"Egoism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... duty,' I thought; 'I have overcome my own egoism; I have urged Andrei to go back to Varia!... Now I am in the right; he that will not when he may...!' At the same time Andrei's indifference wounded me. He had not been jealous of me, he told me to console her.... But ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... however, that we should abandon the old sages' desire for "agreement"; and even though we may not be entitled to expect such perfect "agreement" as they derived from their pardonable egoism, we may still look for agreement of a provisional, conditional kind. And although such "agreement" be not the last word of morality, it is none the less indispensable that we should begin by being as just as we possibly can within ourselves and to ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... not—as you have so unjustly hinted—because I had given it to another man, but because I was then incapable of love. I had no thought of any one beyond myself. I was miserably ignorant and egoistic. It was in ignorance and egoism that I took the position of your wife, but I think from the first that I have tried, as I could, to fulfil its obligations. I have tried to be and to appear what you would wish. And I am not unmindful of the honor and distinction which my marriage ...
— A Manifest Destiny • Julia Magruder
... egoism, his years of heart-ache, sorrows, and shames, the priest's heavy thought slowly lifted and centered upon the child's beautiful face. The animated little figure before him radiated such abundant life that he himself caught the infection; and with it his sense ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... simian chivalry. It is notorious 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 trusted ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... 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 his Church ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... intensity, insensibility to fatigue, the "roughing it" of the mind. He did not want to rough it. Nor was he greatly talented. But he was just sharp enough to see, as he believed, a short and perhaps easy way to a thing that his conceit desired and that his egoism felt it could love. Being only a boy, he had never, till this time, deliberately looked on life as anything. Now he set himself, in his, at first, youthful way, to look on it as burlesque—to see it in ...
— The Folly Of Eustace - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... threatening? In this literature of mysteries of iniquity, which talent and imagination have made fashionable, we prefer the mild, attractive figures to the villains for dramatic effect. The former may undertake and effect conversions, the others cause fear, and fear does not cure egoism, but increases it. ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... doubts felt by Madame 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 ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 10: Auguste Comte • John Morley
... 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 fly on his nose. We ought to wait until need and privation announce ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy • Arthur Schopenhauer
... 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 come to admire. Don ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... 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 favours too dear. Selfishness is calm, a force of nature: you might say the trees were selfish. But egoism is a piece of vanity; it must always take you into its confidence; it is uneasy, troublesome, seeking; it can do good, but not handsomely; it is uglier, because less dignified, than selfishness itself. But here I perhaps exaggerate to myself, because I am the one more than the other, and feel ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... should admire her, and desire to make her his own for ever. Compare this simple and natural longing with the insatiate greed and ambition of one of our own sex, I urged him, and then talk to me, if you can, of this poor girl's selfishness! A young man has more egoism in an hour than a young girl has in her whole life. She thinks she wishes some one to be devoted to her, but she really wishes some one to let her be devoted to him; and how passively, how negatively, she must manage to accomplish her ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... pursuit of Annie. Each was profoundly hurt by the accusations, and each, in the immense fatuity of his pride, had privately sworn to prove his innocence by having nothing more to do with Annie. Such is life! Such is man! Such is the terrible egoism of man! And thus it was that, for the sake of wounded pride, John and Robert not only did not speak to one another for ten years, but they spoilt at least one of their lives; and they behaved ignobly to Annie, who ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... that fit us 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 ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... Baptists he seemed so stolid and matter-of-fact, he was truly suffering storms of emotion. He fell a prey to old illusions; that unreasoning fear returned; he was thrown back into the state of terrified egoism which rendered lofty impersonal meditation ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... Uncle Ned's humour had failed to move the brutal egoism of his brother, beating upon it like the lightest of sea-foam on a rock of basalt, he was made to fall back upon the alternative of heavy denunciation. And it was significant that this commonplace tirade drew more applause than all the pretty wit that had gone before it. Seldom have I ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, April 7, 1920 • Various
... thought-force in a potential state, just as the seed of a 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, ...
— Reincarnation • Swami Abhedananda
... 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, ...
— A Hero of Our Time • M. Y. Lermontov
... an irregular life, play, and countless other costly follies have robbed of all dignity. Between his appetites and his role of father he has decided for the former, and he slowly drifts toward the most abject egoism. ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... idols of their 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
... 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 desperate situation clearly, and to a young man ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... a spiritual ingredient, composed, when one comes to analyse it, of two chemical elements; of what might be called aesthetic egoism and of what we know as philosophic scepticism. Let us deal with the former of these ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... for Merthyr, she would forecast for herself tasks in his service impossible save to one sensually dead and therefore spiritually sexless. "My love is pure," she would say; as if that were the talisman which rendered it superhuman. She was under the delusion that lovers' love was a reprehensible egoism. Her heart had never had place for it; and thus her nature was unconsummated, and the torment of a haunting insufficiency accompanied her sweetest hours, ready to mislead her in ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... you know, 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 impulse, not reflecting that it was ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... 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 ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... great vitality.] I'm nothing of the sort. It's my egoism's dead ... that's an intimation ...
— Waste - A Tragedy, In Four Acts • Granville Barker
... Erich Schmidt, 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 ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... Dick. "It was him or us, you know. And there's not much egoism in saying we're better worth keeping, ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... irresistible. Now I would challenge those who knew him to say whether they ever knew any other man so free from this great human infirmity as Tennyson. The way in which his simplicity of nature would manifest itself was, in some instances, most remarkable. Though, of course, he had his share of that egoism of the artist without which imaginative genius may become sterile, it seemed impossible for him to realize what a transcendent position he took among contemporary writers all over the world. “Poets,” ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... by my visible madness. I have been vile but I have never had a vile thought. I fancy you understand this. And when I am writing my ego does not exist at all—my worst enemies have never accused me of the egoism common to poets. I have lived in another realm, where I have remembered nothing of this. Had it been otherwise no doubt I should have put it all at an end ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... eyes. He had still to learn that when a woman thinks better of her folly, she thinks better of her love; but one thing he understood—he saw that he was no longer the Lucien of Angouleme. Louise talked of herself, of her interests, her reputation, and of the world; and, to veil her egoism, she tried to make him believe that this was all on his account. He had no claim upon Louise thus suddenly transformed into Mme. de Bargeton, and, more serious still, he had no power over her. He could not keep back the tears ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... 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 flesh and ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... man, with full lips and a sweet smile; very plain and rough in his exterior, but with that solid imperturbable ease and good-humor which is infectious, and like great grassy hills in the sunshine, quiets even an irritated egoism, and makes it rather ashamed of itself. "Well, how are you?" he said, showing a hand not quite fit to be grasped. "Sorry I missed you before. Is there anything particular? ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... interested him, and led him into trying to reconstruct the whole story, and especially to imagine how the victims must have felt at the moment of being hurled into the air. There was a charm and a satisfaction in this for him which held him intent on the picture a long time; with all his egoism, he belonged to the numerous class who find more to think about in other people's fate, especially when it is strikingly ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... 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, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... past life, and scarce a name, should ever cross his lips. A profound reserve kept watch upon his most unguarded moments. He spoke continually of himself, indeed, but still in enigmas; a veiled prophet of egoism. ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to be beautiful. The story 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 task? But in his present mood the ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... she suffices to 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 ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... only one feeling had reached its full possibilities in her as yet—hatred for her benefactor. Other more feminine passions might indeed flare up in Olga Ivanovna's heart with abnormal and painful violence... but she had not the cold pride, nor the intense strength of will, nor the self-centred egoism, without which ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... and best of us are monsters of iniquity and egoism, cruelty and corruption; and our planet (a very heaven for warmth and brilliancy and beauty, in spite of earthquakes and cyclones and tornadoes) is a very hell through the creatures that people it—a shambles, a place of torture, ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... if she did. Such is the egoism of untried love that I did not care if she did! And I lapsed into a reverie—a reverie in which everything went smoothly, everything was for the best in the best of all possible worlds, and only ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett
... carry on Nature's work. I loved comfort, and I could afford to have it. From the moment I came of age and relieved my trustees of the care of my money, I wrapped myself in comfort as in a garment. I wallowed in egoism. In fact, if, between my twenty-first and my twenty-fifth birthdays, I had one unselfish thought, or did one genuinely unselfish action, my memory is a ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... we know. These relations when established compel us to acknowledge our duties to one another and give us a delight in discharging them. This delight in turn becomes the power, which opens the eyes to the realization of the great principle of self-sacrifice. Egoism and altruism are not to be mutually exclusive. To seek our own happiness is not to be indifferent to the happiness of society. For what is happiness? not pleasure, but self-realization, and we cannot realise ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll
... 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 ...
— Christmas - A Story • Zona Gale
... graceful attentions, the wittily-turned phrases, and the kindly deeds, which used to make the web of their characters, were seen as if thrust asunder by a microscopic vision, that showed all the intermediate frivolities, all the suppressed egoism, all the struggling chaos of puerilities, meanness, vague capricious memories, and indolent make-shift thoughts, from which human words and deeds emerge like ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... conversation equally lucky occasions for the introduction of that which he has to say. The favorites of society, and what it calls whole souls, are able men, and of more spirit than wit, who have no uncomfortable egoism, but who exactly fill the hour and the company, contented and contenting, at a marriage or a funeral, a ball or a jury, a water ...
— The Etiquette of To-day • Edith B. Ordway
... was 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 to that sweet pressure. Strangely enough ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... Where are they who like Brunhilda abandon their knowledge to love, and finally rob their lives of the highest wisdom, "afflicted love, deepest sorrow, opened my eyes"? and where are the free and fearless, developing and blossoming in innocent egoism? and where are the Siegfrieds, ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Bartley's egoism was slightly deflated. Then Dorothy had come to town to buy a few trinkets, and not to find out how ...
— Partners of Chance • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... 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 ...
— The Balkan Wars: 1912-1913 - Third Edition • Jacob Gould Schurman
... 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
... 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
... 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
... desires, is divided into five species, and the phenomena of the fourth genus, affection, are subdivided into two other species, amongst which is the love of oneself—a legitimate propensity, no doubt, but one which, when it becomes exaggerated, takes the name of egoism. ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... justified merely on the ground that it is explicable. But to explain was something—all but everything at the time of her appearance in literature. Every novel she wrote made for charity—for a better acquaintance with our neighbour's woes and our own egoism. Such an attitude of mind is only possible to an absolutely frank, even Arcadian, nature. She did what she wished to do: she said what she had to say, not because she wanted to provoke excitement or astonish the multitude, but because she had succeeded eminently in leading her own life according ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... 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 ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... opposition to all others: but I consider him entirely unlikely to accomplish anything considerable, except some kind of crabbed, semi-perverse, though still manful existence of his own; which indeed is no despicable thing. His "more than prophetic egoism,"—alas, yes! It is of such material that Thebaid Eremites, Sect-founders, and all manner of cross-grained fanatical monstrosities have fashioned themselves, —in very high, and in the highest regions, for that matter. Sect-founders withal are a class I do not like. ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... 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
... metaphysicians, too, have religious needs and may have warm hearts. At the same time I will not deny that I prefer the northern variety of Buddhism, because I seem to myself to detect in the southern Buddhism a touch of a highly-refined egoism. Self-culture may or may not be combined with self-sacrifice. In the case of the Buddha it was no doubt so combined, as the following passage, indited by ...
— The Reconciliation of Races and Religions • Thomas Kelly Cheyne
... solved it by heroic measures. The whole catastrophe is determined by Rosmer's inability to accept without proof Rebecca's declaration that Rosmersholm has "ennobled" her, and that she is no longer the same woman whose relentless egoism drove Beata into the mill-race. Rebecca herself puts it to him: "How can you believe me on my bare word after to-day?" There is only one proof she can give—that of "going the way Beata went." She gives it: and Rosmer, who cannot believe her if she lives, and ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... in the case of the giraffe, or a wing shorter than usual in the case of an insect on an island. The whole theory of struggle, as formulated by Darwin, is, therefore, a violent assumption. Men of science now recognize that "egoism and struggle play a very subordinate part in organic development, in comparison with co-operation and social action." What, indeed, but a surrender of the paramountcy of struggle for life, is Huxley's celebrated Romanes lecture in which he supplants the cosmic process by the ethical? ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... the elementary types. We need here only to examine the simplest reactions 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, the retrospective form, of the tendencies; and this ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... the 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 bankruptcy of science, go back ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... 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 immediate interest, ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... be friendly, 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 blessed me with its hopeful, tuneful tone By feigned indiff'rence, ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... at the same time the true path of virtue; in fact, that in so far as there has been virtue in the world hitherto, it has just consisted in such striving. Not one of those ponderous, conscience-stricken herding-animals (who undertake to advocate the cause of egoism as conducive to the general welfare) wants to have any knowledge or inkling of the facts that the "general welfare" is no ideal, no goal, no notion that can be at all grasped, but is only a nostrum,—that what is ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... 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 ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... a faithful picture of the brilliant Court at which she was for long the most lustrous ornament. It is only by stray touches, a casual remark, a chance phrase, that we, as it were, gauge her temperament in all its wiliness, its egoism, its love of supremacy, and its shallow worldly wisdom. Yet it could have been no ordinary woman that held the handsome Louis so long her captive. The fair Marquise was more than a mere leader of wit and fashion. ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... love in order to save it from hatred. When the irritating object is a personal one the rights, the well-being, of that one must gain some consideration. There will be but little feeling of altruism in children under thirteen; we must not expect it; but egoism is one way to an understanding of the rights, the feelings, and needs of others. The child can put himself in the other's place. He is capable of affection; he loves and is willing to sacrifice for those he ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... Galbraith, fair though she was, had never set foot. No woman had crossed that magic threshold until now, when her presence stirred all the blended emotions of his manhood. Humility, tenderness, reverence possessed him; self descended from its throne of egoism and yielded its scepter to another; the hot blood of the primitive, untamed Viking raced in his veins. Soul, mind, heart, body were all awakened. He was a dolt who confused genuine passion with the milder preferences of ...
— Flood Tide • Sara Ware Bassett
... in the world than prejudice. When he came to preach the abolition of war, first through an alliance of Britain, America and France, and then through "a confederation of nations" and a European Congress, he saw the obstacle in the egoism of courts and courtiers which appear to quarrel but agree to plunder. Another seven years, he wrote in 1792, would see the end of monarchy and aristocracy in Europe. While they continue, with war as their trade, peace has not the security of ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... its task during the nineteenth century Rationalism was an intensely emotional movement. Mr G. K. Chesterton, in his Victorian Age in Literature, speaks of J. S. Mill's "hard rationalism in religion" and "hard egoism in ethics." Like very many other statements in that lamentable book, these are inexplicably unjust. Mill was so far from being "hard" in religion that he ended his days in a kind of sentimental theism; he was so far from being ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe
... three factors against which the old General has had to fight all his life long—against well-meaning hesitation, against hard-hearted egoism, and against the idle indifference born of ignorance. And these three streams that have flowed against him in every part of the world have not been able to hold him back. To those who think he has only become an important man, and to those who measure ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... expression, she had found herself precipitated at a moment's notice into the crowd of mankind. It is strange how the death of Henry Allegre, which certainly the poor man had not planned, acquired in my view the character of a heartless desertion. It gave one a glimpse of amazing egoism in a sentiment to which one could hardly give a name, a mysterious appropriation of one human being by another as if in defiance of unexpressed things and for an unheard-of satisfaction of an inconceivable pride. If he had hated her he could not have flung that enormous ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... preached on the 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 fearlessly, with an unyielding, but never violent, ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... matter of messages upon pigeons, of course attributed to earthly owners, but said to be undecipherable. I'd do it, ourselves, only that would be selfish. That's more of the Intermediatism that will keep us out of the firmament: Positivism is absolute egoism. But look back in the time of Andree's Polar Expedition. Pigeons that would have no publicity ordinarily, were often ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... 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
... in the intensity 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 to rejoicing that things ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... of strength, which subsequently won for him his unique place, that he was always too much interested in estimating the man to whom he was talking, to consider even what the other might think of him. It was at once a form of egoism, and the total negation of egotism. It made him the least self-conscious of human beings. And old Horace Vanney, pompous, vain, the most self-conscious of his genus, felt, though he could not analyze, ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... 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 nor horror were in it; only wonder, admiration, and ...
— The Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... 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
... Mill was the final flower of that growth. He was himself fresh and delicate and pure; but that is the business of a flower. Though he had to preach a hard rationalism in religion, a hard competition in economics, a hard egoism in ethics, his own soul had all that silvery sensitiveness that can be seen in his fine portrait by Watts. He boasted none of that brutal optimism with which his friends and followers of the Manchester ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... however, that, considering the tendency of the time to 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
... He cared no more for money after he began to make it than he 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
... partners in everything), she became versed in the classics and delved deeply into the literature of a time long past. Unlike her mother, Mary Shelley could do no great work alone. The sensitiveness and the delicacy of her nature precluded that self-reliant egoism which can create. She wrote one book, "Frankenstein," which in point of prophetic and allegorical suggestion stamps the work as classic: but it was written under the immediate spell of Shelley's presence. Shelley also could not work alone, and without ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... severely, if they were other than a credit 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
... enjoyment of fame; and having opened it, 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
... egoism would not have bestowed a thought at such a moment on the possibility of the Vicomte, M. de Comaing, or anyone else appearing on the scene. But Frederick had been too many times the dupe of these very glances to compromise ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... circumstances—unselfish. A faint flush swept into Brigit's face under the effect of an experience so novel. Their twofold consciousness had all the pathos of self-effacement, and all the thrill of satisfied egoism. Such instants cannot last, and they are shortest when one's habits of thought are antagonistic to such luxury. Brigit sighed deeply, and roused herself with a painful sense that the minute she wilfully cut short had been the sweetest ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... would advise it, 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 ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... Eleanor comprehended how far behind she really was in this warfare between egotism and egoism. She began to understand that the first expressed stubbornness and selfishness which eventually would result in unhappiness for all concerned; while egoism meant exactly what Polly was trying to demonstrate for herself—that upright fearless stand for Truth, and the sacrifice of everything that interfered with the perfect working ...
— Polly and Eleanor • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... 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 ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... interests of men of a better sort quite as 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 ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... proteges,—a place, moreover, where they teased and hated each other, and yet felt a certain comradeship, colder than that of a regiment, which itself is less hearty than that of seminaries. As a man advances in life he grows more selfish; egoism develops, and relaxes all the secondary bonds of affection. A government office is, in short, a microcosm of society, with its oddities and hatreds, its envy and its cupidity, its determination to push on, no matter who goes under, ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... 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, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of the army of Independence. Until quite recently this portrait's features had been well-nigh extinguished under the accumulated soot and tarnish of many decades, but Eben had revered them with that veneration of ancestor-worship which is an egoism overflowing the boundaries of a single generation. Lately Conscience had had the picture restored and now the renovated forebear, almost jaunty in his refurbishing, looked down on his descendant and the descendant's ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... in my opinion, many men fall into this reticence because as they grow older the question seems to settle itself without argument, and they cease by degrees to worry themselves about it. It dies in sensible men almost insensibly with the death of egoism. At twenty we are all furious egoists; at forty or thereabouts—and especially if we have children, as at forty every man ought—our centre of gravity has completely shifted. We care a great deal about what happens ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... he was mastered by a healthier 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 no item of her duty to escape her, and moved about the house as usual, sternly observant of ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... intrusive subscription agent. In some ways, he is undoubtedly the oldest man in the world. In another way he hasn't any age at all. Spiritually he is unborn—he simply doesn't exist at all. I diagnose his complaint as ingrowing egoism of a ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... 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 ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... not 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 oneself ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... figures of Alceste and Tartuffe has summarised and 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 ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... 