"Misanthrope" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is also fine in the light of the intimate candle. Have you read lately again his Voyage to the Houyhnhnms? Try it alone again in quiet. Swift knew all about our contemporary troubles. He has got it all down. Why was he called a misanthrope? Reading that last voyage of Gulliver in the select intimacy of midnight I am forced to wonder, not at Swift's hatred of mankind, not at his satire of his fellows, not at the strange and terrible nature of this ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... heart, and chills and thickens the very life's-blood of benevolence: till at length our youthful Nero, soft and susceptible, becomes a hard and cruel tyrant; and our youthful Timon, the gay, the generous, the beneficent, is changed into a cold, sour, silent misanthrope. ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... exemplified than the dread of seeing ghosts. Every one will recall the story of the phantom that appeared in the tent of Brutus before the battle of Philippi. It pervades the "Haunted House" of Plautus. Callimachus wrote the following couplet as an epitaph on the celebrated misanthrope: ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... is no misanthrope, and while he exposes the ridiculous with a rare wit and humour he evinces a natural and warm sympathy with the good. He is a very original thinker and writer, hits off characters with a facility and felicity that few authors possess, and makes them invariably act in accordance with the ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... called the little palace which he occupied on the Choma his Timonium, because he compared himself with the famous Athenian misanthrope who, after fortune abandoned him, had also been betrayed by many of his former friends. Even at Taenarum he had thought of returning to the Choma, and by means of a wall, which would separate it from the mainland, rendering ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... assumed in my eyes the form of the intrepidity of virtue, and I dare assert it to be upon this noble basis, that it supported itself longer and better than could have been expected from anything so contrary to my nature. Yet, not withstanding, I had the name of a misanthrope, which my exterior appearance and some happy expressions had given me in the world: it is certain I did not support the character well in private, that my friends and acquaintance led this untractable bear about like a lamb, and that, confining my ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... men popular idols. His influence over the democracy was unlimited. He was able to carry through the popular assembly almost any measure that it pleased him to advocate. The more prudent of the Athenians were filled with apprehension for the future of the state under such guidance. The noted misanthrope Timon gave expression to this feeling when, after Alcibiades had secured the assent of the popular assembly to one of his impolitic measures, he said to him: "Go on, my brave boy, and prosper; for your prosperity will bring ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... Irish or German-American. He was therefore neither loud nor browbeating. He was dry, quiet and accurate, and it seemed to Martin that either he didn't enjoy being dressed in a little brief authority or was a misanthrope, eager to return to his noiseless and solitary tramp under the April stars. Martin gave him Oldershaw's full name and address and his own; and the girl, still shrill and shattered, gave hers, after protesting that all automobiles ought to be ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... with which he had become identified till they grew into a necessary part of his existence. He was a self-contained man—an undemonstrative man, whose mind was attuned to respectable solitude, and who, without being a misanthrope, regarded his fellow creatures through a ground-glass medium, which made them seem shadowy and unapproachable. A few business acquaintances he had, with whom he would sometimes take his chop and glass of old port at a city tavern of an evening; he would even, on rare occasions, ...
— Miss Grantley's Girls - And the Stories She Told Them • Thomas Archer
... her husband more than once with imaginary stories about their neighbour. "He was a miser—a recluse—a misanthrope—he had a wife in a lunatic asylum—he had known some great trouble that had embittered his life; he had made a vow never to let a human being cross his threshold; he was a Roman Catholic priest in disguise, an Agnostic, a Nihilist." There was no end ...
— Doctor Luttrell's First Patient • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... kindly offer to present me to a gentleman of whom you can say only that he is very rich, and I ask you if he will give me some of his money, you look surprised and shocked. But I am not a misanthrope, and I ask a question which you can answer affirmatively. He will give me some of his money in giving me some of the pleasure which is derivable from what his money buys. For that I am grateful. I tip the custode with my sincere thanks. I bow to ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... "Flint, you are a misanthrope! You have searched out this God-forsaken stretch of sand just for the purpose of getting away from your kind. Now I have hunted you to your lair, and I propose to stay with you for a fortnight; but I am not to be dragooned into saying that I think your resort ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... the loss of his comic powers. We wished to preserve the poet, without losing the statesman. Greatly as we admired the opera and the comedy, we conceived his unbounded talents capable of something higher still. To say all in a word, we looked at his hands for the MISANTHROPE of ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... confident that all would be righted. When he prayed, you could hear in the very tones of his voice the expectation that Christ Jesus would utterly demolish all iniquity, and fill the earth with His glory. This Christian man was not a misanthrope, did not think that everything was going to ruin, considered the world a very good place to live in. He never sat moping or despondent, but took things as they were, knowing that God could and would make them better. When the heaviest surge of calamity came upon him, he met it with ...
— Forty Years in South China - The Life of Rev. John Van Nest Talmage, D.D. • Rev. John Gerardus Fagg
... feelings, which are the contrary of these, are supposed to have fear for their foundation, as a hatred of women, such as is displayed in the Woman-hater of Atilius: or the hatred of the whole human species, as Timon is reported to have done, whom they called the Misanthrope. Of the same kind is inhospitality; and all these diseases proceed from a certain dread of such things as they hate and avoid. But they define sickness of mind to be an overweening opinion, and that fixed and deeply implanted in the heart, ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... have been even worse than with us: it would have been to proclaim virtue and vice mere bubbles and chimeras. He who really thinks so even we reasonably suspect of practical indifference unless when we believe him to speak as a misanthrope. ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... misanthrope, contemporary to Aristophanes. Hating the society of men, he had only a single friend, Apimantus, to whom he was attached, because of their similarity of character; he also liked Alcibiades, because he foresaw that this young man would be ...
— The Birds • Aristophanes
... the theory that adversity and sorrow and disappointment develop moral strength. The happy people are the ones who are bubbling over with kindliness. I have no faith in misanthropes. (Fine word! Just learned it.) You are not a misanthrope are you, Daddy? ...
— Daddy-Long-Legs • Jean Webster
... became of the sweetnesses of life, his fine house, his grand company, and his entertainments? The grand house ceased to be his; he was only permitted to live in it on sufferance, and whatever grandeur it might still retain, it soon became as desolate a looking house as any misanthrope could wish to see—where were the grand entertainments and the grand company? there are no grand entertainments where there is no money; no lords and ladies where there are no entertainments—and there lay the poor lodger in the desolate house, groaning on ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... power of putting visitors entirely at their ease. To my single countrywomen I will whisper that General Korsackoff is of about medium height, has a fair complexion, blue eyes, and Saxon hair, and a face which the most crabbed misanthrope could not refuse to call handsome. He is unmarried, and if rumor tells the truth, not ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... precedent in Sidney, whom he quotes. And he may have had one in Jonson; at least he thought he had. He cited Dryden and Dorset as collectors and readers of ballads; and he might have cited others. He found comfort in the fact that Moliere's Misanthrope was on his side. The modern or broadside version of Chevy Chase, the one which Addison quoted, had been printed, with a Latin translation, in the third volume of Dryden's Miscellany (1702) and had been appreciated along with The Nut-Brown Maid in an essay ...
— Parodies of Ballad Criticism (1711-1787) • William Wagstaffe
... use—your trying to play the misanthrope with me, who know how good you are, in spite of your pretenses to the contrary? To hide your emotion from your poor niece, you go into a feigned fury, and all the time you know how sorry you are your poor friend ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... and at first I meant to live a remote and solitary life, to vegetate in some country district for the rest of my days; but misanthropy is no Catholic virtue, and there is a certain vanity lurking beneath the hedgehog's skin of the misanthrope. His heart does not bleed, it shrivels, and my heart bled from every vein. I thought of the discipline of the Church, the refuge that she affords to sorrowing souls, understood at last the beauty of a life of prayer in solitude, and was fully determined to 'enter religion,' in the grand old phrase. ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... delicacy, indulgent care. mina mine. mineria mining. minero miner. miniatura miniature. ministro minister. minuto minute. mio my, mine. mirada glance. mirar to look, look at. misa mass; —— mayor high mass. misantropo misanthrope. misericordia mercy. mision f. mission. mismo same, own, very; self; even. misterio mystery. misterioso mysterious. mistico mystic. mitad f. half. moderno modern. modo mode, manner. modular ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... but a moderate fortune, which was three parts in the hands of the Jews before he was twenty-five, he had the most brilliant expectations from his uncle; an old bachelor, who, from a courtier, had turned a misanthrope—cold—shrewd—penetrating—worldly—sarcastic—and imperious; and from this relation he received, meanwhile, a handsome and, indeed, munificent allowance. About sixteen years before the date at which this narrative opens, Philip Beaufort had "run off," ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... to be good and happy, pray, Monsieur le Misanthrope—and are you very discontented with your lot—and will your marriage be a compromise "—(asked the author of "Mes Larmes," with a charming moue)—"and is your Psyche an odious vulgar wretch? You wicked, satirical creature, I can't abide you! You take the hearts ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... mould of his own individual impressions. He gives us man as he is, or as he was, in almost every variety of situation, action, and feeling. Lord Byron makes man after his own image, woman after his own heart; the one is a capricious tyrant, the other a yielding slave; he gives us the misanthrope and the voluptuary by turns; and with these two characters, burning or melting in their own fires, he makes out everlasting centos of himself. He hangs the cloud, the film of his existence over all outward things—sits in the centre of his thoughts, and enjoys dark night, bright ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... looking broadly on life, on its utmost ills as well as its beauties, but not with the eye of the misanthrope, but of the Physician who searches out disease that he may find the remedy, and though the soul still sighs for the serenity and placid delight of the ideal life, the world of Thought, the glorious principle of Poetry prevails, and he sacrifices self-ease, ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... none so sweet as those which arise from our social intercourse with the blessed. We are social beings by nature. Our highest and best powers are framed for society; and we are never in our normal state except when in communion with our fellow-men. Hence all men love society, if we except the misanthrope or man-hater, who is a moral monster. He has unfortunately developed in his bosom some of the worst passions of our fallen nature, and they have built an element of hell in his heart. For in that godless and hopeless region ...
— The Happiness of Heaven - By a Father of the Society of Jesus • F. J. Boudreaux
... presented itself. Or, if the dinner was cleared away, one would see Madame Millet busy with her needle, the children at their lessons, and the painter, whom even then tradition painted a sad and cheerless misanthrope, contentedly playing at dominoes with one of the children, or his honest Norman face wreathed in smiles as the conversation took an amusing turn. This, it is true, was when the master of the house was free from his terrible enemy, ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various
... expression from the character. Now, this good man loved after the fashion of Alceste, when Madame de la Baudraye wanted to be loved after the manner of Philinte. The meaner side of love can never get on with the Misanthrope's loyalty. Thus, Dinah had taken care never to open her heart to this man. How could she confess to him that she sometimes regretted ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... the name, If the fond hope I could have fanned At times, if only once a week, To see you by our fireside stand, To listen to the words you speak, Address to you one single phrase And then to meditate for days Of one thing till again we met. 'Tis said you are a misanthrope, In country solitude you mope, And we—an unattractive set— Can hearty welcome give alone. Why did you visit our poor place? Forgotten in the village lone, I never should have seen your face And bitter torment never known. The untutored spirit's pangs calmed down By ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... at once straightening up against the window, 'you have done a kind act. That's the first attempt at sympathy that has been shown me since I died, and I feel better already. In life, you know, I was a misanthrope. Everything went wrong with me, and I came to hate my fellow men so much that I couldn't bear to see them even. Of course, like begets like, and this hate was returned. Finally I suffered from horrible delusions, ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... is full of hobby-riders. Of all people that I know, they have the keenest appetite for life. Look at old Denechaud; he was a misanthrope until he took to gathering scarabs. Fenton, over there, has the finest collection of circus posters in the world. Bellerding's house is a museum of obsolete musical instruments. De Gay collects venomous insects from all over the world; no harmless ones need apply. ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... ridicule which he heaped on their weaknesses and their pretensions, the more that in his satires his characters are rather abstract types of men than concrete individualities; his principal pieces are, "Les Precieuses Ridicules," "L'Ecole des Femmes," "Le Tartuffe," "Le Misanthrope," "George Dandin," "L'Avare," "Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme," "Les Fourberies de Scapin," "Le Malade malgre Lui," "Les Femmes Savantes," and "Le Malade Imaginaire"; though seriously ill, he took part in the performance of this last, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... when a man repeatedly discovers the fallacy of arguments which he before believed to be true, he distrusts reasoning altogether, just as one who meets with friend after friend who proves unfaithful becomes a misanthrope. ...
— Apology, Crito, and Phaedo of Socrates • Plato
... can rest assured that he will do so," returned Feodora. "My father is a very benevolent man naturally, but was fast becoming a misanthrope when you came among us. I shall never cease thanking God for the northern gale ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... which seemed exceptional and distant from us. The first appearances of that depression which in a continuous manner descends to alienation are to be found already in the disorders of character which seemed to be quite insignificant. The miser, the misanthrope, the hypocrite are described by the writer before they are claimed by the physician. A great number of neuropathic disorders which I have described are related to the popular type of mother-in-law. This type is not necessarily that of a woman whose daughter has ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various
... a portrait of human depravity as the gloomiest misanthrope could wish for. But it has much wider claims on public attention than the gratification of the misanthropic few who mope in corners or stalk up and down leafless and almost solitary walks during this hanging ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume XII, No. 347, Saturday, December 20, 1828. • Various
... following his own tastes and inclinations. Match-making mammas saw in him a prize, but so far he had shown no disposition to marry. He cultivated few people, in fact, was considered somewhat of a misanthrope. Kenneth he had known all his life. They were boys together, and the Traynors were among the few on whom he called frequently. He made no secret of his attraction for Ray, and the young girl liked him as well as she chose to like anybody. He had qualities, ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow
... she who would have been glad to teach her son good, but knew nothing herself. The door, however, opened and in came Nikolay Vyesovshchikov, the son of the old thief Daniel, known in the village as a misanthrope. He always kept at a sullen distance from people, who retaliated ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... of Gray Friars, and Green Fairies; also of sacred hollies by the well, and haunted crooks in the glen. But of the bushes that the black dogs rend in the woods of Phlegethon; and of the crooks in the glen, and the bickerings of the burnie where ghosts meet the mightiest of us; and of the black misanthrope, who is by no means yet a dwarfed one, and concerning whom wiser creatures than Hobbie Elliot may tremblingly ask "Gude guide us, what's yon?" hast thou yet known, seeing that thou hast yet ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... paper of today, that the charming and highly-talented Miss Snevellicci takes her benefit on Wednesday, for which occasion she has put forth a bill of fare that might kindle exhilaration in the breast of a misanthrope. In the confidence that our fellow-townsmen have not lost that high appreciation of public utility and private worth, for which they have long been so pre-eminently distinguished, we predict that this charming actress will be greeted with a bumper.' 'To Correspondents.—J.S. is misinformed ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... procured him, among the Wellers, the name of the Misanthrope; and, once distinguished as an object of curiosity, he was the person most attended to, who could at the ordinary of the day give the most accurate account of where the Misanthrope had been, and how occupied in the course of the morning. And so far was Tyrrel's shyness from diminishing the desire of the Wellers for his society, that the latter feeling increased with the difficulty of gratification,—as the angler feels the most peculiar interest when throwing his fly ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... moved away less lightsome than he had come, leaving the discomfited misanthrope to the ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... addressed by an old acquaintance, and, heretofore, constant attendant upon all the gay varieties of life; of this be assured, that, although retired from the fascinating scene, where gay Delight her portal open throws to Folly's throng, he is no surly misanthrope, or gloomy seceder, whose jaundiced mind, or clouded imagination, is a prey to disappointment, envy, or to care. In retracing the brighter moments of life, the festive scenes of past times, the never to be forgotten pleasures of his halcyon days, when ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... who has no one in command set over him learn obedience? He who is never contradicted, patience? He who has no superior, humility? And how shall he who, like a misanthrope, flies from intercourse with other men, notwithstanding that he is obliged to love them as himself, how shall he, I say, ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... majority on sight, the rest as soon as they heard that he would be a millionaire on the death of his Uncle Andrew. There is a subtle something, a sort of nebulous charm, as it were, about young men who will be millionaires on the death of their Uncle Andrew which softens the ruggedest misanthrope. ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... means the misanthrope that some have chosen to think him. He delights in the society of women, and knows how to welcome them gracefully; and more than any one he is sensitive to the pleasant and stimulating impressions produced by the ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... is misanthrope?— The actual men and things that pass Jostling, to wither as the grass So soon: and (be it heaven's hope, Or poetry's kaleidoscope, Or love or wine, at feast, at mass) Each owns a paradise of glass Where never a yearning heliotrope Pursues the sun's ascent or slope; For the ...
— The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems • Aldous Huxley
... blessings. Meeting Willy at the country-house to which, by some predestined relaxation of misanthropy, he had been decoyed-for the first time for years Mr. Gunston was heard to laugh. He said to himself, 'Here is a man who actually amuses me.' William Losely contrived to give the misanthrope a new zest of existence; and when he found that business could be made pleasant, the rich man conceived an interest in his own house, gardens, property. For the sake of William's merry companionship, he would even ride over his farms, and actually ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... floor, and they found Ted McKnight sprawling in his place, his head buried in his arms, dumb and unapproachable. If a mate came too close, moved by curiosity or a desire to offer sympathy, Ted lashed out at him with his heels. For the time being he was a small but cankered misanthrope full of vengeful schemes, and only one person in the whole school envied him. That person was Richard Haddon, whose turn was ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... which they reach systematically I reached accidentally. The solitude, the absorbedness, the lying in a bed month by month, the gazing upon a fixed point hour by hour—these are all self-evident facts with me, a deserted misanthrope. ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... in nature, the song of all the poets who have celebrated the glory of the Eternal as manifested by the creation, the enumeration would be long, and I should soon tire out your patience. You can understand therefore that if there are, as the misanthrope Rousseau says there are, philosophers who hold in such contempt vulgar opinions that they prefer error of their own discovery to truth found out by other people, then the ancient argument, which infers ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... endear'd! While men and angels bid thy fame extend, And nature owns thee her benignant friend; Could there be mortals so perversely blind, As coarsely to revile thy tender mind, Basely applying, with malignant glee, The hateful title Misanthrope, to thee! Let just oblivion wrap in endless night Such baleful fruits of worth-defaming spight: Truth ne'er could Cowper's want of zeal reprove, As fervent as a saint in friendly love. Hannah! to whose effulgent ...
— Poems on Serious and Sacred Subjects - Printed only as Private Tokens of Regard, for the Particular - Friends of the Author • William Hayley
... when he first offered you his hand; he dares not renew that offer himself, for he feels a second refusal from your lips would wound him too deeply. Your voice may chain him to England, an altered and a happier man, or send him from its shores a misanthrope and wretched: it is for you to decide, Caroline, dearest. Must I plead with that eloquence, which you said would surpass even his own, or will the pleadings of your own kind ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar
... not passed without a witness, though, who proved to be none other than the eminent master-painter Van Zwanenburg, who joined himself to the little party. But his brow darkened when he learned the purport of the young traveller's journey, and he spoke no more for some time, for he was a misanthrope, and, consequently, took small share in the hopes and pleasures of others. Soon after, however, as they were passing a forge, young Paul stopped and clapped his hands with delight at the sight of the ruddy light cast on the faces of ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... was a theatrical performance—the Misanthrope, given for the first time with Louis XIV. dresses, acted by Perrier, Provost, Samson, Firmin, Menjaud, Monrose, and Regnier, with Mmes. Mars, Plessy, and Mante; and then one act of Robert le Diable, with Duprez, Levasseur, and ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... he said lightly. "I never take offence. And I'm a rare believer in privacy. If I had a place in the country I should have a ten-foot wall about it and a guard-room at every lodge. It's not that I'm a misanthrope, but to my mind there's not much point in ownership ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... he avoided them, but at length he fell into a particularly damp one, and would inevitably have been drowned, had not the sagacious Stray brought men to his assistance. And thus SONOGUN, the scoffer, the agnostic, the moody, gloomy, morose, cast-iron, Roman-faced misanthrope, got home. That same evening he changed his clothes and his character, and on the following ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. March 7, 1891. • Various
... of the first great French plays. It is certainly not the resistless movement of the intrigue which makes the "Misanthrope," "Tartufe," the "Precieuses Ridicules," masterpieces of comedy as well as of literature. Their dramatic value lies in their piquancy of confrontation. The tug-of-war between Alceste and Celimene, between Rodrigue ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... presence of Subichar, he resumed his old shape, and returning to his brother Pandit Shashi, told him what he had done. Whereupon Shashi, the misanthrope, looked black, and used hard words and told his friend that good nature and soft-heartedness had caused him to commit a very bad action—a grievous sin. Incensed at this charge, the philanthropic Muldev became angry, and ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... air— Poet, soldier, courtier, 't was the mode; The other—as a glow-worm to a star— Suspicious, morbid, passionate, self-involved, The soul half eaten out with solitude, Corroded, like a sword-blade left in sheath Asleep and lost to action—in a word, A misanthrope, a miser, a soured man, One fortune loved not and looked at askance. Yet he a pleasant outward semblance had. Say what you will, and paint things as you may, The devil is not black, with horn and hoof, As gossips picture him: ...
— Wyndham Towers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... [19] Ti'mon, the misanthrope, was born near Athens, B.C. 420. He declared himself the enemy of the human race, and had a companion named Apeman'tus, who possessed a similar disposition. The latter asking him one day why he paid such respect to Alcibi'ades, "It ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... flinching. What tickles another would give him torment; and yet he has what we may call lucid intervals, when he is remarkably facetious — Indeed, I never knew a hypochondriac so apt to be infected with good-humour. He is the most risible misanthrope I ever met with. A lucky joke, or any ludicrous incident, will set him a-laughing immoderately, even in one of his most gloomy paroxysms; and, when the laugh is over, he will curse his own imbecility. In conversing with strangers, he betrays no marks of disquiet — He is ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... hurt,' remonstrated Sara. 'What a little misanthrope you are, Ursula! St. Thomas's has injured you socially; you have become a hermit-crab all at once, and it is such nonsense ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... colour befitting them at the time. He did not paint in raw realism. He seized his characters firmly for the central purpose of the play, stamped them in the idea, and by slightly raising and softening the object of study (as in the case of the ex-Huguenot, Duke de Montausier, {3} for the study of the Misanthrope, and, according to St. Simon, the Abbe Roquette for Tartuffe), generalized upon it so as to make it permanently human. Concede that it is natural for human creatures to live in society, and Alceste is ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... knowledge of him previously. No fugitive from justice ever felt more nervous haste. He pushed on, never pausing till he reached the very verge of civilisation in the far south-west. Not that he would be a hermit or misanthrope, but perchance find a people destitute of the gospel. He would bring it to them. He must preach Christ till death. This should be his joy and comfort; henceforth no other love should come between his ...
— Divers Women • Pansy and Mrs. C.M. Livingston
... hesitation of the horse; next the violence of the rider; then the despair and rebellion of the horse. The finish is a fractured limb from a rear or a runaway. The poor brute is set down as restive and in fact becomes more or less a misanthrope for the rest of his days. I have seen the gentle and brave, under such circumstances, act very much like the cruel and cowardly; that is to say, first rough an innocent animal for their own fault, and then yield ...
— Hints on Horsemanship, to a Nephew and Niece - or, Common Sense and Common Errors in Common Riding • George Greenwood
... secured only by persuading indifferent or hostile people and capturing their good-will he expected to attain by holding aloof from all and leading the life of a hermit, one might almost say of a misanthrope. One can imagine the feelings, if one may not reproduce the utterances, of English-speaking officials, whose legitimate desire for a free exchange of views with Italy's official spokesman was thwarted by the idiosyncrasies of her own ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... man of middle height, neither stout nor thin, with vulgar good looks, a face that expressed vexation rather than melancholy, and a pensive habit in which there was more of indecision than thought. People called him a misanthrope, but he was too eager after his own interests, and too extortionate towards others to have set up a genuine divorce from the world. His indifferent demeanor, his affected silence, his habitual custom of looking, as it were, into the ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... something strangely sympathetic between these two widely-contrasted beings—the young, clear-brained, high-spirited girl and the old misanthrope. She obeyed him as though mesmerized, and, flinging down her muff, took off her gloves, and seated herself at the writing-table. There was determination in every movement. The invalid mumbled and chuckled with satisfaction ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley
... wealth, have been destined to rise above all triumphant; the example of the sublime moral that teaches us with what mysterious beauty and immortal holiness the Creator has endowed our human nature when hallowed by our human affections! You alone suffice to shatter into dust the haughty creeds of the Misanthrope and Pharisee! And your fidelity to my erring self has taught me ever to love, to serve, to compassionate, to respect the community of God's creatures to which—noble and elevated ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... letting their fair hair blow about in the wind. At night the band plays, the visitors walk out, and the beach is enlivened by an elegant, festive, ever-changing crowd, in which every language is heard and the beauty of every country is represented. A few steps distant from this gayety the misanthrope can find solitude and seclusion on the dunes, where the music faintly strikes his ear like a far-off echo, and the houses of the fishermen show him their lights, directing his thoughts to domestic ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... "the poor man was a misanthrope, and lived quite alone, in misery. He came neither to confession nor to mass; but whether he was a heretic or an atheist no man knew. Where he came from or where he went to was known only to himself. But they think that ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... wants which she had witnessed, and had a proud ability to say "no" to all her proposals for their assistance. He spoke much of severity and of wholesome lectures, and so on; and Susanna was not slow in calling him the most cruel of men, another "tyrant Christjern," a regular misanthrope; "wolves and bears had more heart than he had. Never again would she ask him for anything; one might just as well talk to a stock or a stone!" And Susanna set off to weep bitter tears. But when she afterwards found that much want ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer
... prevented him from indulging in Utopian speculations about the future; and his cynicism constantly led him to use the language of a pessimist. But at an early stage of his career he had taken up arms for human nature against that "sublime misanthrope" Pascal, who "writes against human nature almost as he wrote against the Jesuits"; and he returned to the attack at the end of his life. Now Pascal's Pensees enshrined a theory of life—the doctrine of original sin, the idea that ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... to moor my mind And cast the anchor Hope, A puff of breath will put to death The morbid misanthrope That lurks inside—as errors hide In standing forms of type To mar at birth some line of worth; And so ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... a philanthropist who was turned into a misanthrope by attempting to sketch in public and in galleries. Respectable strangers, even clergymen, would stop and coolly look over his shoulder, and ask questions, and give him advice, until he could work no longer. Why is it that people who ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... perpetual problem if Vanity Fair be a cynic's view of life, the sardonic grin of a misanthrope gloating over the trickery and meanness of mankind. It is well to remember how many are the scenes of tenderness and pathos in Vanity Fair, how powerfully told, how deeply they haunt the memory and sink into the heart. The school life of Dobbin, the ruin of old Sedley ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... flash, correct or change our estimate. But these will be uphill intimacies, without charm or freedom, to the end; and freedom is the chief ingredient in confidence. Some minds, romantically dull, despise physical endowments. That is a doctrine for a misanthrope; to those who like their fellow-creatures it must always be meaningless; and, for my part, I can see few things more desirable, after the possession of such radical qualities as honour and humour and pathos, than to have a lively and not a stolid countenance; to have looks ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... figure who thus steps masterfully forward to the center of the most troubled stage in Europe. Days of conflict and turmoil were yet to follow for Napoleon, but never days of uncertainty. He had found himself. In six short years the brooding misanthrope, the gawky young man who shunned his fellows, became the self-possessed leader of men, wielding a power of personal ...
— Boys' Book of Famous Soldiers • J. Walker McSpadden
... carriage thought on; of how Lionel's father on his wife's desertion of him had gone to the dogs, rushing into all kinds of mad dissipation up to the time of his wife's death, when he became a confirmed misanthrope, living in absolute seclusion until his own death some two years agone; while going to destruction for distraction's sake, poor man, he had reduced his income to about L8,000 per annum. Before his death he had imbued Lionel with a distrust of women, endeavouring to extract ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... by no means 'a misanthrope,' in appearance, at least, whatever he may be in fact. My acquaintance with him was casual altogether; and I am scarcely warranted in saying that I know him at all; but to have seen and conversed with a man of so prodigious a notoriety ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... a solitude my somber way Strays like a misanthrope within a gloom Of his own shadows—till the perfect ...
— Green Fields and Running Brooks, and Other Poems • James Whitcomb Riley
... earnest speaker will always be popular, if he be tolerably fluent, and if he "shew himself friendly;" but no reputation and no talent will secure an audience to the automaton who is unconscious of his hearers, or to the misanthrope, who despises or dislikes them. And if, as Anthony a Wood informs us, "the persuasion of his oratory could move and wind the affections of his admiring auditory almost as he pleased," we can well believe ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... one of the greatest masters of English we have ever had; as endowed with an imaginative genius inferior to few; as a keen and pitiless critic of the world, and a bitter misanthropic accounter of humanity at large. Dean Swift was indeed a misanthrope by theory, however he may have made exception to private life. His hero, Gulliver, discovers race after race of beings who typify the genera in his classification of mankind. Extremely diverting are Gulliver's adventures among the tiny Lilliputians; only less so are his more ...
— Gulliver's Travels - Into Several Remote Regions of the World • Jonathan Swift
... become fetid where it lies, and more noisome than utter dryness. It is quite possible, as to emotion, to be very languishing over the misfortunes of others, and yet do the unfortunate as little good as the misanthrope who laughs ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... They called you a misanthrope. I remember the word. I looked for it in the dictionary when I came home. It ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... revenge; but I have been so bothered that I cannot struggle. All Davos has been drinking our wine. During the month of March, three litres a day were drunk - O it is too sickening - and that is only a specimen. It is enough to make any one a misanthrope, but the right thing is to hate the donkey that was duped - ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... must be a misanthrope indeed, in whose breast something like a jovial feeling is not roused—in whose mind some pleasant associations are not awakened—by the recurrence of Christmas. There are people who will tell you that Christmas is not to them what it used to be; that each succeeding Christmas ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... domestic circle. It is necessary for the exercise of all the affections; and even our weaknesses require the presence of other men. There would be no enjoyment of rank or wealth, if there were none to admire;—and even the misanthrope requires the presence of another to whom his spleen may be uttered. The abuse of this principle leads to the contracted spirit ...
— The Philosophy of the Moral Feelings • John Abercrombie
... you another hint, since you appear grateful. It is a species of claptrap in a novel, which always takes—to wit, a rich old uncle or misanthrope, who, at the very time that he is bitterly offended and disgusted with the hero, who is in awkward circumstances, pulls out a pocket-book and counts down, say fifteen or twenty thousand pounds in bank notes, to relieve him ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... much to worry me privately, for the veil is entirely torn aside. You alone remain to me; your affection is very dear to me: nothing more remains to make me a misanthrope than to lose her and see you betray me.... Buy a country seat against my return, either near Paris or in Burgundy. I need solitude and isolation: grandeur wearies me: the fount of feeling is dried up: glory itself ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... 'parallelogrammon' (Holland) 'parallelogram'; 'programma' (Warton) 'program'; 'epitheton' (Cowell) 'epithet'; 'epocha' (South) 'epoch'; 'biographia' (Dryden) 'biography'; 'apostata' (Massinger) 'apostate'; 'despota' (Fox) 'despot'; 'misanthropos' (Shakespeare) if 'misanthropi' (Bacon) 'misanthrope'; 'psalterion' (North) 'psaltery'; 'chasma' (Henry More) 'chasm'; 'idioma' and 'prosodia' (both in Daniel, prose) 'idiom' and 'prosody'; 'energia', 'energy', and 'Sibylla', 'Sibyl' (both in Sidney); ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... did not like Oxford, and I will show you either a sulky misanthrope or an affected ass. Many, many indeed, are the unpleasant recollections which, in the case of nearly all of us, will mingle with the joy with which we recall our college days. More than the ghosts of duns departed, perhaps unpaid; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... composer waited on him in his box, meeting a most cordial reception. On their way home after the opera, Gretry offered his new friend his arm to help him over an obstruction. Rousseau with a burst of rage said, "Let me make use of my own powers," and thenceforward the sentimental misanthrope refused to recognize the composer. About this time Gretry met the English humorist Hales, who afterward furnished him with many of his comic texts. The two combined to produce the "Jugement de Midas," a satire on the old style of music, which ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... and south, to take sorrow, servitude, joy, worry, failing strength, restless ambition in their impartial embraces. He only turned round to Annie, and asked her if she thought she could do with 'enamelled.' But I was quite taken with my idea——Where is it? I left Annie to settle with this misanthrope, amidst his raw frameworks of the Homes of ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... old misanthrope, "I'm too old now! And Hugh has failed me! Nothing from him. This sair blow cuts off the last hope! And no educated men of Thibet ever travel! Blindness—blindness everywhere!" he babbled on, while ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... morbid from external suffering, prevents him (the Irishman) from becoming a fanatic and a misanthrope, and reconciles him ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... classical comedies are significant in themselves. Le Misanthrope, l'Avare, le Joueur, le Distrait, etc., are names of whole classes of people; and even when a character comedy has a proper noun as its title, this proper noun is speedily swept away, by the very weight of its contents, ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... presently, as though to shut out the stream of words opposite, which was damping conversation, the old poet—how the splendid brow and the white hair come back to me!—fell to quoting from the famous sonnet scene in "Le Misanthrope": first of all, Alceste's rage with Phillinte's flattery of the wretched verses declaimed by Oronte—"Morbleu! vil complaisant, vous louez des sottises"; then the admirable fencing between Oronte and Alceste, where Alceste at first tries to convey his contempt for Oronte's sonnet indirectly, ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Misanthrope, shunning mankind? From cities to caves of the forest he flew: There, raving, he howls his complaint to the wind; The ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... his walk and conversation is either a saint or a consummate hypocrite; or, again, One who is happy in a solitary life is either more or less than man; we cannot in such cases mean that the subject may be both. On the other hand, if it be said that the author of 'A Tale of a Tub' is either a misanthrope or a dyspeptic, the alternatives are not incompatible. Or, again, given that X. is a lunatic, or a lover, or a poet, the three ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... a little bitterly. She considered that the scales had fallen from her eyes, and flattered herself that she was by way of becoming a bit of a misanthrope; also, I believe, there was a note concerning the hollowness of life and the worthlessness of society in general. In a word, Margaret fell back upon the extreme cynicism and world-weariness of twenty-three, and assured herself that she despised everybody, whereas, as a matter of fact, she ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... Seattle, and Port Townsend, the most delightful and agreeable watering places in the world. Surrounded by magnificent and picturesque scenery, with beautiful drives and lovely bays for yachting purposes, with splendid fishing and sport of every description to be had, with a climate that would charm a misanthrope, why should they not become the favorite resorts on the Great West Coast? These facts led to the building of the magnificent Hotel Tacoma, at a cost of a quarter of a million dollars. Other such caravansaries will follow, and in time Puget Sound will ...
— Oregon, Washington and Alaska; Sights and Scenes for the Tourist • E. L. Lomax
... better sitter than before; for he assumed a countenance that did not belong to him, as though he were thinking of a frontispiece for Childe Harold. In about an hour our first sitting terminated, and I returned to Leghorn, scarcely able to persuade myself that this was the haughty misanthrope whose character had always appeared so enveloped in gloom and mystery; for I do not remember ever to have met with manners ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... was at the outset no more than timid, easily becomes transformed first into a misanthrope, then into a monomaniac tortured by a thousand physical inhibitions, such as the inability to hold a pen, to walk unaccompanied across an open space, to ride in a public ...
— Poise: How to Attain It • D. Starke
... was fast becoming a misanthrope. His speculation had failed, his love was lost; nothing lay before him but a long and dreary existence spent in immortalizing in tin-types the belles ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... bountiful kindness?" replied Edward: but Eleazar relieved him from the trouble of prolonging the dispute, by carrying off his book in great haste, without once looking at him. Edward breathed more freely when delivered from the presence of this odious misanthrope, who took every opportunity of loading his benefactor ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... old painter of Woodford Cottage was an ascetic and a misanthrope never was the "milk of human kindness" so redundant in any human heart as in that of his excellent little sister, Miss Meliora Vanbrugh. From the day of her birth, when her indigent father's anticipation of a bequeathed fortune had caused her ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... author, M. Sainte Beuve says:—"C'etait un misanthrope poli, insinuant, souriant, qui precedait de bien peu et preparait avec ...
— Reflections - Or, Sentences and Moral Maxims • Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld
... who likes bravery, and yet groans under poverty, has mischief in him. So, too, has the misanthrope, groaning at any severity ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... brother's property, had confined her in a lunatic asylum on a mere pretence. My blood boiled with indignation as I thought of these things, and I did not wonder that my uncle could not sleep nights, that he was a misanthrope, and hated the sound of his own and ...
— Seek and Find - or The Adventures of a Smart Boy • Oliver Optic
... distinctly a charmer who may at most have reached the age when Cleopatra—Antony's and Caesar's Cleopatra—died in the prime of her beauty. If Mrs. East chooses to date herself at thirty-three, any man not a confirmed misanthrope must believe her. Biddy says that until Peter Gilder was safely dead, Clara East was just an ordinary, well-dressed, pleasure-loving, novel-reading, chocolate-eating, respectable widow of a New York stockbroker: ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... that he had been so badly used as to have sufficient grounds for turning misanthrope and woman-hater. Thin natures are like light wines and weak syrups in the readiness ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... happiness. However, for that very reason, perhaps, he bore it worse than I did. He grew imbittered against the world, which had in no way ill-treated him; whereas its very first principle is to scorn all such as I am. He seems to have become a misanthrope, and a fatalist like myself. Though it might almost make one believe the existence of such a thing as justice to see pride pay for its wickedness thus—the injury to the outcast son recoil upon the pampered one, and the family arrogance crown ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... in your view, indicative of a giddy mind or an innocent heart? Of the latter, I presume; for I know you are not a misanthrope. ...
— The Coquette - The History of Eliza Wharton • Hannah Webster Foster
... eyes to Hurlstone with an artless tribute in their depths that brought the blood faintly into his cheek. She was not thinking of the priest's admonishing words; she was thinking of the quiet, unselfish work that this gloomy misanthrope had been doing while his companions had been engaged in lower aims and listless pleasures, and while she herself had been aimlessly fretting and diverting herself. What were her few hours of applauded ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... appeared everywhere before me like a ghost; I fled from the presence of men, was obliged to appear to be a misanthrope although ...
— Beethoven: the Man and the Artist - As Revealed in his own Words • Ludwig van Beethoven
... books and of art, so my life is not altogether empty; and I find my pleasure in hard work. When I saw you at the gallery I wished to know you, and I asked one of the students who you were. He told me you were a misanthrope. Then I did not care so much about knowing you, until one day you spoke to me about my painting, and that was ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... Melancthon,[494] who have ne'er[ix] Done anything exceedingly unkind,— And (though I could not now and then forbear Following the bent of body or of mind) Have always had a tendency to spare,— Why do they call me Misanthrope? Because They hate me, not I them:—and here ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... of suicide.[2047] Another play of the fourth century, which is mentioned as important in the history of the drama, is the Pseudo-Querolus. It is an imitation of Plautus. Querolus is the forerunner of Moliere's Misanthrope and so a biolog,—a permanent type of person.[2048] Dramas representing martyrdom and other Christian incidents were presented with very ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... are scrambled, Say, if you will, that he "died," Write, if you must, that he "ambled"— We shall be last to deride. But us to the Forest of Arden, Along with the misanthrope Jaques, If you cling to the "sinister garden" And ...
— Tobogganing On Parnassus • Franklin P. Adams
... author from the reproach of impiety; la Princesse d'Elide and l'Amour medecin were but charming interludes in the great struggle henceforth instituted between reality and appearance. In 1666, Moliere produced le Misanthrope, a frank and noble spirit's sublime invective against the frivolity, perfidious and showy semblances of court. "This misanthrope's despitefulness against bad verses was copied from me; Moliere himself confessed ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot |
