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More "Egoism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sin of egoism, and took as the motto of his sermon the words—"Ego dormio et cor meum vigilat." His method of preaching was quiet, but intense; again the glow of the lamp. Often there were passages which suggested a meditation—a soul communing with itself ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... take into his arms this dusky, brown-cheeked sweetheart of his, became aware that he did not want her to let his arguments persuade her. The fierce, tender egoism of her love filled him with ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... forming a sectarian minority. Again, in this minority there are a good many who are lukewarm; with most men the distance is great between conviction and action; the interval is filled up with acquired habits, indolence, fear and egoism. One's belief in the abstractions of the "Contrat-social" is of little account; no one readily bestirs oneself for an abstract end. Uncertainties beset one at the outset; the road one has to follow is found to be perilous and obscure, and one hesitates and postpones; one feels himself ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... that this tendency to exaggerate everything with which they come in contact is due solely to egoism. It is certain at any rate that egoism plays a large part in it, but some portion of it is due to the lack of observation that ...
— Poise: How to Attain It • D. Starke
... {FN4-9} Ahankara, egoism; literally, "I do." The root cause of dualism or illusion of MAYA, whereby the subject (ego) appears as object; the creatures imagine themselves ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... out of place to give here a closer description of the training of the officers and men of the new navy, drawn from personal experience. To do this without the irritating egoism of the personal narrative it will be necessary, as often in future pages, to adopt the ...
— Submarine Warfare of To-day • Charles W. Domville-Fife
... enterprises which in themselves are ethically {213} unjustifiable, and to which the only answer could be, "Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself"; prayers which carry the spirit of egoism, of competition, of bargaining even into our relations with the Most High; prayers of an imprecatory character such as meet and shock us in some of the psalms. How could these and their like possibly be granted by ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... a mystery. I'm no good. And I'm not even sorry enough to cry about it—ever. I've actually thought that I was in love—oh, ever so many times: sometimes with you. What's the use? The only things I've ever been faithful to are the dressmaker, dancing, and what in moments of supreme egoism I am pleased ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... and kind Assume no airs of pride or arrogance; But in her voice, her manner, and her glance, Convey that mystic something, undefined, Which men fail not to understand and read, And, when not blind with egoism, heed. My task was harder—'twas the slow undoing Of long sweet months of unimpeded wooing. It was to hide and cover and conceal The truth, assuming what I did not feel. It was to dam love's happy singing tide That blessed me with its ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... cradle surrounded with aureole and nimbus! As if the finest and most manly of spectacles were not that of the man who conquers his soul hour after hour, fighting first against himself, against the suggestions of egoism, idleness, discouragement, then at the moment when he might believe himself victorious, finding in the champions attracted by his ideal those who are destined if not to bring about its complete ruin, at least to give ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... It is only man's egoism which wants to keep woman like some buried treasure. All endeavors to introduce permanence in love, the most changeable thing in this changeable human existence, have gone shipwreck in spite of religious ceremonies, vows, and legalities. Can you deny that our Christian world has ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
... compensate her for the flat blueness of her eyes, the xanthous pallor of her hair, the doll-like pink of her cheeks? What conceivable cunning could do such execution as her stupendous appeal to masculine vanity, sentimentality, egoism? ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... of the two representatives was cold. Halifax feared that the proposed route would turn to St John both the grain trade of the west and that of the Gulf of St Lawrence. Howe personally was depressed and sullen. Probably his latent egoism was beginning to show itself. He was asked to {114} sacrifice his scheme, his darling, and to aid in a plan patched up by others. Long conferences were held. Eventually the financial terms were amended in favour of Nova Scotia, and her government, Howe included, ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant
... or was she getting tired of him? It was so easy to ask and so difficult to answer these questions. However closely we look into our souls, some part of the truth escapes us. One always slurred something or exaggerated something.... She remembered that Owen had been very tiresome lately; his egoism was ceaseless; it got upon her nerves, and she felt that, no matter what happened to her, she could not endure it. There were his songs! How tired she was of talking about his songs, the long considerations whether this ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... whom I speak. In their humble surroundings the love of self, the desire to possess things, the cherished need for luxuries, crowd out the feelings that make character. They are but one manifestation of the egoism of the unmarried ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... one reason why we are seldom able to comfort our neighbours with our words is that our goodwill gets adulterated, in spite of ourselves, before it can pass our lips. We can send black puddings and pettitoes without giving them a flavour of our own egoism; but language is a stream that is almost sure to smack of a mingled soil. There was a fair proportion of kindness in Raveloe; but it was often of a beery and bungling sort, and took the shape least allied to ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... Lucien's mother and sister had concentrated all their tenderness on him, David was his devoted friend; he was accustomed to see the three making every effort for him in secret, and consequently he had all the faults of a spoiled eldest son. The noble is eaten up with the egoism which their unselfishness was fostering in Lucien; and Mme. de Bargeton was doing her best to develop the same fault by inciting him to forget all that he owed to his sister, and mother, and David. He was far from doing so as yet; but was there ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... of my universe, the centre of the universe, and in my supreme anguish I cry with Michelet, "Mon moi, ils m'arrachent mon moi!" What is a man profited if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul? (Matt. xvi. 26). Egoism, you say? There is nothing more universal than the individual, for what is the property of each is the property of all. Each man is worth more than the whole of humanity, nor will it do to sacrifice each to ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... shutting out things is all very well, but it has one simple corollary—that from everything that we shut out we are ourselves shut out. When we shut our door on the wind, it would be equally true to say that the wind shuts its door on us. Whatever virtues a triumphant egoism really leads to, no one can reasonably pretend that it leads to knowledge. Turning a beggar from the door may be right enough, but pretending to know all the stories the beggar might have narrated is pure nonsense; and this is practically the claim of the egoism which thinks that self-assertion ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... of the weakness and frailty of human nature. Not long since this bit of lifeless clay had straddled his world like a Colossus. To the young cowpuncher he had been a superman, terrible in his power and capacity to do harm. Now all that vanity and egoism had vanished, blown away as though it ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... manifestations to us; or, finally, the unconditioned par excellence—the unconditioned in Ontology—the being on which all other being depends. It is of course possible to identify any one of the three first with the last. It is possible to adopt a system of Egoism, and to maintain that all phenomena are modes of my mind, and that the substance of my mind is the only real existence. It is possible to adopt a system of Materialism, and to maintain that all phenomena are modes of matter, and that the material substance of the world is the only real ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... "Some day, when my works are developed, you will realise that it required many an hour to think out and write so many things; then you will absolve me for all that has displeased you, and you will pardon, not the egoism of the man (for he has none), but the egoism of the ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... all cases the standards of our less intelligent neighbours. Nay, more, we sometimes actually cultivate in ourselves, we superfine and aesthetic creatures, a preference for such kinds of enjoyment as are exclusive and costly; we allow ourselves to be talked into the notion that solitary egoism, laborious self-assertion of ownership (as in the poor mad Ludwig of Bavaria) is a badge of intellectual distinction. We cherish a desire for the new-fangled and far-fetched, the something no other has had before; ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... majesty is not like women-folk, but is stout-hearted and of a good understanding, so that, if she be not corrupted, we have good hopes of her." Unfortunately her brilliant and commanding qualities were vitiated by an inordinate pride and egoism, which exhibited themselves in an utter contempt for public opinion, and a prodigality utterly regardless of the necessities of the state. She seemed to consider Swedish affairs as far too petty to ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... a vast egoism, rooted in his nature and trained by his philosophy. It must die, if at all, violently, painfully, and—in silence. The truer and more constant the soul, the more complete the destruction of its idol. Character is not always the slow growth of years: often do the elements ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... best for the hazardous enterprise of living. They speak authoritatively to our common-sense, to our intelligence, to our desire of peace or to our desire of unrest; not seldom to our prejudices, sometimes to our fears, often to our egoism—but always to our credulity. And their words are heard with reverence, for their concern is with weighty matters: with the cultivation of our minds and the proper care of our bodies, with the attainment of our ambitions, with the perfection of the means and the ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... This maxim of egoism, which has, indeed, its advantages in procuring the means to the end in view, itself concurrently destroys the ultimate end, namely, contentment; like the bear in the fable that throws a stone at the hermit to kill ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy • Arthur Schopenhauer
... to him, the forest guard cannot take legal proceedings against the offender, and it is just as well, for our egoism, which is inclined to see in the acorn only a garland of sausages, would have annoying results. The oak calls the whole world to enjoy its fruits. We take the larger part because we are the stronger. That is ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... wanted children! He could afford to have them, and he considered it a duty as well as a glorious privilege to pour his individuality into a new being. It was Nature's way from a true and healthy egoism towards altruism. But she travelled on another road and made jackets for the babies of strangers. Was that a better, a nobler thing to do? It stood for so much, and yet was nothing but fear of the burden of motherhood, ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... Comte as to the expediency of relieving the philosopher from the necessity of being in plain and business-like relations with indifferent persons for a certain number of hours in the week. Such relations do as much as a doctrine to keep egoism within decent bounds, and they must be not only a relief, but a wholesome corrective to the tendencies of concentrated thinking on ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 10: Auguste Comte • John Morley
... poverty. In every great artist there is a large area of self-esteem; it is the reservoir which he must, during years of drought and defeat, draw upon to keep his soul fresh. Without the consoling fluid of egoism, genius must perish in the dust of despair. But fill this source to the brim, accelerate the speed of its current, and artistic deterioration may ensue. Rodin has been called, fatuously, the second Michael ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... into peaceable attempt at learning to be himself governed. The newspaper outcry against Russia is no more respectable to me than the howling of Bedlam, proceeding as it does from the deepest ignorance, egoism, ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... the convenient license of wandering as far as we list, in the direction of our own fancies. We are freed from the obligation to refer our knowledge to the Divine and True. On the other hand, the vanity and egoism which characterize our knowledge find, in this false position, ample justification; and the pious modesty which puts far from itself the knowledge of God can well estimate how much furtherance thereby accrues to its own wayward and vain strivings. I ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... fair specimen of the unworthy egoism which all religious systems virtually inculcate Here a pious father leaves his children miserable to save his own ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... these circumstances to be a social concern, and narrows into a personal affair between an individual and his Maker, in which the issue at stake is but his private salvation. Religion in this shape is quite consistent with the most selfish and contracted egoism, and identifies the votary as little in feeling with the rest of his kind ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... by man and Nature, so discordant was it with my gloomy outlook. If you would have food for reflection upon the evanescent quality of life, upon the nothingness of man, upon the empty, heartless egoism implicit in human nature, get yourselves sentenced to death, and then look around you. With such a force was all this borne in upon me, and with such sufficiency, that after the first pang was spent I went near to rejoicing that things were as they were, ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... he adhered to it as manfully in one as in the other. Throughout his intercourse with intimate friends there is that happy and frank play of direct personal allusion, which is as distinct from flattery when it is about another, as it is from egoism when it refers to the ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... on the stone-bench—"There is one man! He was my third and last experience of happiness. When I first met him, my whole heart gave itself in one big pulsation—but like a wave of the sea, the pulsation recoiled, and never again beat on the grim rock of human egoism!" She laughed gaily, and a delicate colour flushed her face. "But I was happy while the 'wave' lasted,—and when it broke, I still played on the shore with ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... the supreme moral law of rational religion, the love, that is to say, that holds the balance between egoism and altruism, between self-love and love of others. "Do to others as you would they should do to you." This natural and highest command had been taught and followed thousands of years before Christ said: "Thou shalt love thy neighbour ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel
... is"—and his voice broke—"I have lied to myself and to the world these many years. Much of it hasn't been my fault, but I must pay the price just the same. I am blind. That has led me to a sort of clamorous egoism which carried me on and on until I came to feel that I was really doing something. At last, I know that I am a narrow human parasite, worthless, utterly worthless. A blind, clinging, grasping, vagrant beast, fed upon the mercy of too kind-hearted humanity. ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... children came to be felt as a burden, so that "progress" caused abortion and infanticide. Further progress has made children more and more expensive, down to our own times, when "neomalthusianism," although unavowed, exists in fact as a compromise between egoism and child rearing. All the folkways which go to make up a population policy seem to imply greater knowledge of the philosophy of population than can be ascribed to uncivilized men. The case is one, however, in which the knowledge is simple and the acts proceed from ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... the habit of making life a consecutive series of absorbing preoccupations are numerous. The practice narrows the sphere of one's interests and activities, tends to introspective egoism, and robs the present of much of its savour. But, now and again, it has its compensations. Save for a single week-end of rather pensive moping, the end of my love affair changed the colour of my outlook but very little indeed. ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... lost himself. The boy with his bravery of ignorance, his frankly arrogant egoism was effaced as might be the writing from a slate, and in his place was a sexless creature, rarely beautiful, with parted, tremulous lips and wide eyes in which subtle, crowding thoughts struggled ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... he would notice any change in her appearance. It seemed to her that the flagellation of her thoughts must have left visible traces. But Mr. Orme was not a man of subtle perceptions, save where his personal comfort was affected: though his egoism was clothed in the finest feelers, he did not suspect a similar surface in others. His daughter, as part of himself, came within the normal range of his solicitude; but she was an outlying region, a subject province; and Mr. Orme's was ...
— Sanctuary • Edith Wharton
... Hill, writhing against the mountain wind and its aeolian song. He had never felt so lonely THERE. In his rigid self-examination he thought Kitty right in protesting against the effect of his youthfulness and optimism. Yet he was also right in being himself. There is an egoism in the highest simplicity; and Barker, while willing to believe in others' methods, never abandoned his own aims. He was right in loving Kitty as he did; he knew that she was better and more lovable than she could believe herself to be; but he was willing to ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... criminals, when it is not impaired by disease, is, in the main, dominated by a boundless egoism. Let us first consider those whose wills are impaired by disease. Among drunkards and the degenerate generally the power of sustained volition is often as good as gone. Nothing can be more pitiful or hopeless than the position of wretched beings in a condition such as this. Often animated ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... most of your artists and poets and musicians of the present day. For a life sincerely spent between the Temple and the Vineyard, between devotion and honest labour, producing to one man of all mankind some positive good, is not to be compared with the life which oscillates continuously between egoism and vanity, quackery and cowardice, selfishness and pretence, and which never rises, do what it ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... spirited history. Yet if he does not appear worthy of admiration, we must beware of judging him harshly; and there is deep pathos in the fact that he was compelled in writing to be his own worst detractor. The combination, which the autobiographical account reveals, of egoism and self-seeking, of cowardice and vanity, of pious profession and cringing obsequiousness, of vaunted magnanimity and spiteful malice to his foes, of religious scruples and selfish cunning, points to a meanness of conduct which he was forced to assume by circumstances, ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... young, be true! Evil is nothing but vanity, let us have the pride of good, and above all let us never despair. Do not let us despise the woman who is neither mother, sister, maid, nor wife. Do not let us limit esteem to the family nor indulgence to egoism. Since "there is more joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth than over ninety and nine just persons that need no repentance," let us give joy to heaven. Heaven will render it back to us with usury. Let us leave on our way the alms of pardon for those ...
— Camille (La Dame aux Camilias) • Alexandre Dumas, fils
... boys at my school besides myself who took a private pleasure in poetry; but red-hot iron would not have induced most of us to admit this to the masters, or to repeat poetry with the faintest inflection of rhythm or intelligence. That would have been anti-social egoism; we called it "showing off." I myself remember running to school (an extraordinary thing to do) with mere internal ecstasy in repeating lines of Walter Scott about the taunts of Marmion or the boasts of Roderick Dhu, and then repeating the same lines in class with the colourless ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... Egoism, moral cowardice, and sexual excess play a part in much neurasthenia, but relatives must not forget, in their indignation at these laxities, that the patient really is ill; it is unkind, unjust and useless to ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... of war urge four capital reasons in behalf of their principle: personal glory, moral education, class interest, and national egoism. ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... come very near Rochefoucauld's own. "Take self-love from love, and little remains," might be an extract from that Doomsday Book of Egoism in which Rochefoucauld was so deeply read. "Self-love is the Love of a man's own Self, and of everything else, for his own Sake": so begins his terrible analysis of human motives, and no man escapes from a perusal of it without recognition of himself, ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... righteous reasons ready for you at his finger-ends. But the Vicar with his eyes shut could see clearly that if Gwenda married Rowcliffe the unpleasant event would have its compensation. He would be rid of an everlasting source of unpleasantness at home. He didn't say to himself that his egoism would be rid of an everlasting fear. He said that if Rowcliffe married Gwenda he would keep ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... about bread and cheese, for that is talking shop; we must not talk about death, for that is depressing; we must not talk about birth, for that is indelicate. It cannot last. Something must break this strange indifference, this strange dreamy egoism, this strange loneliness of millions in a crowd. Something must break it. Why should it not be you and I? Can you do ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... that would have been coarse; be merely conveyed that idea; conveyed it so subtly that I only caught it fleetingly, as one catches vagrant faint breaths of perfume when one traverses the meadows in summer; conveyed it without offense and without any suggestion of egoism ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... him, I find that I am not disturbed by any brag or egoism in his book. He may turn out the least of a braggart of all, having a better right to be confident. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... simple—the logic of egoism. But the argument is simplified by lopping off the greater part of the premise. For these writers seem to hold that the only important question for the white men of South Africa is, how indefinitely to grow fat on ostrich feathers and diamond mines, and ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... individual, others to the good of the species—as existing in an animal which is not conscious of a self, these appetites will neither be selfish nor unselfish in the sense in which we apply these terms to man. Where there is no ego there can be no alter-ego, and therefore neither egoism nor altruism. The idea of the self as a permanent unity to which all the different tendencies are referred, and the rise in consequence of a new desire of pleasure, distinct from the desires of particular objects, are essential to egoism. ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... that America, which once was the progressive nation, has been for a generation in a comatose state in the matter of social ideas. It is high time that our college women should stand solid against the blind superstition, whose mother is fear and whose father is egoism, that women can not be ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... the Sheik's complete indifference to everything beyond his own will, his Oriental egoism, that stung her most. He treated her supplications and invectives with a like unconcern. The paroxysms of wild rage that filled her periodically made no impression on him. He accorded them a shrug of ennui or watched her with cold curiosity, his lips parted in a little cruel smile, ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... home again. He meditated a great deal more about her sister Anna.—"Here now," he said to himself, "is a wonderful, sympathetic being! What a delicate comprehension of everything, what a loving heart, what absence of egoism! And how comes it that such girls bloom with us, and in the provinces,—and in such surroundings into the bargain! She is both sickly, and ill-favoured, and not young,—but what a capital wife she would ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... are intended to bring us scientifically to the superconscious state or Samadhi.... Just as unconscious work is beneath consciousness, so there is another work which is above consciousness, and which, also, is not accompanied with the feeling of egoism .... There is no feeling of I, and yet the mind works, desireless, free from restlessness, objectless, bodiless. Then the Truth shines in its full effulgence, and we know ourselves—for Samadhi lies potential in us all—for what we truly are, ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... of Iago. Richard III., for example, beside being less subtly conceived, is a far greater figure and a less repellent. His physical deformity, separating him from other men, seems to offer some excuse for his egoism. In spite of his egoism, too, he appears to us more than a mere individual: he is the representative of his family, the Fury of the House of York. Nor is he so negative as Iago: he has strong passions, he has admirations, and his conscience disturbs ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... lonely and terrible surrender of her religion. He was profoundly interested. Once or twice he was appalled. Did he take this woman, he must assume responsibility for every part of her. She was so wholly without egoism that she would give herself up without reservation and expect him to guide her. That would be all very well with the ordinary woman; but with a nature of high ideals, and possibly of transcendent passions,—was he equal to the task? But in his present mood the prospect fascinated him. One of her ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... immoral, everything would be lawful, even cannibalism. That's not all. He ended by asserting that for every individual, like ourselves, who does not believe in God or immortality, the moral law of nature must immediately be changed into the exact contrary of the former religious law, and that egoism, even to crime, must become not only lawful but even recognized as the inevitable, the most rational, even honorable outcome of his position. From this paradox, gentlemen, you can judge of the rest of our eccentric and paradoxical friend Ivan ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... of the individual, necessarily produced by rubbing up again the external world; reactions which become persistent forms of experience that are approximately as self-evident as the libido itself. The degree of egoism which is active in the elementary tendencies must, according to the experience of psychoanalysis, be considered very great. For this purpose I have selected in what follows an excessively egotistical expression for the "titanic" aspect, ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... benefits of which we are personally the object did not inspire in us a more lively gratitude than those which we spread over all mankind, we should probably experience few preferences, and extend few preferences to others, and in that case egoism would grow to its most ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... her intense egoism and her abundant self-assertion under all circumstances. It often seemed to us as if for her the world revolved, with passing show, around a pivot from which she regarded it as existing only for what it meant for her career. ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... English literature who thus stand out of the tradition, who are without ancestors, Donne and Browning. Each seems to have certain qualities almost greater than the qualities of the greatest; and yet in each some precipitation of arrogant egoism remains in the crucible, in which the draught has all but ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... terrific egoism might have got fresh books somehow from somewhere, had she really believed in the virtue of books. Thus far, however, books had not furnished her with what she wanted, and her faith in their promise ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... men and cows. For him his own friends are a mythology made up by himself. He created his own father and his own mother. This horrible fancy has in it something decidedly attractive to the somewhat mystical egoism of our day. That publisher who thought that men would get on if they believed in themselves, those seekers after the Superman who are always looking for him in the looking-glass, those writers who talk about impressing their personalities instead of creating life for the world, ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... benignity, his assumption of resignation, which so closely resembled calmness that it is easy to mistake it. Just as when walking through forest-lands certain soils give forth under our feet a sound which enables us to guess whether they are dense masses of stone or a void; so intense egoism, though hidden under the flowers of politeness, and subterranean caverns eaten out by sorrow sound hollow under the constant touch of familiar life. It was sorrow and not despondency that dwelt in that really great soul. The Count had understood ...
— Honorine • Honore de Balzac
... resembles demoniacal possession can have come about through something engrafted on to the soul as a mechanism foreign to its inner nature, {135} or through conscious deliberation which adheres always to a bare egoism, and is utterly incapable of such self-sacrifice for the sake of offspring as is displayed by the procreative and ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... their characteristic properties. These latter too have their properties which are also correlated to each other. And of the three qualities, which are gradually characterised by each, in order of priority is consciousness which is called the mind. The seventh is intelligence and after that comes egoism; and then the five senses, then the soul, then the moral qualities called sattwa, rajas and tamas. These seventeen are said to be the unknown or incomprehensible qualities. I have described all this to thee, what else dost thou wish ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... to realize that he is simply enslaving you, ruining you, seeking to crush your personality out of sheer egoism. Oh, think of the Margaret you were in the old days! Think of the freedom you had to develop your ego when you loved me! Think of the choice spirits who were your associates then, of the disciples who gathered round me and were your disciples too. Don't you sometimes long to be ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... doubtful if Rachael had ever heard of the phenomenon, and the sum of her worldly aspirations was a wealthy and intellectual husband who would take her to live and to shine at foreign courts. Her nature was too sweet and her mind too serious for egoism or the pettier vanities, but she hardly could help being conscious of the energy of her brain; and if she had passed through childhood in ignorance of her beauty, she barely had entered her teens when her happy indifference was dispelled; for ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... on arts and crafts, but perhaps it has in tapestry its most intentional record. It is a forced and deliberate piece of egoism when a monarch or a conqueror has a huge picture drawn exhibiting his grandeur in battle or his elegance at home. In some hangings modesty limits to the border of an imaginary and decorative scene the monogram of the heroine of history for whose apartments the ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... Government Board was promptly accepted. The workman first took his place in the Cabinet when Mr. John Burns, at the age of forty-seven, went to the Local Government Board—to the complete satisfaction of Mr. Burns. For the robust egoism of Mr. Burns is largely a class pride. His invincible belief in himself is part of an equally invincible belief in the working class. His ambitions thrive on the conviction that whatever Mr. John Burns does, that the working class ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... individual or of the community. It may express itself in the masses as mere plasticity and softness of spirit. The capacity for collective sagacity and strength of will demands from the individual merely a dry intelligence in human affairs, and egoism. It would be too much to say that our political weakness may be merely the expression of spiritual power, for the latter has not proved an obstacle to success in business. Indolence and belief in authority have their share ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... floor. Rowland looked at him for some moments; it seemed to him that he had never so clearly read his companion's strangely commingled character—his strength and his weakness, his picturesque personal attractiveness and his urgent egoism, his exalted ardor and his puerile petulance. It would have made him almost sick, however, to think that, on the whole, Roderick was not a generous fellow, and he was so far from having ceased to believe in him that he felt just now, more than ever, that all this ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... high-natured girl, hopelessly ill-mated with a somewhat tyrannical and stupid, yet not entirely ill-disposed old colonel, and exposed to the seductions of a Lovelace—the truth about whose unloveable character, in its profound and heartless egoism, first bursts upon her at the moment when, maddened by brutal insult, she is driven to claim the generous devotion he has proffered a thousand times. Side by side with the ideal of selfishness, Raymon stands in contrast with the ideally chivalrous ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... Viveash's mouth, curved forward, eager, shedding flame at the brim, giving itself to lips that longed for it. Philippa's mouth was a flower that opened only at the touch, the thrill of her own gorgeous egoism. He read in it the triumph of Philippa over the flesh and blood of her race. She had nothing in her of the dead. That was the wonder of her. The passion of the dead had built up her body to the semblance and the promise of their own delight; their desire, long forgotten, rose again, ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... The egoism of the boy left him almost unappreciative of what this man was offering him. Kars had subtly flattered his vanity. He had done it purposely. He had left the youngster with the feeling that he was being asked a favor. There was relief in the tone of the ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... physiognomy of Maupassant, as it is the leading and most profound trait in the psychology of his work, viz, that human life is a snare laid by nature, where joy is always changed to misery, where noble words and the highest professions of faith serve the lowest plans and the most cruel egoism, where chagrin, crime, and folly are forever on hand to pursue implacably our hopes, nullify our virtues, and annihilate our wisdom. But this ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... of the fiddle, and being proud in her way, she became more and more quiet and reticent, and drew herself aloof from me, although, wrapped up as I was in the double egoism of art and boyhood, I failed to notice this. I have been sorry since that any shadow of misunderstanding should have clouded the closing days of our partnership. It is late to regret now, however. When my fiddle was added to our belongings, we took to going out separately. It was ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al
... of Ego for them: first the king who conquers and can govern. In his egoism he dubs him holy; his family is of a selected blood; he makes the crown hereditary—Ego. Son by son the shame of egoism increases; valour abates; hereditary Crown, no hereditary qualities. The Barons rise. They in turn hold sway, and for their order—Ego. The traders overturn them: each class rides ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... received," says Herbert Spencer in his Sociology, referring to gambling, "does not imply effort put forth; but the happiness of the winner involves the misery of the loser. This kind of action is therefore essentially anti-social, sears the sympathies, cultivates a hard egoism, and produces general deterioration of character and conduct." The young should specially guard against this vice, which has been a rock upon which many a promising ...
— Life and Conduct • J. Cameron Lees
... Don Juan, swayed by a thousand thoughts, wavered toward many different resolutions. After having ascertained the amount of the wealth amassed by his father, he returned in the evening to the death chamber, his soul puffed up with a horrible egoism. In the apartment he found all the servants of the household busied in collecting the ornaments for the bed of state on which "feu monseigneur" would lie to-morrow—a curious spectacle which all Ferrara would ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... of individuality, we cannot do better than regard man in his several mundane relations, supposing that either of these might become the central, actuating focus of his being—his "ruling love," as Swedenborg would call it—displacing his mere egoism, or self-love, thrusting that more to the circumference, and identifying him, so to speak, with that circle of interests to which all his energies and affections relate. Outside this substituted Ego we are to suppose that he has no conscience, no desire, no will. Just as the entirely ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... sealed with the bung of self, and he tightens the staves in the wells of self. Each one shuts himself in the cask of self, plunges deep down in the ferment of self." Imperfect sympathies, misplaced egoism—for there is a true as well as a false egoism—a craze for silly pleasures, no matter the cost, and a mean little vanity that sacrificed lives when not appeased. She is the most disagreeable figure in modern drama. Were it not for her good looks and pity for her misspent life and ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... the sensibilities, and the refinement of the emotions; thus along the track of altruism or ethical development, which had its foundation in primitive life, with its ever widening and enlarging circles, the advancement of humanity may be traced. The old egoism, the savage warfare for existence, has been constantly tempered by altruism, which has been a saving ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... in pronouncing the exercise of the right of taxation in the case of the American colonists to be thoroughly impolitic and inexpedient. No practical difference, therefore, existed upon the important question of the hour. But Pitt's prodigious egoism, stimulated by the mischievous counsels of men of the stamp of Lord Shelburne, prevented the fusion of the only two sections of the Whig party that were at once able, enlightened and disinterested enough to carry on the government efficiently, to ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... reason, impinged upon him the fact that it was a thing to be guarded against. He did not go blindly into the mystery of things now. He circumvented them, and came up from behind. Craft and cunning replaced mere curiosity and puppyish egoism. He was quick to learn, and Jolly Roger's word became his law, so that only once or twice was he told a thing, and it became a part of his understanding. While the keen, shrewd brain of his Airedale father developed inside ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... route, and from the first moment of his appearance on the scene he has taken so high a stand, both by his pianoforte-playing and by his compositions for this instrument, that he is to the multitude an inexplicable phenomenon which it looks on in passing with astonishment, and which stupid egoism regards with a smile of pity, while the small number of connoisseurs, led by a sure judgment, rather by an instinct of progress than by a reasoned sentiment of enjoyment, follow this artist in his efforts ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... true only in a very superficial and strictly qualified sense. In reality, just as there is eternal conflict between egoism and altruism, so there is conflict ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... thoughts on friendship. No one else, to my knowledge, has spoken in so high and just a spirit of the kindly relations; and I doubt whether it be a drawback that these lessons should come from one in many ways so unfitted to be a teacher in this branch. The very coldness and egoism of his own intercourse gave him a clearer insight into the intellectual basis of our warm, mutual tolerations; and testimony to their worth comes with added force from one who was solitary and disobliging, and of whom a friend remarked, with equal wit and wisdom, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... same," continued Novikoff obdurately, in the same tone. "All of you want fireworks, applause, and the rest of it. It's nothing else but egoism!" ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... him as a child masquerading in the garments of a somewhat audacious woman of the world, and he told himself that if she could be placed amidst more favourable surroundings, her natural character would shine forth triumphantly. Moreover, he was by no means free from egoism. He had enough vanity to experience some shadow of gratification, and even though the other candidate was no one more estimable than Colonel Faversham, there was, perhaps, a grain of satisfaction in the knowledge that he might have ...
— Enter Bridget • Thomas Cobb
... Buddhistic or Judaic, socialistic or democratic. Everybody admits that one can be civilized and be none of these things: just as one may be "cultured" without being kind. In other words, it is consistent with being civilized to be highly selfish; one need only be rationalized in one's egoism. Indeed, civilization is the incarnation of self-interest. If self-interest, its basic principle, should give way to social interest; if the monopoly of social power should be broken and the power transferred to the general will of the community; if the community should relegate its administration ...
— Is civilization a disease? • Stanton Coit
... herself to inveigle" the boy; but herein Mrs. Haydon was mistaken. As a matter of fact Bob, having discovered someone obliging and intelligent enough to listen, dinned the story of his aspirations into the girl's ear with the persistent egoism of a hobbedehoy. It must be allowed, however, that the counsel she gave him would have annoyed ...
— The Delectable Duchy • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... to dealing with men in difficult moments, threw in a word or two occasionally. Although a grave, even a rather sad-looking man, he was evidently entertained by Miss Van Tuyn's volubility and almost passionate, yet not vulgar, egoism. Probably he thought such a lovely girl had a right to admire herself. She talked of herself in modern Paris with the greatest enthusiasm, cleverly grouping Paris, its gardens, its monuments, its pictures, its brilliant men and ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... an imperceptible shrug. He was disappointed but not surprised: there was in Hyde a vein of hard selfishness— not a weakness, for the egoism which openly says "I will consult my own convenience first" is too scornful of public opinion to be called weak, but an acquired defensive quality on which argument would have been thrown away. Val's arm dropped inert, he was tired, not in body ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... cared in his bohemian days when he was readier to give than to take. He loved his friends blindly. He did not hate his enemies, he despised them. He had all the manly virtues, courage, generosity, modesty. Yes, modesty; for egoism such as he had was not foolish pride. His egotism was only his own force asserting itself. His friendship was almost foolish. He praised too generously. He was inclined to help everybody he could and I am sure that he never assailed ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... essential question. Strange, is it not? But quite a common experience, I believe. Besides, I don't actually care twopence what any other philosopher has replied to my question. In this, each man must be his own philosopher. There is an instinct in the profound egoism of human nature which prevents us from accepting such ready-made answers. What is it to us what Plato thought? Nothing. And thus the question remains ever new, and ever unanswered, and ever of dramatic interest. The singular, the highly singular thing is—and here I arrive at my ...
— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett
... He abolished all distinctions of race, rank, sex, and intellect. He made the first last and the last first, acknowledging only devoted service as true greatness; the only law, the Law of Love. In His sweeping condemnation of egoism in every form it seems doubtful if He did not even lay iconoclastic hands on marriage and the family, as they existed and exist. In the resurrection they neither marry nor give in marriage, but are as the ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... interrupted in Chip's presence by a peremptory voice, saying, "Now, Emery, don't spoil the child," or "Lily, dear, can't you find anything better to do than tease your uncle?" In it all Chip had found two subjects of wonderment: first, the strange egoism of this middle-aged woman who could see nothing in the expansion of her husband's affections but what was stolen from herself; and then, the extraordinary freak of marital loyalty that could keep a man like Emery Bland, with his refinement and his knowledge of the world, true to ...
— The Letter of the Contract • Basil King
... that tries to manage him. This anarchism of his is not a question of thinking for himself; every decent man thinks for himself; it would be highly immodest to think for anybody else. Nor is it any instinctive licence or egoism; as I have said before, he is a man of peculiarly acute public conscience. The unmanageable part of him, the fact that he cannot be conceived as part of a crowd or as really and invisibly helping a movement, has ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... Without power—no style. Without a possible humour,—no style. The weakling has no confidence in himself to keep him from grasping at words that he fancies hold within them the true passions of the race, ready for the uses of his egoism. And with a sense of humour a man will not steal from a shelf the precious treasure of the language and put it ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... toleration the time was ripe to expand her organization it was necessary to recruit her priests in Ireland. What the Jesuits had begun the Irish completed. It had been amusing to listen to the lamentations of Monseigneur Cripps; but Monseigneur Cripps had expressed, however ludicrous his egoism, the failure of ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... by daily cares, any understanding in which ideas involuntarily translate themselves through imagery. Owing to this palpable form it is able to give its weighty support to the conscience, to counterbalance natural egoism, to curb the mad onset of brutal passions, to lead the will to abnegation and devotion, to tear Man away from himself and place him wholly in the service of truth, or of his kind, to form ascetics, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... far above any personal animus, although the same cannot be said of those he criticizes. These, like d'Annunzio, whose limitations he points out—his egoism, his lack of human sympathy—are often very bitter, and accuse the penetrating critic of want of courtesy. This seriousness of purpose runs like a golden thread through all Croce's work. The flimsy superficial remarks on poetry and fiction which too often pass for criticism ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... republican or royalist, with all his frenzies and 'fool-fury' of red or white, still has his hope and dream and aspiration, with which to enlarge his life and lift him on an ample pinion out from the circle of a poor egoism. What stirs the hope and moves the aspiration of our Englishman? Surely nothing either in the heavens above or on the earth beneath. The English are as a people little susceptible in the region of the imagination. But ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... to the family, but still not to alienate from them the smallest rightful share in the family shoebuckles and other property. A conspicuous quality in the Dodson character was its genuineness; its vices and virtues alike were phases of a proud honest egoism, which had a hearty dislike to whatever made against its own credit and interest, and would be frankly hard of speech to inconvenient "kin," but would never forsake or ignore them,—would not let them want bread, but only require them to ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... uncomplimentary asides at Hastings—in the days of the boy, "ill-exchanged for the foppery and freshwater niceness of the modern steampacket," the boy that asked "no aid of magic fumes, and spells, and boiling cauldrons." "The Convalescent" expatiates upon the allowable egoism of the occupant of a sick bed, upon his "regal solitude," and goes on to show "how convalescence shrinks a man back to his primitive state." The essay was inspired by that ill-health which led to Lamb's retirement from the India House in 1825. At the close he indulged ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... would find room in her heart for human passion, she had no room for it now. She had only room for the little creatures she befriended and for her eager, quickly growing self. For, like her mother, she had the egoism that is more selfless than most people's altruism—the divine egoism ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... these pseudo philosophers have attacked the Christian religion, 'tearing the soul of Christ into silly strips labelled altruism and egoism. They are alike puzzled by His insane ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... so contrary to the laws of nature. Considered with regard to your species, you are a prodigy. Now let us investigate, in good faith, the causes of this psychological anomaly. Does there exist in you, as in many women, a certain pride in self, a love of your own loveliness, a refinement of egoism which makes you shudder at the idea of belonging to another; is it the thought of resigning your own will and submitting to a superiority, though only of convention, which displeases you? You would seem to me a ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... tracks of blood. Day by day, as long as the light of day—God's glorious gift to man—had lasted, these trails across the passes, between the snowy peaks, the peaks themselves, had been the theatre of hideous scenes of human cruelty, of human lust and greed, of human egoism. Day by day a slow terrible stream of humanity had wound like a dark and sluggish river through these passes, bringing with it sweat and toil and agony, torture and suffering and death. As long as the brilliant sun in the placid azure of the summer ...
— A Girl of the Klondike • Victoria Cross
... purpose of his life, sometimes to touch it here and there with delicate implication, and often to sit down, by an unspoken consent, for long, serious talks. To-night Newell spoke from a reminiscent mood. There were times when, in an ingenuous egoism, he had to take down the book of his romance and read a page. But only to Dorcas. She was ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... reason to one of those awful conclusions which "tend to make a man lose his wits:" Tolstoy, for instance, reaching an unthinkable doctrine of self-sacrifice, Nietzsche an equally unthinkable doctrine of egoism, Ibsen, Haeckel, Mr. Shaw, Mr. McCabe—that never-to-be-forgotten Mr. McCabe—each of them by sheer force of logic ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... women rush to buy? Yet still I cried to myself, "Onward!" because I have studied, more than you give me credit for, the geography of the great summits of humanity, which you tell me are so cold. Did you not say that Goethe and Byron were the colossi of egoism and poetry? Ah, my friend, there you shared a mistake into which superficial minds are apt to fall; but in you perhaps it came from generosity, false modesty, or the desire to escape from me. Vulgar minds may mistake ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... concerned, Myra detected this subtle change in his attitude toward her and her work. The origins of the change, she knew, were obscurely lodged in the male egoism. He himself was not aware of them. He seemed nearer and dearer than ever, even more ardent. He wanted her constantly within range of his eyes and hands that he might in a thousand coaxing or, often, petulant ways assert a fond dominion. She yielded gladly ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... announced that compulsory service must be applied, and when Sir Sam knew it was coming, he said publicly to soldiers in Toronto that Canada, the freeman's country, would never need conscription. It was most pitiful to hear him. Sir Sam never seemed to pity himself. His egoism was game enough for anything. Bigger men than he had gone down. A big man here or there was nothing now. But what of little men that stayed up? Hughes probably asked that in silent contempt as he saw the coming of ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... in the presence of the Scotland Yard official (for he tells his stories in propria persona) is not to some extent justified. "Dora" is very sensitive and six months ago would never have permitted Mr. COPPLESTONE to reveal to our enemies either the bumptious egoism of a nameless First Lord or the platitudinous vacillations of an anonymous Premier, even in the interests of popular fiction. Though we concede his audacity in allowing his superlative sleuth to stop a general strike of engineers by threatening them with martial law and to tempt the German fleet ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov 21, 1917 • Various
... Katherine exclaimed, wrung by the pathos of his innocent egoism; "it happened even before then, my dearest, before ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... which Man is to look forward must be of the same genus, if not of the same species, as the lash of the whip that punishes the lagging race-horse, or the lump of sugar that rewards his exertions. And with the inevitable growth of egoism and individualism in the demoralising atmosphere with which legalism (and its lineal successors) must needs invest human life, Man's conception of the rewards and punishments that await him will deteriorate rather than improve. ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... Rome can nowhere find. The common traits in the Kreon of tragedy and the Kritias of history, in the hero of the Aeneid and the triumvir Octavianus, are not accident, but arise from the revolt of the higher freedom of Art, conscious or unconscious, against the essential egoism of the wrong masking as right of the ancient State. And it is in the Empire of Britain that this effort of Modern Europe is realized, not only in the highest, but in the most original and varied forms. The power of the Roman ideal, on the other hand, saps ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... easier to practise during daylight, in company, when distractions are plentiful, than in the solitude of the night. Triumphantly to battle with an obsession at night, when the vitality is low and the egoism intensified, is extremely difficult. But the small persistent successes of the day will gradually have their indirect influence on the night. A great deal can also be done by simple resolute suggestion. Few persons seem to know—what is, nevertheless, a fact—that the most effective moment for ...
— The Plain Man and His Wife • Arnold Bennett
... unrestrained, and kind Assume no airs of pride or arrogance; But in her voice, her manner, and her glance, Convey that mystic something, undefined, Which men fail not to understand and read, And, when not blind with egoism, heed. My task was harder—'twas the slow undoing Of long sweet months of unimpeded wooing. It was to hide and cover and conceal The truth, assuming what I did not feel. It was to dam love's happy singing tide That ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... despotism, ceases in these circumstances to be a social concern, and narrows into a personal affair between an individual and his Maker, in which the issue at stake is but his private salvation. Religion in this shape is quite consistent with the most selfish and contracted egoism, and identifies the votary as little in feeling with the rest of ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... disagreeable to him; alike in the gloom of Pascal's reveries, and in the inflation of speech of some of the heroes of Corneille. He failed to relish even Montaigne as he ought to have done, because Montaigne's method was too prolix, his scepticism too universal, his egoism too manifest, and because he did not ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3) - Essay 1: Vauvenargues • John Morley
... bordering on relief. Here was, at least, a step which he thought blameless; here was a way out of his troubles. He sat down to write to Seraphina; and his anger blazed. The tale of his forbearances mounted, in his eyes, to something monstrous; still more monstrous, the coldness, egoism, and cruelty that had required and thus requited them. The pen which he had taken shook in his hand. He was amazed to find his resignation fled, but it was gone beyond his recall. In a few white-hot words, he bade adieu, dubbing desperation by the name of love, and calling ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... I took an animated part in the conversation, which turned on recent books and plays. At last reference was made to a book, "The Ethics of Egoism," which had excited much attention. It was a work advocating the most rabid individualism, denying the Socialist standpoint of the right to live, and saying that the best safeguard for the development and amelioration of the race lay in that relentless ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... novelists, of a romantic, sensitive, passionate, high-natured girl, hopelessly ill-mated with a somewhat tyrannical and stupid, yet not entirely ill-disposed old colonel, and exposed to the seductions of a Lovelace—the truth about whose unloveable character, in its profound and heartless egoism, first bursts upon her at the moment when, maddened by brutal insult, she is driven to claim the generous devotion he has proffered a thousand times. Side by side with the ideal of selfishness, Raymon stands in contrast with the ideally chivalrous Ralph, Indiana's ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... averse from the glorification of the individual of which some writers are fond. Indeed, he would prefer a naturalistic explanation of man rather than one framed as a result of man's individualistic egoism. The former explanation admits that man is entirely a thing of nature; the latter, from a selfish and proud standpoint, claims for man a place in a higher world. There is nothing that is worthy and high in the low desires of Mr. Smith—the mere subjective Mr. Smith. But if through the mind ...
— Rudolph Eucken • Abel J. Jones
... Then this vast egoism had heard itself expressed in the mention of Bruce's baby—the third generation. But by the great sorcery wherewith Nature has protected herself, this mammoth sense of self, when it extends unto the next generations, becomes a keeper of the race. Ebenezer had been touched, ...
— Christmas - A Story • Zona Gale
... laid her work aside to think of him, she was hardly sure that his genial egoism had not repelled her. Her instinct told her that he could be both kind and generous, that he was capable of unselfish impulses, and full, too, of a broad and tolerant humanity, yet there was something within her—some ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... pictures; and simply as a picture of a fresh, sweet, young life, it is charming. But in its aim at a higher import I find it simply an arrow shot into the air, going so high, but at—nothing! If one crave a moral luxury, it is here. If he desire a lash for egoism, this, perhaps, is also here. If he is already praying the heavens for a sufficing worth and work in life, and is asking only the what and how, this book, taken in connection with its sequel, says, "Distribute your property, and begin ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... theory which was called orthodox political economy—the laisser-faire system—the philosophy of competition or supply and demand, and it was incessantly denounced by Carlyle as Mammon worship, as 'devil take the hindmost,' as 'pure egoism'; 'the shabbiest gospel that had been taught among men.' He declared that in the long run no society could flourish, or even permanently cohere, if the only relation between man and man was a mere money tie. He maintained ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... EGOISTS, EGOISM, EGOTISM.—"The disciples of Descartes were egoists, the ego being the basis of their philosophy." Egoism is the name of their system. Egoism is sometimes used also in the sense of undue admiration of self, the outward ...
— Practical Exercises in English • Huber Gray Buehler
... the place of bayonets because this was a field in which intelligence counted for more than brute force and in which therefore they expected to be supreme. As usual they were right in their major premise but wrong in their conclusion, owing to the egoism of their implicit minor premise. It does indeed give the advantage to skill and science, but the Germans were beaten at their own game, for by the end of the war the United States was able to turn out toxic gases at a rate of 200 tons a day, while the output of Germany or England ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... from the coils of an intense and selfish egoism that fetter you to the petty cares and trials of your individual existence,—if you would endeavor to forget for a season the woes of Mrs. Gerome, and expend a little more sympathy on the sorrows ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... which he believes to await its people in the centuries to come. A Frenchman, republican or royalist, with all his frenzies and 'fool-fury' of red or white, still has his hope and dream and aspiration, with which to enlarge his life and lift him on an ample pinion out from the circle of a poor egoism. What stirs the hope and moves the aspiration of our Englishman? Surely nothing either in the heavens above or on the earth beneath. The English are as a people little susceptible in the region of the imagination. But they have done good work in the world, acquired a splendid ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... and excused himself for it: "Some day, when my works are developed, you will realise that it required many an hour to think out and write so many things; then you will absolve me for all that has displeased you, and you will pardon, not the egoism of the man (for he has none), but the egoism of the thinker ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... just? Is this even moral? Female labor can be exploited in shop and factory; feminine virtue can be made the object of commerce, and yet woman is not allowed to defend directly the interests of her sex, owing to one of those aberrations of the moral sense that spring from the crass egoism and brutal ...
— The Woman and the Right to Vote • Rafael Palma
... which money could buy—and, of course, such pleasures became irksome to me. Then I launched out into the world of fashion—and that, too, soon palled upon me. I fell in love with fashionable beauties and was loved by them, but my imagination and egoism alone were aroused; my heart remained empty... I began to read, to study—but sciences also became utterly wearisome to me. I saw that neither fame nor happiness depends on them in the least, because the happiest people are the uneducated, and fame is good fortune, to attain which you ...
— A Hero of Our Time • M. Y. Lermontov
... — N. selfishness &c. adj.; self-love, self- indulgence, self-worship, self-interest; egotism, egoism; amour propre[Fr],&c. (vanity) 880; nepotism. worldliness &c. adj.; world wisdom. illiberality; meanness &c. adj. time-pleaser, time-server; tuft-hunter, fortune-hunter; jobber, worldling; egotist, egoist, monopolist, nepotist; dog in the manger, charity that ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... old man. It isn't that at all. The truth is"—and his voice broke—"I have lied to myself and to the world these many years. Much of it hasn't been my fault, but I must pay the price just the same. I am blind. That has led me to a sort of clamorous egoism which carried me on and on until I came to feel that I was really doing something. At last, I know that I am a narrow human parasite, worthless, utterly worthless. A blind, clinging, grasping, vagrant beast, fed upon the mercy of too ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... its adaptation to a changing environment. And from this point of view the whole growth of man is in the nature of an expansion of his sympathies and sense of duty over an ever-widening area. The primitive egoism of the tribal individual is extended to the nation, that of the nation to the empire, and thence to the whole of humanity. There is no destruction or denial of self in such cases, it is a development of the sense of self over ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... her expression—'not to be a burden.'" The Octopus, having seized her prey in this tentacle, was then at liberty to enlarge upon the unselfish character of her great-aunt, reaping the advantages of a vicarious egoism from an hypnotic suggestion that that character was also her own. The great-aunt had, it appeared, lost the use, broadly speaking, of her anatomy, and could only communicate by signs; but when she died she was none the less missed ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... as the ancient priests of sacrifice sought to read the future in the hearts of men, he had found nothing in the entrails of his chimera. Scorning a sentiment so wholly personal: "Glory," said he, "is but beatified egoism." ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... best of all people and animals?" "Ich!" (1). "If you mean yourself you should say "mich" (myself)", so she at once rapped "mich!" "And after yourself?" "Dich!" ("thee," the familiar of you commonly used in German). A frank remark, at all events, and without the taint of human egoism! ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann
... felt himself ill-used by destiny, and therefore by Marian, who was fate's instrument. It was not in his nature that this mood should last long, but it revealed to him those darker possibilities which his egoism would develop if it came seriously into conflict with overmastering misfortune. A hope, a craven hope, insinuated itself into the cracks of his infirm resolve. He would not examine it, but conscious of its existence he was able to go home ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... also, is her intense egoism and her abundant self-assertion under all circumstances. It often seemed to us as if for her the world revolved, with passing show, around a pivot from which she regarded it as existing only for what it meant for her career. These qualities have ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... say, you need not listen. I always call a spade a spade; the truth is, you want her to die so that the way may be cleared for your other schemes. Be it so; but can't you wait? If, instead of crushing the life out of your wife by your heartless egoism, you let her die naturally, do you think you would lose Sasha and Sasha's money? Such an absolute Tartuffe as you are could turn the girl's head and get her money a year from now as easily as you can ...
— Ivanoff - A Play • Anton Checkov
... indivisible trinity. Such unions of natures of especial grace have been born under like conditions of fated intercourse, and they have been unions of a strange beauty, the more blest by the sense of a conquest over love's one unworthiness, its egoism. As the egoisme a deux is finer than an egoism of one, so this egoisme a trois, if you will, is again finer by its ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... favour of our middle classes, those who best represent their rather narrow ideas, their somewhat prescribed views, their rather superficial scepticism, and their at times somewhat excessive egoism, display profound alarm at this new power which they see growing; and to combat the disorder in men's minds they are addressing despairing appeals to those moral forces of the Church for which they formerly professed so much disdain. They talk to us of the ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... reflection on arts and crafts, but perhaps it has in tapestry its most intentional record. It is a forced and deliberate piece of egoism when a monarch or a conqueror has a huge picture drawn exhibiting his grandeur in battle or his elegance at home. In some hangings modesty limits to the border of an imaginary and decorative scene the monogram of the heroine of history for whose apartments the tapestry was woven. And so ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... of, or too much over, myself. For to get oneself forth as one really is requires deep investigation into every cause, and the depicting all early characteristics, and the man never lived who ever did this truly and accurately without much egoism, or what the ill-disposed may treat as such. And I promise the possible reader that when this subjective analysis shall be fairly disposed of, there will be no lack of mere incident or event of objective ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... attributes were modified by the sentiment and romance she inherited from her Teutonic ancestors; or from Madame de Castries, the fragile and brilliant coquette. Mentally and physically there was a certain massiveness in Madame Hanska which was absent in her rivals. She was characterised by an egoism and self-assertiveness unknown to the "dilecta"; while, on the other hand, her principles were too strong to allow her to use a man as her plaything, as Madame de Castries had no scruple in doing. Side by side ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... in duty bound to come! You cannot refuse to come! It's egoism! A man is bound to sacrifice his life for his neighbour, and you . . . you refuse to come! I will summon you before ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... with that old-fashioned veneration which made her see all that he did with the moral indistinctness, without which there could not be the perfect filial devotion that makes the family a union in good report and evil. She had not even that, by no means repellent, secondary egoism which upholds us in doing ungrateful things that abstract good may follow. Opposition, which becomes delightful when we can call it persecution, had no charm for her. If her father had suddenly adopted the role of the stern parent in novels and ordered her to her chamber, ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... were anyone able to prove to me the necessity for it, or to point out a worthy end which could be attained by it and in no other way. Why do great States wage war nowadays? The only sound principle of action for a great State is political egoism and not Romanticism, and it is unworthy of a great State to fight for any matter which does not concern its own interests. Shew us, gentlemen, an object worthy of war and you have my vote. It is easy for a statesman in his office or his chamber to blow the trumpet with the breath of ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... expediency of relieving the philosopher from the necessity of being in plain and business-like relations with indifferent persons for a certain number of hours in the week. Such relations do as much as a doctrine to keep egoism within decent bounds, and they must be not only a relief, but a wholesome corrective to the tendencies of concentrated thinking on ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 10: Auguste Comte • John Morley
... many men and women of genuine capacity and power. It rests like a heavy load on shoulders which ought to be free; it is an impediment of speech when speech ought to have entire spontaneity, and freedom. This intense consciousness of self, although always revealing a certain amount of egoism, is often devoid of egotism; it is, in many cases, a sign of diffidence and essential modesty. It is the burden and limitation of those especially who have high aims and standards, but who distrust their own ability to do well the things they are eager to do. To be self-conscious ...
— Essays On Work And Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... he should reach home again. He meditated a great deal more about her sister Anna.—"Here now," he said to himself, "is a wonderful, sympathetic being! What a delicate comprehension of everything, what a loving heart, what absence of egoism! And how comes it that such girls bloom with us, and in the provinces,—and in such surroundings into the bargain! She is both sickly, and ill-favoured, and not young,—but what a capital wife she would ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... of its cobalt. Unfeeling I deemed the note that everywhere was struck by man and Nature, so discordant was it with my gloomy outlook. If you would have food for reflection upon the evanescent quality of life, upon the nothingness of man, upon the empty, heartless egoism implicit in human nature, get yourselves sentenced to death, and then look around you. With such a force was all this borne in upon me, and with such sufficiency, that after the first pang was spent I went near ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... social vertebrates, and has, therefore, like all social animals, two sets of duties—first to himself, and secondly to the society to which he belongs. The former are the behests of self-love, or egoism, the latter love for one's fellows, or altruism. The two sets of precepts are equally just, equally natural, and equally indispensable. If a man desires to have the advantage of living in an organized community, ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... for life, an illuminated contempt for men and women, had long ago taken possession of him. This philosophic attitude was the product of his egoism. He felt himself the center of life and it became his nature to revolt against all evidences of life that existed outside himself. In this manner he grew to hate, or rather to feel an impotent disgust for, whatever ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... like the way dame Nature gathers round a foreign body an envelope of some insensitive tissue which can protect from evil that which it would otherwise harm by contact. If this be an ordered selfishness, then we should pause before we condemn any one for the vice of egoism, for there may be deeper root for its causes ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... arrangement had been contrived by the hypocrite, Adhemar Meydieux. He did not mistake the Count's infatuation for his goddaughter. A marriage of such wealth and aristocratic connections flattered his foolish egoism, and he was sworn to attempt everything that would bring about such ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... setting for our daily morning parade. We have been here for some weeks now, and the populace is getting used to us. But when we first burst upon this peaceful township I think we may say, without undue egoism, that we created a profound sensation. In this sleepy corner of Hampshire His Majesty's uniform, enclosing a casual soldier or sailor on furlough, is a common enough sight, but a whole regiment on the march is the rarest of spectacles. As for this tatterdemalion ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... lantern jaws, and grinned in Nal's face. The selfishness which rated its sordid interest paramount to any consideration for others appalled the young man. How could he stem this tide of avarice, this torrent of egoism? ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... detestable." Is it not one of the "mixed results of revivals" that "some gain a religious vocabulary rather than a religious experience?" Is there a descendant of the Puritans who will not relish the fair play of this? "They might give the name of piety to much that was only Puritanic egoism; they might call many things sin that were not sin, but they had at least the feeling that sin was to be avoided and resisted, and color-blindness, which may mistake drab for scarlet, is better than total blindness, which sees no distinction of color at all." ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... with Henry. Do my best to show a forgiving spirit in face of his egoism. So to bed, conscious of a day ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 14, 1920 • Various
... admitted Dick. "It was him or us, you know. And there's not much egoism in saying we're better worth ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... this would be true only in a very superficial and strictly qualified sense. In reality, just as there is eternal conflict between egoism and altruism, so there is conflict ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... all. Mrs. Fursey's information had suggested to me a fresh grief. I stopped not to console myself with the reflection that my fate had been but the fate of all little boys and girls. With a child's egoism I seized only upon ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... his Sociology, referring to gambling, "does not imply effort put forth; but the happiness of the winner involves the misery of the loser. This kind of action is therefore essentially anti-social, sears the sympathies, cultivates a hard egoism, and produces general deterioration of character and conduct." The young should specially guard against this vice, which has been a rock upon which many a promising life has ...
— Life and Conduct • J. Cameron Lees
... girl, that had been interrupted in Chip's presence by a peremptory voice, saying, "Now, Emery, don't spoil the child," or "Lily, dear, can't you find anything better to do than tease your uncle?" In it all Chip had found two subjects of wonderment: first, the strange egoism of this middle-aged woman who could see nothing in the expansion of her husband's affections but what was stolen from herself; and then, the extraordinary freak of marital loyalty that could keep a man like Emery Bland, with his refinement ...
— The Letter of the Contract • Basil King
... is not merely the Poet whom we recognise to-day; you have a much greater claim to our homage. In an age in which egoism and the eager thirst for riches prevails, you have, in the noble work which you have performed, displayed the virtues of benevolence and self-sacrifice. You yourself have put them into practice. ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... ended with the lonely and terrible surrender of her religion. He was profoundly interested. Once or twice he was appalled. Did he take this woman, he must assume responsibility for every part of her. She was so wholly without egoism that she would give herself up without reservation and expect him to guide her. That would be all very well with the ordinary woman; but with a nature of high ideals, and possibly of transcendent passions,—was he equal to ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... your species, you are a prodigy. Now let us investigate, in good faith, the causes of this psychological anomaly. Does there exist in you, as in many women, a certain pride in self, a love of your own loveliness, a refinement of egoism which makes you shudder at the idea of belonging to another; is it the thought of resigning your own will and submitting to a superiority, though only of convention, which displeases you? You would seem ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... individual, necessarily produced by rubbing up again the external world; reactions which become persistent forms of experience that are approximately as self-evident as the libido itself. The degree of egoism which is active in the elementary tendencies must, according to the experience of psychoanalysis, be considered very great. For this purpose I have selected in what follows an excessively egotistical expression for the "titanic" aspect, the retrospective form, of the tendencies; ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... All the faculties controlled by the Reason. The End of Interest. End of Universal Order. Morality the expression of divine thought; identified with the beautiful and the true. The moral law and self-interest coincide. Boundaries of the three states—Passion, Egoism, ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... appearance on the scene he has taken so high a stand, both by his pianoforte-playing and by his compositions for this instrument, that he is to the multitude an inexplicable phenomenon which it looks on in passing with astonishment, and which stupid egoism regards with a smile of pity, while the small number of connoisseurs, led by a sure judgment, rather by an instinct of progress than by a reasoned sentiment of enjoyment, follow this artist in his efforts and in his creations, if not closely, at least at a distance, admiring him, learning ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... them, Jon was still curious, but he was getting mad underneath at the cold egoism ...
— Acid Bath • Vaseleos Garson
... with admirable sang-froid; but not, as to the first one in any case, without considerably greater inward commotion than he gave her credit for. She was in fact keyed up by it, excited, taken out of herself to an unprecedented extent, her native optimism and egoism in singular disarray. Yet thereby, through that very excitement, she recaptured for the time being the physical loveliness of an earlier period. Beauty is very much a matter of circulation; and the blood cantered, not to say galloped, ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... be gratified. Louis commanded; Versailles arose, a palace of rare delight for princes and nobles, for wits and courtly prelates, for grave philosophers and ladies frail as fair. A palace and a hell, a grim monument to regal egoism, created to minister to the inflated vanity of a despot, an eternal warning to mankind that the abuse of absolute power is an accursed thing. Every flower, in those wide gardens has been watered with the tears of stricken souls; every stone in that ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... in criminals, when it is not impaired by disease, is, in the main, dominated by a boundless egoism. Let us first consider those whose wills are impaired by disease. Among drunkards and the degenerate generally the power of sustained volition is often as good as gone. Nothing can be more pitiful or hopeless than the position of wretched beings in a condition such as this. Often animated by ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... than three times. Can we suppose that what so closely resembles demoniacal possession can have come about through something engrafted on to the soul as a mechanism foreign to its inner nature, {135} or through conscious deliberation which adheres always to a bare egoism, and is utterly incapable of such self-sacrifice for the sake of offspring as is displayed by ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... child had its room—except Jimmie and Johnnie, who shared one. And each room was the fortress of an egoism, the theatre of a separate drama, mysterious, and sacred from the others. Jimmie could not remember having been in Janet's room—it was forbidden by Alicia, who was jealous of her sole right of entree—and nobody would have dreamed of violating the ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... it easier to believe that the alpha and the omega of their policy was to undo him. He would undo them—even at the cost of the cause he had at heart: to see Greece openly on the side of the Entente. It is not that he thought less of the cause, but he thought more of himself. His egoism was of that heroic stature which shrinks from nothing. His nature impelled him to this labour; his privileged position as the particular friend of the Entente supplied him ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... the presence of three strange people, he showered his caresses upon his companion every minute, and, it must be said, sufficiently coarse ones. With the unceremoniousness of an owner, with that especial egoism of one in love, who, it would seem, is saying to the whole universe: "See, how happy we are—this makes you happy also, isn't that so?"—he would now pass his hand over her leg, which resiliently and in relief stood out beneath her dress, now pinch her on the cheek, now tickle her neck with ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... was—was only a chattel, an object to give enjoyment to him, in fact, a prostitute. He did not know he felt this, could not know it, in fact. It would have needed a revolution of his character to turn his vision to something other than himself. Neither did the wife realize her egoism, an egoism more agreeable certainly than was his, because on a less crude plane, but equally reprehensible, as spiritually barren and limited to Self as was that ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... calls egoism the spirit of the eighteenth century, by which he means the revelling, the complete absorption, in the personal. This will naturally find its favorite occupation in sentimental self-contemplation, which becomes a sort of fashionable epidemic. It is this fashion which Goethe wished ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... EGOISM.—An unconscious, easy, selfish person shocks less, and is more easily loved, than one who is laboriously and egotistically unselfish. There is at least no fuss about the first; but the other parades his sacrifices, and so sells his ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... who are chanting the Marseillaise in the group at the left are not professional soldiers, they are armed citizens, marching to work out their sublime and violent mission. Their nudity makes them appear to me like sans-culottes in Grecian helmets. . . . Here there is more than the glory and egoism of a great nation. All Europe is awake to new life, thanks to these Crusaders of Liberty. . . . The nations call to mind certain images. If I think of Greece, I see the columns of the Parthenon; Rome, Mistress of the World, is the Coliseum and the Arch of Trajan; and ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... doubts not the existence of angels or devils, but the existence of men and cows. For him his own friends are a mythology made up by himself. He created his own father and his own mother. This horrible fancy has in it something decidedly attractive to the somewhat mystical egoism of our day. That publisher who thought that men would get on if they believed in themselves, those seekers after the Superman who are always looking for him in the looking-glass, those writers who talk ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... he half turned to Beatrice. How kind was her simple earth-warm affection, after the star-cold transcendentalism in which he had been living! How full of comfort was her unselfish humanity, after the pitiless egoism ...
— The Worshipper of the Image • Richard Le Gallienne
... synonym, antonym prologue, epilogue nadir, zenith amateur, connoisseur anterior, posterior stoic, epicure ordinal, cardinal centripetal, centrifugal stalagmite, stalactite orthodox, heterodox homogeneous, heterogeneous monogamy, polygamy induction, deduction egoism, altruism Unitarian, Trinitarian concentric, eccentric herbivorous, carnivorous deciduous, perennial esoteric, exoteric endogen, exogen vertebrate, invertebrate ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... was, ruined, dishonored, and now finally determined to make an end of my misspent life, my only surprise to this day is that I did not do so then and there. The despicable satisfaction of involving another in one's destruction added its miserable appeal to my baser egoism; and had fear or horror flown to my companion's face, I shudder to think I might have died diabolically happy with that look for my last impious consolation. It was the look that came instead which held my hand. Neither fear ...
— The Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... don't understand what you're pleased to call a cat's egoism.... Our instinct of self-preservation, our dignity, our modest reserve, our attitude of weary renunciation (which comes of the hopelessness of ever being understood by them), they dub, in haphazard fashion, egoism. You're not a very discriminating dog, but at least you're free from prejudice. ...
— Barks and Purrs • Colette Willy, aka Colette
... to-morrow, and forever, provided I do not annoy you. I am a gloomy companion, I fear. I fancy there is no other person in the world troubled with such petty egoism as I am. Think of it, my wife locked up in an asylum is occupied every moment of the day with proving her own selfishness, weakness, unworthiness and wickedness toward me. Because she is so unworthy, as she ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... of the terrace that evening with footsteps still eager notwithstanding his long walk. The splendid egoism of youth had already triumphed, the tragedy of the day had become a dim thing. He himself was moving forward and onward. He glanced up at the familiar window, feeling a slight impulse of disappointment when he received no welcoming wave of the hand. It was the first time for weeks that Ruth ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... nothing of the unfailing pleasure of facing the world of men with a hidden misanthropy, a sense that they were armed against their kind, and could retire into themselves with one idea which the most remarkable men had not,—all this constituted a religion of pleasure and egoism which made fanatics of the Thirteen. The history of the Society of Jesus was repeated for the Devil's benefit. It was ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... full of schemes, too full of thoughts of Jeanne to note the tone of quiet irony with which Chauvelin had been speaking all along. With the unreasoning egoism of youth he was quite convinced that his own arrest, his own affairs were as important to this entire nation in revolution as they were to himself. At moments like these it is difficult to envisage a ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... found the clue that I was seeking. All I had been reading now had a clear meaning for me. In my delight, I laughed aloud. I saw the egoism of the solitary male; I knew the meaning of the females' retreat; they were guarding the young from the feared attacks of the father. I realised how the male's unsocial conduct towards his offspring had forced the ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... kindly heart, a stimulating egoism, a wholesome contentment in modest circumstances, and such sufficient ease, in that accepted state, as permitted the passing of a good deal of time in wishing that daisies could see the beauty of their own shadows, and other such profitable mental exercises, Wordsworth ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... adoration A Vampire fond of meditation, Or Melmoth, gloomy wanderer he, The Eternal Jew or the Corsair Or the mysterious Sbogar.(33) Byron's capricious phantasy Could in romantic mantle drape E'en hopeless egoism's dark shape. ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... Without demanding absolutism I do desire a predominant democratic character in our national enterprises, rather than a confused muddle or struggle of interests where nothing really emerges except the egoism ...
— National Being - Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity • (A.E.)George William Russell
... Almighty; for, as Emerson says: "In the woods we return to reason and faith. Then I feel that nothing can befall me in life—no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes)—which Nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground—my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space—all mean egoism vanishes. . . . I am the lover ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... somewhat audacious woman of the world, and he told himself that if she could be placed amidst more favourable surroundings, her natural character would shine forth triumphantly. Moreover, he was by no means free from egoism. He had enough vanity to experience some shadow of gratification, and even though the other candidate was no one more estimable than Colonel Faversham, there was, perhaps, a grain of satisfaction in the knowledge that he might have been first ...
— Enter Bridget • Thomas Cobb
... did not come. And that same instinct, or reason, impinged upon him the fact that it was a thing to be guarded against. He did not go blindly into the mystery of things now. He circumvented them, and came up from behind. Craft and cunning replaced mere curiosity and puppyish egoism. He was quick to learn, and Jolly Roger's word became his law, so that only once or twice was he told a thing, and it became a part of his understanding. While the keen, shrewd brain of his Airedale father developed inside Peter's head, ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... Testament theory of woman's inferiority and of a wife's duty of strict subjection to her husband; a few weeks after the marriage she fled to her family and refused to return. Thereupon, with characteristic egoism, Milton put forth a series of pamphlets on divorce, arguing, contrary to English law, and with great scandal to the public, that mere incompatibility of temper was adequate ground for separation. He even proceeded so far as to make proposals of ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... very much," they said between themselves. They were indeed reaping the harvest of egoism which they ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... make literature a trade, or at least a profession, I cannot help feeling Wordsworth's to have been the most privileged life of them all. He had not work enough to do; and his mode of life encouraged an excess of egoism: but he bore all the necessary retribution of this in his latter years; and the whole career leaves an impression of an airy freedom and a natural course of contemplation, combined with social interest and action, more healthy than the existence of either the delinquent ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... terrible, a cause so important to the future of the world? Who has striven so hard, suffered so much, so often passed through death? To prove himself equal to his high mission, he has had to rid himself of all egoism, renounce lucre and vain honors, sacrifice family joys; many times he has known the worst extremes of weariness, thirst, hunger and cold; he equals and surpasses in austerity the severest of monks; ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... had concentrated all their tenderness on him, David was his devoted friend; he was accustomed to see the three making every effort for him in secret, and consequently he had all the faults of a spoiled eldest son. The noble is eaten up with the egoism which their unselfishness was fostering in Lucien; and Mme. de Bargeton was doing her best to develop the same fault by inciting him to forget all that he owed to his sister, and mother, and David. He was far from ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... in her inimitable way, the impression that she thinks they are "just right." She will use "blarney" as a science in an artful way. The flattering remarks she will make regarding others will be passed along by those to whom she makes them, and she will be responsible for an epidemic of egoism all over town. It is ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... lose his support. He was courted, flattered, cajoled on every side; but the use he made of his new power is sad to contemplate. An unbearable arrogance took possession of him. Lords, statesmen, even ladies were compelled to sue for his favor and to apologize for every fancied slight to his egoism. It is at this time that he writes in his Journal ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... not obtain dominion over us; "possessing without being possessed" was one of his mottoes which Horace thus translated: "I strive to subject things to myself, not myself to things." This eminently practical wisdom, which is only a highly-developed egoism, is that of Horace and Montaigne, and was expressed by Voltaire in ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... short laugh and stammered excuses for his naked egoism, comparing himself to a forester who has sharpened such an appetite in toiling to slay his roe that he can think of nothing but the fire preparing ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... to all religions: they haunt the artist, the philanthropist, the philosopher, the saint. Often they are due to some strain of egoism or ambition which has intermixed itself with the impersonal desire; sometimes, as in Wordsworth's case, to the persistent tension of a mind which has been bent too ardently towards an ideal scarce possible to man. And in this case, when the objects of a man's habitual admiration are true and noble, ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... main by Otto Pfleiderer,[6] and other German writers. It was from the impressions made on man by the powers of nature, these scholars hold, and not from his belief in spirits, that his religion came. But it was not necessarily due to pure egoism, as Von Hartmann represents; the earliest religions need not, they hold, have been a mere attempt at bribery. The motives which first caused man to worship the heavenly powers surely arose from other ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... acutely than the rest, suffering more pain and more joy, who had the power to express his pain and his joy so that it would impose itself on others, should force his will on those around him. "More of the psychology of slavery," said Andrews to himself, suddenly smashing the soap-bubble of his egoism. ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... at his solemn face that simmered with excited egoism. Barbara could see that he was playing—playing in his ponderous, fatuous way, at being her young, her not more than twenty-five years old son. He turned with a sudden, sportive, caracoling movement, to ...
— Mr. Waddington of Wyck • May Sinclair
... if he would notice any change in her appearance. It seemed to her that the flagellation of her thoughts must have left visible traces. But Mr. Orme was not a man of subtle perceptions, save where his personal comfort was affected: though his egoism was clothed in the finest feelers, he did not suspect a similar surface in others. His daughter, as part of himself, came within the normal range of his solicitude; but she was an outlying region, a subject province; and Mr. Orme's was a highly ...
— Sanctuary • Edith Wharton
... an uncritical admirer of the Puritan, although I believe he is more nearly on the side of the angels than is his opposite. I deprecate the smug virtuosity which his kind often favor, I dislike a vinegar morality, and am repelled by the monstrous egoism of the idea that redeeming one's soul is such a serious matter that every moment spared from contemplating the sins of others or the pieties of ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... Hilda's terrific egoism might have got fresh books somehow from somewhere, had she really believed in the virtue of books. Thus far, however, books had not furnished her with what she wanted, and her faith in their promise ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... antiquity, King Midas of the golden touch.... Do not suppose them to entertain hidden but far-reaching designs. They are men of short views. Their aim is to pile up as much wealth as they can, as quickly as possible. In them we see the climax of that anti-social egoism which is the curse of our day. They are merely the most typical figures in an epoch enslaved to money. The intellectuals, the press, the politicians, the very members of the cabinets (preposterous puppets!), have, whether they like it or not, become tools in the hands of the profiteers, and ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... interest, 57. The personal factor negligible in counting interests, 58. The refutation of egoism. The first proposition of egoism, 59. The second proposition of egoism, 61. Impartiality as a part of justice, 63. Justice as imputing finality to the individual, 64. The equality of rational beings as organs of truth, 64. ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... spirit of self-assertion, which made him rebel against the uselessness of the conflict, and doggedly resolve to put an end to it, he was only enabled to stand firm by summoning to his aid all the strengthening egoism, which is latent in every more or less artistic nature. To the mother, in her honest narrowness, the son's choice of a calling which she held to be unfitting, was something of a tragedy. She allowed ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... embodied all that we need to know of indignant honesty and the false fervour of sanctimonious animalism, so in the person of Sir Willoughby Patterne has Mr. Meredith succeeded in expressing the qualities of egoism as the egoist appears in his relations with women and in his conception and exercise of the passion of love. Between the means of the two men there is not, nor can be, any sort of comparison. Moliere is brief, exquisite, ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... before she had appealed to the Invisible—that night before her catastrophe, when she wound her wonderful hair round her throat and drew it tighter and tighter, and had cried out to the beloved mother she had never known. But her inborn, her cultivated, her almost invincible egoism, had not even then been scattered by the bitter helplessness ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... for himself without regard to others or even without thought of a future day of reckoning seems to be the maxim of national conduct among the Balkan peoples. The spirit of strife and division possesses them; they are dominated by the uncontrolled instinct of national egoism and greed. The second Balkan War, alike in its origin, course, and conclusion, was a bald exhibition of the play of these primitive ...
— The Balkan Wars: 1912-1913 - Third Edition • Jacob Gould Schurman
... herself and can learn nothing from other people. By still stronger reason she owes them no duty of respect or good-will. What is called humanity has no meaning for the German. The mot of William II., "Humanity for me stops at the Vosges," is not merely an instance of national egoism. The German Emperor feels that what is for the present beyond his empire can only acquire value when it shall be annexed ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... destinies that Germany was bound to win. It was not only, as we are too ready at the first glance to believe, the megalomania of an autocrat drunk with vanity, the gross vanity of some brainless buffoon; it was not the warlike impulses, the blind infatuation and egoism of a feudal caste; it was not even the impatient and deliberately fanned envy and covetousness of a too prolific race close-cramped on a dreary and ungrateful soil: it was none of these that let loose the hateful war. All ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... self-martyring revenge, was only an extreme case among the partial and narrow sympathies of that audience. In Savonarola's preaching there were strains that appealed to the very finest susceptibilities of men's natures, and there were elements that gratified low egoism, tickled gossiping curiosity, and fascinated timorous superstition. His need of personal predominance, his labyrinthine allegorical interpretations of the Scriptures, his enigmatic visions, and his false certitude about ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... high society were for a long time little instructed, but this was because, moreover, the men distrusted Greek culture. When literature, science, and Hellenic philosophy were admitted into the great Roman families as desired and welcome guests, neither the authority, nor the egoism, nor yet the prejudices of the men, sought to deprive women of the joy, the comfort, the light, that might come to them from these new studies. We know that many ladies in the last two centuries of the republic not only learned ...
— The Women of the Caesars • Guglielmo Ferrero
... constant repentance. In the night she would go over her day and probe it for tender points. "Oh, that was a dreadful thing to say," was a refrain that would keep her awake for hours, wriggling and giggling in her bed over the dreadfulness of it. She had too little egoism. The lack gave her face a look of littleness. A lack of altruism has the same outward effect. A complete face should be full of something, of gentleness, of vigour, of humour, of wickedness. The admirer's face was only half full of anything. All the same there was charm about her, ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... was a loving nature. Deeds of kindness were as easy to him as a bad habit: they were the common issue of his weaknesses and good qualities, of his egoism and his sympathy. He didn't like to witness pain, and he liked to have grateful eyes beaming on him as the giver of pleasure. When he was a lad of seven, he one day kicked down an old gardener's pitcher of broth, from no motive but a kicking ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... dissolves or subsides, do the fairest sights and sweetest sounds in nature lose their relationship to us the beholder and hearer, and relapse into the common property of all our kind. To self appertains the whole sensuous as well as the whole spiritual world. Egoism is the creator of all beauty and all bliss, of all hope and of all faith. Even thus doth imagination unify Sabbath worship. All our beloved Scotland is to the devout breast on that day one House of God. Each congregation—however far apart—hears but one hymn—sympathy with ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... mockery of desire. He could not see it, as he had seen Nora Viveash's mouth, curved forward, eager, shedding flame at the brim, giving itself to lips that longed for it. Philippa's mouth was a flower that opened only at the touch, the thrill of her own gorgeous egoism. He read in it the triumph of Philippa over the flesh and blood of her race. She had nothing in her of the dead. That was the wonder of her. The passion of the dead had built up her body to the semblance and the promise of their own delight; their desire, long forgotten, rose again, lightening ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... to, having an imperious magic in his fingers that seem to send a nerve-thrill through ivory key and wooden hammer, and compel the strings to make a quivering lingering speech for him. Gwendolen, in spite of her wounded egoism, had fullness of nature enough to feel the power of this playing, and it gradually turned her inward sob of mortification into an excitement which lifted her for the moment into a desperate indifference about her own doings, or at least a determination to get a superiority over them by laughing ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... found his true self in the little pieces of the Emaux et Camees. He is not without sensibility, but he will not embarrass himself with either feelings or ideas. He has emancipated himself from the egoism of the romantic tendency. He sees as a painter or a gem-engraver sees, and will transpose his perceptions into coloured and carven words. That is all, but that is much. He values words as sounds, and can combine them harmoniously in his little stanzas. ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... Trollope's injunctions to write again from Perugia or elsewhere, according to our route homeward. But pray warn him, that when my throat is not sore, and my head not stagnant, I am a much fiercer antagonist. It is perhaps a delight to one's egoism to have a friend who is among the best of men with the worst of theories. One can be at once affectionate and spit-fire. Pray remember me with indulgence, all of you, and believe, dear ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... unmistakably as the most extravagant of objective superstitions. In brief, what he saw in Christian ethics, under all the poetry and all the fine show of altruism and all the theoretical benefits therein, was a democratic effort to curb the egoism of the strong—a conspiracy of the chandala against the free functioning of their superiors, nay, against the free progress of mankind. This theory is the thing he exposes in "The Antichrist," bringing to the business his amazingly chromatic and exigent eloquence at its ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... virtue. There is sound reason for believing that in this form the symbol existed before Abraham, and that its fundamental signification of creation or generation was gradually overbuilt with arbitrary speculations and fantastic notions. In theory it degenerated into a crude egoism, a vaunting and hyper-stoic hostility to nature, which, though intellectually godless, was not without that universal instinct for divinity which, by countless ways, seeks with an ever-present and importunate longing ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... plant contains in it the life force and the power of growth. According to Vedanta, the subtle body consists of Antahkaranam, that is, the internal organ or the mind substance with its various modifications, mind, intellect, egoism, memory, the five instruments of perception: the powers of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching; the five instruments of action, such as the powers of seizing, moving, speaking, evacuating, and generating, and the five Pranas. Prana is a Sanskrit word which ...
— Reincarnation • Swami Abhedananda
... Julian Crum, to give her a start unique in the history of the platform and the stage. Criminal, was he? Then the dearest, kindest, most enchanting, most romantic criminal the world had ever seen! But she must be worthy of his chivalry and her chance; and, from the first, her artistic egoism ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... arose out of Patriotism, Localism, the family spirit, and finally Egoism.... Diminish Patriotism, then men will learn to know each other again as such, their dependence on each other will be lost, the bond of union ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... alter, the other of two), a philosophical term used in ethics for that theory of conduct which regards the good of others as the end of moral action. It was invented by Auguste Comte and adopted by the English positivists as a convenient antithesis to egoism. According to Comte the only practical method of social regeneration is gradually to inculcate the true social feeling which subordinates itself to the welfare of others. The application to sociological ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... devilled codfish and drinking hot plum-juice, or whatever is the accepted remedy for what we call obesity. We're all odd old things, as you say. We can only get away from that depressing fact by doing something, and not thinking about ourselves. We can all try not to be egoists. Egoism is the really heavy quality in ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... And I'm not even sorry enough to cry about it—ever. I've actually thought that I was in love—oh, ever so many times: sometimes with you. What's the use? The only things I've ever been faithful to are the dressmaker, dancing, and what in moments of supreme egoism I am ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... perfectly accomplished, that my anxiety about this work is wholly at an end, and that now I may begin another effort at offering something new in a similar manner. Judge then, can you blame my conviction which rids me of all egoism, of all the small passions of ambition? Surely not. Ah, that I might be able to communicate to all of you some of the blissful ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... them. After relating the history of the Carbonari, who troubled by their plots the reign of Louis XVIII., he says:—"This Carbonarism never descended into the depths of society; it never moved the lower strata. How, then, could it be preserved from the vices of the middle class—egoism, littleness of ideas, extreme love of a mere material happiness, gross instincts!"—(P. 115.) So that he finds Carbonarism to have lacked in virtue, because it had not descended, for its disciples, sufficiently low in the scale of society!—to have ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... urge four capital reasons in behalf of their principle: personal glory, moral education, class interest, and national egoism. ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... of salvation. Thus in III. 82. 9 ff., the poet says: "The fruit of pilgrimage (to holy pools)—he whose hands, feet, and mind are controlled;[49] he who has knowledge, asceticism, and fame, he gets all the fruit that holy pools can give. If one is averse from receiving gifts, content, freed from egoism, if one injures not, and acts disinterestedly, if one is not gluttonous, or carnal-minded, he is freed from sin. Let one (not bathe in pools but) be without wrath, truthful, firm in his vows, seeing his self in all ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... written enabling us to see so clearly into the soul of a young girl, belonging to our social and cultural stratum, during the years of puberal development. We are shown how the sentiments pass from the simple egoism of childhood to attain maturity; how the relationships to parents and other members of the family first shape themselves, and how they gradually become more serious and more intimate; how friendships are formed and broken. We are shown the dawn of love, feeling ...
— A Young Girl's Diary • An Anonymous Young Girl
... possible humour,—no style. The weakling has no confidence in himself to keep him from grasping at words that he fancies hold within them the true passions of the race, ready for the uses of his egoism. And with a sense of humour a man will not steal from a shelf the precious treasure of the language and put ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... Leconte de Lisle, in the preface of his Poemes antiques (1853), scornfully dismissed Romanticism as a second-hand, incoherent, and hybrid art, compounded of German mysticism, reverie, and Byron's stormy egoism. Sully Prudhomme addressed a sterner criticism to the shade of Alfred de Musset—the Oscar Wilde of the later Romantics[6]—who had never known the stress of thought, and had filled his poetry ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... ourselves; touches that would be intolerable from common people become a mystery of delight, acts of self-abasement and self-sacrifice are charged with symbolical pleasure. We cannot tell which of us is me, which you. Our imprisoned egoism looks out through this window, forgets its walls, and is for those brief ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... then, the present, the spirit of the time, angel of the dawn who is neither night nor day; they found him seated on a lime sack filled with bones, clad in the mantle of egoism, and shivering in terrible cold. The anguish of death entered into the soul at the sight of that specter, half mummy and half fetus; they approached it as the traveler who is shown at Strasburg the daughter of an old ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... talk. Now that she was no longer hungry, she was no longer woebegone, and her laugh, though faint, was so pretty that he found himself making every effort to set her laughing. They talked about themselves with the simple egoism of children; and he learned that her name was Elsie Brand; that she was ten years old—nearly two years younger than himself—that her mother had died many years ago, and that she had lived with her father in his Devonshire ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... Socialists; and I pity the Socialist state that tries to manage him. This anarchism of his is not a question of thinking for himself; every decent man thinks for himself; it would be highly immodest to think for anybody else. Nor is it any instinctive licence or egoism; as I have said before, he is a man of peculiarly acute public conscience. The unmanageable part of him, the fact that he cannot be conceived as part of a crowd or as really and invisibly helping a movement, has reference to another thing in him, ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... It is a feeling of jealousy based upon a sense of inferiority that causes hatred. O'Ryan and Anderson (5), military writers, say there are two causes of war: those based upon an assumed necessity, and those based upon hatred. Nusbaum (86) also finds two causes of war, the expansion impulse and the egoism of species, ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... democratic. Everybody admits that one can be civilized and be none of these things: just as one may be "cultured" without being kind. In other words, it is consistent with being civilized to be highly selfish; one need only be rationalized in one's egoism. Indeed, civilization is the incarnation of self-interest. If self-interest, its basic principle, should give way to social interest; if the monopoly of social power should be broken and the power transferred to the general will of the community; if the community should relegate its ...
— Is civilization a disease? • Stanton Coit
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