and Napoleon might continue to rule over a region which would have gladdened the heart of a Richelieu or of a Louis XIV. But it was still victory and not peace upon which the supreme egotist had bet his mind. He still dreamed of overwhelming ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... feeling of dissatisfaction. Le Gaire was not the kind that wears well—he could not improve upon acquaintance; and, while I was no connoisseur of women, yet I could not persuade myself that her nature was patient enough not to revolt against his pretensions. I was no egotist, no lady-killer, but I recognized now that I loved this girl, and had read in her eyes the message of hope. Mine was, at least, a fighting chance, and fighting was my trade. I liked it better so, finding the lady more alluring because ...
— Love Under Fire • Randall Parrish
... flattered me, because you had not the courage to answer my question concerning the unworthiness of mankind, when I said I could no longer love or trust them! You feel, however, that I am right, and you will know how to pardon me, when I appear to the world as a cold, hard-hearted egotist. It is true my heart has become hardened in the fire of many and deep sufferings! I loved mankind very dearly, marquis; perhaps that is the reason I now despise them so intensely; because I know they are not worthy of ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... up! You crush me down! I try to escape—I cry out: "I am not an egotist—I am a worshiper! I want nothing in the world so much as to forget myself—my rights, my claims, my powers, my talents! I want to think of God! Only give me a chance—only give me a chance to do that, and I care not what you do with me! Here I stand with ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... yourself when I have given you a slight sketch of her character. Lady Placid, in the opinion of all sensible persons in general, and myself in particular, is a vain, weak, conceited, vulgar egotist. In her own eyes she is a clever, well-informed, elegant, amiable woman; and though I have spared no pains to let her know how detestable I think her, it is all in vain; she remains as firmly entrenched in ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... trust myself, as I am still so far from strong, I must not venture to play tricks with that health which it cost my dear, kind nurses so much to preserve. I am as careful of myself as any creature can be without becoming an absolute, selfish egotist. Lady Scott is really so watchful and careful of me, that even when my own family guardian angels are not on either or both sides of me, I can do no wrong, and can ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... this constitution and its concomitant forces. I will place him in the loftier grades of society. I will suppose his desires emphatically those of the sensualist—he has, therefore, a strong love of life. He is an absolute egotist—his will is concentrated in himself—he has fierce passions—he knows no enduring, no holy affections, but he can covet eagerly what for the moment he desires—he can hate implacably what opposes itself to his ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... an egotist, nor blinded by female partialities, saw his own grief in poor proud Pietro; and the more he thought of it the more he resolved to share his humble means with that unlucky artist; Pietro's sympathy would repay him. He tried to waylay ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... people had conceived that her father had led him away in selfish speculations. As if he—Barker—would not have first discovered it, and as if anybody—even dear Kitty herself—was responsible for HIS convictions and actions but himself. Nevertheless, this gentle egotist was unusually serious, and when the child awoke at last, and with a fretful start and vacant eyes pushed his caressing hand away, he felt lonelier than before. It was with a slight sense of humiliation, too, ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... egotist and a fool. My surprise was so great at such a conquest, and at so fortunate a discovery, that I went no further in my inquiries. Besides, I did not think that your majesty would attach any very great importance to what you heard, knowing how much your attention was ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... self-defence like a fool. All my stock goes down, and as my stock goes down the chances of a good report dwindle. Young Dent grieves to see me injuring my own case. Too damned a fool to see what will happen to the report! You see if only they can convince themselves I am just a prig and an egotist and an impractical bore, they escape from a great deal more than my poor propositions. They escape from the doubt in themselves. By dismissing me they dismiss their own consciences. And then they can scamper off and be sensible ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... Maxwell was no egotist, and was always prone to see only an impersonal significance in parish compliments. A more self-conscious subject for confidences ...
— Hepsey Burke • Frank Noyes Westcott
... Contrast him with Louis XIV., a contemporaneous despot: Cromwell devoted all his energies to develop the resources of his country, while Louis did what he could to waste them; Cromwell's reign was favorable to the development of individual genius, but Louis was such an intolerable egotist that at the close of his reign all the great lights had disappeared; Cromwell was tolerant, Louis was persecuting; Cromwell laid the foundation of an indefinite expansion, Louis sowed the seeds of discontent and revolution. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... but not shown in the life; and such wrong-doing loses the edge of villainy. It might be believed that Hollingsworth as a man failed; but as a typical man, as that reformer who is only another shape of the selfish and heartless egotist sacrificing everything wrongfully to his philanthropic end, it is not so easily believed that he must have failed; it is the absence of this logical necessity that discredits him as a type, and takes out of his character and career the universal ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... concentrated in Anna, but besides the parallel story of Kitty, we have many other incidents and characters which often contribute nothing to the progress of the novel. They are a part of life, however, so Tolstoi includes them. One might say there is an attempt at unity, in the person of that sleek egotist, Stepan—his relation by blood and marriage to both Anna and Kitty makes him in some sense a link between the two couples. But he is more successful as a personage than as the keystone of an arch. The novel would really lose nothing by ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... sense. Across it ran one deep wrinkle that did not belong to her youth. That wrinkle was the brand of trouble, the line of agony. It had come of loving above her, yet below her, and of loving an egotist. ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... being an egotist and the very incarnation of selfishness, was a prig of the first water. He had been reared altogether in convention. Home life and Eton and Christchurch had taught him many things, wise as well as ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... selfishness and fatally tainting every thing with that central vice. To desire to live everlastingly as an identical individual, it has been said, is the ecstasy and culmination of avaricious conceitedness. Man, the vain egotist, dives out of sight in God to fish up the pearl of his darling self. He makes his poor individuality the measure of all things, his selfish desire the law of endless being. Such a rampant proclamation of self will and enthronement of pure egotism, flying in the face of the solemn and all ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... I'm going to do! (After a slight pause—with a good-natured grin.) Here I am talking about myself again! Why don't you call me down when I start that drivel? But you don't know how good it is to have your dreams coming true. It'd make an egotist out of anyone. ...
— The Straw • Eugene O'Neill
... was saddened by the painful spectacle of Diaz' collapse in life? No! I only knew that he needed sympathy, and that I could give it to him with both hands. I could give, give! And the last thing that the egotist in me told me before it expired was that I was worthy to give. My longing to assuage the lot of ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... a gong sounded from beneath and the two men descended to their meal. It was Giuseppe Doria who did the talking while they ate a substantial dinner. He proved a great egotist and delighted to relate his own picturesque ambitions, though he had already confessed that these ambitions ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... is said to have been through her zeal that he was admitted to the Academy so young. Among others who formed her familiar circle were her devoted friend Pont de Veyle; the Chevalier d'Aydie; Formont, the "spirituel idler and amiable egotist," who was one of the three whom she confesses really to have loved; and President Henault, who brought always a fund of lively anecdote and agreeable conversation. This world of fashion and letters, slightly seasoned with philosophy, is also the world of Mme. de Luxembourg, ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... frightful egotist, Archie! This is a large world and man's memory is short. The man you dine with most frequently at your club wouldn't remember in a week whether you told him you were going to the Rockies or the Himalayas and if you met him on the Avenue ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... real life by a sympathetic effort of interpretative imagination. Delobelle, Gardinois, "all the personages of 'Fromont' have lived," Daudet declares; and he adds a regret that in depicting old Gardinois he gave pain to one he loved, but he "could not suppress this type of egotist, aged ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... the outline of a plot. He would write a story of the struggles of a young author in the metropolis—not such a young author as himself, a rebel and a frenzied egotist, but a plain, everyday young author whom other people could care about. He had the "local color" for such a tale, and he could do it without too much waste of time. Mr. Ardsley thought it ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... prayer-meeting. Small did nothing of the sort. He sat still in prayer-meeting, and listened to the elders as a modest young man should. Your commonplace hypocrite boasts. Small never alluded to himself, and thus a consummate egotist got credit for modesty. It is but an indifferent trick for a hypocrite to make temperance speeches. Dr. Small did not even belong to a temperance society. But he could never be persuaded to drink even so much as a ...
— The Hoosier Schoolmaster - A Story of Backwoods Life in Indiana • Edward Eggleston
... the commonest assumptions in the world. Although when you state the belief as I have, it sounds absurdly pretentious, yet the boastfulness is closer to the child's who stretches out its hand for the moon than the romantic egotist's who thinks he has created the moon and all the stars. Whole systems of philosophy have claimed such an eternal and absolute validity; the nineteenth century produced a bumper crop of so-called atheists, ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... and only remembered the affection they felt for him. Nevertheless, in the course of his life of fighting, his ever-pressing anxieties and the strain of his work, coupled with his belief in the importance and sacredness of his destiny, made him something of an egotist. Therefore, in spite of his real goodness of heart, he would sometimes shoulder his way through the world, oblivious of the unfortunate people who had come to grief owing to their connection with him, and careless of the lesser, ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... The world, knowing me not, could judge me by my clothes alone. But I refused to be so judged. My spiritual backbone stiffened, and I held my head high, looking all men in the eyes. And I did these things, not that I was an egotist, not that I was impervious to the critical glances of my fellows, but because of a certain hogskin belt, plethoric and sweat-bewrinkled, which buckled next the skin above the hips. Oh, it's absurd, I grant, but had that belt not been so ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... Aristophanes was more of a politician and a patriot, Lucian more of a freethinker, Horace more of a simple pococurante. Rabelais may have had a little inclination to science itself (he would soon have found it out if he had lived a little later), Montaigne may have been more of a pure egotist, Saint-Evremond more of a man of society, and of the verse and prose of society. But they all had the same ethos, the same love of letters as letters, the same contempt of mere progress as progress, the same relish for the simpler and more human pleasures, the same good fellowship, ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... Arabic phrase lantarani, a corruption of la-an-tarani, literally signifies "egad, if you saw me [do so and so];" hence lantarani-wala is equivalent to our terms, "an egregious egotist," or "great boaster." ...
— Bagh O Bahar, Or Tales of the Four Darweshes • Mir Amman of Dihli
... as loved at home, how ample, The tribute to that modest spirit paid! To pushing quackery a high example, A calm rebuke to egotist parade! ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 17, 1891 • Various
... His moral attitude is certainly somewhat boring, but nevertheless the Good Stockbroker is one of those people to whom one really is polite. Although obvious irritation was visible on the face of the Family Egotist we listened respectfully, with the exception of the Wicked Stockbroker, whose dinner was far too important in his scheme of life to be ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... her several times, saying: "You are here at last! How charmed I am to see you again! You made us wait long enough; I began to fear that you had taken root in the Grisons. Is it indeed an enchanted land? I rather believe that your father is a cruel egotist, that he shamefully sacrificed you to his own convenience in prolonging his cure; but here you are—I will pardon him. Your poor, your proteges, are clamorous for you. Who do you think asked after you, the other day? Mlle. ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... "manage men." In Lord Chesterfield's letters to his son, we have pointed out the true value of egotism in its relation to morals. All his words amount to this, that we are to consider every man to be an egotist, and to convert his very egotism into a means of finding out his weak side; i.e. to flatter him by exciting his vanity, and by means of such flattery to ascertain his limits. In common life, the expression "having had experiences" means ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... movement—"Pardon me, my brother," replied he. "I have neither a mother nor a sister who are suffering. My throne is hard and naked, but I am firmly seated on my throne. Pardon me that expression, my brother; it was that of an egotist. I will retract it, therefore, by a sacrifice,—I will go to monsieur le cardinal. Wait for me, if you ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... they should die, the stars would vanish. We understand; a few months ago we, too, were like that. What makes us reckless of death is our intense gratitude that we have altered. We want to prove to ourselves in excess how utterly we are changed from what we were. In his secret heart the egotist is a self-despiser. Can you imagine what a difference it works in a man after years of self-contempt, at least for one brief moment to approve of himself? Ever since we can remember, we were chained to the prison-house of our bodies; we lived ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson
... direction unseeingly. He was passing through the fire as surely as though actual flames rose about his feet; and whatever the result, whatever the fibre of the man who emerged from the ordeal, the John Loder who had hewn his way through the past weeks would exist no more. The triumphant egotist—the strong man—who, by his own strength, had kept his eyes upon one point, refusing to see in other ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... autobiographies! Give us the veritable notchings of Robinson Crusoe on his stick, the indubitable records of a life long since swallowed up in the blackness of darkness, traced by a hand the very dust of which has become undistinguishable. The foolishest egotist who ever chronicled his daily experiences, his hopes and fears, poor plans and vain reachings after happiness, speaking to us out of the Past, and thereby giving us to understand that it was quite as real as our Present, is in no mean sort ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... might lower their aims. With regard to the plan and style of his works, he showed strong good sense and clear judgment. The man who indulged such narrowing egotism, such irrational scorn, would prime and polish without mercy the stanzas in which he uttered them." (Wonderful! that an egotist and a misanthrope should have been kept from defacing his own verses. Then follows our terrible bye-blow.) "And this bewildered idealist was a very bigot in behoof of the common-sensical satirist, the almost peevish realist—Pope!" ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... Byron not been impatient he must have been satisfied with his own condition and indifferent to that of others. In other words, he must have been an egotist, which he was not. He was gay by nature, and repeatedly showed it; but he had been sorely wounded by the injustice of men, and his marriage with Miss Milbank had undermined his peace and happiness. How, then, could he escape the occasional ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... But I am prudent. I have to bring up this child; she is much too young to be married now. No! I am not an egotist, but I must certainly keep her with me for a few years more— keep her alone with me. She can surely wait until I am dead! Fear not, Antigone, old Oedipus will find holy ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... its lines sharply defined.... he made free to lecture the great ones of the earth, and was very round with them, even ridiculing them at his pleasure. He held the field for Confucius—not the Taoist, but the Mencian Confucius—against all comers; smote Yang Chu the Egotist hip and thigh; smote gentle Mo Ti, the Altruist; preached fine and practical ethics; and had no patience with those dreamers of the House of Laotse.—A man sent from the Gods, I should say, to do a ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... never done it before. Nor could it be want of society, for George Bascombe was to dine with them. So was the curate, but he did not count for much. Neither was she weary of herself. That, indeed, might be only a question of time, for the most complete egotist, Julius Caesar, or Napoleon Bonaparte, must at length get weary of his paltry self; but Helen, from the slow rate of her expansion, was not old enough yet. Nor was she in any special sense wrapt up in herself: it was ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... own deeds in the field of battle lies fairly open to the charge of seeking to make a hero of himself in the eyes of the public; and feeling this, it is not without reluctance that I proceed to recount the part which I myself took in the affair of this night. But, in truth, I must either play the egotist awhile, or leave the reader without any details at all; inasmuch as the darkness and general confusion effectually prevented me from observing how others, except my own immediate party, ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig
... see in Gra-a-m'ma, I cannot imagine," Bessie would sometimes say; "he is a lazy white-headed egotist; a good judge of lace and ribbons, but mortally afraid of a dog, and as to powder, the very sight of ...
— The Old Stone House • Anne March
... given us one hero, a better man than Hector or Achilles. For Hector ran away from a single man; this hero was never known to run away at all. Achilles was a better egotist than soldier; wounded in his personal vanity, he revenged himself, not on the man who had wronged him—Prudence forbade—but on the army, and on his country. This antique hero sulked; my hero, deprived of the highest command, retained a higher still—the ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... universe of thought and feeling within itself, and had no one peculiar bias, or exclusive excellence more than another. He was just like any other man, but that he was like all other men. He was the least of an egotist that it was possible to be. He was nothing in himself; but he was all that others were, or that they could become. He not only had in himself the germs of every faculty and feeling, but he could follow them by anticipation, intuitively, into all their conceivable ramifications, through ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... The father, colossal egotist that he was, heard Phil's protests with mild amusement and quiet pride in his independence, for he loved this boy ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... some Account of the Journeyings of an Irresponsible Egotist, and of How he enjoyed ...
— The Autobiography of Sergeant William Lawrence - A Hero of the Peninsular and Waterloo Campaigns • William Lawrence
... the most successful egotist, the most deluded hypocrite must inevitably meet up with himself some day and begin to know the ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... egotist is seldom capable of giving efficient instruction: that lies in the nature of the case. Even a child will soon perceive whether the teacher has a sole eye to its interest, or has other and personal aims in view. The former bears good fruits, the latter very doubtful ones. I ...
— Piano and Song - How to Teach, How to Learn, and How to Form a Judgment of - Musical Performances • Friedrich Wieck
... know that, my daughter; but I do know, if I had set myself down a grieving egotist, to brood over my own individual troubles, in a world full of troubles, needing ministrations, I should have lost my reason, if not ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... is the consciousness of being—that is, Being raised to the second power. If the universe subsists, it is because the Eternal mind loves to perceive its own content, in all its wealth and expansion—especially in its stages of preparation. Not that God is an egotist. He allows myriads upon myriads of suns to disport themselves in his shadow; he grants life and consciousness to innumerable multitudes of creatures who thus participate in being and in nature; and all these animated monads multiply, so to speak, ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of the family, par excellence, was the youngest, Aglaya, as aforesaid. But Totski himself, though an egotist of the extremest type, realized that he had no chance there; Aglaya was clearly ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... talk of, and you arrive one day at the condition of Louis XIV. after the battle of Ramillies: "Dieu a donc oublie tout ce que j'ai fait pour lui?" Read your Renan; remind yourself at every turn that it is quite possible after all the egotist may turn out to be in the right of it, and you will find at any rate that the world gets on excellently well without your blundering efforts to set it straight. And so we get back to the Archbishop's maxim—adapted, no doubt, ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... strides up and down the room, and then, halting on his hearth, and facing his brother, he thus spoke: "I condemn his deed, Roland! At best he was but a haughty egotist. I understand why Brutus should slay his sons. By that sacrifice he saved his country! What did this poor dupe of an exaggeration save? Nothing but his own name. He could not lift the crime from his son's soul, ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... circumstances which you mention in your kind letter are not exactly of the kind that I could wish for you, yet I am egotist enough to be much pleased at its friendly contents towards myself. Accept my warmest thanks for them—and let me tell you how anxious I am that you should like me very much, and how desirous I am to deserve this—as far as it can be deserved; ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... on talking about himself, without noticing that this did not interest the others as much as it did him. A man is never such an egotist as at moments of spiritual ecstasy. At such times it seems to him that there is nothing on earth more splendid and interesting ...
— The Cossacks • Leo Tolstoy
... glory. The intolerable poignancy of existence is bittersweet to his mouth; he craves to incarnate, to interpret its entire human process, always striving to pierce to its center, to capture and express its inexpressible ultimate. He is an egotist but a valuable one, acutely aware of the depths and immensities of his own spirit and of its significant relations to this seething world without. Thus it is both himself and a new vision of life, in terms of himself, that he desires to ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... that a super-egotist, vast, but not so vast as it had supposed, had refused to move to one ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... being could be less selfish or vain, or less of an egotist than Dulcie. If she saw things chiefly as they were related to herself, it was because this problem of her life was rather an intricate one. Her position was not sufficiently simple to suit ...
— Love at Second Sight • Ada Leverson
... that she is odd, a genius, an extreme egotist; has no conscience; despises her father, "Jim MacLane of selfish memory"; loves scrubbing the floor because it gives her strength and grace of body, although her daily life is an "empty damned weariness." ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... he was being measured, and, egotist though he was, he was equally aware that Bruce's observations still left him ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... origin of a fire which no one made an effort to stay. Left alone, it brightened the night, fired the surrounding hills and shot its jets and rockets of sparks far into the sky. You, a poet, would have thought it fine. Sublime egotist that you are, everything is effect, color, mirages, decorations. Endeavoring to make myself useful in this disaster, I thought I heard it whispered around me that some travellers remained in the inn, who, if not already ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... that such a scheme could only find hospitable reception in the head of a spiteful, inflated, and unprincipled egotist, for such an egotist Mr. Johnson assuredly is. It is needless to say that it would break down through the refusal of General Grant to give up his command, and through the refusal of the great body of the army to obey the President; for the danger is not so ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... egotist. But I am prudent. I have to bring up this child; she is much too young to be married now. No! I am not an egotist, but I must certainly keep her with me for a few years more— keep her alone with me. She can surely ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... serve the State In the halls of legislative debate, One day with all his credentials came To the capitol's door and announced his name. The doorkeeper looked, with a comical twist Of the face, at the eminent egotist, And said: "Go away, for we settle here All manner of questions, knotty and queer, And we cannot have, when the speaker demands To be told how every member stands, A man who to all things under the sky ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... the last extreme, depraved to his very core; past-master in the art of Parisian high life; an unbridled egotist, thinking himself superior to everything because he abased everything to himself; and, finally, flattering himself for despising all duties, which he had all his life prided himself on dispensing with—such was his father. But for all this, he was the pride of his circle, with a pleasing presence ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... am," he agreed. "One is an egotist, I suppose, when he finds himself and his needs and whims essentially worth while. I'll admit I find mine so. Perhaps you feel the same about yours. One scarcely knows where egotism and vanity meet or end in a woman." He smiled, for he meant that ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... no anger showing in his tone. "I will not force myself upon anybody, but I'm no egotist, even if I do say you're the losers. My knowledge of the region and my friendship with the Sioux would be of great advantage to you, would be of so much advantage, in fact, that it would make me worth more than a fourth ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler
... Science for the cure of Crime; To patient righting of a thousand wrongs; To final healing of a thousand ills. Blind runner now, and cruel egotist It yet leads on to more than mortal sight, And the large knowledge that means humbleness, And tender love for ...
— Poems of Experience • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... probably meant to suggest a desirable equilibrium and mental balance; but the actual effect of the self-centred training is illustrated by a story told of Thomas H. Benton, who had been described as an egotist by some of the newspapers. Meeting Colonel Frank Blair one day, he said: "Colonel Blair, I see that the newspapers call me an egotist. I wish you would tell me frankly, as a friend, if you think the charge is true." "It is a very direct question, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... can say, Mr. Hosmer, is, that I hope you have acted blindly. I hate to believe that the man I care for, would deliberately act the part of a cruel egotist." ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... destroyed, I am egotist enough to desire that credit for it should not accrue to another. I do not propose, therefore, more than lightly to touch upon the Damar Greefe Law, but I may say that in its essentials ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... the selfish and mercenary character of the men, and women, too, that I meet in this world has made me, perhaps, too suspicious of all men's motives," said the champion egotist of the world, speaking with the air of the great king condescending to an apology—if his answer ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... more important progressions in the development of civil order and society in France. But it was to the advantage of absolute power that all these facts were turned, and the perverted ability of Philip the Handsome consisted in working them for that single end. He was a profound egotist; he mingled with his imperiousness the leaven of craft and patience, but he was quite a stranger to the two principles which constitute the morality of governments, respect for rights and patriotic sympathy with public sentiment; he concerned himself about nothing ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... private faults and literary virtues ran somewhat in the same line, he is only in the situation of every man; for every one of us it is surely very difficult to say precisely where our honest opinions end and our personal predilections begin. But to attempt to denounce Carlyle as a mere savage egotist cannot arise from anything but a pure inability to grasp Carlyle's gospel. 'Ruskin,' says a critic, 'did, all the same, verily believe in God; Carlyle believed only in himself.' This is certainly a distinction between the author he has understood and the author he has not understood. Carlyle ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... former self, the less he admired its manifestations. A Corsican upstart, an assassin, no gentleman! It was all too true. Very well, for that vaunted force of will, but to what base ends had it been applied! He was merciless to himself, an egotist and a vulgarian. How it would shock that woman, as yet unidentified, who was one day to be the mother of the world's greatest left-handed pitcher. Take the flapper—impossible, of course, but just as an example—suppose she ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... and stood over her. "To some self-centered cub—some puny egotist in his twenties, who'll make you a slave to his needs and whims, and discard you for another woman when you've worn out your youth and beauty," he cried. "But you won't marry ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... admired himself while I dressed in hot haste: a fine young fellow; not at all the natural egotist, but cast for death by the doctors, and keenly incredulous in his bag of skin. It revived one's confidence to hear him talk. But he forgot himself in an instant, and gave me a lead through the saloon with a boyish eagerness ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... morning routine, the baths, bottles, dishes, the picking up, the disheartening conferences over the ice box, she wondered what had become of the old southern belle, Nancy Barrett, who had laughed and flirted and only a few years ago, who had been such a strong and pretty and confident egotist? There was no egotism left in Nancy now, she was only a busy woman in a world of busy women. She knew backache and headache, and moods of weary irritation. The cut of her gowns, the little niceties of table-service or of children's clothing ...
— Undertow • Kathleen Norris
... obligation? Himself! He is expensively nurtured, schooled, put forward into life—for what? To help himself as best he can at the general table of society. He can never forget himself, subordinate his personal ambition to any transcendent loyalty. He becomes from his cradle the egotist. ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... was an ambitious man; he was more, he was a profound egotist. In his character pride, the love of power, the desire for wealth, were evenly balanced and made subservient to a most indomitable will. Those who knew him well said he was a hard self-sufficient man, one who never forgot an injury ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... that makes me think of your future with hope. You are an egotist, Paul; and that is ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... and purposely misunderstood. Elia, albeit he loved the cheerful glass, was not a drunkard. The "poor nameless egotist" of the Confessions is not Charles Lamb. In printing the article in the "London Magazine," (it was originally contributed to a collection of tracts published by Basil Montagu,) Elia introduced it to the readers of that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... the Preacher recommends, to fill up his cup with the wine of life, "pressing all that it yields of mere vintage," he was anything but an egotist. The broad stream of his sympathy flowed out towards all his fellows, nay, to all things animate and inanimate. The sheep, the lion, the eagle, and the oxen, were his comrades, the fire and the wind his kinsmen. Even ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... all consulted together in despair, and asked each other what should be done. They thought her an egotist—a cold-hearted old woman, holding at arm's length any idea of the inevitable. And so she did; but not because she was cold-hearted,—because she was so accustomed to living, and had survived so many calamities, and gone on so ...
— Old Lady Mary - A Story of the Seen and the Unseen • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... with a certain distaste, as a necessary evil, an irritating but inevitable restriction upon the "natural" sovereignty and entire self-government of the individual. That was the dream of the egotist. It was a theory in which men were seen to strut in the proud consciousness of their several and "absolute" capacities. It would be as instructive as it would be difficult to count the errors it has bred in political thinking. As a matter of fact, men have never ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... necessary, in a garret all his life; study women and live on their work and care as Darwin studied worms and lived upon sheep; work his nerves into rags without payment, a sublime altruist in his disregard of himself, an atrocious egotist in his disregard of others. Here Woman meets a purpose as impersonal, as irresistible as her own; and the clash is sometimes tragic. When it is complicated by the genius being a woman, then the game is one for a king of critics: your George Sand becomes a mother to gain experience ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... stumbled in the doing,—that is all. Temptation is sweet only because the impulse comes from the depths of our being, not because it is difficult to be tempted. If we overcome, the satisfaction is deep and enduring,—which only goes to show that man is but a petty egotist, always drawing pictures of himself on a pedestal. The man who emancipates himself from traditions and yields to his impulses is debarred from happiness by the blunders of the blindfolded generations preceding him, which arranged that to yield was easy and to resist difficult. Had they reversed ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... greater reputation than his talents were entitled to; and his advancement was more attributable to his good fortune than his merit. He had found warm and powerful assistants in both philosophers and women; he was a confirmed egotist, yet passed for a man who cared little for self. He was quick at matters of business, and he obtained the character of a deep and profound politician. It must, however, be admitted, that he was ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... longer recognised the dog, that friend of man, the attached and faithful companion—the lively and honest courtier. He is here a gloomy egotist, and cut off from all human intercourse without being the less a slave. He does not know him whose house he protects, and devours his corpse without repugnance." Travels in Lower Egypt, ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt |
