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Individualistic   Listen
adjective
Individualistic  adj.  
1.
Of or pertaining to the individual or individualism.
2.
Exhibiting marked individuality (3) in thought and action; as, an individualistic way of dressing.
Synonyms: individualist.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Individualistic" Quotes from Famous Books



... state is the most indispensable as well as highest requisite of our earthly existence.... All individualistic endeavor must be unreservedly subordinated to this lofty claim.... The state eventually is of infinitely more value than the sum of the individuals within its jurisdiction. This conception of the state which is as much ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman

... illustration of this fact is to be seen in the expanding ideals of missionary work. When the missionaries first went to the ends of the earth they went to save souls one by one. They went out generally with a distinctly, often narrowly, individualistic motive. They were trying to gather into the ark a few redeemed spirits out of the wreck of a perishing world; they were not thinking primarily of building a kingdom of social righteousness in the earth. Consider, then, the fascinating story of the way the missionaries, whatever may have been the ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick

... expect, the performances and performers of magic have been most vigorously discountenanced and outlawed. The interests of religion and its officials are wholly antagonistic to those of magic and magicians. In civilised communities and in historical times magic is in the main individualistic, not social; magical ceremonies for the good of the community seem to be confined to races in a very early stage of development. The examples on which Dr. Frazer relies for his theory of the development of the public magician into a king[84] are of this primitive kind, or ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler

... head of the most scientific state that the world has seen. In many ways Germany, with an intelligent, economical, and uncorrupt Government, was a model to the rest of the world. But the whole structure was menaced by that form of individualistic materialism which calls itself social democracy, and which in practice is at once the copy of organic materialism and the reaction against it. The motives for drilling a whole nation in the pursuit of purely national and purely materialistic aims are not strong enough to prevent ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge

... other hand, if Jeffersonian democracy was the representative of all the individualistic tendencies of the later science of political economy, Hamiltonian federalism represented the necessary corrective force of law. It was in many respects a strong survival of colonialism. Together with some of the evil features of colonialism, ...
— American Eloquence, Volume I. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various

... art, by which personal impressions of nature or human life may be expressed as truly as by the brush. These workers in photography see in it a medium by which the action of light upon sensitive surfaces may be so controlled as really to interpret scenes and persons in the individualistic spirit of a true art. From every part of our country come evidences of the growing appreciation of photography as a pictorial medium. Exhibitions in many museums which have hitherto been indifferent to pictures made with the lens have opened the eyes of the public to the possibilities ...
— Pictorial Photography in America 1920 • Pictorial Photographers of America

... human life if the church keeps true to the spirit of the Bible itself. The aspirations of humanity, the longings of masses of men, find utterance in the great popular spiritual demands all the more effectively because such demands override and nullify the insistence of an individualistic point of view which might easily become selfish. We have said that this democratic interpretation is final so long as it keeps itself in line with the biblical purpose. There are some dangers, however, ...
— Understanding the Scriptures • Francis McConnell

... genuine merit of Walt Whitman's works, as the true inspiration of individualistic genius is always destined to do, is rapidly conquering the opposition and prejudice even of those whose obtuse minds seldom discover the intrinsic good motive frequently underlying an indifferent form. Those whose objections rested on their incapacity of ...
— The Writer, Volume VI, April 1892. - A Monthly Magazine to Interest and Help All Literary Workers • Various

... On the individualistic theory of the State, a theory so brutal and so impracticable that no one consistently upholds it, the widow's misfortune is her private affair, but does not really concern us. Her husband should have provided for her. Indeed ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby

... race-destructive counsels of their seniors or advisers as the truest and purest earthly wisdom. Among certain small religious sects, again, such as the Quakers, the duty of 'marrying in' has been strenuously inculcated, and only the stronger-minded and more individualistic members have had courage and initiative enough to disregard precedent, and to follow the internal divine monitor, as against the externally-imposed law of their particular community. Even among wider bodies it is commonly ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen

... the soil must needs admit that the farmer of the past, living secluded in his house or village, was provincial, narrow, bigoted and individualistic. Times are rapidly changing, however, and out of the old desolation of rural individualism there is arising the spirit of wholesome, virile co-operation, which has transformed the face of many a country district almost in the twinkling of an ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing

... Organized labor, however, has done nothing to help the blacks. Yet it is a fact that accustomed to the easy-going toil of the plantation, the blacks have not shown the same efficiency as that of the whites. Some employers report, however, that they are glad to have them because they are more individualistic and do not like to group. But it is not true that colored labor cannot be organized. The blacks have merely been neglected by organized labor. Wherever they have had the opportunity to do so, they have ...
— A Century of Negro Migration • Carter G. Woodson

... significance. And this significance is typical of the religion of the East and the West. Western Christianity, grown upon the soil of a youthful individualism, preferred this or that apostle's personality and dedicated their best temples to him. The aged East, tired of individualistic ambitions, tired of great men, flagellated by the phantom of human greatness, was thirsty for something higher and more solid than any human personality. Adoration of great personalities being the very wisdom of this world, the East stretched its ...
— The Agony of the Church (1917) • Nikolaj Velimirovic

... foreign religion; but at the same time I think it may fairly be asserted that, though the Buddhist religion may have influenced and utilised Japanese art, it has never killed, or indeed affected to any degree, what I may term the individualistic artistic instincts of the nation. Japanese art requires to be closely studied. It is something that grows upon one, and the closer it is studied the greater its influence. To me one of its most pleasing features is what I have termed in the Preface its catholicity. ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery

... fellows ceases to affect him, he must be thrown back upon his own mere individuality, unless he can find another creed of equal or greater power to inspire and direct his life. And mere individualism is nothing, but anarchy. That this is so, was not indeed manifest to those who first expressed the individualistic principle: on the contrary, they seemed to themselves to have, in the assertion of individual right, not only an instrument for destroying the old faith and the old social order, but also the principle of a better faith, and the means of ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various

... an aristocracy conscious of a solidarity of interests transcending state lines. It is equally true that until the Civil War, at the earliest, the great mass of Americans still felt themselves to be first of all citizens of their particular States. Nor did this individualistic bias long remain in want of leadership capable of giving it articulate expression. The amount of political talent which existed within the State of Virginia alone in the first generation of our national history is amazing to contemplate, but this talent unfortunately exhibited one most damaging blemish. ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin

... to twenty-three. Of the first two periods he says, children before seven rarely play games spontaneously, but often do so under the stimulus of older persons. From seven to twelve, games are almost exclusively individualistic and competitive, but in early adolescence "two elements predominate—first, the plays are predominantly team games, in which the individual is more or less sacrificed for the whole, in which there is obedience to a captain, in which there is ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall

... a preliminary fur trade, and is settled by the combined and sometimes antagonistic forces of eastern men of property (the absentee proprietors) and the democratic pioneers. The East attempted to regulate and control it. Individualistic and democratic tendencies were emphasized both by the wilderness conditions and, probably, by the prior contentions between the proprietors and non-proprietors of the towns from which settlers moved to the frontier. Removal away from ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner

... with capital, and we have hardly yet reached the point where we can see what it will become with great wealth, and under the treatment of a plutocratic class. From what has been said it is evidently most important that man and wife should have been educated in the same mores. Pair marriage is also individualistic. It is the barrier against which all socialism breaks into dust. As the cost of a family increases, the connection between family and capital becomes more close and vital. Every socialist who can think is forced to go on to a war on marriage and the ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner

... and develop and multiply lives. It does not follow that life is consciously a fabric woven of births and the struggle to maintain and develop and multiply lives. I do not suppose a cat or a savage sees it in that light. A cat's standpoint is probably strictly individualistic. She sees the whole universe as a scheme of more or less useful, pleasurable and interesting things concentrated upon her sensitive and interesting personality. With a sinuous determination she evades disagreeables and pursues delights; life is to her quite clearly and simply ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells

... definite is to know our goal and then strive to attain it. In the lack of definite standards based upon the lessons of the past, our dominant national ideals shift with every shifting wind of public sentiment and popular demand. Are we satisfied with the individualistic and self-centered idealism that has come with our material prosperity and which to-day shames the memory of the men who founded our Republic? Are we negligent of the serious menace that confronts any people when it loses its hold upon those goods of life that are far more precious than commercial ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley

... (whose father belonged to the priestly class) regards as ideal the commune and the peasant guild (artel), with their individualistic, moral ideals of union in a spirit of brotherly love and solidarity, both in work and in the enjoyment of its products, his pessimism is directed against the Russian educated classes, not excepting ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood

... damn prettily, Larry Woolford decided. She could be an attractive item if it wasn't for obviously getting her kicks out of being individualistic. ...
— Status Quo • Dallas McCord Reynolds

... others, is a better foundation upon which to build than no foundation at all. Purely disinterested or altruistic motives do not appear in the normal child much before the age of adolescence, and by that time selfishness, which accords so well with the individualistic instincts of the child, will have hardened into a fixed habit if not ...
— Vocational Guidance for Girls • Marguerite Stockman Dickson

... peaceful outcome did not suit the aristocratic wing of the Law and Order party in the least. The haughty, supremely individualistic, bold, forceful, often charming coterie of fire-eaters had, in their opinion, been insulted, and they wanted reprisal, punishment, blood. Terry, Baker, Bennett, Miles, Webb, Nugent, Blatchford, Rowlee, Caldwell, Broderick, Ware, Volney ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White

... with individual rights would apply also to child-labor legislation, to legislation against street soliciting by prostitutes or the sale of indecent pictures, and, more obviously still, against anti-opium and anti-cocaine legislation. As a matter of fact, the older individualistic point of view has been generally abandoned now, and we are free to discuss what is desirable for the general welfare. We may at once say that whatever method will most quickly and thoroughly root out the evil should be adopted. Different methods may be more or less efficacious in different ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake

... all edge-cases. Sure, we all have the shared desire for the core canon of literature, but each of us want to complete that collection with different texts that are as distinctive and individualistic as fingerprints. If we all look like we're doing the same thing when we read, or listen to music, or hang out in a chatroom, that's because we're not looking closely enough. The shared-ness of our experience is only present at a coarse level of measurement: once ...
— Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books • Cory Doctorow

... growing among its women for some fifteen years before the outbreak of the war. They ventured no public meetings or militant acts of any sort, for men were far too strong for them yet, and the German woman is by nature retiring, however individualistic her ego. Their only outward manifestation was the hideous reformkleid, a typical manifestation in even the women of a nation whose art is as ugly as it often is interesting. But thousands of them were muttering ...
— The White Morning • Gertrude Atherton

... began well, mounted halfway to its climax, and fell flat. Some of the lines, embodying the new individualistic philosophy of woman, roused the Professor ...
— Bambi • Marjorie Benton Cooke

... George Eliot, hardly more than an omission. There was perhaps a time when Mr. Rawjester was more widely known than Mr. Rochester. And certainly Mr. Rochester (to adopt the diction of that other eminent country gentleman, Mr. Darcy) was simply individualistic not only in practice, but in theory. Now any one may be so in practice: but a man who is simply individualistic in theory must merely be an ass. Undoubtedly the Brontes exposed themselves to some misunderstanding ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton

... America. It was so easy to show that its chief principles and fundamental doctrines were directly opposed to the deepest creeds of Americanism and that the whole temper of the population was necessarily averse to the anticapitalistic fancies. The individualistic striving, the faith in rivalry, the fear of centralization, the political liberty, the lack of class barriers which makes it possible for any one to reach the highest economic power, all work against socialism, and all are ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg

... birds of North Queensland jungles which have marked individualistic characters is that known as the koel cuckoo, which the blacks of some localities have named "calloo-calloo"—a mimetic term imitative of the most frequent notes of the bird. The male is lustrous black, the female mottled brown, and during most parts of the year both are extremely ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield

... practically social equals, members of one great family—found it more profitable to keep their captives as slaves than to eat them. The change from the primitive Communism of the tribes, into the more individualistic organization of the nations, and the development of private ownership of the land and slaves and means of subsistence. The change from chattel slavery into Feudalism; and the change from Feudalism into the earlier ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell

... ought to know them. That drunken poet from whom you would not take a dreary tragedy, he believed in himself. That elderly minister with an epic from whom you were hiding in a back room, he believed in himself. If you consulted your business experience instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter. Actors who can't act believe in themselves; and debtors who won't pay. It would be much truer to say that a man will certainly fail, because he believes in himself. Complete self-confidence is not ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton

... Germany have told us, even with pride, that in Germany the supreme conception is the dedication of Man to the State. This was not true of old Germany. Before the formation of the Prussian empire, her spirit was intensely individualistic. She stood preeminently for freedom of thought and action. It was this that gave her noble spiritual heritage. Goethe is the most individualistic of world masters. Froebel developed, in the Kindergarten, one of the purest of democracies. ...
— The Soul of Democracy - The Philosophy Of The World War In Relation To Human Liberty • Edward Howard Griggs

... however socially gifted, can aspire; and that social institutions of tried worth are not lightly to be cast upon the rubbish heap. It is by no means certain that society can afford or that women ought to demand individualistic rights that will put in jeopardy the welfare of the remainder of the family. The average woman has not the strength to carry properly the burden of home cares plus large political and social responsibilities, nor ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe

... with us, the same stages are manifest. Age parallels age. Tennyson in artistic technique is Virgilian, we are aware of the style; but both Virgil and Tennyson remain classic in matter, in universality, and the elemental in man. Browning in substance is Euripidean, being individualistic, psychologic, problematic, with special pleading; classicism had departed from him, and left not even the style behind. The great opposition lies in the subject of interest. Is it to know ourselves in others? Then art which is widely interpretative of the common ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry

... ask for is the connection, the inner thread which joins these Books together. It was stated that Polyphemus was the negation of the institutional world, he was individualistic, he belonged to neither Family nor State. No laws, no councils, no civil polity; he is a huge man of violence, hostile specially to man's social life. Circe on the contrary, is the woman hostile to woman's domestic world, the Family, ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider

... the beginning; then you'll see who's right. I'm a biochemist by profession. A damned good one, but too individualistic to please the big research centers. They like docile teams—scientific Percherons to pull the big red wagon. So I taught at one jerkwater college after another. Sooner or later my superiors, all dodderers who stopped thinking with sighs of relief once they had their PhD union ...
— Revenge • Arthur Porges

... note of the party man to his individualistic impressionism, and all three are strong apologists of the Revolution. Lamartine extols the Girondins; Blanc sanctifies Robespierre, whom he mistakes for an apostle of socialism; Michelet, as enthusiastic ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston

... individualistic age has not been a success, either for the individual, or the community in which he has lived, or the nation. We are, beyond question, entering on a period where the welfare of the community takes precedence over the interests of the individual and where the liberty ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine

... readers. It connects itself with a definite view of the world and of our moral relations to the same. Those who have done me the honor of reading my volume of philosophic essays will recognize that I mean the pluralistic or individualistic philosophy. According to that philosophy, the truth is too great for any one actual mind, even though that mind be dubbed 'the Absolute,' to know the whole of it. The facts and worths of life need many cognizers to take them in. There is no point of view absolutely public and universal. Private ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James

... is what may be called the individualistic test. Under this method we think of the individual as individual or of his work as a concrete case of production. One phase of this is the individual's estimate of his own powers. We may inquire what is the man's appreciation of his own worth. This is precarious because ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86

... and individualistic. He was not as subtle nor as smooth as his confederates. And money was not the only incentive which would drive him to commit crime. He was a gross sensualist, unprincipled and ruthless, and Sanderson's hatred of him was beginning to overshadow ...
— Square Deal Sanderson • Charles Alden Seltzer

... name the union of one man and one woman, in aim at least for life, and their children. Whereas once it was the rule of a tribe or clan which determined every detail of sex-relationship, a rule represented either by the mother or the father, it is now an individualistic choice of two adult persons only, socially legalized by a required certificate and ceremony. Whereas once it was the basis of all social order and mutual aid, it is now one of several institutions inherited ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer

... be no doubt, first, as to the widespread, nay, universal, prevalence of the race idea, the race spirit, the race ideal, and as to its efficiency as the vastest and most ingenious invention of human progress. We, who have been reared and trained under the individualistic philosophy of the Declaration of Independence and the laisser- faire philosophy of Adam Smith, are loath to see and loath to acknowledge this patent fact of human history. We see the Pharaohs, Caesars, Toussaints and ...
— The Conservation of Races • W.E. Burghardt Du Bois

... to-night Esther fared to the kitchen, with her red pitcher, passing in her childish eagerness numerous women shuffling along on the same errand, and bearing uncouth tin cans supplied by the institution. An individualistic instinct of cleanliness made Esther prefer the family pitcher. To-day this liberty of choice has been taken away, and the regulation can, numbered and stamped, serves as a soup-ticket. There was quite a crowd of applicants outside the stable-like doors of the kitchen when Esther ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... this, is to say that American society is the most individualistic in the modern world. This follows naturally from the whole situation of the country. The pioneer has no object save to get rich; the government of pioneers has no object save to develop the country quickly. To this object everything is sacrificed, including the interests ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

... the shape (or form) of the vibrations which give rise to the tone. A series of simple vibrations will cause a simple (or colorless) tone, while complex vibrations (giving rise to overtones of various kinds and in a variety of proportions) cause more individualistic peculiarities of quality. Quality is affected also by the shape and size of the resonance body. (Cf. last ...
— Music Notation and Terminology • Karl W. Gehrkens

... prosperity a flock about the ministrant, business wants customers close to the store, and government is more powerful where it can harangue and proclaim, parade before and spy upon its subjects. Individualistic and segregated domestic circles give rise to tax evasions, feuds, and moonshining, plots and the growth of strong men. The city is the corral where humans mill like cattle in a panic, are more easily ridden down en masse, and become habitual ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien



Words linked to "Individualistic" :   individual, capitalistic, individualist



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