"Egoist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... are now face to face with an "egoist" system par excellence. It is, perhaps, the only one that the history of human thought has to chronicle. The French Materialists of the last century have been accused of preaching egoism. The accusation was quite wrong. The French Materialists always preached "Virtue," ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff
... are very impertinent. I don't wish to talk about myself. Just because I asked your advice in my difficulties, you assume that I'm a little egoist—" ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... originality, involved the surrender of some of the glories of spontaneous song, but opened the way, for consummate artists such as these, to a profusion of undiscovered beauty, and to a peculiar grandeur not to be attained by the egoist. Leconte's temperament leads him to subjects which are already instinct with tragedy and thus in his hands assume this grandeur without effort. The power of sheer style to ennoble is better seen in Sully Prudhomme's ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... you see? It's what we've been talking about. You made her in love with your goodness. And she was in love with it, not because it was your goodness, but because it was her own. That's why she wanted to marry it. She couldn't be in love with it for any other reason, because she's an egoist." ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... developed one. While the units of which it is composed have distinct and independent lives within certain limits, they are, outside of those limits, interdependent and inter-related. Man is governed by two great forces. On the one hand, he is essentially an egoist, ever striving to attain individual freedom; on the other hand, he is a social animal, ever seeking association and avoiding isolation. This duality expresses itself in the life of society. There is a struggle between its members motived by the desire for individual expression ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... his wife." He was not really more of an egoist than the average man, but he did assume that if he wanted her he could win her. His mistress was very young: it was her rose of youth and her unquelled spirit that charmed him even more than her beauty: and she had not sixpence to her name, while he was a rich man. He did not, as Bernard ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... instincts—to choose the finest mate for her nest-building. She'll marry again, though the dear woman doesn't know it, and would be horrified at the thought. But she will, and it won't be either of us—we are too much her kind. It will be some other brilliant egoist who will thrill her, grind her heart, and give her wonderful children. She is an instrument. As I think I once heard poor Byrd say, she is not merely an expression ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... Dawn. Emmanuel, too, had come from his far-off home to flush America's spiritual darkness with a new light. He had written much about our shortage of genuine spiritual values; about "the continual frustrations and aridities of American life." He was a member of various groups—the Imagist group, the Egoist group, the Sphericists, other groups piquantly named; versed in the new psychology, playing upon the word "pragmatism" as ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... the egoist. "That's a parable of the general situation in England. And look at those brutes!" A huge household removals van was halted at a public-house. The men in charge were drinking beer from blue and white mugs. It seemed to me a pretty sight, but Penfentenyou said it represented ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... looking at you two. You are the very portrait of him, and not so much in face as in soul. You are both melancholy, both morose and hot-tempered, both haughty and both generous.... Surely he can't be an egoist, Dounia. Eh? When I think of what is in store for us this evening, my ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... hinder the development of civism, and the first is egoism. Whilst the citizen prefers the community to himself, the egoist prefers himself to the community. He cares only for his own interest, he gives no heed to public necessities; he sees none of the superior rights which take precedence of his derived right; he supposes that his property is his own without ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... with artists in Germany; Hugo Wolf is another example of it. Mahler's case is really rather curious. When one studies his works one feels convinced that he is one of those rare types in modern Germany—an egoist who feels with sincerity. Perhaps his emotions and his ideas do not succeed in expressing themselves in a really sincere and personal way; for they reach us through a cloud of reminiscences and an atmosphere ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... the Bulgars behaved toward the Russians, a foreign and therefore perhaps neutral diplomat replied: "The Bulgar will not do anything for people in distress. He is an egoist. He'll let his own father starve rather than sacrifice anything of his own. He has cause to be eternally grateful to the Russians, and now he has a chance to pay back something of what he owes, but not he. He treats the Russian as a beggar and an inferior, just because ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... always the bad nigger who gets religion most strongly at the camp-meeting, and in my case 'getting religion' had taken the form of suppression of self. I never have been able to do things by halves, or even with a decent moderation. As an egoist I had been thorough in my egoism; and now, fate having bludgeoned that vice out of me, I found myself possessed of an almost morbid sympathy with ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... than the purely productive is possible to him; all in him tends to absolute, pure production, and yet he has never yet concentrated his whole power of will on the production of a great work. Is he, with all his individuality, too little of an egoist? Is he too full of love, and does he resemble Jesus on the Cross, Who helps every one ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... like all timid creatures, he kept silence as to his pain; and so by degrees schooled himself to hide his feelings, and learned to take sanctuary in his inmost self. Many superficial persons interpret this conduct by the short word "selfishness;" and, indeed, the resemblance between the egoist and the solitary human creature is strong enough to seem to justify the harsher verdict; and this is especially true in Paris, where nobody observes others closely, where all things pass swift as waves, and last ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... an egoist by nature, the egoist par excellence. A thousand traits show that this kind of men have no point of contact with the rest of humanity. There was demanded of Charles II. the punishment of Lauderdale, his favorite, who had infamously oppressed the Scotch. "Yes," said Charles coolly, "this man has ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... all, is cut off there and besieged. They have rations (some say half rations) for six weeks or two months, and ammunition. They are being bombarded, and have been attacked once, but repelled it easily. We aren't worried about them; but I with my leg (like another egoist) can't be sorry to be out of it. I should like to be there to mother my men. Our Major is wounded and the other officers infants; the Captain a Colonial one ...
— Letters from Mesopotamia • Robert Palmer
... if I forgot The Egoist. It is art, if you like, but it belongs purely to didactic art, and from all the novels I have read (and I have read thousands) stands in a place by itself. Here is a Nathan for the modern David; here is a book to send the blood into men's faces. Satire, the angry ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... novels, of which "David Copperfield" may be taken as an example, has chosen to tell the entire life-story of his hero from birth up to maturity. But other novelists, like George Meredith in "The Egoist," have chosen to represent events that pass, for the most part, in one place, and in an exceedingly short stretch of time. It is by no means certain that Meredith does not know as much about the boyhood and youth of Sir Willoughby Patterne as Dickens knew ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... Helena. Even her fastidiousness was natural in view of her upbringing. She was a most practical young flirt, with a very distinct intention of having her own way as long as she lived. The wealth and petting and adulation which had surrounded her from birth had made a thorough-going egoist of her, albeit a most charming one; for she was warm-hearted, impulsive, generous, and kind—in her own way. Naturally the men for whom her lovely eyes beamed welcome, for whom her tantalising mouth pouted into smiles, thought her nothing short of ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... character-sketching. His schoolboy of seventeen, Eddie Durwold, is in this book particularly good. It is the things that these people do that bothers me. And if I might venture to rename The Business of a Gentleman the title I should choose is "The Escapade of an Egoist." ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 11, 1914 • Various
... for a few months, her husband: and then, as the men bowed, pencilling on their programmes, over their shoulders I saw her eyes travel to an awkward young naval cadet (Do you remember Crossjay in Meredith's "The Egoist"? It was just such a boy) who sat abashed and glowering sulkily beside me on the far bench. Promptly with a laugh, she advanced, claimed him, and swept him off into ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... countryman's nose was hard to overcome. Never in all his life had he listened to such a frankly cold-blooded argument as that put forth by the insufferable Knicker-bocker. In the end the big New Yorker saw only the laughable side of the little New Yorker's plight. After all, he was a harmless egoist, from whom no girl could expect much in the way of recompense. It mattered little who the girl of the moment might be, she could not hope to or even seek to hold his perambulatory affections. "He's a single example of a great New York class," reflected Brock. ...
— The Husbands of Edith • George Barr McCutcheon
... Minoret's build, and Minoret's wealth, at the head of such an establishment might well be called, without contradiction, the master of Nemours. Though he never thought of God or devil, being a practical materialist, just as he was a practical agriculturist, a practical egoist, and a practical miser, Minoret had enjoyed up to this time a life of unmixed happiness,—if we can call pure materialism happiness. A physiologist, observing the rolls of flesh which covered the ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... might think he didn't know how funny his father was, and he had to show her. It wasn't decent of him. Barbara didn't approve of young Horace; yet she couldn't resist him; his eyes and mouth were full, like Ralph's, of such intelligent yet irresponsible joy. He wanted her to share it. He was an egoist like his father; but he had something of his mother's charm, something of ...
— Mr. Waddington of Wyck • May Sinclair
... hardly one of us who is proof against this sort of intellectual snobbery. A detective story may have been a very good friend to us, but we don't want to drag it into the conversation; we prefer a casual reference to The Egoist, with which we have perhaps only a bowing acquaintance; a reference which leaves the impression that we are inseparable companions, or at any rate inseparable until such day when we gather from our betters that there are heights even ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... course of professional training, and is valued as a professional asset. But his supernaturalism at its best is devoid of spiritual quality. His "spiritual facts" are collections of miraculous coincidences raked together by the anteater's tongue of a cool egoist, ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... away with the misconception that Narcissus was ever base to a woman. No! he left that to Circe's hogs, and the one temptation he ever had towards it he turned into a shining salvation. No! he had nothing worse than the sins of the young egoist to answer for, though he afterwards came to feel those pitiful and ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... guardian he might have taken her to Sidi-bel-Abbes himself, and persuaded his old friend, DeLisle, to be lenient. All that Max had heard against the explorer came back to him, and he was ready to believe Stanton the cruel and selfish egoist that gossip sketched ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... madman?" he thought with vexation. "I, who try not to disturb my fellow-passengers in any way, or this egoist who thinks that he is cleverer and more interesting than anyone here, and so will ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... through just that vein of conversation, half sentimentalising, half sensible, all profligate, which seldom fails to win the ear of a man both of imagination and of the world. "I will not; and, to vary the topic, I will turn egoist, and tell ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... said again; but the words glided, with a perfunctory grace, on the surface of emotion. Suppose that what he said was true, she told herself; suppose that it was really "over"; suppose that she also recognized only the egoist's view of duty—of the paramount duty to one's own inclinations; suppose—"Oh, am I so different from him?" she thought, "why cannot I also mistake the urging of desire for the command of conscience—or at least call it that in my mind?" ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... now?" Stella rose with her promptness, and, going to the piano, plunged at once into the opening bars. Although the composer was not an egoist, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various |
