"Egotistical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... before condemning unqualifiedly in the cases where he deserts him and harks back to Roman authorities we must remember that Livy was a strong nationalist, one of a people who, despite their conquests, were essentially narrow, prejudiced, egotistical; and, thus remembering, we must marvel that he so fully recognises the merit of his unprejudiced guide and wanders as little as he does. All told, it is quite certain that he has dealt more fairly by Hannibal than have Alison and ...
— Roman History, Books I-III • Titus Livius
... peculiar man," said Mlle. Moiseney, indignantly, to Antoinette. "He is shockingly egotistical. He has confiscated M. Larinski. The idea of employing such a man as that to play bezique! ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... use, of the possessive pronoun here and elsewhere, let it signify also the life of my life-partner—is beyond the range of ordinary experience, since it is immune from the ferments which seethe and muddle the lives of the many, I am assured that a familiar record will not be deemed egotistical, I am scolded because I did not confess with greater zeal, I am bidden ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... been comrades, Eleanor—fellow-workers—friends. You have come to know me as perhaps no other woman has known me. I have shown you a thousand faults. You know all my weaknesses. You have a right to despise me as an unstable, egotistical, selfish fool; who must needs waste other people's good time and good brains for his own futile purposes. You have a right to think me ungrateful for the kindest help that ever man got. You have a right as Miss Foster's friend—and perhaps, guessing as you do at some of my past history,—to ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... singularly and fatally deranged in its action before it could show its best quality. Marvelous analytical faculty he had; but it all oozed out in barren words. Charming eloquence he had; but it degenerated into egotistical garrulity, rendered tempting by the gilding of his genius. It is questionable whether, if he had never touched opium or wine, his real achievements would have been substantial, for he had no conception of a veritable ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... also was anxious to speak with Benedetto. She brought her companions, both male and female, with her. No longer young, but still frivolous, half superstitious, half sceptical, egotistical but not heartless, she was devoted to the consumptive daughter of her old coachman, Having heard of the Saint of Jenne and his miracles, she had arranged this excursion, partly for amusement, partly to satisfy her curiosity, and she wished to ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... the old Flag, is all right, Jud, and I'm mighty glad to find that you have such views," Hal continued. "But you mustn't be too severe on a fellow like Bunny Hepburn. He simply can't rise above his surroundings, and you know what a miserable, egotistical, lying, slanderous fellow his father is. Bunny's father hates the country he lives in, and would set everybody to tearing down the government. That's the kind of a brainless anarchist Hepburn is, and you can't expect his dull-witted ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys in the Ranks - or, Two Recruits in the United States Army • H. Irving Hancock
... from yourself, and wondering and lamenting that you did not write; for you will remember it was your turn. I must not bother you too much with my sorrows, of which, I fear, you have heard an exaggerated account. If you were near me, perhaps I might be tempted to tell you all, to grow egotistical, and pour out the long history of a private governess's trials and crosses in her first situation. As it is, I will only ask you to imagine the miseries of a reserved wretch like me, thrown at once ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... such an egotistical ass as to imagine a woman of your sort could be genuinely in love with a man of my sort," replied he. "So, I'll see to it that we keep away from each other. I don't wish to be tempted to do ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... Blucher, who was stationed in and around Namur, was attacked on the 14th of June, 1815.[10] Napoleon afterward observed in his memoirs that he had attacked Blucher first because he well knew that Blucher would not be supported by the over-prudent and egotistical English commander, but that Wellington, had he been first attacked, would have received every aid from his high-spirited and faithful ally. Wellington, after being repeatedly urged by Blucher, collected his scattered corps, but neither completely nor with sufficient rapidity; and on Blucher's ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... statue of Goethe, by an Italian artist, was the first thing I saw. What a head the man had I a Jupiter of a head. And what a presence! The statue is really majestic; but was Goethe so much, really think you? That egotistical spirit shown in his Diary sets me in doubt. Shakspeare was not self-conscious, and left no trace of egotism; if he knew himself, he did not care to tell what he knew. Yet the heads are both great and majestic heads, and would ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Purcell had shown a mean and unreasoning jealousy of his assistant. The English tradesman inherits a domineering tradition towards his subordinates, and in Purcell's case, as we know, the instincts of an egotistical piety had reinforced those of the employer. Yet Mr. Ancrum felt some ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... plan of my life to follow my conviction, at whatever personal cost to myself. I have represented for many years a district in Congress whose approbation I greatly desired; but though it may seem, perhaps, a little egotistical to say it, I yet desired still more the approbation of one person, and his name was Garfield. He is the only man that I am compelled to sleep with, and eat with, and live with, and die with; and if I could not have his approbation I should ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... he had learnt to speak, with the surface of his mind—with the object of passing the time and avoiding topics that might possibly be painful. Many who appear to be egotistical must assuredly be credited with this good motive. One is, at all events, safe in talking of one's self. Sufficient for the social day is the effort to avoid glancing at the cupboard where ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman
... that he and Byron had very little in common. Byron disliked his familiarity and his airs of equality; while he himself was not long in discovering Byron to be egotistical to the verge of insanity, childishly vain of his rank, ill-natured, jealous, coarse, inconsiderate, disloyal, a blabber of secrets, mean, deceitful. But the glamour of Byron's fame, the romance that surrounded ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... of this astonishing success he steered a steady course. In the first exhilaration of Fraide's favor, in the first egotistical wish to break down Eve's scepticism, he might possibly have plunged into the vortex of action, let it be in what direction it might; but fortunately for himself, for Chilcote, and for their scheme, he was liable to strenuous second thoughts—those ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... end, unless I may be permitted to supplement its meagreness by one or two personal—not to say egotistical—reminiscences. The death of Mr. Mill senior, in 1836, had occasioned a vacancy at the bottom of the examiner's office, to which I was appointed through the kindness of Sir James Carnac, then chairman of the Company, in whose gift it was. Within a few months, however, ...
— John Stuart Mill; His Life and Works • Herbert Spencer, Henry Fawcett, Frederic Harrison and Other
... sobbed on his pillow, "she wasn't worth your love. I just knew it from the start. She's a selfish—egotistical—" a thin, feverish hand stayed ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... library. There, rallying his spirits, he dilated upon law, science and belles-lettres, oblivious of the fact that his commonplace remarks were tedious to a lively mind. He was opinionated, though not egotistical; revered authority, took himself seriously, and was a hero worshipper lacking humor and imagination. Pedantically conscious of imparting his stored wisdom to the attentive listener, whom he desired ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... merely his life on earth, but all eternity beyond the grave. Where hope ends despair steps in; and Philip, with reckless vehemence, flung himself, as it were, into its arms. His was an excitable nature; he had never thought of any one but himself, but labored with egotistical zeal to cultivate his own mind and outdo his fellows in the competition for learning. The sullen words in which he called himself the most wretched man on earth, and the victim of the blackest ill-fortune, fell from his lips like stones. He rudely repelled his sister's encouraging words, like ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... with the scope and antiquity of his reminiscent knowledge. He contributed paragraphs of general information and Nestorian opinions to the New Orleans Picayune, and signed them "Mark Twain." They were quaintly egotistical in tone, usually beginning: "My opinion for the benefit of the citizens of New Orleans," and reciting incidents and comparisons dating as far ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... in his full-blooded, boyish fashion, fairly gasconaded over the success of his exhibit. Larry smiled at the other's exuberant enthusiasm. Hunt was one man who could boast without ever being offensively egotistical, for Hunt, added to his other gifts, had the divine gift of being ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... quasi-religious thirst for inconclusiveness and room to move on lent a certain triumphant note to Hegel's satire; he was sure it all culminated in something, and was not sure it did not culminate in himself. The system, however, as it might strike a less egotistical reader, is a long demonstration of man's ineptitude and of nature's contemptuous march over a path paved with good intentions. It is an idealism without respect for ideals; a system of dialectic in which a psychological flux (not, of course, psychological science, which would ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... very picturesque and interesting figure, is Gabriele d'Annunzio—very much in earnest, wholly sincere, but fanatical, egotistical, intolerant of the rights or opinions of others, a visionary, and perhaps a little mad. I imagine that he would rather have his name linked with that of that other soldier-poet, who "flamed away at Missolonghi" nearly a century ago, than with any other character in history ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... pro and con about genius, and views, and achievements, and ambition, et coetera. 1st. As to the poetical character itself (I mean that sort, of which, if I am anything, I am a member; that sort distinguished from the Wordsworthian, or egotistical sublime; which is a thing per se, and stands alone), it is not itself—it has no self—it is everything and nothing—it has no character—it enjoys light and shade—it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated—it has as much delight ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... and as Hal walked along toward the outposts in the direction from which he had so recently come, he whistled blithely to himself. It was a mission well done, and the lad, although by no means egotistical, was well aware ...
— The Boy Allies On the Firing Line - Or, Twelve Days Battle Along the Marne • Clair W. Hayes
... pleasant letters makes me egotistical; you make me take myself too gravely. Comprehend how I have lived much of my time in France, and loved your country, and many of its people, and all the time was learning that which your country has ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... come those desires and motives that one shares perhaps with some social beasts, but far more so as a conscious thing with men alone. These desires and motives all centre on a clearly apprehended "self" in relation to "others"; they are the essentially egotistical group. They are self-assertion in all its forms. I have dealt with motives toward gratification and motives towards experience; this set of motives is for the sake of oneself. Since they are the most acutely conscious motives in unthinking men, there is a ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... not to have it all of one sort. After awhile a woman doesn't produce pleasant or profitable reactions in my soul. Yes, I know," he added, as he noticed her look of wonderment, "I am selfish and supremely egotistical. Every artist is; his only lookout, however, should be that his surroundings don't become stale. Or, if you prefer to put it more humanely, an artist isn't fit to marry; it's criminal for him to marry and break ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... egotistical, overweening, vainglorious; nugatory, fruitless, ineffectual, frustrate, unavailing, bootless, futile, abortive, ineffective, empty; delusive, chimerical, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... conviction. The admission or confession of a defendant needs legal corroboration. This corroboration is often very difficult to find, and frequently cannot be secured at all. This provision of the statutes is doubtless a wise one to prevent hysterical, suicidal, egotistical, and semi-insane persons from meeting death in the electric chair or on the gallows, but it often results in the guilty going unpunished. Personally, I have never known a criminal to confess a crime of which he was innocent. The nearest thing to it in ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train
... of life came with quite overwhelming force, and that was to Schopenhauer, surely at once the most acute and the most biassed of mortal men. It came to him as a most detestable fact, because it happened he was an intensely egotistical man. But his intellect was of that noble and exceptional sort that aversion may tint indeed but cannot blind, and we owe to him a series of philosophical writings, written with an instinctive skill and a clearness and a vigour uncommon ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... very different. He loved the king, who, in turn, had for him almost a fatherly affection. Young and impulsive, he was, perhaps, somewhat egotistical, and cared for little but to be happy. Handsome, brave and rich, Nature had done so much for him that Henri often regretted that she had left so little for him to add. The king knew his men well, for he was remarkably clear-sighted: and ...
— The Forty-Five Guardsmen • Alexandre Dumas
... back to prose and reality by the major. Mrs. Mayburn had been condoling with him, and he now turned and said, "I hope, my dear sir, that you may never carry around such a barometer as I am afflicted with. A man with an infirmity grows a little egotistical, ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... that letter is,—egotistical, vain, foolish; no, not foolish—narrow, limited, but not foolish; worldly, oh, how worldly! and yet not repulsively so, for there always was in her a certain intensity of feeling that saved her from the commonplace, and gave her an inexpressible ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... of Romanticism began to show symptoms of exhaustion. The subjective and personal character of its lyric verse provoked protest. It seemed to have no other theme but self, to be a universal confession or self-glorification, immodest and egotistical. And it began to be increasingly out of harmony with the intellectual temper, which was determined more and more by positive philosophy and the scientific spirit. LECONTE DE LISLE voiced this protest most clearly (cf. les Montreurs, p. 199), and set forth the claims ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... this nature; the calm heroism of the seventeenth century, and the insane devotion of the nineteenth, were alike its fruits. The voyageur possessed it, in common with all his countrymen. But in him it was not noisy, turbulent, or egotistical; military glory had "neither part nor lot" in his schemes; the conquests he desired to make were the conquests of faith; the dominion he wished to establish was ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... cold, jealous of other men, monumentally egotistical when comparing himself with other sons of women. But he reverenced and appreciated the noble woman who bore him, lived for him, and watched over him ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... mother's picture. I took a wax taper from a stand, and held it up. I gazed long, earnestly; my heart grew to the image. My mother, I perceived, had bequeathed to me much of her features and countenance—her forehead, her eyes, her complexion. No regular beauty pleases egotistical human beings so much as a softened and refined likeness of themselves; for this reason, fathers regard with complacency the lineaments of their daughters' faces, where frequently their own similitude is found flatteringly associated ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... laugh when Captain Rattleton tells his garrison stories. I step up to the harpsichord with old Miss Humby (our neighbour from Beccles) and try and listen as she warbles her ancient ditties. I play whist laboriously. Am I not trying to do the duties of life? and I have a right to be garrulous and egotistical, because I have been reading Montaigne ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... has been put in perfect order by the use of "Golden Medical Discovery." This is the only perfectly safe, scientific, and successful mode of acting upon and healing it. Without, we trust, being considered egotistical, we can say that this opinion is based upon a large experience and a perfect familiarity with the nature and curability of the disease. For many years our whole time and attention has been given to the study and cure of catarrh and other chronic diseases treated of in "The People's Common ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... against the sceptics. Faith in truth was extinct; faith in human nature was gone; philosophy was impossible. And, though the influence of Socrates continued to be felt in the field of ethics, the ethics of the Greeks were at best narrow and egotistical. What a light was poured upon all questions of morality by that one divine axiom, "Love your enemy." No Greek ever attained the sublimity of such a point of view. Still, the progress made by the Greeks was immense, and they must ever occupy in the history ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... helps me to get out of myself and to be happy. I have never known before what a good thing it was to be happy,—perhaps because I have tried so hard to be so. I believe that I have been selfish and egotistical.' Freddie don't furgit his words," the old man paused to say. "'I have always thought too much of myself, and not enough of others. That was the reason that I was not strong enough to live down the opposition in Dexter. It seems that, after all your kindness to me, I might have stayed and made ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... than the pleasure of much praise. The attaching circumstance of my present office, is, that I can do its duties unseen by those for whom they are done. You did not think, by so short a phrase in your letter, to have drawn on yourself such an egotistical dissertation. I beg your pardon for it, and will endeavor to merit that pardon by the constant sentiments of esteem and attachment, with which I am, Dear Sir, your sincere ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... show. To seek petty, immediate triumphs instead of earning and waiting for the big, silent approval of one's own conscience and of those who understand, is a mark of inferiority. It is also a barrier to usefulness, for an egotistical man is necessarily selfish and a ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... and, in noting a new arrangement, is often led to consider the whole as new. It is, therefore, necessary to exercise a proper discrimination lest injustice be done to the various laborers in the same field of invention. I trust it will not be deemed egotistical on my part if, while conscious of the unfeigned desire to concede to all who are attempting improvements in the art of telegraphy that which belongs to them, I should now and then recognize the familiar features of my own ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... in that first talk between them that could make the meditative Kenelm listen so mutely, so intently, I know not; at least I could not jot it down on paper. I fear it was very egotistical, as the talk of children generally is—about herself and her aunt and her home and her friends—all her friends seemed children like herself, though younger—Clemmy the chief of them. Clemmy was the one who had taken a fancy to Kenelm. And amidst ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... accidental but deliberate. He wondered what awaited him and why his life had been spared. That he had walked blindly into a trap prepared for him by that mysterious personality known as Fire-Tongue, he no longer could doubt. Intense anxiety and an egotistical faith in his own acumen had led him to underestimate the cleverness of his enemies, a vice from which ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... of wasteful liberality of Henry III.'s reign. Then, really, several great nobles were richer than the king. They knew it, used it, and never deprived themselves of the pleasure of humiliating his royal majesty when they had an opportunity. It was this egotistical aristocracy Richelieu had constrained to contribute, with its blood, its purse, and its duties, to what was from his time styled the king's service. From Louis XI.—that terrible mower-down of the great—to Richelieu, how many families had raised ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... was permitted to France between two convulsive efforts, and the Revolution as yet knew not whether it should maintain the constitution it had gained, or employ it as a weapon to obtain a republic, Europe began to arouse itself; egotistical and improvident, she merely beheld in the first movement in France a comedy played at Paris on the stage of the States General and the constituent Assembly—between popular genius, represented by Mirabeau, and the vanquished ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... picture which I have drawn of Mr. Adams, I still remain moderately contented—by which remark I mean nothing more egotistical than that I believe it to be a correct picture, and done with whatever measure of skill I may happen to possess in portraiture. I should like to change it only in one particular, viz.: by infusing throughout ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... Paulo, with enthusiasm. "I must fulfil this great task of my life, or die! Away, now, with all wavering or hesitation! What must be, shall be! They shall not say of the man who took compassion upon the deserted and threatened orphan and raised her for his own egotistical wishes, and pusillanimously failed to finish the work he began! No, no, history shall not so speak of me. It shall at least represent me as a brave man capable of sacrificing his heart and his life for the attainment of his higher ends! Seal these letters, Cecil. They contain my ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... been in every country of the world, and mixed with people of note in each. His anecdotes were always pungent, personal without being egotistical, and savoured always with a certain dry and perfectly natural humour. I found myself both interested and fascinated by his constant flow of reminiscences, and yet at times my attention wandered. For within a few yards of us were seated ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... ballad-making a lost art? That it is a lost art there can be no question. Nobody who is painfully acquainted with the rambling, egotistical pieces of dreary versification, passing for ...
— Book of Old Ballads • Selected by Beverly Nichols
... fluttered rather pathetically, as if it begged him to put no unwonted strain upon it now, as in that time foregone, when every beat cried out, "Heave the weight! charge up the hill! We're equal to it. If we're not, we'll die submerged in our own red fount." He was not taking age with any sense of egotistical rebellion; but it irked him like an unfamiliar weight patiently borne and for no reward. The sense of the morning of life was upon him; yet here he was fettered to his traitorous body which was surely going to betray him in the end. No miracle could save him from atomic downfall. ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... an immense effort hastened to throw himself into the Emperor's arms, and his Majesty pressed him to his heart as if to thank him for rousing such gentle emotions at a moment when danger usually renders men selfish and egotistical. ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... mist-haunted seas kept his carven goblet; and even as he flung away at last his love-pledge, so will I burn this book of souvenirs. Assuredly it is not through any arrogant avarice nor through any egotistical pride, that I shall destroy this record of a humble life—it is only because I fear lest those things which are dear and sacred to me might appear before others, because of my inartistic manner of expression, ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... Scotland." The, Westminster Gazette sounded its usual warning note. "Giants Beware," said the Westminster Gazette, and tried to make a point out of it that might perhaps serve towards uniting the Liberal party—at that time greatly torn between seven intensely egotistical leaders. The later newspapers dropped into uniformity. "The Giant in the New Kent Road," ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... insane glee at having eluded Lapierre, and then I determined on a course of action. Like the egotistical villain I was, I had no more regard for your feelings than if you had been a stick or a stone. You should never suspect that I had wilfully deserted you, and should be made to believe that I had been murdered. Having ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... prejudiced," replies Eleanor hotly, "you can't bear me to have a friend that is not of your own choosing! My taste wasn't a thing to be shuddered at when I married you, was it? A selfish, egotistical——" ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... be sheer conceit on the part of Podbury. His successes with punch were making the man egotistical. I did not believe that he had heard of these interesting points before, whatever he said to the contrary. At any rate, they were quite new to his wife and daughters and aunts. So I turned my attention to them, and told them several ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... had the soul of a martyr; she had resigned herself to sinking down into the star of cousin Ward's set, who went on holidays to the play—mostly honest, fat and fatuous, or jaunty and egotistical folk, who admired the scenery and the dresses, but could no more have made a play to themselves than they could have drawn the cartoons. She helped cousin Ward, not only with her purse, but with a kinswoman's concern in her and hers: she assisted to wash and dress the children of a morning; ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... people are actually offended if I don't jump into every mad goat-feather quest that is proposed. I am firmly convinced that there is now extant an Association to Prevent Butler Doing a Full Day's Work. I don't want to seem egotistical, but I am now of the opinion that the Kaiser started the war in order to make it seem necessary for me to make Four-Minute speeches on Food Conservation, Give Your Binoculars, and ...
— Goat-Feathers • Ellis Parker Butler
... circulated through the town in manuscript. For, before the volume appeared, the critics at the coffee-houses very confidently predicted that it would be utterly worthless, and were in consequence bitterly reviled by the poet in an ill- written, foolish, and egotistical preface. The book amply vindicated the most unfavourable prophecies that had been hazarded. The style and versification are beneath criticism; the morals are those of Rochester. For Rochester, indeed, there ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... chance to afford them innocent pleasure, would fain know something more about an author whose works have brought them that gratification than the cold letter of a mere literary preface usually tells: to such readers this—something of an egotistical—epistle is addressed. ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... to appear seeking credit for a courage, or rather a coolness, which the reader may conceive I exaggerate, I may be pardoned if I pause to indulge in one or two egotistical remarks. ...
— Haunted and the Haunters • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... have a letter from you; of you I have heard often—but of and from, though they may be both brothers of the family of the prepositions, are very different in meaning. I have not written one word of Caroline or Ellen. Am I not incurably egotistical? The former declares she is sure you will have no time to read a letter from her, with such a volume as mine, and Ellen says she has no time by this opportunity. I told her she ought to get up as I ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar
... answered Eugenie, firmly. "I am not intended to become the slave of a hypocritical and egotistical man. You are aware that my inclination pushes me toward the stage, where my voice, my beauty, and my independent spirit will assure me success. The time has now arrived when I must decide: here, the scandal and contempt ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume I (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... of the rest of the world except to despise it, and to wish it evil.[4] The disabused epicurean who wrote Ecclesiastes, thought so little of the future, that he considered it even useless to labor for his children; in the eyes of this egotistical celibate, the highest stroke of wisdom was to use his fortune for his own enjoyment.[5] But the great achievements of a people are generally wrought by the minority. Notwithstanding all their enormous defects, ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... least it is so exceedingly small, as to be incapable of protrusion. If hereafter any highly cultured, poetical nation shall lure back to their birth-right, the merry May-day gods of old; and livingly enthrone them again in the now egotistical sky; in the now unhaunted hill; then be sure, exalted to Jove's high seat, the great Sperm Whale shall lord it. Champollion deciphered the wrinkled granite hieroglyphics. But there is no Champollion to decipher the Egypt of every man's ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... turns out that the words were spoken more in my own will than in the power, I feel that egotistical-I has done it, and that this self-doing has set me apart from the other members of the meeting. I am dissatisfied until again immersed in the life of the group. But if it seems that I have been an instrument of the power, I have the feeling that the power ...
— An Interpretation of Friends Worship • N. Jean Toomer
... opened out before Sir Richmond of talking about history and suchlike topics with a charming companion for perhaps two whole days instead of going on with this tiresome, shamefaced, egotistical business of self-examination was so attractive to him that it took immediate possession of his mind, to the entire exclusion and disregard of Dr. Martineau's possible objections to any such modification ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... himself must have died in some previous existence, in order to analyse death so clearly. And all these officers, who walk in the Valley of the Shadow, have their selfish ambitions, their absurd social distinctions, and their overweening, egotistical vanity. ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... closet. When I shut myself up on account of wrong doing, I would not allow myself to read or do any thing but think of my fault. The words of my mother which had been uttered without much serious thought, were as a law to me. I became, if possible, too sensitive to my own defects; it made me rather egotistical. It seemed as if my heart had become suddenly changed. I was, as it were, born again; a ...
— Two Festivals • Eliza Lee Follen
... faster gait, then heading off some wayward fellow who manifested a strong disposition to sheer off to the right or left, and again turning the whole body just where the master wished. It was an amusing sight, and well worth the walk from the city. To be sure, the dog was rather egotistical and ostentatious. He knew his smartness, and was quite willing that bystanders should know it too, for he pawed, and fawned, and barked at a tremendous rate. The flock seemed to know his ways, and while they obeyed his voice, they were not ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... finds a deep-resoundingecho in his bosom. In every man, he loves his humanity only, not his superiority. The avowed object of all his literary labors was to raise up again the down-sunken faith in God, virtue, and immortality; and, in an egotistical, revolutionary age, to warm again our human sympathies, which have now grown cold. And not less boundless is his love for nature,—for this outward, beautiful world. He embraces it all in ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... them telling eagerly some evil that had not happened or some terrific secret which was not true. All the rationalist and plain man revolted within him against bowing down for a moment in that forest of deception and egotistical darkness. He wanted to blow up that palace of delusions with dynamite; and in some wild way, which I will not defend, he tried to ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... Paasch, another had come to share the trade and take the bread out of his mouth, and he choked with the egotistical dread of the shopkeeper at another rival in the struggle for existence. Who could this be? he thought, with the uneasy fear of a man threatened with danger. For the moment he had forgotten Jonah's real name, and he looked into the shop to size up his adversary ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... field" he describes himself "truly as nothing," and learned to read Homer in the original with difficulty. He preferred Homer and Aeschylus to all other classical authors, found Tacitus and Virgil "really interesting," Horace "egotistical, leichtfertig," and Cicero "a windy person, and a weariness." Nor did he take much to metaphysics or moral philosophy. In geometry, however, he excelled, perhaps because Professor (subsequently Sir John) Leslie, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... been able to wither nor water to quench their honest zeal. But this good soul on being sprinkled laid down his arms; he was commonplace. Moreover, he was guilty of something beside cowardice. He let a small egotistical pique sully as well as betray a great cause. "The justices have thrown cold water on my remonstrance—very well, gentlemen, torture your prisoners ad libitum; I shall interfere no more; we shall see which was in ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... years 1515, 1516, and 1517. Seven of them are addressed to Cardinal Ippolito and two to Lucretia. These letters are not in her own handwriting but are dictated. They disclose a powerful will, a cast of mind that might be described as rude and egotistical, and an insinuating character. They are devoted chiefly to practical matters and to requests of various sorts. On one occasion she sent the cardinal a present of two antique columns which had been exhumed ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... steadily enough, but every step he took beat in his mind like the accents of a dirge. For he had betrayed into the hands of the Eurasian his most loved and loyal friend. Betrayed him! Despicably egotistical he had been in submitting to the chair, in not making one last wild break for freedom at that time. He had thought he could beat Ku Sui at his own game. Ku ...
— The Affair of the Brains • Anthony Gilmore
... handsome man in his prime, with a charmingly expressive face and a good figure. His hair is now snow-white, but otherwise he is not old in his looks. His manners are somewhat precise, and after the old school. He is fond of admiration, and is accounted egotistical, although reserved in general society. His talk, like his writings, is a good deal upon out-of-the-way subjects, and is often deemed unintelligible by those unfamiliar with his thought. To his enthusiastic ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... and egotistical all your ideas are! He never mentioned you, and probably never thought of you. He only took a little pains that a tired and dispirited man might see and feel the eternal beauty and freshness of nature, as one might give, in passing, a cup ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... would not much mind telling you. Of course I studied you before I came here. Even hunger would not make me sit in a tavern beside a fool, or a snob, or (with a faint blush) a libertine. But to tell one's own story, that is so egotistical, for one thing. ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... angry with me that I cannot become for you that which you wish. I shall certainly not marry. I am too happy in my own home for that. Ah! this to be sure is egotistical, but I cannot do otherwise. Forgive me! I am so very much, so heartily attached to you; and I should never be happy again if you love not hitherto ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... of Caleb Stukely. She has her little conceits, and her little fancies; rather an overweening pride of caste, and contempt for the plebeian multitude, and an addiction to filling too many pages of her books with small personal and egotistical details about herself, and her sensations, and what dresses she wears, and how thin she is, and so on. But with all her faults, she is unquestionably a very accomplished and clever writer. Her criticisms on subjects relating to art, and especially ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... to do this than the English, though the Americans do it likewise to quite as great an extent. There is nothing, I think, to choose between them in this respect, and for national egotism these two nations head the list. There are not many more disagreeable beings than the egotistical, untravelled young Englishman (age generally modifies his views), who reviles everything foreign, and thinks nothing really good is found out of Great Britain! The class are well known on the Continent, and naturally avoided, for ...
— The Truth About America • Edward Money
... their return journey to Excelsior in blissful but timid communion with her. If he did not dare to confess his past suspicions, he was equally afraid to venture upon the boldness he had premeditated a few hours before. He was therefore obliged to take a middle course of slightly egotistical narration of his own personal adventures, with which he beguiled the young girl's ear. This he only departed from once, to describe to her a valuable grizzly bearskin which he had seen that day for sale at Indian Spring, with a view to divining her possible acceptance of it for a "buggy ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... more thoroughly investigate the matter. Egoism is a quality so deeply rooted in every personality that it is on egotistical ends only that one may safely rely in order to ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... was proud to observe that many eyes were turned in the direction of his companion. It made him feel rather egotistical, for there were many girls there well worth looking at, and people don't always go to horse shows to look at horses. Jimmy forgot all about chocolates. Unconsciously he relapsed to his habitual self, and, inasmuch as most any one who is unassuming and entirely natural is entertaining, seemed ...
— Mixed Faces • Roy Norton
... reflected that perchance I had left those most dear to return to them no more. But I forget; a description of private feelings is, to uninterested readers, only so much twaddle, besides being more egotistical than even an account of personal adventures could extenuate; so, with the exception of a few extracts from my "log," I shall jump at once from the English Channel to the ...
— A Lady's Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852-53. • Mrs. Charles (Ellen) Clacey
... fool," she ordered curtly. "We needed you, and I, for one, was not going to see your egotistical ideas about an unimportant piece of work—your cosmological chemistry—jeopardize the safety of the world. Oh, I know the government wanted you in your laboratory. But with Ludwig Leider loose on Orcon, and you the only one ...
— The Winged Men of Orcon - A Complete Novelette • David R. Sparks
... remarkable and almost inconceivable machinations of those who have stained their hands with crime, but I honestly believe that the extraordinary features of my own life-romance are as strange as, if not stranger than, any hitherto recorded. Even my worst enemy could not dub me egotistical, I think; and surely the facts I have set down here are plain and unvarnished, without any attempt at misleading the reader into believing that which is untrue. Mine is a plain chronicle of a chain of extraordinary circumstances which led ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... reflections of his companion's mood mirrored in his own sympathetic mind. Further, I am sure that what was something very like patient and courteous boredom in him, when he was confronted with some sentimental and egotistical character, was interpretated as a sad and remote unworldliness. Someone writing of him spoke of his abstracted and far-off mood, with his eyes indwelling in a rapture of hallowed thought. This seems to me wholly unlike Hugh. He was far more likely to ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... surrendered its rights to a bureau of its officers; exhortations to liberty and tolerance; side-glances at the contrasts of national gifts and destinies and futures in the first century and in the nineteenth; felicitous parallels and cunning epigrams, subtle combinations of the pathetic, the egotistical, and the cynical, all presented with calm self-reliance and in the most finished and distinguished of styles, may veil for the moment from the audience which such things amuse, and even interest, the hollowness ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... that night at the Tin Road-house, a comfortless shack sheathed with flattened kerosene cans, and Folsom's irritation at his new partner increased, for Harkness was loud, boastful, and blatantly egotistical, with the egotism that ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... worse, than nothing in a church service. But how often sentimental and restless music, making not for restraint and reverence, not for the subduing of mind and heart but for the expression of those expansive and egotistical moods which are of the essence of romantic singing, is what we employ. There is a great deal of truly religious music, austere in tone, breathing restraint and reverence, quietly written. The anthems of Palestrina, Anerio, Viadana, Vittoria among the Italians; of ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... setting her right. Yet in some things he is very like Ernest, and perhaps a wife destitute of self-assertion and without much individuality would have spoiled him as Harriet has spoiled John. For I think it must be partly her fault that he dares to be so egotistical. Helen, is the dearest, prettiest creature I ever saw. Oh, why would James take a fancy to Lucy! I feel the new delight of having a sister to love and to admire. And she will love me in time; ...
— Stepping Heavenward • Mrs. E. Prentiss
... said he had found in his wife's room, and this valise belonged to Parnell! The English members talked of Parnell's aberration and carelessness concerning his luggage; and all hands agreed that O'Shea, whoever he was, was a fool—a hot-headed, egotistical rogue, trying to win fame for himself by ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... and rode off in a walk. This was the first clean knock-out I had ever met. Heretofore I had been egotistical enough to hold my head rather high, but this morning it drooped. Wolf seemed to notice it, and after the first mile dropped into an easy volunteer walk. I never noticed the passing of time until we reached the river, and the black stopped to drink. Here I ...
— A Texas Matchmaker • Andy Adams
... dark. He crossed the street, and sat on one of the iron benches placed under the trees on the Courthouse lawn. He could see a dull, reddish light shining through the dusty window of the Bugle office. Shining like that, through his egotistical pride, the facts of his failure and impotence tormented him. It hurt him the more that he had been, simply, diddled, no better than a child in Simmons' astute, practised hands. The latter's rascality was patent, but Simmons could not have ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... that it is an inevitable law that man should not be happy; but it is an inevitable law that a man, in spite of himself, should live for something higher than his own happiness. He cannot live in himself or for himself, however egotistical he may try to be. Every desire he has links him with others. Man is not a machine,—he is a ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... much that is quite unfit for, and untrue of, people who live in the ordinary relations of life. I don't think I like the book quite so much as I did. There is a hot-house, egotistical air about much of its piety. Other persons are, ordinarily, the appointed means of learning the love of God; and to stifle human affections must be very often to render the love of ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... and sub-committees, in the tribune and in the lobbies, discussions, disputes, personal questions cloaked under the guise of the general welfare, suddenly appeared to him as petty and vain, narrow and egotistical beside the formidable question of bread which was propounded to him so quietly by this man of the people, who was not a rebel of the violent days, but the unfortunate brother, the eternal Lazarus crying, without threat, but ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... but did not consider Germany's contributions in these lines as equal to those of other nations. We never have regarded German culture as superior, but rather as inferior, to that of certain other countries; and the Germans' loud claims to superiority have seemed to us egotistical and the result of a weak point in the German character. For your form of government and the philosophy of history taught by your university professors we could never have much admiration or respect. Both seemed to us unworthy of an intelligent, civilised people, and ...
— Plain Words From America • Douglas W. Johnson
... into exile, if I may so call that house of misery—a clear conscience, a heart whose still small voice tells me that I have done no wrong to upbraid myself with. This is the consolation that I have,—that my conscience is clear. I know it appears somewhat egotistical for me to speak thus, but it is a source of consolation for me that I have nothing to upbraid myself with, and I will now say in conclusion, that if my sufferings can ameliorate the wrongs or the sufferings of Ireland. I am willing ...
— The Dock and the Scaffold • Unknown
... tense now; and to review him and his works at this time of day would be suspiciously like a post-mortem examination, resulting possibly in a verdict of temporary insanity—if not, indeed, of felo de se—so wilful and wrongheaded were the vagaries of this 'rough, egotistical Yankee,' as he has been called: Herman Melville is replete with graphic power, and riots in the exuberance of a fresh, racy style; but whether he can sustain the 'burden and heat' of a well-equipped and full-grown novel as deftly as the fragmentary autobiographies he loves to indite; ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal Vol. XVII. No. 418. New Series. - January 3, 1852. • William and Robert Chambers
... the ball, sizing up the play, working out the weak points—nothing. Brains, brains, brains, Stover! You told me you came out here because we needed some one to be banged around—and I took you on your word, didn't I? Now, if you're going out there as an egotistical, puffed-up, conceited individual who's thinking only of his own skin, who isn't willing to sacrifice his own little, measly feelings for the sake of the school, who won't fight ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... you are not a woman, but a brave, high-minded man. In that character you pity poor Mr. Little, but you blame him a little because he fled from trouble, and left his wife and child in it. To you, who are Guy Raby—mind that, please—it seems egotistical and weak to desert your wife and child even for the grave." (The widow buried her face and wept. Twenty-five years do something to withdraw the veil the heart has cast over the judgment.) "But, whatever you feel, you utter only regret, and open your arms to your ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade |
