"Individualism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Shelley's individualism is always a thing with open doors; a thing with corridors into Eternity. It never conveys that sad, cynical, pessimistic sense of "eating and drinking" before we die, which one is ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... sea-voyage. Philippe gave way to a rush of feeling, which made Agathe think to herself, "Ah! how he loves me!" Alas, the hero loved but one person in the world, and that person was Colonel Philippe. His misfortunes in Texas, his stay in New York,—a place where speculation and individualism are carried to the highest pitch, where the brutality of self-interest attains to cynicism, where man, essentially isolated, is compelled to push his way for himself and by himself, where politeness does not exist,—in fact, even ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... typical paper as the British Labour Leader, for example, may be read in vain, number after number, for any sound and sincere constructive proposal. It is a prolonged scream of extreme individualism, a monotonous repetition of incoherent discontent with authority, with direction, with union, with the European effort. It wants to do nothing. It just wants effort to stop—even at the price of German victory. If the whole fabric of society in western ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... of the individualism and liberty of personal development, which, even for a Roman Catholic, were effects of the Reformation, that there was so much in Montaigne of the "subjective," as people say, of the singularities of personal character. Browne, too, bookish as he really is claims to give ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... party in Norway, without having gratified or won the confidence of the Liberals. He was now in personal relations of friendliness with Bjoernson, whose generous approval of his work as a dramatist sustained his spirits, but his own individualism had been intensified by the hostile reception of Ghosts. His life was now divided between Rome in the winter and Gossensass in the summer, and in the Italian city, as in the Tyrolese village, he wandered solitary, taciturn, absorbed in his own thoughts. ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... relations according to the Law, and to make obedience to the commandments a necessity and a custom' (Lauterbach, Jewish Encyclopedia, ix. 326). Only the latest development of Judaism is away from this direction. Individualism is nowadays replacing the olden solidarity. Thus, at the Central Conference of American Rabbis, held in July 1906 at Indianapolis, a project to formulate a system of laws for modern use was promptly rejected. The chief modern problem in Jewish life is just this: ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... solve this vexed question, I lean toward the view of individualism pure and simple. It seems to me very difficult to admit that the great creator is only the result of his environment. Since this influence acts on many others, it is very necessary that, in great men, there should be in addition a personal factor. ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... the west they are erecting not despicable public buildings, founding universities, running a few public services. That 'politics' has a voice in these undertakings does not make them valueless. There are perceptible in the prairies, among all the corruption, irresponsibility, and disastrous individualism, some faint signs of the sense of the community. Take a very good test, the public libraries. As you traverse Canada from east to west they steadily improve. You begin in the city of Montreal, which is unable to ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... to guarantee individualism against the masses, on the one hand, and the masses against the individual, on the other. In society as now organized, the many are slaves to a few favored individuals in a community. I should dread the bondage of individuals to the power of the mass, while Association, ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... came, did nothing to diminish this individualism of the religious outlook, but rather accentuated it. The whole emphasis of Protestantism was thrown upon the life of the individual soul in relation to GOD, to the comparative neglect of the importance of the conception ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... tastes run to the modern school. Individualism, even morbidity: Spencer, Nietsche, Schopenhauer, Tolstoi, Kropotkin, Gorky—They ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... thrifty, industrious, faithful, efficient, and affectionate to the verge of sentimentality. He, and not the Junker, has made Germany the most efficient political State in the world. If to his genius for organization could be added the individualism of the American, the resultant product would be incomparable. A combination of the German fortiter in re with the American suaviter in modo would make the most efficient ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... was this Luther of the early period the hero of the people and the prophet of a deep and inward religion, he seemed also to have found, even more emphatically than had the Humanists, a far-reaching principle of individualism which took the key from the Church and put it into the hands of the Christian man himself. Salvation in its essence, he sees, is conferred upon no one from without. The soul is dependent for it upon no organization, no traditions, no dogma, no sacred performances. It is a transaction ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... point of Nonconformist churches. We pride ourselves on our individualism, and that is all very well. We believe in direct access of each soul to Christ, that men must come to Him one by one, that religion is purely a personal matter, and the firmness with which we hold this tends to make us weak in combined action. It cannot be truthfully denied ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... be admitted that the Kabyles, with a thousand faults, are far from the fatalism, the abuse of force and that merging of individualism which are found with the Islamite wherever he appears. Whence, then, have come these more humane tendencies, charitable customs and movements of compassion? There are respectable authorities who ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... community; that regards itself as a purely isolated, unrelated, irresponsible unit,—an atom without affinities! The home can be, if it will, the most antisocial force in existence, for it can, if it will, exist practically for itself. That excessive individualism, which is responsible for so many evils in our country, has encouraged this isolation. The girl who finds herself without a productive place at home at the same time finds none of the fine inspiration which comes from fitting herself into a social scheme ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... as children who never grew up, we are referring to a much larger class than is commonly understood. All who attain mature years with fixations are to be regarded as children. All individualists belong here unless their individualism is merely a stepping stone to altruism. Indeed, we see in all men a desire to place themselves on a pinnacle. This craving seeks expression in a thousand acts. Even if outgrown it may assert itself in times of stress. It is of benefit at times when individuals espouse just but unpopular causes. ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... when it ought to have been put at the end. It matters comparatively little what sort of education we give[34] children; the primary matter is what sort of children we have to educate. That is the most fundamental of questions. It lies deeper even than the great question of Socialism versus Individualism, and indeed touches a foundation that is common to both. The best organized social system is only a house of cards if it cannot be constructed with sound individuals; and no individualism worth the name is possible unless a sound social organization permits the breeding ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.
... most serious questions are really beginning to be discussed. What made the popularity of "Jane Eyre," but that a central question was answered in some sort? The question there answered in regard to a vicious marriage will always be treated according to the habit of the party. A person of commanding individualism will answer it as Rochester does,—as Cleopatra, as Milton, as George Sand do,—magnifying the exception into a rule, dwarfing the world into an exception. A person of less courage, that is, of less constitution, will answer as the heroine does,—giving way to fate, to conventionalism, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... as much a part of this reaction as the sudden preoccupation with things medieval. The medieval tendency is in Goethe's Goetz von Berlichingen, the Hellenic in his Iphigenie. At first this medievalism was superficial, or at least external. Adventure, romance in the frankest sense, grotesque individualism—that is one element in medieval poetry, and with it alone Scott and Goethe dealt. Beyond them were the two other elements of the medieval spirit: its mystic religion at its apex in Dante and Saint Louis, and its mystic passion, passing here and there into the great romantic loves of ...
— Aesthetic Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... progressive changes which had been under way for centuries, and the flood time of a slowly but steadily rising tide of protest against the enslavement of the intellect and the limitation of natural human liberties by either Church or State. The flood of individualism which characterized the second half of the eighteenth century demanded outlet, and, denied, it rose and swept away ancient privileges, abuses, and barriers—religious, intellectual, social, and political—and opened the way for the marked progress in ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... the shade. Work was everything. It was sanctification and salvation. The pride I took in a hard day's work well done would be inconceivable to you. I was as faithful a wage-slave as ever a capitalist exploited. In short, my joyous individualism was dominated by the orthodox bourgeois ethics. I had fought my way from the open west, where men bucked big and the job hunted the man, to the congested labour centres of the eastern states, where men ...
— The House of Pride • Jack London
... communities together. It cannot be done in a year or a decade; but it ought to be the first aim of education to initiate the imagination of the young into the idea of fellowship, and to make the thought of selfish individualism intolerable. It is not perhaps the only end of education, but I can hardly believe that it has any nobler or more ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... profession; their jibes and jests on the credulity of the public yet rang in his ears. What if she—his casual acquaintance of the day before—belonged to that yet greater class of dissemblers who ply their arts and simulations with more individualism and intelligence? ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... political ideals and actions of the west are explained by social quite as much as by economic forces. It was certain that this society, where equality and individualism flourished, where assertive democracy was supreme, where impatience with the old order of things was a ruling passion, would demand control of the government, would resent the rule of the trained statesmen ...
— Rise of the New West, 1819-1829 - Volume 14 in the series American Nation: A History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... which challenge or threaten this conception of the national State are dismissed by Treitschke as damnable heresies: the heresy of individualism (see paragraph XII.), the heresy of internationalism (see paragraph XIII.), and the heresy of ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... further still. Whence comes the idea that all measures inspired by the sentiment of solidarity are contrary to Nature's trend? Observe her carefully, and she will not give lessons only in individualism. Side by side with the struggle for existence do we not find in operation what Lanessan calls "association for existence." Long ago, Espinas had drawn attention to "societies of animals," temporary or permanent, ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... fail to engender. The Americans could not trust the natives, as it was impossible to tell the truthful from the treacherous. Nevertheless it was a kind of fighting which gave unusual scope for that American individualism, so strongly represented in the army, to which the romance of precisely this sort of thing had drawn just the class of men best fitted for the work. Scouting, counter scouting, surprise attacks, and ambuscades formed the daily news transmitted from the front—affairs not of ...
— The Path of Empire - A Chronicle of the United States as a World Power, Volume - 46 in The Chronicles of America Series • Carl Russell Fish
... germ of a great truth in this, but the development of the truth is lost sight of. Individual initiative is a good thing, and our institutions do develop it—and its consequences! There is a species of individualism, too, about a bulldog. When he takes hold he holds on. It may as well be noticed by the objectors that that is a characteristic much appreciated by American people. They, too, hold on. They remember, besides, a pregnant ...
— Problems of Expansion - As Considered In Papers and Addresses • Whitelaw Reid
... the last time, and found him in this almost crazy crisis of extreme individualism, where he hopelessly "passed up" everything—human society, love and friendship, all the things his warm and loving Irish heart really desired, I felt that here indeed was a complete expression of the spirit of revolt. It was so extreme that I and no one else could follow him ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... people were declared superior to the privileges of the rulers; revolution was justified; and the principles of eighteenth century individualism were made the foundation of the new political state. Aristocracy was swept aside and in ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing
... too. Sometimes it seemed that the conflict was over for him and that he had sailed into a sure and quiet haven where no storm could reach him again. All that he had lacked was his; independence was his and the possibility of developing his own individualism. The ghosts of the ancestors were laid; Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, was no longer a mold that sought to grasp him and turn him into something he was not and did not wish to be. The plan was proving itself, demonstrating its right ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... regard to which the love of friends corroborates the malice of enemies it is in ascribing to the English an individualism, hard-shelled beyond all human parallel. The Englishman's country is an impregnable island, his house is a castle, his temperament is a suit of armour. The function common to all three is to keep things ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... accustomed to obey any word of command; city boys, sometimes pampered, often wayward, have thus been in a short time transformed: they stand erect; they look the world squarely in the face; the intensity of their American individualism is happily modified; they can take the word of command and they can give it. I doubt whether any feature of instruction at Cornell University has produced more excellent results upon CHARACTER than the training thus given. And this is not all. The effect on the State has been valuable. ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... advise, but retained the right of execution for the tribe; who followed his chief, but would have scorned to obey him. In Germany to-day one hears a good deal concerning Socialism, but it is a Socialism that would only be despotism under another name. Individualism makes no appeal to the German voter. He is willing, nay, anxious, to be controlled and regulated in all things. He disputes, not government, but the form of it. The policeman is to him a religion, ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... in England and France. An article in the Poor Man's Guardian (a periodical edited by H. Hetherington, afterwards by Bronterre O'Brien), Aug. 24, 1833, is signed "A Socialist"; and in 1834 socialisme is opposed to individualism by P. Leroux in an article in the Revue Encyclopedique. The word is used in the New Moral World, and from 1836 was applied to the Owenites. See Dolleans, Robert Owen (1907), p. 305.] The first phase of socialism, what has been ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... at once that in discussing the status of the individual, we are not referring—at least, not directly—to the struggle between Individualism and Socialism. We know that individualists express the fear that under a socialist regime there would be an end to individual initiative, while socialists retort that the chief sin of the competitive system is {65} that it crushes and destroys individuality; ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... public medical work is that it admits of organization, and consequently of the distribution of the work in such a manner as to avoid wasting the time of highly qualified experts on trivial jobs. The individualism of private practice leads to an appalling waste of time on trifles. Men whose dexterity as operators or almost divinatory skill in diagnosis are constantly needed for difficult cases, are poulticing whitlows, vaccinating, changing unimportant dressings, ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... Thomas R. Slicer and Herman Robinson of the American Federation of Labour. There were many others, of course, but these were the best known. The Socialist leaders were W.J. Ghent, Rufus Weeks, Gaylord Wilshire and R.W. Bruere. Exponents of individualism were many, and most of them were brilliant. The most powerful address on behalf of labour was made by R. Fulton Cutting. There has been no attempt to bait an ecclesiastical hook to catch the masses. We have tried to make men think ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... war,—the vast number of slaves imported, and the consequent resuscitation of the old system of the economic independence of the great households; the decay of religious practice, which affected both public and private life in a hundred different ways; and that steady growth of individualism which is characteristic of eras of town life, and especially of the last three centuries B.C. It is curious to notice that by the time these old gilds emerge into light again as clubs that could be used for political purposes, a new source of gain, and ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... sweet or rugged rhymes,—it is music: in its metaphorical diction, descriptive imagery, succession of shifting pictures, diversified illustration, and vivid coloring,—it is painting; while in its organic development and arrangement of parts, its complicated structure, in the individualism of characters, and the sharply defined personalities of its dramatic realm,—it struggles to attain the fixed ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... sympathy with the Socialist movement, which began to spread just as he took his seat; and being assiduous in Parliament, he was drawn more and more from "the Clubs," where his libellers and detractors wagged their tongues to some purpose. His strong individualism, as well as his practical good sense, made him bitterly hostile to the mildest proposals for putting the people's industrial interests into the hands of Government departments. And being a man of most positive quality, it was natural that he ...
— Reminiscences of Charles Bradlaugh • George W. Foote
... became, in his mind, one and the same. Quakerism means divine democracy. George Fox was the first forerunner, the John Baptist, of the new time,—leather-aproned in the British wilderness. Seeing the whole world dissolving into individualism, he did not try to tie it together, after the fashion of great old Hooker, with new cords of ecclesiasticism; but he did this,—he affirmed a Mount Sinai in the heart of the individual, and gave to the word person an INFINITE depth. To sound ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... that they might be dissipated again, towards every side, in daring adventure alike of action and of thought. Variety and novelty of experience, further quickened by a consciousness trained to an equally nimble power of movement, individualism, the capacities, the claim, of the individual, forced into their utmost play by a ready sense and dexterous appliance of opportunity,—herein, certainly, lay at least one half of their vocation in history. The material conformation of Greece, a land of islands ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... one of the most powerful poems lately seen in the amateur press. Mrs. Jordan is the newest addition to the United's constellation of genuine poetical luminaries; shining as an artist of lively imagination, faultless taste, and graphic expression, whose work possesses touches of genius and individualism that have already brought her renown in amateur circles. In the poem under consideration, Mrs. Jordan displays a phenomenal comprehension of the sterner aspects of Nature, producing a thoroughly virile effect. Words are chosen with care and placed with ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... evils which he does and suffers. To attribute to each individual, not only the responsibility of his acts, but the origin of the evil germs which exist in his soul, is the untenable proposition of a desperate individualism. There is evidently among men a common property in evil; Rousseau sees it clearly enough, but he makes vain efforts to find in the organization of society and in the condition of civilization the causes of pain and of sin. When one has come to see clearly that the source of evil is in the ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... don't use the word as a cliche) chronicle and commentary of the battles of another, battles which cover the same period and were fought broadly for the same causes. But the French Radical extremist could never see his way to subscribe to the Socialist creed. His stalwart individualism, in part temperamental, was also as a political working faith the result of a distrust of logic divorced from the experience and responsibility of actual administration. Somewhat similarly the English Socialist refused to let logic press him into the premature Internationalism ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, March 19, 1919 • Various
... be noted that all that is vivifying in the ideal of individualism is included in this third positive ideal of Socialism, so that, it is now seen, Mr. Street was fully justified in making no separate mention of the ideal of individualism. There can be no doubt that it is the immensely richer literary and artistic life promised by this third ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... supreme authority that had belonged to his office, and the imperial power was also much shaken. We cannot speak of these subjects in detail here, but the result to art of these changes was seen in a development of individualism, and the effects of it did not show an improvement when considered as a whole, though it has some new features ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... crushed by loss, but he was stinging with the organic mortification of the man who has not been able to keep his woman. It was then that Helena Richie first noticed a harshness in him that frightened her, and a cynical individualism that began to create its own code of morals, or at any rate of responsibilities. But before he shut himself into all this misery, not only of loss, but of suspicion and humiliation, he did say ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... is almost a Spencerian in his bias towards individualism, but he forgets that individualism can never be maintained in practice except through the assumption by the state of those monopolies which, if left in private hands, would benefit the few at the expense of the many. True individualism ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... desire. Equality engenders uniformity; and evil is got rid of by sacrificing all that is excellent, remarkable, extraordinary. Everything becomes less coarse but more vulgar. The epoch of great men is passing away; the epoch of the ant-hill is upon us. The age of individualism is in danger of having no real individuals. Things are ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... became at last an instrument powerful enough to save civilisation. What the moral renovation of Rousseau did for France we all know. Now Rousseau's was far more profoundly social than the doctrine of Mr. Carlyle, which, while in name a renunciation of self, has all its foundations in the purest individualism. Rousseau, notwithstanding the method of Emile, treats man as a part of a collective whole, contracting manifold relations and owing manifold duties; and he always appeals to the love and sympathy which ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... Greek art is Fellowship. Perhaps there is no quality in it which is more instructive for our days than this. The extreme individualism which is the most remarkable characteristic of modern times lays the utmost stress on the right or the duty of an artist to express himself in his work, to work out his own vein of originality, to give to the world a rendering of his own qualities and individuality. ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... Socialists love to assert that at present we live in the age of individualism; the truth, however, is that individuality was never valued at so low a rate as to-day. Individual thinking and feeling are incumbrances and not recommendations on the paths of life. Wherever they are found on the market they meet with the word "adaptation." Adapt yourself to the demands of the ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... weeks, and the weeks months. And why? Simply because I have discovered the philosopher's stone. I have grasped the secret of my era. The comedy of rank is played out; the life of the trifler is at an end; all that went out with the Bourbons. Individualism is the new order. To-day a man exists simply by virtue of his own effort—he stands on his own feet. It is the era of the republican, of the individual—science is the true republic. For us who are displaced from the elevation our rank gave us, work is the watchword, and it ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... must know more than the mechanics of staff-control. They must know the character of the man-material in the machine. It was their duty as real Frenchmen to understand Frenchmen, their verve, their restlessness for the offensive, their individualism, their democratic intelligence, the value of their elation, the drawback of their tendency to depression and to think for themselves. Indeed, the leader must counteract the faults of his people and make the most ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... of interest to any reader who has persevered so far. The conditions were in some respects favourable. The farms are small and their owners belong to the class to which cooperation brings most immediate benefit. The Irish peasantry are highly intelligent. They lack the strong individualism of the English, but they have highly developed associative instincts. For this reason cooperation, an alternative to communism,—which they abhor,—comes naturally to them. On the other hand, the ease with which they can be organised makes them peculiarly amenable to political influence. ...
— The Rural Life Problem of the United States - Notes of an Irish Observer • Horace Curzon Plunkett
... between man and man. The common utility which Bentham considers is the happiness experienced by a number of individuals, all of whom are reckoned for this purpose as of equal value. This is the radical individualism of the Benthamite creed, to be set against that socialistic tendency which struck us in ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... example belongs to the epoch of 1584 to 1594. Mr. Erich in New York possesses three pictures, St. Jerome, a portrait of St. Domingo de Guzman and a Deposition. El Greco is a painter admired by painters for his salt individualism. Zuloaga, the Spaniard, has several; Degas, two; the critic Duret, two; John S. Sargent, one—a St. Martin. Durand-Ruel once owned the Annunciation, but sold it to Mrs. H.O. Havemeyer, and the Duveens in London possess a Disrobing of Christ. At the ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... the least about was that this religion was becoming militant. Its followers spoke of the heathen without, and were horrified at the prevalence of the sin of individualism. They were inspired with the mission that the message of God—scientific perfection—must be carried to the whole world. But, knowing that vested interests, governments, invested capital, and established religions would oppose them ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... people, and Society has no support but Egoism. Every individual believes in himself. For us the future means egoism; further than that we cannot see. The great man who shall save us from the shipwreck which is imminent will no doubt avail himself of individualism when he makes a nation of us once more; but until this regeneration comes, we bide our time in a materialistic and utilitarian age. Utilitarianism—to this conclusion we have come. We are all rated, not at our just worth, but according to our social importance. People will scarcely look at an ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... harping on one string, Nature has secured individualism by giving the private person a high conceit of his weight in the system. The pest of society is egotists. There are dull and bright, sacred and profane, coarse and fine egotists. 'Tis a disease ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... by the fraternal dream of a new golden age which he had found in Bache's humanitarian Communism. And indeed even Janzen had momentarily shaken him by his fierce confidence in the theory of liberative Individualism. But afterwards he had found himself out of his depth; and each and every theory had seemed to him but part of the chaotic contradictions and incoherences of humanity on its march. It was all a continuous ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... nothing of those designs for civil breadwinning or moss-dodging in Central Africa, Bond Street, Kirkcaldy or Dawson City. The consequence is that here, pretty well out of A.P.M. range, sartorial individualism flourishes unchecked. Thus the eye is startled to behold a fur headdress as big as a busby, an ordinary service tunic, gaberdine breeches, shooting stockings and Shackleton boots, going about as component ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 28, 1919. • Various
... than in any other country. On strolling along the spacious squares and magnificent streets in which civilization displays all its marvels, you seek in vain for some fissure by which to introduce yourself into English society, which is thickly steeped in individualism. With letters of recommendation, if of high authority, you may, it is true, gain access to a family of the middle class; and, once received, you will be well treated. But what conditions you must fulfill to gain that! You must ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... Man helped to produce alike the anarchy of the first French Revolution and the remedial despotism of the Jacobins and their successor Napoleon; and the oscillation between under-government and over-government, between individualism and socialism has continued to this day. Each coincides with obvious human interests: the blessed in possession prefer a policy of laissez faire; they are all for Liberty and Property, enjoying sufficient means for doing whatsoever they like with what they ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... 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 law of nature which sent the mentally and morally weak to the wall. I had read the book with interest, and had even written a rather ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... is a queer psychological state of mind; the abnormal is an extreme kind of individualism that is probably insane, provided the opposite ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... From their individualism, however, comes inevitably a keen spirit of competition (the more so because Scotch democracy gives fine chances to compete), and from their keen spirit of competition comes, inevitably again, an envious belittlement ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... the Redeemer of men might have appealed profoundly. But Isaac Hecker's problems were at this time mainly social; as, indeed, to use the word in a large sense, they remained until the end. Now, Protestantism is essentially unsocial, being an extravagant form of individualism. Its Christ deals with men apart from each other and furnishes no cohesive element to humanity. The validity and necessity of religious organization as a moral force of Divine appointment is that one of the Catholic principles which it has from the beginning ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... civilization, all the greater because its evil is probably not clearly seen. We are assured by our historians, who try to point out the causes for all the great convulsions in our career, that excessive individualism in property rights, with its selfish disregard of others, was a potent factor in the downfall of many of the enlightened nations of our antiquity. We have noticed that even our animals have the instinct of possession, ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... and sometimes the dwellers on one side of a river were forced to live nearer to each other than to the dwellers on the other. Every man shut himself up in his own house: and it seemed that this jealous individualism, instead of growing weaker after centuries of neighborhood, was stronger than ever. ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... grew fruit superior in taste to any apple which ever came from Hood River or Wenatchee, and could grow it again; but greed has determined that our cities shall pay five cents apiece for the showy western product, and the small individual grower of the East is helpless. We have raised individualism to a creed, and killed the individual. We have exalted "business," and depopulated our farms. The old gray ruin on the back road to Monterey is an epitome of our history for a ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... race has always run to individualism, and yet there is none which is capable of conceiving and carrying out a finer ideal of discipline. There is nothing in Roman or Grecian annals, not even the lava-baked sentry at Pompeii, which gives a more sternly fine object-lesson in duty than the young recruits of the ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... his head slowly. "So," he said softly. "Your lack of caution and discretion is more understandable, then. You have been quite fortunate, I should say. Of course, extreme individualism is far from common now, and persons who combine extreme individualism with high empathic power are rare, but they do appear. And they are dangerous in the highest degree." He spread ...
— The Best Made Plans • Everett B. Cole
... Guillaume, and others opposed this view with such heat, however, that Hales was forced to respond: "I combat anarchy because the word and the thing that it represents are the synonyms of dissolution. Anarchy spells individualism, and individualism is the basis of the existing society that we desire to destroy.... Let us suppose, for example, a strike. Can one hope to triumph with an anarchist organization? Under this regime each one, being able to do what he pleases, can, according to his will, work ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... members of the community through their standing as freeholders; the democratic influence of the United States told everywhere on their behalf; and even where hard work left little time for political discussion, the fact that local needs might be assisted by political discussion, and the stout individualism bred by the life of struggle in village, town, and country, forced the new settlers to interest themselves in politics. Many of the new arrivals had some pretensions to education—more especially those from Scotland. Indeed it is worthy of note that from the Scottish stream of immigration ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison
... and all-important occasion and provocative of these beliefs was actually the RISE OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS—that is, the coming of the mind to a more or less distinct awareness of itself and of its own operation, and the consequent development and growth of Individualism, and of the Self-centred attitude ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... free herself from this fettering life, where all is limitation and division. Its individualism appeared to her particularly clear when she thought of Owen. They had clasped and kissed in the hope to become part of the other's substance. They had sought to mingle, to become one; now it was in the hope of a union ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... man, and the elimination of governmental control. "Truth, Liberty, and Justice," form the motto over their door. Mr. Herne has won great distinction as a powerful and ready advocate of the single tax theory, and they are both personal valued friends of Mr. George. It is Ibsen's individualism as well as his truth that appeals so strongly to both Mr. and Mrs. Herne. They are in deadly earnest like Ibsen, and Margaret Fleming sprang directly from their radicalism on the woman question. The home of these extraordinary people is a charged battery radiating the most advanced ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... Economy is only the science of selfishness; Adam Smith is the prophet of individualism; grow rich per fas et nefas is its ultimate teaching. Such a judgment is evidence of much levity and little enlightenment. How could the man who conceived the study of human interests on so large a scale, the philosopher who acknowledged Hutcheson as his master ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... is perfectly true! Christianity was at first the most new, radical, original, anarchical force in the world—it was the purest individualism; it was meant to over-ride all human combinations by simply disregarding them; it was not a social reform, and still less a political reform; it was a new spirit, and it was meant to create a new kind ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... had done better than himself, but some had done as well. And in some way the old sense of oneness, the old community interest which had held the little band of pioneers together amid their privations and their poverty, began to weaken and dissolve, and in its place came an individualism and a materialism that measured progress only in dollars and cents. Harris did not know that his gods had fallen, that his ideals had been swept away; even as he sat at supper this summer evening, with his ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... myself to be a mere individual, the more I realised that I was bound up with humanity, one link in the chain, one organ belonging to the Universe. The philosophical Pantheism I was absorbed by, itself worked counter to the idea of individualism inherent in me, taught me and presented to me the union of all beings in Nature the All-Divine. But it was not from Pantheism that the crisis of my spiritual life proceeded; it was from the fountains of emotion which now shot up and filled my soul ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... much in common with rationalism. It shared with the latter its opposition to the whole administration of religion established by the State, its antagonism to the social distinctions which prevailed, its individualism, its emphasis upon the practical. It was part of a general religious reaction against ecclesiasticism, as were also Jansenism in France, and Methodism in England, and the Whitefieldian revival in America. But, through the ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... Marks, who thought it sheer idleness, was vociferous in objection. She would gladly have torn up all my writings and paintings, and have set me to a useful task. My Father, with his strong natural individualism, could not take this view. He was interested in this strange freak of mine, and he could not wholly condemn it. But he must have thought is a little crazy, and it is evident to me now that it led to the revolution in domestic policy by which he began to encourage any acquaintance with other ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... two dominant races in modern history—the Germanic and the Romanic races. The Germanic races tend to personal liberty, to a sturdy individualism, to civil and to political liberty. The Romanic race tends to absolutism in government; it is clannish; it loves chieftains; it develops a people that crave strong and showy governments to support and ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... interrupted Fenellan. 'As much of the former as you like. He 's right about our "individualismus" being another name for selfishness, and showing the usual deficiency in external features; it's an individualism of all of a pattern, as when a mob cuts its lucky, each fellow his own way. Well, then, conscript them, and they'll be all of a better pattern. The only thing to do, and the cheapest. By heaven! it's the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Individualism, the thing that lends something of greatness to each American, but which does not tend to the greatness of the nation, was the mainspring of this big man whom Nature had undoubtedly designed with her eye on the vast plains, virgin forests, and unfordable rivers, ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... of the Bonaparte family, Josephine, Hortense, Pauline, have all the grace and fascination of the earlier age, merge with it the abandon of the Directoire period, and touch the whole with the romanticism and individualism of the coming century. In terrible contrast with these lovely and alluring women of the new age, is the grim figure caught in a few masterly strokes by David, as Marie Antoinette, proud and unbending as ever, but shorn of all the glory of Versailles, her face haggard, her hair gray, dishevelled, ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... have seen it unmistakably, both as a schoolmaster and as a don—a different spirit has grown up, a sense of corporate and social duty, a larger idea of national service, not loudly advertised but deeply rooted, and far removed from the undisciplined individualism of my boyhood. It has been a secret growth, not an educational programme. The Boer War, I think, revealed its presence, and the war we are now waging has testified to its mature strength. It has ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... "glory as of an only begotten from a father." It is a family picture, so common in the East. Here in the West, the unit of society is the individual. The farther west you come the more pronounced this becomes, until here in our own land individualism seems at times to run to extremes. Custom in the East is the very reverse of this. There the unit of action is not the individual, but the family. The family controls the individual in everything. We Westerners think we can see where it runs to such extremes as to constitute one ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... something of a politician? He seems really to have wished his fellow-creatures to be fine, and to have been angry with them because they wished to be nothing of the sort. He did not understand that this passionate individualism, this sense of personal responsibility, this claim to private judgment, is what no modern State, be it democratic, bureaucratic or autocratic, can tolerate. Men long for the ease and assurance of conformity and so soon as they are sufficiently organized enforce it. Truth ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... beginning there has been no such thing as unmitigated individual struggle among animals. Nowhere in nature does pure individualism exist in the sense that the individual animal struggles alone, except perhaps in a few solitary species which are apparently on the way to extinction. The assumption of such a primitive individual struggle has been at the bottom of many erroneous views of human society. The primary conflict ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... was therefore increasingly marked by a spirit of individualism, a natural partiality for local rule, and a tenacious adherence to their special privileges, whether granted to Crown colonies, like New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, Virginia, the two Carolinas, and Georgia, or proprietary governments, like Maryland, ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck
... teachers, established by generous benefactions, are explicitly reserved for those who are on the faculties of institutions which formally dissociate themselves from any religious influence. I maintain that this is both unjust and against public policy. Under our present system of religious individualism and ecclesiastical multiplicity, approximations only are possible, but I believe the wise and just plan would be for the state to fix certain standards which all schools receiving financial support from the public funds must maintain, and then, this ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... new form of teaching which will, so to speak, "fit the feet of the wearers"? Then all questions of divorce could be settled by noble and exalted feeling and desire to do right and elevate the nation. But meanwhile, with the growth and encouragement of individualism, every little unit is giving forth his personal view (as I am doing in this paper!), perhaps many of them without the slightest faculty for looking ahead, or knowledge of how to make deductions from past events, or other countries' experiences; and the Church is preaching one thing, ...
— Three Things • Elinor Glyn
... spend. And all your dreams of brotherhood!—we will set you by the ears. We hold ourselves up as my little Christian nephews—Philip's boys—do some coveted object, and say Quis? and the whole brotherhood shouts 'Ego!' to the challenge.... Back you go into Individualism at the word and all your Brotherhood crumbles ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... liberalizing tendency; nevertheless it was mainly in the field of Unitarianism that literature flourished, as was natural, and Transcendentalism was a phenomenon that grew out of Unitarianism, being indeed the excess of the movement of enlightenment and the extreme limit of intuitionalism, individualism and private judgment. These two factors, religion and scholarship, gave to New England literature its serious stamp and academic quality; but the preparatory stage being longer, it was slower to emerge than the literature of the rest of the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... priesthood," paralysed with the cant of hireling clergy; "a holy nation," rotten with the luxury of wealth, or embittered by the sting of poverty; "a peculiar people," deformed to Lucifer's own pleasure by the curse of caste; while, in this pandemonium of Individualism, the weak, the diffident, the scrupulous, and the afflicted, are thrust aside ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy |
