"Self-centred" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... their author's, and form at once the motto and the stigma of mid-century Liberal policy. And then the book is concluded by two other elegies—in rhyme this time—The Stanzas written at the Grande Chartreuse and Obermann once more. They are, however, elegies of a different kind, much more self-centred, and, indeed, little more than fresh variations on "the note," as I ventured to call it before. Their descriptive and autobiographic interest is great, and if poetry were a criticism of life, there is plenty of that of them. The ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... himself an Indian bride and in all innocence heaped shame high upon the blonde head. How Elmer unearthed such ancient history was a mystery to Florrie; but none the less she "hated" him for it. They saw a very great deal of each other, each serving as a sort of balance-wheel to the other's self-centred complacency. Perhaps the one subject upon which they could agree was Jim Galloway; Elmer still liked to look upon the gambler as a colossal figure standing serene among wolves, while Florrie could admit to him, with no fear of a chiding, that ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... her as yet—hatred for her benefactor. Other more feminine passions might indeed flare up in Olga Ivanovna's heart with abnormal and painful violence... but she had not the cold pride, nor the intense strength of will, nor the self-centred egoism, without which any passion passes ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... valued neither comfort, nor money, nor the world's good word. That they took help, and even sacrifice, as a matter of course, seemed in them mere modesty and sound good sense; tantamount to saying, 'I am not so silly or self-centred as to suppose you do this for me. You do it, of course, for the Cause. The Cause is yours—is all Women's. You serve humanity. Who am I that I ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... be evoked in the soul. Of all terms in the vocabulary of religion, repentance is probably the one which is most frequently misused. It is habitually applied to experiences which are not even remotely akin to true penitence. The self-centred regret which a man feels when his sin has found him out—the wish, compounded of pride, shame, and anger at his own inconceivable folly, that he had not done it: these are spoken of as repentance. But they are not repentance at all. They have no relation to God. They constitute no fitness ...
— The Atonement and the Modern Mind • James Denney
... her like a mantle, and she was possessed by a burning longing to comfort and save. In the midst of the fog and darkness God had sent to her a great opportunity. She rose to it with a dignity which seemed to set the restless, self-centred Betty of an hour ago years behind. Her fingers tightened on the stranger's arm; she ...
— Betty Trevor • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... which marked the first decade of the present century. No doubt even the World-War has been precipitated by the sudden inrush of these unprecedented forces, and the realization of their trend by the self-centred leaders of civilization. ...
— Is civilization a disease? • Stanton Coit
... children of their successors and supplanters, and then their children and children's children, change and develop with extraordinary rapidity. The conditions accentuate vices and virtues, energy and ruthlessness, all the good qualities and all the defects of an intense individualism, self-reliant, self-centred, far more conscious of its rights than of its duties, and blind to its own shortcomings. To the hard materialism of the frontier days succeeds the hard materialism of an industrialism even more intense and absorbing than that of the older nations; although ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... and that speedily, to bridge the widening chasm between the Executive and the Congress. Our experience with President Wilson has demonstrated this. As a self-centred autocrat, confident of himself and suspicious of others, hostile to advice or discussion, he became the absolute master of the Congress while his party was in ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... been struck by lightning at all; even a child might wonder how many services, on this scale of gratitude, were adequate for the rest of the party whom the lightning had completely missed. And it was perhaps a little self-centred of Ready to thank God for her recovery on the grounds that she could "ill be spared" by a family rather ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... areas, that the Australian attains full consciousness of his own nationality; it is in places like this, and as clearly here as at the centre of the continent. To me the monotonous variety of this interminable scrub has a charm of its own; so grave, subdued, self-centred; so alien to the genial appeal of more winsome landscape, or the assertive grandeur of mountain and gorge. To me this wayward diversity of spontaneous plant life bespeaks an unconfined, ungauged potentiality of resource; ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... to deduct the great class of what I shall call the Self-centred. These are they who not only were never canvassed, but didn't even so much as hear about it, who had probably given up newspapers as a war economy and were living quiet virtuous lives in out-of-the-way places. Add to them removals and conscientious objectors (less allowance for ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 19, 1916 • Various
... petty trials and tribulations, their empty theories and speculations into cacophony. Even so far back as Beethoven's day that autobiographical habit had begun. "Beethoven," says Old Fogy, is "dramatic, powerful, a maker of storms, a subduer of tempests; but his speech is the speech of a self-centred egotist. He is the father of all the modern melomaniacs, who, looking into their own souls, write what they see therein—misery, corruption, slighting selfishness and ugliness." Old Ludwig's groans, of course, we can stand. He was not only a great musician, but also a great ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... camp followers, who each differ from each other only superficially, and, not unseldom, transfer their allegiance in pursuit of fatter game. The differences do impress one at first, but, as I say, they are mainly superficial. All are equally self-centred and true to type as parasites; though one brood is better dressed than another, and has a more formidable appetite. What makes rich pickings for the follower of one camp would leave the follower of another camp ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... observances for those of the Hindu religion. And they apparently have large satisfaction in them. The old Hindu idea of the supreme value of asceticism is largely yielding to a Christian altruism which abandons self-centred, self-seeking, activity in favour of loving sympathy for, and an endeavour to ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... indispensable to all gatherings of the clan. Katherine was fun when you were in the mood for her; Roberta, if she was in the mood for you. Betty was always fascinating, always responsive, but in many ways she was only a pretty child. Helen and Eleanor, unlike in almost everything else, were at one in being self-centred. Rachel was as jolly as Katherine, as sympathetic as Betty, and far more mature than either of her friends. As Katherine put it, "you could always bank on Rachel to know what ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... bag too. She was not witty. He questioned whether she was essentially kind. She was not young; her age was an enigma. She had not a remarkable figure, nor unforgettable hair, nor incendiary eyes. She seemed too placid and self-centred for love. If she had loved, it must have been as she sat to photographers or occupied boxes on first nights—because 'they' would have it so. George was baffled to discover the origin of her prestige. He had to seek it in ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... nihilistic view that all the creatures are "ein lauteres Nichts."[21] It would be easy to find such passages in all the fourteenth-century mystics, but it cannot be denied that on the whole their religion is too self-centred. There are not many maxims so fundamentally wrong-headed and un-Christian as Suso's advice to "live as if you were the only person in the world."[22] The life of the cloistered saint may be abundantly justified—for the spiritual activity ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... then at the downright fashion in which the thirteen-year-old Catie made known her matrimonial plans. Mrs. Brenton liked Catie well enough, but not too well. She could have dreamed of another sort of wife for her boy, for Catie's crudeness occasionally irritated her, Catie's self-centred ambition, her intervals of density sometimes came upon Mrs. Brenton's nerves. However, girls were scarce upon the horizon of the Brentons. Catie was not perfect; but, at least, she might be infinitely worse. And Scott would be sure to need a practical wife, to counteract ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... barren of instruction to actual men. The Poet's self-centred seclusion was avenged by the furies of an irresistible passion pursuing him to speedy ruin. But that Power which strikes the luminaries of the world with sudden darkness and extinction, by awakening them to too exquisite a perception ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... gravity, which was fixed upon Washington in his mature years, has been projected back over his youth. The actual records are lacking, but such hints and surmises as we have do not warrant our thinking of him as a self-centred, unsociable youth. On the contrary, he was rather, what would be called now, a sport, ready for hunting or riding, of splendid physical build, agile and strong. He liked dancing, and was not too shy to enjoy the society of young women; indeed, he wrote poems to some of them, and seems to have ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... imagined the postal arrangement to be somewhat irregular. After Benediction she would ask Veronica what time the letters left the convent. And looking across the abyss which separated them, she saw her passionate self-centred past and Veronica's little transit from the schoolroom to the convent. It seemed strange to her that she never had what might be called a girl friend. But she had arrived at a time when a woman friend ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... recognized the old established laws which have been accepted as regulating both. In short, with all his originality, he worked in Old World harness, and cannot be considered as the creator of a truly American, self-governed, self-centred, absolutely independent style of thinking and writing, knowing no law but its own sovereign will ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... continual prayer.[60] One of the most intuitive men we ever met had a desk at a city office where several other gentlemen were doing business constantly, and often talking loudly. Entirely undisturbed by the many various sounds about him, this self-centred faithful man would, in any moment of perplexity, draw the curtains of privacy so completely about him that he would be as fully inclosed in his own psychic aura, and thereby as effectually removed from all distractions, as ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... placid, motherly face breaking into lines of anguish while the gray old head bowed in weakness, completely unmanned the self-centred young scientist, and bending ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... Nobody who had had the advantage of Leek's acquaintance would have said "Poor Leek!" For Leek's greatest speciality had always been the speciality of looking after Leek, and wherever Leek might be it was a surety that Leek's interests would not suffer. Therefore Priam Farll's pity was mainly self-centred. ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... naturally so taciturn one was compelled to guess her thoughts; and long since Camors had reflected as to what was passing in that self-centred soul. Inspired by his innate generosity, as well as his secret admiration, he took pleasure in heaping upon this poor cousin the attentions he might have paid a queen; but she always seemed as indifferent to them as she was to the ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... becomes our temptation. The rich have their special and great opportunity of generous service for the common good, and yet through that very opportunity comes their special temptation. The poor are saved by their lot from many temptations of self-centred and frivolous luxury, but are much tempted {218} by their poverty itself. The healthy have a great gift of God, but they are tempted by that very gift to recklessness, inconsiderateness and self-injury. The sick receive peculiar blessings of patience and resignation, but are much tempted ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... as Radowitz vowed, she was in love with Douglas Falloden? The antagonism between the man of Scroll's type—disinterested, pure-minded, poetic, and liable, often, in action to the scrupulosity which destroys action; and the men of Falloden's type—strong, claimant, self-centred, arrogant, determined—is perennial. Nor can a man of the one type ever understand the attraction for women of ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... inhabitants either! Lawrence, without country, creed, profession, or territorial obligation, was one of those sons of rich men who form, in any social order, its loosest and most self-centred class. In his set, frank egoism was the only motive for which one need not apologize. But in Chilmark it was not so. Far other forces were in play in the lives of the Stafford family, and Laura Clowes, and Lord Grantchester and his wife and Jack Bendish. What were these forces? ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... Self-centred thought of any kind hangs about the thinker, and most men surround their mental bodies with a shell of such thoughts. Such a shell obscures the mental vision and facilitates the ...
— A Textbook of Theosophy • C.W. Leadbeater
... something, too, inconceivably lonely in the situation. The unfurnished vacant room, the half-lights, the monstrous doll, whose very size seemed to give a pathetic significance to its speechlessness, the smallness of the one animate, self-centred figure,—all these touched more or less deeply the half-poetic sensibilities of the woman. She could not help utilizing the impression as she stood there, and thought what a fine poem might be constructed from this material, if the room were a little ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... in the screened upper balcony with Vivian. He liked her. She was a keen-witted, plain-spoken young woman, with few false ideals and no subtlety. She was less snobbish than arrogant. Of all the Wrandalls, she was the least self-centred. Leslie never quite understood her for the paradoxical reason that ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... emotion could have made the quiet, self-contained 'man o' God' as Mrs. Spruce called him, speak to her as he had done,—and she also knew that only the most bitter malice and cruel under-intent to do mischief could have roused Roxmouth, usually so coldly self-centred, to the white heat of wrath which had blazed out of him that evening. Between these two men she stood—a quite worthless object of regard, so she assured herself,—through her, one of them was like to have his name ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... like to receive confidences, have a morbid fear of giving them. Perhaps it is because I was so much alone, so self-centred, ...
— The Dangerous Age • Karin Michaelis
... your new mode of life is that it is entirely self-centred. There is no projection of yourself into other lives. You are contributing nothing to the common stock of moral effort. You are simply marooned. It alters nothing that you have marooned yourself ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... with Wentworth over the possession of Michael. Wentworth, a sedate, self-centred young man of three-and-twenty, of independent means, mainly occupied in transcribing the nullity of his days in a voluminous diary, had taken charge of him virtually from his first holidays, during which Michael's father had achieved the somewhat tedious task of ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... bustle in the streets had been a torture that she could not bear. It wanted but two days to Christmas and the gaiety of the season, forced or genuine, rang out everywhere. Christmas shopping, with its anxious solicitude or self-centred absorption, overspread the West End and made the pavements scarcely passable at certain favoured points. Proud parents, parcel-laden and surrounded by escorts of their young people, compared notes with one another on the looks and ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... unusually exposed to them; we may have nerves very sensitive to pain, and be afflicted with a disease very painful. Virtue will not help us, and it is not meant to help us. It is not even its own reward, except for the self-centred and - I had almost said - the unamiable. No man can pacify his conscience; if quiet be what he want, he shall do better to let that organ perish from disuse. And to avoid the penalties of the law, and the minor CAPITIS DIMINUTIO of social ostracism, ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... prosaic sense of duty, no steady habit, no enduring interest in work. As these two human beings drifted further and further apart from their common love and their common interest, the idealistic man became more self-centred, more unsocial, more fiercely individual, and the emotional and sensual woman became more self-indulgent, more hostile to any philosophy—anarchism such as Terry's, with its blighting idealism—which limited her simple joy in life ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... curiosity that the moon seemed always to retreat when I ran towards her, and to pursue when I fled. It was a very significant symbol. Stand a little apart, and things of their own accord will come more than half-way. Nobody ever goes to meet a loafer. Self-centred, domesticated persons attract. What would be the value of the heavens, if we could bring the stars into our lap? They cannot be approached or appropriated. Upon the highest mountain the horizon sinks you in a valley, and far aloft in night and mystery ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... impulses. In accordance with their respective characters, the first of these youths becomes a physician, and the other a clergyman. Then we have the sister of the physician, who becomes the wife of the clergyman, a noble, proud, self-centred nature, finely strung to the inmost fibre of her being. Then we have a woman of the other sort, clinging, abnormally sensitive, a child when the years of childhood are over, and made the victim of a shocking child-marriage to a crippled old man. She it is whom the physician loves, ...
— Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson • William Morton Payne
... favorite candidates." It was Bea's voice that spoke. "If Miss Brett completes her quota of lines this month she will undoubtedly have the best chance in the election, even if she is personally unpopular. She is exceedingly self-centred, you know, and does not trouble herself even to appear interested in anybody else. Her manner is unfortunate. However she is unquestionably the ablest writer in the class though little Laura Wallace is a close second. Berta knew her at home and is very fond of her. Laura and Berta's sister ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... sloppy finger-bowl, nut-shells and cigarette-ash. For ten minutes he could rest; conversation with either of his companions threatened to be as difficult as it was unnecessary. John Gaymer, in upbringing, intellect, habits of mind and method of speech, belonged to a self-centred world which cheerfully defied subjugation by a brigade of Byrons, reinforced by a division of Wesleys and an army of Rousseaus; for him there was one school and no other, one college and no other, one regiment, club, restaurant, ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... also had a son, a bright enterprising boy,—too bright and spirited to suit Boston commercialism,—who went westward in 1858 to seek his fortune, nor have I ever heard of his return. The child Pansie, frisking with her kitten —a more simple, ingenuous, and self-centred, but also less sympathetic nature than the Pearl of Hester Prynne—may have been studied from Hawthorne's daughter Rose. There also lived at Concord in Hawthorne's time a man with the title of Colonel, a pretentious, self-satisfied person, who corresponded ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... Pilot, in the glory of his prime, Lies in woe-impelling silence, dead before his hour or time, Victim of a mind self-centred in a Godless fool ...
— Poems of Power • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... academical life was that it entailed a certain amount of social intercourse; it compelled one to come into contact with a large variety of people. Without this Hugh felt that his outlook would have become narrow and self-centred. He knew of course that there would be times when it would seem to him that his life was an ineffective one, when he would envy the men of affairs, when he would wonder what, after all, his own performance amounted to. But Hugh felt that the great lack of many lives was ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... evening that will call you home, or to Kamchatka, or to Ecuador, or anywhere, on unavoidable business. No, it is not because I loathe the sight of you or for any melodramatic reason of that sort. It is because, I think, I had fancied you to be not completely self-centred, after all, and I cannot bear to face my own idiocy. Why, don't you realize it was only yesterday you borrowed money from ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... your country. As silent as an owl and as inscrutable as a sphinx. Nobody in Rome knows certainly who his father was, nobody knows certainly who his mother was. Some say his father was an Englishman, some say a Jew, and some say his mother was a gipsy. A self-centred man, who never talks about himself, and cannot be got to lift the veil which surrounds his birth and early life. Came back to Rome eight years ago, and made a vast noise by propounding his platonic scheme of politics—was called up for his term of military service, refused to serve, ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... him, with a blast of her golden trumpet, amongst the mighty Immortals. What lot can be happier than his? Secure in his impregnable egotism, ramparted about with mighty walls of conceit, he bids defiance to attack, and lives an enviable life of self-centred pleasure. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, VOL. 103, November 26, 1892 • Various
... perfectly obvious. What are you waiting for? Now that Marion has behaved so shamefully, it is my dearest hope that you will marry Rose. I didn't mean to speak of it; but, really, you are changing, Donald, and I don't want to think of your becoming a self-centred old bachelor." ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... advice, not as a self-centred, cautious, and orderly citizen of Manhattan, but as a young man whose heart leads his head every time! I want that sort of advice; and I can't give it ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... provocative of these beliefs was actually the RISE OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS—that is, the coming of the mind to a more or less distinct awareness of itself and of its own operation, and the consequent development and growth of Individualism, and of the Self-centred attitude in human ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... Result: A very nice young man, of whom no maid's mother need ever be in trepidation; a very strong young man, whose substance had not been wasted in riotous living; a very learned young man, with a Freiberg mining engineer's diploma and a B.A. sheepskin from Yale; and, lastly, a very self-centred, self-possessed young man. ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... "How horribly self-centred you are! You will talk as if you were in some special sort of quarantine. I keep on telling you it's the same ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... other girl envies you—well, that would hardly be satisfactory, would it? Dick, on the other hand, is clever and brilliant. He will make his way; there will come a day, you are convinced, when a woman will be proud to bear his name. If only he were not so self-centred, if only ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... them until her power might be commensurate with her desire for revenge. At the same time, she would not delay to inflict any injury, big or little, which would wound the object of her revenge and still leave him uncertain as to the source of the evil. She was a cold, self-centred woman, with many a thought of her own which never found expression, not even by so much as the glint ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... was felt by the Honourable George, I had no means of knowing. I dare say not, as he is self-centred, being seldom aware of anything beyond his own immediate sensations. But I had reason to believe that the Klondike woman had divined some menace in our attitude of marked indifference. Her own manner, when it could be observed, grew increasingly defiant, if that were possible. The ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... the extent that Socialism is an antidote to and a check upon excessive individualism and holds up to a busy and self-centred and far from perfect world, grievances to be remedied, wrongs to be righted, ideals to be striven for, it is a ...
— Right Above Race • Otto Hermann Kahn
... and I suppose some one else has found it. It is all right, so far as the ownership is concerned; but I am still self-centred enough to be chagrined ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... the question it raises? Its message is that the cause of weakness lies in the inner life of the soul. It is in some break of harmony with the Good, some dissociation from the True. In the commencement of the poem we find that the God Shiva, the Good, had remained for long lost in the self-centred solitude of his asceticism, detached from the world of reality. And then Paradise was lost. But Kumara-Sambhava is the poem of Paradise Regained. How was it regained? When Sati, the Spirit of Reality, through humiliation, suffering, ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... wherein he once again gave proof of his piety and his virtue. He retired into himself, and there, in a kind of sunless, motionless void, became still more just, still more humane. And in each succeeding century do we find a similar ardour, self-centred and solitary, among those who were wise and good. The name of more than one immovable law might change, but its infinite part remained ever the same; and each one regarded it with the like resigned ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... pure, simple, but intense truth. There was neither egoism, nor monotony, nor commonplace in it. It was all coloured with native imagination and a sense of true art. There is ample room in Art for these subjective idealisations of even the narrowest world. Shelley's lyrics are intensely self-centred, but no one can find in them either realism or egoism. The field in prose is far more limited, and the risk of becoming tedious and morbid is greater. But a true artist can now and then in prose produce most precious portraits of self and ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... still despite her majestic bearing; admired the terse contour of her head and noticed, not without a sigh, her small selfish ear. Madame Patel was nearing forty and her November hair had begun to whiten, but in her long gray eyes was invincible youth, poised, self-centred youth. She was deliberate in her movements and her complexion a clear brown. Chardon followed her example, eating and drinking, for they were exhausted by the ordeal of hearing under the most painful ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... from the crowd and hating the voices of the world, can afford to lose touch with the secret of Rousseau; with what his self-centred ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... and wall, He thrusts his cushions red; O'er burdock rank, o'er thistles tall, He rears his hardy head: Within, without, the strong leaves press, He screens the mossy stone, Lord of a narrow wilderness, Self-centred and alone. ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... their dressing and correct intervals. Much had to be done. We inclined first to the left and then to the right and it was very trying. Men began to drop and I could not help them now that I had lost touch with them. Then I began to lose all interest. I had become purely self-centred—if the whole platoon had collapsed I am afraid I should not have been concerned. I had almost got to such a state that if the Turks had suddenly appeared from the wood I should not have cared what ...
— The Seventh Manchesters - July 1916 to March 1919 • S. J. Wilson
... did not have to hear much more of Claire's story before making up my mind that the wealthiest and most fashionable of New York's young bachelors was a rather self-centred person. He had fallen desperately in love with the peerless Southern beauty, and when she had refused to have anything to do with him, he had come back to the other woman for consolation, and had compelled her to pretend to sympathize ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... thought is one that makes his notion of the obligations of truth and justice very different from that of the ordinary educated European. He is not devoid of the conception of duty, but he applies this conception in methods adapted to the narrow and illiberal conditions of his isolated and self-centred life. ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... The ceaseless chagrin of a self-centred life can be removed at once by learning Meekness and Lowliness of heart. He who learns them is forever proof against it. He lives henceforth a charmed ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... explanation for this strangely self-centred life? Those who knew him best seemed to think so. In the first place he had sprung from an unfortunate stock. Events of an unusual and tragic nature had marked the family of both parents. Nor had his parents themselves been exempt ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various
... to doubt if there was anything before—if there was any just—— He paused and shivered as the thought came to him. And he was glad he paused. To question the Deity was to rank himself at once with a sect he had always despised as self-centred fools, and pitied them as purblind creatures who were in some degree ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... "People say he is self-centred, whatever that may mean. He is certainly a very ambitious man, but his ambitions are large, and he makes no secret of them. He will make a great stir in the ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... fame, just born to bloom Shall spread and flourish from the tomb, How hast thou left mankind for heaven! 20 Even now reproach and faction mourn. And, wondering how their rage was borne, Request to be forgiven. Alas! they never had thy hate: Unmov'd in conscious rectitude, 25 Thy towering mind self-centred stood, Nor wanted man's opinion to be great. In vain, to charm thy ravish'd sight, A thousand gifts would fortune send; In vain, to drive thee from the right, 30 A thousand sorrows urg'd thy end: Like some well-fashion'd ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... they so choose, provided they have some great ideal to measure themselves by,—but even these, without faith in God, may sometimes slip, and fall into deeper depths of ruin than they dreamed of, when self-centred on those heights of virtue where they fancied themselves ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... recognized that these years of absence had wrought a noticeable change in the man before her. He had aged. Hard living and hard travelling had left their marks. But, like Lady Tranmore, she also perceived another difference. The eyes bent upon her were indeed, as before, the eyes of a man self-centred, self-absorbed. There was no chivalrous softness in them, no consideration. The man who owned them used them entirely for his own purposes; they betrayed none of that changing instinctive relation towards the human being—any ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... particular his teasing reticence as to his stay in Matanga, had the effect of recalling Clarice's thoughts to the subject of Stephen Drake. She recalled her old impression of him as one self-centred and self-sufficing, a man to whom nothing outside himself would make any tangible difference; but she recalled it without a trace of the apprehension with which it had been previously coupled. She began indeed to dwell upon that ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... in that terrible chain of events which led to her public humiliation; and I haven't a shadow of doubt that the names of the actors in the tragedy which broke up my life vanished completely from her memory. As you may have noticed, Chloe is a self-centred woman. Her sympathies are not deep, nor her interests wide. Her own life is a good deal more interesting to her than the lives of other people—it is generally so with strong characters, I believe—and after all, her own ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... Andrew Dean from Lilian Swetnam! He was to take part in a shameful conspiracy! He was to assist in ruining an innocent child's happiness! And he was deliberately to foster the raw material of a scandal in which he himself would be involved! He, the strong, obstinate, self-centred old man who had never, till Helen's advent, done anything except to ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett
... organs that act and react on what is presented to them, confront your Italy—whatever it may be—and the Past, and give yourself over to it. The result is paradox and power, a receptive, creative man, an obeying and commanding, but self-centred and self-poised man, world-open, subject to the whole world and yet who has a whole world subject to him, either by turns or ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... of B.'s writings is his marvellous eye for, and sympathy with, Nature. He may be said to have done for Devonshire what Scott did for the Highlands. He has been described as "proud, shy, reticent, strong-willed, sweet-tempered, and self-centred." ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... elder's imagination. The Stannards had come in, and the Sumters, Kate, and "Dad" Ennis, the chaplain, and both doctors, and all these surrounded the brother and sister and held them in cheery converse, while Bob and Miriam sauntered, self-centred, away. ...
— Lanier of the Cavalry - or, A Week's Arrest • Charles King
... to my old ward I remained there for a period of three weeks. At that time I was a very self-centred individual. My large and varied assortment of delusions of grandeur made everything seem possible. There were few problems I hesitated to attack. With sufficient provocation I even attacked attendants—problems in themselves; but such fights as I subsequently engaged in were ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... a more continuous strain, than any other form of society. In Josiah Quincy we have an example of character trained and shaped, under the nearest approach to a pure democracy the world has ever seen, to a firmness, unity, and self-centred poise that recall the finer types of antiquity, in whom the public and private man was so wholly of a piece that they were truly everywhere at home, for the same sincerity of nature that dignified the hearth carried ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... I haven't; but I seem to possess the remainder of his lordship's traits—inconsequence, self-centred selfishness, the instinct for Fifth Avenue nest-building—all the feathered vices, all the unlovely personality and futility and uselessness of my prototype. ... Only, as you observe, I lack ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... to cure certain rather self-centred countries of affecting the morbid view that the people of the United States are lying awake nights contriving to devour them, when, in fact, it would be hard to find in a crowded street in the United States one in a thousand of the passersby who knew more than the name, at most, of one ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... protagonist of life's tragedy, and looked on action as the one undramatic element of a play. To us, at any rate, the [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] is the true ideal. From the high tower of Thought we can look out at the world. Calm, and self-centred, and complete, the aesthetic critic contemplates life, and no arrow drawn at a venture can pierce between the joints of his harness. He at least is safe. He ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... explanation which people give to my desire for retirement and a life of contemplation. Well," he slowly added, with the halting utterance of one to whom each word is an effort, "I can see some justification for their conclusions now. I have been too self-centred, and too short-sighted to recognise my own folly. I might have known that anything out of the common course rouses a curiosity which supplies its own explanation at any cost to propriety or respect. I have courted my own doom. I am the victim of my own ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... clenched fists, during the paroxysms of cutting, wrenching pain. His suffering was supreme. All else in the world shrank into insignificance beside it. No thoughts of Dora fortified him; no mother's face came to comfort him; nor that of any human being he had ever known. He was just Smith—self-centred—alone; just Smith, fighting and suffering and struggling for his life. His anguish found expression ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... The table had been set on the porch and Mrs. Derrick, stirring her coffee with one hand, held open with the other the pages of Walter Pater's "Marius." At her feet, Princess Nathalie, the white Angora cat, sleek, over-fed, self-centred, sat on her haunches, industriously licking at the white fur of her breast, while near at hand, by the railing of the porch, Presley pottered with a new bicycle lamp, filling it ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... any expression of sympathy was hard for her to make. They had grown into very friendly relations this last month. Warwick Hall had widened Ethelinda's horizon, until she was able to take an interest in many things now outside of her own narrow self-centred circle. ...
— The Little Colonel's Chum: Mary Ware • Annie Fellows Johnston
... expression, as we ourselves strike final chords? It sounded so to me then, and suggested something—I can't tell what, I can't define it; but something that changed the current of my thoughts, and made me feel I had done right to come. And from that moment my grief was less self-centred, and the blessed power to feel for others began to return to me. Almost immediately after my arrival, I heard of the tragedy in the cathedral, the suicide of the tenor, and the trouble the dean and chapter were having to find a substitute; ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... start a little; evidently no thought of yielding had come to him before. We were passing the house that used to belong to that strange book-lover and recluse, Beckford. I looked up at the blank windows, and thought of that curious, self-centred life in the past, surrounded by every luxury, able to indulge every whim; and then I looked at my companion's pale, tortured face, and thought of the life he had elected to lead in the hope of saving one whom duty bound him to honour. After all, which life was the ...
— Derrick Vaughan—Novelist • Edna Lyall
... Sefton, "I love a woman, and with all the greater fire because I am naturally undemonstrative and self-centred. The stream comes with an increased rush when it has to break through the ice. I love a woman, I say, and I am determined to have her. You know well who ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... apparatus, which is to be taken care of and respected; but he is no goal, not outgoing nor upgoing, no complementary man in whom the REST of existence justifies itself, no termination—and still less a commencement, an engendering, or primary cause, nothing hardy, powerful, self-centred, that wants to be master; but rather only a soft, inflated, delicate, movable potter's-form, that must wait for some kind of content and frame to "shape" itself thereto—for the most part a man without frame and content, a "selfless" man. Consequently, ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... round at her beloved books and drawings; for they spoke a message to her which they had never spoken before, of self-centred ambition. 'Yes,' she said aloud to herself, 'I have been selfish, utterly! Art, poetry, science—I believe, after all, that I have only loved them for my own sake, not for theirs, because they would make me something, feed my conceit of my own ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... in part, at least, escaped from abject slavery to appetite; it sometimes rises superior to fear. But it is evidently self-centred. The animal may have forgotten the claims of his dead ancestors, he is certainly fully alive to his own interests. Can he even partially rise superior to prudential considerations, as he has to some extent to the claims ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... the perfect egoism of early youth, the way it has no ears for the words of reason and wisdom, and only half an ear for anything else. Like a distant noise and bustle sound the world's doings amid the undisturbed content of self-centred youth and beauty. ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... more croaked like ravens over their impending loss of pay and rank, Brigadier Generals who would soon be Colonels again, and Colonels who would soon be Majors. To have been, through long uneventful unmental years, a peace-time soldier puts the imagination in jeopardy and is apt to breed a self-centred fatuity, which the inexperienced may easily mistake for deliberate naughtiness. Yet these brave men, who hate peace and despise civilians, have many human qualities. They are generally polite to women, and they are kind to animals and to those of their inferiors who show them proper ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... was two years old his parents viewed life, its good and its evil, much as other Moor folks contemplated it. Phoebe's heart was still sweet enough, but she grew more selfish for herself and her own, more self-centred in great Will and little Will. They filled her existence to the gradual exclusion of wider sympathies. Miller Lyddon had given his grandson a silver mug on the day he was baptised, though since that time the old man held more aloof from the ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... Bonaparte was generically different from that produced by either of these classes. She found that such epithets as 'good,' 'violent,' 'gentle,' and 'cruel' could not be applied to him in their ordinary senses. He was in truth a being who stood self-centred, and apart from the sympathies, passions, and enthusiasms of his kind, habitually regarding men, not as fellow-creatures, but as mere counters in a game; a will of colossal strength; an intellect ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... chickens, half-churned butter, unfinished ironing, unmilked cows or an irate husband with a placidity that was worthy of the old Greek gods. Martin was dumbfounded to the point of stupefaction. He was too thoroughly self-centred, however, to let other than his own preferences long dominate his Rag-weed's actions. Her first duty was clearly to administer to his comfort, and that was precisely what she would do. It was ridiculous, the amount of ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... fall.... Their growth becomes self-centred. The intellect expands at the expense of soul, a treacherous way that leads to the dark.... And then—a man must father his own children beautifully before he can ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... "How trivial, how self-centred we are!" Mrs. Valentin murmured, leaning across to claim a look from Elsie. "I realize it the moment we get outside our own little treadmill. We do nothing but take thought for what we shall eat and drink and wherewithal we shall be clothed. I haven't thought ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... sadly whether, if Maud were never, never found, she could ever feel happy again! And if happiness did come to her, and Maud had not come back, how terrible that would be, for it would mean that she had forgotten Maud, forgotten her wrong-doing; that she had become again the self-loving, self-centred being that had ...
— The Girls of St. Olave's • Mabel Mackintosh
... process, Lenau's Weltschmerz therefore stands midway between that of Hoelderlin and Heine. It is more self-centred than Hoelderlin's and while the poet is able to diagnose the disease which holds him firmly in its grasp, he lacks those means by which he might free himself from it. Heine goes still further, for having become conscious of his melancholy, he mercilessly applies the lash of self-irony, and in ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... self-centred and silent man, absorbed in getting and spending, always taking care to have much of the one, and no more than he could help of the other. Sara was a nervous and sensitive little woman, hungering for communion and for sympathy. She got little ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine
... her what was written in it. All the time that his eyes were occupied she watched him eagerly, a little anxiously. But by the time he had finished she had been intrigued for the moment out of her own self-centred thoughts, her fancies caught by all that underlay this crude tale of treasure and murder, of lust for gold, of ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... as from a distance. It bore an unfamiliar note, upon the strangeness of which he dwelt for a detached instant. Then its meaning broke in upon his consciousness from all sides, and lighted up his heavy face with the glow of a conqueror's self-centred smile. He bent his eyes upon her, and noted with a controlled exaltation how her glance in turn deferred to his, and fluttered beneath it, and shrank away. He squared his big shoulders and lifted his head. Still holding her jewelled hand in his, he turned and ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... small, delicate features seemed, somehow, to disappear in her face, so that you saw it as a large white surface bearing indentations, ridges, and hollows like one of those enlarged photographs of the moon's surface as seen through a telescope. A self-centred face, and misleadingly placid. Aunt Sophy's large, plain features, plumply padded now, impressed you as indicating strength, courage, and ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... confessions of the interior life; but it has the further claim to notice that it is the signal expression of the spirit of its time, though we can no longer call it the modern spirit. The book perfectly renders the disillusion, languor and sentimentality which characterise a self-centred scepticism. It is the record, indeed, of a morbid mind, but of a mind gifted with extraordinary acuteness and with the utmost delicacy of perception. Amiel wrote also several essays and poems, but it is for the "Intimate Diary" alone that ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... household task, and obeyed, she had gone to her own room and wept, and told herself that her mother would never have put such things on her. She had no one in whom to confide. She was not a girl to have unlimited intimates among other girls at school. She was too self-centred, and, if the truth were ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... about is that which consists of an inner process of moral transformation, through which one passes over "the great divide" from a life that is self-centred and dominated by impulse and sin to a life that is assured of divine forgiveness, that has {xliii} conceived a passion for a redeemed inward nature, that is conscious of help from beyond its own resources, ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... know it—I was proud and self-centred! In all our games, I would still be the Queen, because I was the tallest, the fairest, the wisest! ...
— Henrik Ibsen's Prose Dramas Vol III. • Henrik Ibsen
... Peter, but I expect you've got a lot to go through before you're clear of things. Now I'm going to be brutal. The fact is that you're too self-centred. People never do anything in the world so long as they are wondering whether the world's going to hurt them or no. Those early years of yours made you morbid. You've got a temper and one or two other things that want a lot of holding ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... sixteen-year-old when her mother died, so spoiled and so self-centred that old Lady Frothingham had been heard more than once to mutter that the young lady could get down from her high horse and make herself useful, or she could march. But that was six years ago. And now—this! Magsie had evidently decided to make herself useful, but she had managed to make herself ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... on which the personal is based; and it is of the utmost importance to keep the two aspects before us concurrently, because reliance on the growing fullness of the individual life to the neglect of the social evolution is likely to empty that life itself of its true content, to leave the self-centred visionary absorbed in the contemplation of some ideal perfection within himself, while the world outside him from which he ultimately derives his notions, is toiling and suffering from the want of those very elements which he is best able ...
— Progress and History • Various
... He was frightfully self-centred. He seemed to be thinking about nothing but himself. In reality, however, he was not reflecting at all on the character and probable course of his life. It was all a matter of feeling and what concerned him was merely the comforts or discomforts, pleasures ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... don't. Babe hasn't the make-up for a professional woman in any line. She is too self-centred, too impetuous. She needs something to humanize her womanhood, not make an abstract thing of her. I'd rather see Babe a gentle, loving woman than the greatest light of ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... regarded me no more than a chauffeur they had hired by the hour. This left Polly who was beside me on the front seat, and myself, to our own devices. Our devices were innocent enough. They consisted in conveying the self-centred Lowells so far from home that they could not get back for supper and were so forced to dine with me. Polly, for as Polly I now thought of her, discovered the place. It was an inn, on the edge of a lake with an Indian name. We did not get home until late, but it had been such a successful ...
— The Log of The "Jolly Polly" • Richard Harding Davis
... sentences of instruction and comment; he saw boxes and bales hauled from the dock side to the deck and swung below with the rattling of machinery and chains. But these formed merely a noisy background to his mood, which was self-centred and gloomy. He was one of those who go back to their native land knowing themselves conquered. He had left England two years before, feeling obstinately determined to accomplish a certain difficult thing, but forces of ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... follows. I would like to linger and talk to this sultry and self-centred being; I would like to wander with her through these rooms, imbibing their strange Oriental spirit—not your vulgar Orient, but something classic and remote; something that savours, for aught I know, of Indo-China, where Mrs. Nichol, in one of her immature efforts at self-realisation, ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... longer the same beings we had previously known, that in their long flights in heat and cold and rain and wind and dust they had shaken off some ancient weakness that was theirs, that without loss of femininity they had become more like ourselves in the sense that they were more self-centred and ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... charges—I saw the veiled and hooded Mabel shyly try to pull Mrs. Bronson into place with her, as near as possible to Sheridan. She must have suspected that there was trouble brewing, and guessed the cause. Her timid, self-centred little soul instinctively sought shelter in the neighbourhood of a friend, who would perhaps have been more than a friend, if he could. So she followed him, he not knowing what eyes the gray veil hid: but Mrs. Bronson ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... approve—highly." He left her, and she heard him getting his hat and stick in the little hallway, as if he were going out of doors. She called to him, "What I wonder is how a man so self-centred that he can't look at his wife for days together, can tell whether another woman's eyes are ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... day, his philosophy passed from discovery to acceptance, and all unknown to him his pen fell into a common way of writing. The faculty of reading which has added fuel to the fire of so many waning inspirations was denied him. He was much too self-centred to lose himself in the works of others. Only the shock of a change of environment—a tour in Scotland, or abroad—shook him into his old thrill of imagination, so that a few fine things fitfully illumine the enormous and dreary bulk of his later work. If we ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... strange sweet things that were locked up in it, it sings as it runs, for love of him. Each plant tries to bear at least one fragrant little flower for him; and the world that was dead lives, and the heart that was dead and self-centred throbs, with an upward, outward yearning, and it has become that which it seemed impossible ever to become. There, does that satisfy you?" she asked, looking down at Gregory. "Is that how you ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... soft-headed and soft-hearted; no match at all for the lady. The thought of her walking the lawns or the drawing-rooms of Crosby Ledgers as the betrothed of the heir stirred in Arthur Meadows's wife a silent, and—be it confessed!—a malicious convulsion. Such mothers, so self-centred, so set on their own triumphs, with their intellectual noses so very much in the clouds, deserved such sons! She promised herself to keep her own counsel, and watch ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward
... Out!" cried Darius feebly, in the wreck, not of his workshop, but of his religion. And Edwin fled down the steps, pushing the mystified apprentices before him, and followed by the men. In the yard the journeyman, entirely self-centred, was hopping about on one leg ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... suite of rooms in the eastern wing of the Castle, and the two new-wedded couples passed the first days of their new happiness under one roof without the slightest constraint; for the Castle was vast enough for solitude when they desired it, and yet the solitude was not isolation or self-centred seclusion. ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... du Pain"). The second is Leisure for All, or, in Paul Lafargue's witty phrase, "The Right to be Lazy." The third is the fullest possible physical and intellectual development of every individual, considered not as an isolated, self-centred entity, but as a member of an interdependent society; or, in the words of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the Communist Manifesto, the socialist ideal is "an association in which the free development of each is the condition for ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... contact, and works more good, teaches more truth by the example of a patient, noble, holy life than could be taught by a thousand sermons from the most eloquent lips." He paused, and then continued in a tone of deep feeling, "I may well say so! I shudder to think what a weak, useless, self-centred being I should have ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... could never get wholly free. Intrepid, independent, steadfast, frugal, prudent, dauntless, he trampled on the pride of kings with the pride of Lucifer. He was clannish to excess, painfully jealous of proximate rivals, self-centred if not self-seeking, fired by zeal and inflamed by almost mean emulations, resenting benefits as debts, ungenerous—with one exception, that of Goethe,—to his intellectual creditors; and, with reference to men and manners around him ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... who must, come to seek health in them. Sad-faced invalids, who have tried other baths in vain and have been ordered hither as a last resort; wounded or broken-down soldiers; cripples, who stump their crutches past us down the earthen road,—these are the ones who haunt Bareges, anxious and self-centred and unhopeful. Style and fashion are things apart; there is not a landau to be had in the place, and scarcely a smaller vehicle. In cold or storm, the sick hurry from boarding-house or hotel to the bath-establishment in close-shut sedan-chairs; on fairer ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... grain of interest in me," thought Helen. "Many of them, I suppose, don't even see me. Goodness, what a lot of self-centred people there ...
— The Girl from Sunset Ranch - Alone in a Great City • Amy Bell Marlowe
... the bed, they smell deliciously of lavender, and we had very good luck doing up the muslin curtains. It is pleasant to be expecting a guest, isn't it, Ellen? I have often thought, although I have never said so before, that our lives were too self-centred. We seemed to have no interests outside of ourselves. Even Elizabeth has been really nothing to us, you know. She seemed to have become a stranger. I hope her child will be the means of ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1904 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... was an egoist of an opposite kind to Montaigne. Walpole lived for his eyes, and saw the world as a masque of bright and amusing creatures. Montaigne studied the map of himself rather than the map of his neighbours' vanities. Walpole was a social being, and not finally self-centred. His chief purpose in life was not to know himself, but to give pleasure to his friends. If he was bored by Montaigne, it was because he had little introspective curiosity. Like Montaigne himself, however, he was much the servant of whim in his literary tastes. That he was no sceptic but a disciple ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... The calm, self-centred Anglo-Saxon temperament—the almost fatalistic acceptance of failure without reproach yet without despair, which Percy's letter to him had evidenced in so marked a manner—was, mayhap, somewhat beyond the comprehension of this young enthusiast, ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy |
