"Individualism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... wolf would have died at the brink of the river bluff, and been eaten by his fellows ere they continued their chase of the leaping buck—in this fashion would he have died, but for that extra breadth of skull between the eyes, that heightened individualism and resourcefulness. Had there been any chance to escape by fighting, fighting would have been the choice of his fierce and hardy spirit. But what was ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... triumphant Anglo-Saxon with dreams of expansion that include the round earth, the student of sociology who wishes an insight into cooperative methods as opposed to individualism, the young man anxious to learn how to get on, parents with children to be equipped for the struggle for existence, business men and employers of labor, all sit down beside the dandelion and take its lesson to heart. How has ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... peace and you must sacrifice privacy. The many appliances which save our useless time may be enjoyed only by crowds. The citizens of New York travel, live, and talk in public. They have made their choice, and are proud of it Englishmen are still reckless enough to waste their time in pursuit of individualism, and I think they are wise. For my part, I would rather lose my time than save it, and the one open conveyance of New York which in pace and conduct suits my inclination is the ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... Africa adopted a legislative instead of a federal union. For Canada, a legislative union was impracticable. This was due partly to the racial solidarity of the French, but even more largely to the fully developed individualism of each province. It is to the glory of the Fathers of Confederation that the constitution, mainly constructed by themselves as the product of their own experience and reflection, has lasted without substantial change for nearly half a century. They were forced to deal with conditions ...
— The Fathers of Confederation - A Chronicle of the Birth of the Dominion • A. H. U. Colquhoun
... remarked, by the way, that Rolle is not inclined to substitute individualism for the authority of the Church; a change which has been brought against some mystics. There is immense emphasis laid, all through his writings, on the importance of conduct. The penetrating analysis, in ch. vi, of The Form of Perfect Living, of the possible sins humanity can commit ...
— The Form of Perfect Living and Other Prose Treatises • Richard Rolle of Hampole
... life; the more conscious we are in the pursuit of moral and spiritual good, the nearer we are to that kingdom of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost which we seek. Get out of the narrow individualism or atomism—for let us never forget that individual and atom are the same word—which threatens to dwarf and pulverize us, which keeps within our view only the narrow range of our own interests and defeats their true pursuit by ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... deliberate, reserved, practical, sticklers for formalities, with a marked ability for organization; the Russian Jews were quick-tempered, emotional, theorizing, haters of formalities, with a decided bent toward individualism. An enormous amount of explosives had been accumulating between the two sections, which if lit by a spark might have disrupted the edifice of American Israel, still in the process ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... efficacy of good. I believe in the telepathic potency of moral force. I believe in physical conservation for the eugenic good of the race and mental dominance over matter. But I'm infernally lazy myself, and it's easy to preach. It's even easier to create a counter-philosophy of condonance and individualism, and I'm alternately an ethical egoist, a Fabian socialist and a cynic. Moreover, I'm a creature of whims and inconsistencies and there are black nights in my temperament when John Barleycorn lightens the gloom; and there are other nights ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... had been going on a short while, she found she was not in the humor for it; the men who asked her to dance didn't interest her, and she felt like going to bed. Being a firm believer in individualism and thinking only of herself, she quietly ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... words. To find the life is the highest object of every man and the end for which he was created; yet this can be attained only by the losing of it for Christ's sake. Individuality can be preserved only by the sacrifice of Individualism. Let us break up this thought and ...
— Paradoxes of Catholicism • Robert Hugh Benson
... mentality and Polish sentiment. Both the German submissiveness (idealistic as it may be) and the Russian lawlessness (fed on the corruption of all the virtues) are utterly foreign to the Polish nation, whose qualities and defects are altogether of another kind, tending to a certain exaggeration of individualism and, perhaps, to an extreme belief in the Governing Power of Free Assent: the one invariably vital principle in the internal government of the Old Republic. There was never a history more free from political bloodshed than the history of the Polish State, ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... of certain adults as children who never grew up, we are referring to a much larger class than is commonly understood. All who attain mature years with fixations are to be regarded as children. All individualists belong here unless their individualism is merely a stepping stone to altruism. Indeed, we see in all men a desire to place themselves on a pinnacle. This craving seeks expression in a thousand acts. Even if outgrown it may assert itself in times of stress. It is of benefit at times ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... an older "Lamiyat al-Arab" a pre-Islamitic L-poem by the "brigand-poet" Shanfara, of whom Mr. W. G. Palgrave has given a most appreciative account in his "Essays on Eastern Questions," noting the indomitable self-reliance and the absolute individualism of a mind defying its age and all around it. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... times the institution of marriage is menaced by two opposite forces; on the one hand, by a revolutionary type of socialism, and on the other, by the reactionary influence of self-interested individualism. (a) It is contended by some advanced socialists that among {226} the poor and the toiling home life is practically non-existent; indeed, under present industrial conditions, impossible. Marriage and separate family ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... got to do is just to list all the chaps and put a note to their play:—'Naylor minor must pass more. Football isn't the place for extreme individualism.' 'Ammersham shapes well as half-back.' ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... has always run to individualism, and yet there is none which is capable of conceiving and carrying out a finer ideal of discipline. There is nothing in Roman or Grecian annals, not even the lava-baked sentry at Pompeii, which gives a more sternly fine object-lesson in ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... without us some day," he said lightly, in answer to her tirade; "no one is indispensable. But are you so sure, Miss Boyce, you believe in your own creed? I thought I had observed—pardon me for saying it—on the two or three occasions we have met, some degenerate signs of individualism? You take pleasure in the old place, you say; you were delighted to come and live where your ancestors lived before you; you are full of desires to pull these poor people out of the mire in your own way. No! I don't feel ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... tottering in almost decrepit decay. He even admitted himself that it needed perfecting by means of a law that should establish compulsory corporations, like the ancient guilds, which proposal was objected to by the workmen themselves, more inclined to Saxon individualism and revolutionary co-operation than to his socialism, in which he saw salvation, and which they regarded as pedantic and hybrid. Bismarck's system had no justification and derogated all laws of ethics and justice. With his Utopian schemes the professors ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... American Federation of Labour. There were many others, of course, but these were the best known. The Socialist leaders were W.J. Ghent, Rufus Weeks, Gaylord Wilshire and R.W. Bruere. Exponents of individualism were many, and most of them were brilliant. The most powerful address on behalf of labour was made by R. Fulton Cutting. There has been no attempt to bait an ecclesiastical hook to catch the masses. We have tried to make men think and to act on ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... Alone with his bruised ambitions, his hectored egoism, his watery aims. Alone and plotting the ruin of those who had dared bid him halt in his mad, destroying career. Alone, this high priest of the caste of absolutism, of the old individualism which is fast hurrying into the realm of the forgotten. Alone, and facing a new century, with whose ideals his own were utterly, stubbornly, ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... people have hitherto dreamed, and it must be confessed that the prospect is not altogether pleasing. We have been flattering ourselves—in Anglo-Saxondom, at least—for many years back that all social progress was to be hereafter in the direction of greater individualism, and among us, certainly, this view has derived abundant support from observed facts. But it is now apparent that there is a tendency at work, which appears to grow stronger and stronger every day, toward combination in all the work of life. It is specially observable in the efforts ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... The unsparing fashion in which he developed the theory of individualism in the case of Emilius, and insisted on man being allowed to grow into the man of nature, instead of the man of art and manufacture, might have led us to expect that when he came to speak of women, he would suffer equity and logic ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... to be reoriented. It has too much glorified individualism, and put a premium on "white collar" work. The trend toward industrial education will ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... plan. He wondered glumly if that was better for men who were pitted against space. The rigid discipline sheltered them. They didn't have to think in a medium that might be too huge for their brains and emotions. Maybe it was more practical than rough-and-tumble individualism. He had a bitter picture of the whole solar system without a free mind in its whole extent—that is, if another gigantic ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... which were once given our scholars, the social and political offices which were once open to the winner of the highest prize, have been thrown upon the altar of modernity. They say it is a most wise move and leads to the greater individualism, which is now the battle-cry of China. The fault of the old examination, we are told, is the lack of original ideas which might be expressed by a student. He must give the usual interpretations of the classics. Now the introduction of free thought and private opinion has produced ...
— My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard • Elizabeth Cooper
... from neglect of these plain considerations that the fanatical individualism [Note 21] of our time attempts to apply the analogy of cosmic nature to society. Once more we have a misapplication of the stoical injunction to follow nature; the duties of the individual to the state are forgotten, and his tendencies to self-assertion are dignified by the name ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... of the wages of some at the same time that we raise those of others. Monopoly does not gain in respectability by belonging to the lowest classes of people, especially when it serves to maintain only the grossest individualism. The revolt of the silk-workers met with no sympathy, but rather hostility, from the porters and the river population generally. Nothing that happens off the wharves has any power to move them. Beasts of burden fashioned in advance for despotism, they will not mingle with ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... individualism, Darwinism, and the law of evolution; he speaks of "the broad paths of human sin," and accuses the English clergy of "betraying the God of Justice"; he places before them the God of the Boers, declaring that "an invisible ...
— Boer Politics • Yves Guyot
... at such a love feast an aristocratic poet extoll in harangue the unwashed Democracy, a Walking Delegate read a poem, a Jew quote the Koran with unction, a Mohammedan eulogise Monogamy, a Single-Taxer declare himself a Democrat, a Socialist glorify Individualism, and an Anarchist express ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... speak, "fit the feet of the wearers"? Then all questions of divorce could be settled by noble and exalted feeling and desire to do right and elevate the nation. But meanwhile, with the growth and encouragement of individualism, every little unit is giving forth his personal view (as I am doing in this paper!), perhaps many of them without the slightest faculty for looking ahead, or knowledge of how to make deductions from past ...
— Three Things • Elinor Glyn
... age of sixty-five, with the whole of New England's individualism behind him, he asked about socialism. When he met H. G. Wells, he listened to the socialist, and, as it happens, was converted. So he said so. James was no more afraid of a new political theory than he was of ghosts, and he was no more afraid of proclaiming ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... Bible and Religion, on the Church and the Priesthood, and on Woman's Rights, and the Bloomer Costume, and Marriage Laws, and Free-love, and Education, and Solomon's Rod, and Non-resistance, and Human Government, and Communism, and Individualism, and Unitarianism, and Theodore Parkerism, and Spiritualism, and Vegetarianism, and Teetotalism, and Deism, and Atheism, and Clairvoyance, and Andrew Jackson Davis, and the American Congress, and Quakerism, and William Henry Channing, ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... incidents. "Spiridion" (1839), composed under the influence of Lamennais, deals with questions of free thought in religion. But the novels of the first period of her literary activity, which came to a close in 1840, are mainly occupied with a lyrical individualism, and are inspired by the wrongs and disillusions ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... in philosophy, even in architecture and its subordinate crafts. In the social and political order it rejoices in the freest action of local and personal influences; its restless versatility drives it towards the assertion of the principles of separatism, of individualism—the separation of state from state, the maintenance of local religions, the development of the individual in that which is most peculiar and individual in him. Its claim is in its grace, its freedom and happiness, its lively interest, the variety of its gifts to civilisation; ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... the weak. But strength is not limited to muscle. To protect the weak mind from the strong mind is an equal duty, and a far more difficult task. So far we have only partially succeeded. In this difficulty lies the whole problem. Socialism, so far as it attempts to repress individualism, and reduce mankind to an evenness opposed to all natural laws, is suicidal of the best in favor of mediocrity. But so far as it attempts to protect that mediocrity and weakness from the superior minds of the best, it is only in line with ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... West to teach. Her costume was a thing apart, suggesting neither sex, epoch, nor personal vanity, but what it lacked of these more usual sartorial characteristics, it more than made up in a passionate individualism; an excessively short skirt, so innocent of "fit" or "hang" in its wavering, indeterminate outline as to suggest the possible workmanship of teeth rather than of scissors; and riding-boots coming well to the knee, displaying a well-shaped, ample foot, perched ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... of the family as an organic whole, with common joys, honors, and responsibilities, common sorrows and disgraces, was giving way to the newer notion of individualism. In France, however, the process never went so far as it has done in some other countries, ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... stories which I reproduce at the end of this book, the little Hare (who is, I think, a symbol of nervous individualism) constantly says: "Suppose the Earth were to fall in, what would ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... those was to be the school of the future, and which represented the true utilitarian tradition? Here I must just notice a fact which is not always recognised. The utilitarians are identified by most people with the (so-called) Manchester doctrines. They are regarded as advocates of individualism and the laissez-faire or, as I should prefer to call it, the let-alone principle. There was no doubt a close connection, speaking historically; but a qualification must be made in a logical sense, which is very important for my purpose. The tendency which Fitzjames attacked as ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... dangers to dogmatic faith arising from self-abandonment to God within the heart. The elaborate structure of orthodoxy seemed to dissolve in the ardour of a personal emotion; it seemed to him another form of the individualism which he condemned. The Church was a great objective reality; it had laid down a system of belief. A love of God which ignored the method of God, was but a spurious ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... are told, Political Economy is only the science of selfishness; Adam Smith is the prophet of individualism; grow rich per fas et nefas is its ultimate teaching. Such a judgment is evidence of much levity and little enlightenment. How could the man who conceived the study of human interests on so large a scale, the philosopher who acknowledged Hutcheson as his master and gave his ideas ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... life. Man can dodge Nature as the scale insect cannot, but higher forms of life can, and man the most effectively of all. But in the end she will get every one of us. Those will live happiest and longest who best know how to work with Nature and not against her. And individualism and not collectivism, is Nature's way. If our own object is the greatest aggregate of human comfort, we should realize that the greatest possible aggregate can only be attained when each individual under the stimulus of self-interest gets the ...
— The Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams
... began to spread just as he took his seat; and being assiduous in Parliament, he was drawn more and more from "the Clubs," where his libellers and detractors wagged their tongues to some purpose. His strong individualism, as well as his practical good sense, made him bitterly hostile to the mildest proposals for putting the people's industrial interests into the hands of Government departments. And being a man of most positive quality, it was natural that he should excite the hatred of the more fanatical Socialists; ...
— Reminiscences of Charles Bradlaugh • George W. Foote
... while at the same time through governmental regulation and supervision it emphasizes the semi-public character and duties of railroads, protects the community's rights and just claims and guards against those evils and excesses of unrestrained individualism which experience ...
— Government Ownership of Railroads, and War Taxation • Otto H. Kahn
... this," she said. "It's very personal, and yet, some way, everything is impersonal now, in a sense. There has been such a common cause, and such a wave of common suffering, that it seems to flood out over the individual and embrace us all. Individualism is gone. It's the community now; the state; mankind, if you like, above everything. I suppose, so far as German kultur stands for that, it has been imposed upon the world. . . . So this is really, in a sense, your letter as ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... is anything in regard to which the love of friends corroborates the malice of enemies it is in ascribing to the English an individualism, hard-shelled beyond all human parallel. The Englishman's country is an impregnable island, his house is a castle, his temperament is a suit of armour. The function common to all three is to keep things out, and ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... upon our affections, to say nothing of those designs for civil breadwinning or moss-dodging in Central Africa, Bond Street, Kirkcaldy or Dawson City. The consequence is that here, pretty well out of A.P.M. range, sartorial individualism flourishes unchecked. Thus the eye is startled to behold a fur headdress as big as a busby, an ordinary service tunic, gaberdine breeches, shooting stockings and Shackleton boots, going about as component parts of one officer's ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 28, 1919. • Various
... conception of Christ as the Life as well as the Light of the world has two consequences besides those which have been already mentioned. In the first place, it is fatal to religious individualism. The close unity which joins us to Christ is not so much a unity of the individual soul with the heavenly Christ, as an organic unity of all men, or, since many refuse their privileges, of all Christians, with ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... the people were declared superior to the privileges of the rulers; revolution was justified; and the principles of eighteenth century individualism were made the foundation of the new political state. Aristocracy was swept aside and in its stead ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing
... was the proposal by which Winstanley deemed the relative merits of Individualism and Communism, as a system of social union, might best be tested, and which he immediately proceeded to defend in the ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... thing. The interest of the State is with him a sincere thirst of the soul, as it was in the little pagan cities. Now this public passion, this clean appetite for order and equity, had fallen to a lower ebb, had more nearly disappeared altogether, during Shaw's earlier epoch than at any other time. Individualism of the worst type was on the top of the wave; I mean artistic individualism, which is so much crueller, so much blinder and so much more irrational even than commercial individualism. The decay of society was praised by artists as the decay of a corpse is praised by worms. The aesthete was ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... cannot perform the duty of another, that hired soldiery cannot protect a state, but their own hearts and arms must be enlisted unless they would be buried in its ruins. It wakes up the dormant dynamical powers of courage and heroism, and checks for a moment the selfish individualism that was taking the ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... discharge; and these are to administer law, and to make war. Of the two war, since it is politics par excellence, would appear to be the greater. War cannot be thought or wished out of the world: it is the only medicine for a sick nation. When we are sunk in the selfish individualism of peace, war comes to make us realize that we are members one of another. 'Therein lies the majesty of war, that the petty individual altogether vanishes before the great thought of the state.' War alone makes us realize ...
— Why We Are At War (2nd Edition, revised) • Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History
... roles for the benefit of the industrial and military coalition. Nietzsche depicted in lines of fire the resurrection of heroism, his vision of the superman was that of an ardent soul, steeled by sufferings, meditating a tragic conception of life with serenity, and in his solitary individualism surmounting the infirmity of man and his own by the insistent will to ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... had afterwards been touched by the fraternal dream of a new golden age which he had found in Bache's humanitarian Communism. And indeed even Janzen had momentarily shaken him by his fierce confidence in the theory of liberative Individualism. But afterwards he had found himself out of his depth; and each and every theory had seemed to him but part of the chaotic contradictions and incoherences of humanity on its march. It was all a continuous ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... more assumed the burden of the world's industries outside the home (which before had been woman's care alone), and as woman became more and more absorbed in purely domestic concerns, man's individualism assumed greater and greater power within the family life, and he gradually acquired the despotic family headship which marked the ancient patriarchal order of Rome. This was not a social descent, but an immense social uplift, in the age in which it was natural. Professor Mason says, and with ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... owner was the supreme type of that sheer individualism which had burst forth from the restraints of feudalism. He stood alone fighting his commercial contests with persistent personal doggedness. Beneath his occasional benevolence and his religious professions was a wild ardor in the checkmating or bankruptcy of his competitors. ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... with the mechanical and material civilisation in esteem with us, and nowhere, as I have said, so much in esteem as with us. The idea of perfection as a general expansion of the human family is at variance with our strong individualism, our hatred of all limits to the unrestrained swing of the individual's personality, our maxim of "every man for himself." The idea of perfection as an harmonious expansion of human nature is at variance with our ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... strange that the Indians should so emphasize their national individualism at this particular time, inasmuch as six of them, the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, Creek, Seminole, and Caddo, professing to be still in strict alliance with the Southern States, had formed an Indian confederacy, had collectively re-asserted their allegiance, ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... under all the talk is more and more toward individualism, not self-effacing communism. As for myself I like the idea of the fight—for public recognition, I mean; and I don't think I'd be happy at all if things were made too smooth for me; if, for instance, in a socialized ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... State, and that hereafter they have duties towards that State the performance of which is the only rational ground of their possession of rights as against the State. E.g., in many of our slums we have the best examples of individualism run mad, of the conception that the individual is a law unto his private self, and that all government is something alien, something forced upon the individual from the outside and impinging upon his private will, instead of law being what it really is, an expression of ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... adage that says "Like draws to like." The antithesis of this is probably that "Unlike repels unlike." But there are times when individualism does not enter into the matter, and Fate alone, by throwing two persons together, sets up a state, congenial or uncongenial, as the case may be. Fate chose to throw together Mr. Gorby and Mr. Kilsip, and each was something more than uncongenial to the other. Each was equally clever in their ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... is a matter in which individual initiative is the chief thing needed; the function of the state should begin and end with insistence on some kind of education, and, if possible, a kind which promotes mental individualism, not a kind which happens to conform to ...
— Political Ideals • Bertrand Russell
... Millenarians,—and the untempered zeal of all classes, like an engine without a balance wheel, when men were breaking away from authority and setting up their own religious standards. Bunyan's life is an epitome of that astonishing religious individualism which marked the close of ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... Prudhon's theories), so as to represent the revolt of the individual against the religious creed and patriarchal customs of old Russia. "The fundamental principle of Nihilism," says "Stepniak," "was absolute individualism. It was the negation, in the name of individual liberty, of all the obligations imposed upon the individual by society, by family life, and ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose |