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. Ardent in the ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... marriage and political activity. He wished everything, but resolved on nothing. At that time his college chums asked him for money for a common cause. He knew what that common cause was, and at the time took no interest in it whatever, but from a feeling of fellowship and egoism gave the money, that it might not be thought that he was afraid. Those who took the money were arrested; a note was found from which it was learned that the money had been given by Kryltzoff. He was arrested, taken to the police station, then ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... of us, we bruise so easily," she had said with a laugh that was more than half a sob. And for his mother's sake he had vowed to be gentle to all women who might cross his path. And how had he kept his vow? Tonight his egoism had swallowed his oath and he had fled like a coward to be alone with his misery. A great sob rose in his throat. Craven by name and craven by nature he thought bitterly and he cursed again the father who had bequeathed him such an inheritance, but as he did so he ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... tribalism to which she was, from of old, only too prone. The Pan-Germans were the Uhlans, the stormy petrels, of the movement; but the whole mind of the nation was in reality carried away by it, save for a very small section which was conscious of its dangers and feebly protested. The egoism of which she was constantly accusing other nations, ran riot in her own breast, was elevated into a political virtue, and expressed itself on the spiritual side in a towering racial vanity. The word ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various
... counters and small jests; he will give you the best of himself, like one interested in life and man's chief end. A Scotsman is vain, interested in himself and others, eager for sympathy, setting forth his thoughts and experience in the best light. The egoism of the Englishman is self-contained. He does not seek to proselytise. He takes no interest in Scotland or the Scots, and, what is the unkindest cut of all, he does not care to justify his indifference. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of its members... But as we shall presently see, the conditions of ant-society that most deserve our attention are the ethical conditions; and these are beyond human criticism, since they realize that ideal of moral evolution described by Mr. Spencer as "a state in which egoism and altruism are so conciliated that the one merges into the other." That is to say, a state in which the only possible pleasure is the pleasure of unselfish action. Or, again to quote Mr. Spencer, the activities of the insect-society ...
— Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things • Lafcadio Hearn
... a deadly criminality not with high life or the slums (the usual haunts for villains) but with the laborious respectability of the lower, middle classes. The other good conception is the boy, Bradley Headstone's pupil, with his dull, inexhaustible egoism, his pert, unconscious cruelty, and the strict decorum and incredible baseness of his views of life. It is singular that Dickens, who was not only a radical and a social reformer, but one who would have been particularly concerned to maintain the principle of ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... refreshing to come upon the other characters, who are of a different breed to these shop-keepers. The vodka-loving, jolly father of Polja (Bezemenov's niece, who is exploited and maltreated in this house), is, in his contented yet sentimental egoism, a true representative of the ordinary Russian, the common man. And Polja! And Nil! . . . Here is the fresh blood of the future. How sure they both are in their love. "Ah! what a beautiful world it is, isn't it? Wondrously beautiful . . . dear friend. . . ...
— Maxim Gorki • Hans Ostwald
... himself said of her, when she was only fifteen: "Her 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 occupy her full attention; while her unworthy treatment ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... before the work of building was completed, has brought about what Gilbert Murray in speaking of Greek thought calls the failure of nerve. In the seventeenth century men still had the courage of their egoism. The world was a bad job to be made the best of, all hope lay in driving a good bargain with the conductors of life everlasting. By the end of the nineteenth century the life everlasting had grown cobwebby, ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... is natural, deal chiefly with the desires and hopes of the worshiper, and often do not rise above mere egoism. Their object is to secure blessing, and the blessing is often, perhaps generally, of a nonmoral character—wealth, children, triumph over enemies. Desire for moral purity appears in some Hebrew hymns, and perhaps in some Babylonian. Of ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... 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 ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... rhetorical. Like Voltaire, who inaugurated modern history, Sallust thought more of style than of accuracy as to facts. He was a party man, and never soared beyond his party. He aped the moralist, but exalted egoism and love of pleasure into proper springs of action, and honored talent disconnected with virtue. Like Carlyle, Sallust exalted strong men, and because they were strong. He was not comprehensive like Cicero, or philosophical like Thucydides, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord |
