"Unsocial" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his mind, which keeps open house, and entertains all comers; and after being fatigued and amused with morning calls from idle visitors, finds the day consumed and its business unconcluded. Mr. Godwin, on the contrary, is somewhat exclusive and unsocial in his habits of mind, entertains no company but what he gives his whole time and attention to, and wisely writes over the doors of his understanding, his fancy, and his senses—"No admittance except on ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... actions of one opposed to it; in a society in which it were usual to appropriate the possessions of others or to devour unpleasant or useless relatives, virtue and lack of appetite would be reprobated as unsocial. ...
— Disease and Its Causes • William Thomas Councilman
... interwoven in the Soul of Man. "So it is in that of a Wolf;" However irrational, ungenerous, and unsocial the love of liberty may be in a rude Savage, he is capable of being enlightned by Experience, Reflection, Education, and civil, and Political Institutions. But the Nature of the Wolf is, and ever will be confined to running in the forest to satisfy his hunger, and his brutal appetites; ...
— The Original Writings of Samuel Adams, Volume 4 • Samuel Adams
... house; or a pond, or a small lake be near, a few varieties of choice water-fowls may be kept, adding much to the interest and amusement of the family. Many of the English nobility, and gentry, keep swans for such purpose. They are esteemed a bird of much grace and beauty, although silent, and of shy, unsocial habits, and not prolific in the production of their young. For such purposes as they are kept in England, the great African goose, resembling the China, but nearly double in size, is a preferable substitute in this country. It is a more beautiful bird in its plumage; equally ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen
... the expression of the separation and the alienation of man from man. The political democracy is Christian to the extent that it regards every individual as the sovereign, the supreme being, but it means the individual in his uncultivated, unsocial aspect, the individual in his fortuitous existence, the individual just as he is, the individual as he is destroyed, lost, and alienated through the whole organization of our society, as he is given under the dominance of inhuman conditions and elements, ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... routine that is wearisome and debilitating to him, or tie him to her apron strings when he needs that occasional solitude which is one of the most sacred of human rights, he does so because he has no right to impose eccentric standards of expenditure and unsocial habits on her, and because these conditions have produced by their pressure so general a custom of chaining wedded couples to one another that married people are coarsely derided when their partners break the chain. And when ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... behold that indefatigable mole, that rodent which undermines and disintegrates the soil, parcels it out and divides an acre into a hundred fragments,—ever spurred on to his banquet by the lower middle classes who make him at once their auxiliary and their prey. This essentially unsocial element, created by the Revolution, will some day absorb the middle classes, just as the middle classes have destroyed the nobility. Lifted above the law by its own insignificance, this Robespierre, with one head and twenty million arms, is at work perpetually; crouching in country ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... Darwin has some remarks about the smallness of the brain of an ant, assuming that this insect possesses a very high intelligence, but I doubt very much that the ant, which moves in a groove, is mentally the superior of the unsocial flea. The last is certainly the most teachable; and if fleas were generally domesticated and made pets of, probably there would be as many stories about their marvellous intelligence and fidelity to man as we now hear about our over-praised "friend" ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... my loss. And now it was her turn to attempt to restore my spirits, as we fell back to our original mode of conversing. I urged her to make an effort to sing, and she told me she had tried many times, and that it had grieved her to be so unsocial while I was toiling so hard ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... him had driven him upon himself, almost taking self-respect with it. He re-lived the barren years when, longing for love and companionship, he found solace in a cold pride that carried him along through school and into college, with a reputation for hard, unyielding work, and unsocial habits. ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... pleases him. You know how, in better days, he enjoyed appearing as Dionysus, and with what wanton gaiety he played the part of the god. Now he is hiding his real, cheerful face behind the mask of unsocial melancholy, because he thinks the former does not suit this time of misfortune. True, he often says things which make your skin creep, and frequently broods mournfully over his own thoughts. But this never lasts ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... who, were she constant long, Would leave us few adventures for our song. A wicked elfin roved this land around, Whose joys proceeded from the griefs he found; Envy his name: —his fascinating eye From the light bosom drew the sudden sigh; Unsocial he, but with malignant mind, He dwelt with man, that he might curse mankind; Like the first foe, he sought th' abode of Joy Grieved to behold, but eager to destroy; Round blooming beauty, like the wasp, he flew, Soil'd the fresh sweet, and changed the rosy hue; ...
— Miscellaneous Poems • George Crabbe
... typical instances from Lancaster must here suffice. Savonarola was solitary, pondering, meditating, felt profoundly the evils of the world and need of reform, and at twenty-two spent a whole night planning his career. Shelley during these years was unsocial, much alone, fantastic, wandered much by moonlight communing with stars and moon, was attached to an older man. Beecher was intoxicated with nature, which he declared afterward to have been the inspiration of his life. George Eliot at thirteen had a passion ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... repugnant to his nature; and after becoming an orphan, the solitary boy had no human object on which the deep capacity for tenderness of his occult nature could be exerted. Thus forced by his fate into solitariness of habits, and secreted emotions, he was deemed unsocial, and reproached for what he felt was his misfortune—the being wholly misunderstood by those his early lot was cast among. Hence his perverted ardour of affection was misplaced on the lower living world—dog, cat, or owl, whatever chance made his companions. Returning to India, where ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... the religious manners of Mary; partly by the cold and unsocial temper of William, who shunned excess, not perhaps because it was criminal, but because it was derogatory; partly by the political fashion of the day, which was to disown the profligacy that marked the partisans ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... isolation and partly from absorption in labor, is the most unsocial man in New England. The farmers are comparatively few who go into society at all, who ever dine with their neighbors, or who take any genuine satisfaction in the company of the women whom their wives invite to tea. They may possibly be farmers among farmers, but they are not men among men and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... and indecent. It is unsocial and uneconomic. It is immoral and unpatriotic. Toward women the Progressive party proclaims the chivalry of the State. We propose to protect women wage-earners by suitable laws, an example of which is the minimum wage for women workers—a wage which shall ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... into the England we know to-day, "of which at least one-third is indigent, of which nineteen-twentieths are dispossessed of capital and of land, and of which the whole industry and national life is controlled upon its economic side by a few chance directors of millions, a few masters of unsocial ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... he says, "by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... the Queen's commands, and Roland performed the office of carver and attendant as usual. But, notwithstanding what the Queen had said, the meal was silent and unsocial; and every effort which Mary made to excite some conversation, died away under the solemn and chill replies of the Lady of Lochleven. At length it became plain that the Queen, who had considered these advances as a condescension on her part, and who piqued herself justly on her powers of pleasing, ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... is on the Unsocial Passions. These necessarily divide our sympathy between him that feels them and him that is their object. Resentment is especially hard to sympathize with. We may ourselves resent wrong done to another, but the less so that the sufferer strongly resents it. ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... many other birds. She deposits five to eight eggs of a white or creamy-white ground-color, speckled with rufous and lavender. During the season of incubation and brood rearing the nuthatches retire to the depth of the woods, and are quiet, secretive, and unsocial, seldom betraying their ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... Bell; but he shows more of resistance than all the other persons to the poetries and eloquences of the place. Tears are a great luxury to him: he sips the cup of woe with all the gust of an epicure. Still his temper is by no means sour: fond of solitude, he is nevertheless far from being unsocial. The society of good men, provided they be in adversity, has great charms for him. He likes to be with those who, though deserving the best, still have the worst: virtue wronged, buffeted, oppressed, is his special delight; because such moral discrepancies offer the most salient points to ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... it is particular and unsocial, in a country where the common diet is of another nature. But I am sure sickness, lowness, and oppression, are much more so. These difficulties, after all, happen only at first, while the cure is about; for, when good health comes, all these oddnesses and ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... circumstances similar to each other; and their consequent rivalship prevented any disproportionate refinement from appearing in any particular region. The principles of government, firmly rooted in the Feudal System, unsocial and unphilosophical as they were, laid the foundation of that balance of power which discourages the Cesars and Alexanders of modern ages from attempting the ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... the vehicle was a third traveller who took no part in the discussion, and preserved a deep silence. The driver and the patriot and even Gudin paid no attention to this mute individual; he was, in truth, one of those uncomfortable, unsocial travellers who are found sometimes in a stage-coach, like a patient calf that is being carried, bound, to the nearest market. Such travellers begin by filling their legal space, and end by sleeping, without the smallest respect for their ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... slight solace for the arduous trip), but never more than once a day, and never in another man's house. Let us hope that on their lonely journeys they conscientiously obeyed the law, though we can but suspect that the one unsocial smoke may have been a long one. In some communities the colonists could not plant tobacco, nor buy it, nor sell it, but since they loved the fascinating weed then as men love it now, they somehow invoked or spirited it into their pipes, though they never could smoke it in public unfined and unpunished. ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... Butcher-row I was surprized to perceive Johnson come in and take his seat at another table. The mode of dining, or rather being fed, at such houses in London, is well known to many to be particularly unsocial, as there is no Ordinary, or united company, but each person has his own mess, and is under no obligation to hold any intercourse with any one. A liberal and full-minded man, however, who loves to talk, will break through this churlish ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... accomplishments, and qualities more easily communicable to those about us. He that can only converse upon questions, about which only a small part of mankind has knowledge sufficient to make them curious, must lose his days in unsocial silence, and live in the crowd of life without a companion. He that can only be useful on great occasions, may die without exerting his abilities, and stand a helpless spectator of a thousand vexations which fret away happiness, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... drunken eyes unclose, And now thou feelest for thy little nose, And, finding it, thou rubbest thy two hands Much as to say, "I'm glad I'm here again." And well mayest thou rejoice—'tis very plain, That near wert thou to Death's unsocial lands. ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... at much of the moral design, of a statesman and a legislator: while, in the Ionian states, the wonderful stir and agitation, the changes and experiments in government, the rapid growth of luxury, commerce, and civilization, afforded to a poetry which was not, as with us, considered a detached, unsocial, and solitary art, but which was associated with every event of actual life—occasions of vast variety—themes of universal animation. The eloquence of poetry will always be more exciting in its appeals—the love ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... security, warmth, and home enjoyment; of money spent not for show, but for comfort. Thick crimson curtains descend in heavy folds over the embrasures of the windows, and the ample hearth and wide fireplace speak of the customs of the good old times, ere that gloomy, unpoetic, unsocial gnome—the air-tight—had monopolized the place of ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... through coperation that man has become the dominant and supreme species upon the planet. Man's social instincts, in other words, have been perhaps even more important for his survival than his intelligence. The man who lies, cheats, and steals, or who indulges in other unsocial conduct sets himself against his group and places his group at a disadvantage as compared with other groups. Now, natural selection is continually operating upon groups as well as upon individuals, and the group which can command the most loyal, most efficient ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... himself laughed at the crude paganism of his time, could also point the finger of scorn at the Jews as "a people notorious by their contempt of divine images." To the genuine Roman, the state religion might not be true, but it was part of the civic life, and therefore its rejection was unsocial and disloyal. Yet the account of Tacitus contains several remarks which, in their author's despite, reveal the moral superiority of the conquered over the conquerors. He notes their national tenacity, their ready charity, their freedom from infanticide, their conviction of the immortality of the ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... young men despised all non-capitalists on high moral grounds. They argued that every such man who went through life without laying aside any wealth for those to come, must be selfish by nature and utterly unsocial at heart. There always are plenty of high moral ...
— The Crow's Nest • Clarence Day, Jr.
... part in the conversation which ensued. He had again resumed his taciturn and unsocial demeanor, and now, with folded arms, he stood in the deep recess of a curtained window, sometimes looking gloomily out into the night, anon glancing at the little knot of adventurers, and personages of doubtful reputation, who occasionally ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... sorts of dramatic representations and exhibitions." But in pressing for this liberty, he expresses the strongest conviction that "the frequency and gaiety of public diversions" is absolutely essential for the good of the commonwealth, in order to "correct whatever is unsocial or disagreeably rigorous in the morals of all the little sects into which the country is divided," and to "dissipate that melancholy and gloomy humour which is almost always the source of popular superstition and enthusiasm."[61] ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... world. All Oriental piety assumed this ascetic form. The transition was easy to the sundering of domestic ties, to the suppression of natural emotions and social enjoyments. The devotee became austere, cold, inhuman, unsocial. He shunned the habitations of men. And the more desirous he was to essay a high religious life and thus rise in favor with God, the more severe and revengeful and unforgiving he made the Deity he adored,—not ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord
... and enjoy intercourse, not so familiar but as sweet, as that I saw at Brook Farm. Is it not the tendency of a decided institution of reform to be unjust to the Barbarians? I do assure you the warm, tender south winds blow over us here in the unsocial state no less ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... of two or three days, people ceased to take interest in a feud so coldly conducted; and if they thought of it at all, it was but to wonder that both the parties should persevere in residing near the Spa, and in chilling, with their unsocial behaviour, a party met together for the ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... permanent union, and doubtless natural selection favored the groups in which parents co-operated in caring for the offspring. But assuming a relation permanent enough to be called marriage, the man was still, as compared with the woman, unsettled and unsocial. He secured food by violence or cunning, and hunting and fighting were fit expressions of ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... together, their lives blending in childhood association and affection. It is interesting to think what the effect would have been upon the characters of both if they had been reared in close companionship. How would John's stern, rugged, unsocial nature have affected the gentle spirit of Jesus? What impression would the brightness, sweetness, and affectionateness of Jesus have made on the temper and disposition ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... it, Miss Lavillotte. He's got where he doesn't care. He is one of our finest workmen, and a good fellow, but he is so unsocial and gloomy the ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... course of his political life he had been so generally feared that he was thought unsocial, and it is not difficult to explain the causes of that opinion. The life, morals, and fidelity of Piombo made him obnoxious to most courtiers. In spite of the fact that delicate missions were constantly intrusted to his discretion which to any other man ...
— Vendetta • Honore de Balzac
... need intellectual stimulus, so the young people need social satisfactions. The salvation of the American rural community lies largely in the contentment of the young people, for without that quality of mind they leave the country for the town, or settle back in an unprogressive, unsocial state of sullen resignation. There must be opportunity for recreation. The community house should function for the entertainment of its constituency in ways that approve themselves to the associates in charge. But it is not so much entertainment ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... about Epworth, singing songs and soaking with the riff-raff of the neighbourhood until turned out at midnight to roll homeward to his lonely lodgings. She connected drunkenness with uproarious mirth, boon companionship, set orgies. Of secret unsocial tippling she ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... cordon round. depopulate; dispeople^, unpeople^. Adj. secluded, sequestered, retired, delitescent^, private, bye; out of the world, out of the way; the world forgetting by the world forgot [Pope]. snug, domestic, stay-at-home. unsociable; unsocial, dissocial^; inhospitable, cynical, inconversable^, unclubbable, sauvage [Fr.], troglodytic. solitary; lonely, lonesome; isolated, single. estranged; unfrequented; uninhabitable, uninhabited; tenantless; abandoned; deserted, deserted in one's utmost need; unfriended^; kithless^, friendless, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... It will, perhaps, appear, that it was most effectually favored and assisted by the five following causes: I. The inflexible, and if we may use the expression, the intolerant zeal of the Christians, derived, it is true, from the Jewish religion, but purified from the narrow and unsocial spirit, which, instead of inviting, had deterred the Gentiles from ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... and educated by my bachelor uncle. He was a reticent, moody man, and with his aged housekeeper and myself, led a solitary and unsocial life in the old rambling house which had been ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... leave behind him children's children to be the servants of God in his place for ever. All this and much more may be truly said by way of prelude about the duty of marriage. But if a man will not listen, and remains unsocial and alien among his fellow-citizens, and is still unmarried at thirty-five years of age, let him pay a yearly fine;—he who of the highest class shall pay a fine of a hundred drachmae, and he who is of the second ...
— Laws • Plato
... who rejected with abhorrence the deities adored by their sovereign and by their fellow-subjects, enjoyed, however, the free exercise of their unsocial religion, there must have existed some other cause, which exposed the disciples of Christ to those severities from which the posterity of Abraham was exempt. The difference between them is simple and obvious; but, according to the sentiments ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... of his house may block the improvement of a whole street. The heedlessness of one family may bring an epidemic upon an entire city. There must be a plan, and by law the will of the majority must be imposed upon the unsocial few. Where voluntary cooeperation fails, compulsory cooeperation often is necessary. Thus health laws, tax laws, and improvement laws regulate many of the acts of citizens, limit the use of property, and compel ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... height. This is, supposing the master or mistress of the house to be at home. If they are not in, she answers your "Amici!" with "No ghe ne xe!" (Nobody here!) and lets down a basket by a string outside the window, and fishes up your card.] or by the unsocial domestic habits of Europe. You bow and give good-day to the people whom you meet in the common hall and on the common stairway, but you rarely know more of them than their names, and you certainly care nothing about them. ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... with great personal charm, take infinite pains to cultivate all the little graces and qualities which go to make up popularity. If people who are naturally unsocial would only spend as much time and take as much pains as people who are social favorites in making themselves popular, they would ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... earnest, so truly those of a woman standing on the assured ground of fealty to another, that she was beyond her former girlish sensitiveness and its quick, involuntary manifestations. She said gently, "Pardon me, Mr. Graham, for my unsocial abstraction. You deserve better treatment for all your efforts for our ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... unsocial breast Locks from the world his useless stores. Wealth by the bounteous only is enjoyed, Whose treasures, in diffusive good employed, The rich return of fame and friends procure, And 'gainst a sad ...
— Book of Wise Sayings - Selected Largely from Eastern Sources • W. A. Clouston
... "blue books" from the Minerva press devoured by him in his boyhood, we may ascribe the style and tone of his first compositions. For physical sports he showed no inclination. "He passed among his school-fellows as a strange and unsocial being; for when a holiday relieved us from our tasks, and the other boys were engaged in such sports as the narrow limits of our prison-court allowed, Shelley, who entered into none of them, would pace backwards and forwards—I think I see him now—along ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... the stomach as a centre. And the truth is, it is impossible for those men ever to participate of generous and princely joy, such as enkindles a height of spirit in us and sends forth to all mankind an unmade hilarity and calm serenity, that have taken up a sort of life that is confined, unsocial, inhuman, and uninspired towards the esteem of the world and the love of mankind. For the soul of man is not an abject, little, and ungenerous thing, nor doth it extend its desires (as polyps do their claws) unto eatables only,—yea, these are in an instant of ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... he reached home he even contemplated resignation. He liked better the thought of playing his own hand, and keeping both its colour and its purpose secret from everybody else in the world. His head was, for the moment, full of unsocial thoughts; but whether the impressions created by Mr. Baggs were likely to persist in a mind so ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... sensitiveness than the rest of mankind." At the same time we are told that a neurosis is a partial triumph of anti-social, non-moral factors, and that it is a cowardly flight from reality; we hear a nervous invalid called selfish, unsocial, shut in, primitive, childish, self-deceived. Both these descriptions are true to life. A neurosis is an ethical struggle between these two sets of forces. If the lower set had triumphed, the man would have been merely ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... a ghost unless there had been a murder?" asked the average gossip and Fishtowner, to whom the marvellous was certain and the real to be inferred from it. Duff Salter believed in the ghost, as Agnes was satisfied; he had become unsocial and suspicious in look, and after two or three days of absence from the house, succeeding Podge's disappearance, entered it with ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... their legitimate rights. But the rights of fighting one another, and of plundering traders, were as dear to the Barons of Hindustan as ever they had been to their precursors in medival Europe; and, in the fancied security of their strong earthen ramparts, they very generally maintained these unsocial privileges. ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... deathless place in the annals of the religious history of the eighteenth century, and, more particularly, determined the beginnings and the essential character of the world-wide Methodist movement. His gentle life presents very little of dramatic incident: he was a reserved, somewhat unsocial boy, greatly devoted to study and to the reading of poetry. He was given a most thorough education, and, while completing his university career, became acquainted with Friedrich Schlegel, and remained his most intimate friend. He ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... female pride! 'I suffer not,' saith St. Paul, 'the woman to usurp authority over the man.' If the Apostle could not suffer it," he naturally remarks, "into what mold is he mortified that can?" He had a sincere desire to preserve men from the society of unsocial and unsympathizing women; and that ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... been almost always remarkably regular and orderly; generally much more so than in the established church. The morals of those little sects, indeed, have frequently been rather disagreeably rigorous and unsocial. ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... most frequently won, rendered even this temporary absence matter of anxious thought and apprehension; so that, during their afternoon journey, he rode in silence by Eveline's side, rather meditating what might chance to- morrow, than endeavouring to avail himself of present opportunity. In this unsocial manner they travelled on until the point was reached where they were to ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... visited by those gusts which come to the ascetic, when all life seemed suddenly caught up and devoured by a flame burning night and day, and going out mercifully, he knew not why, like a blown candle. However unsocial in the proper sense of the word, he by no means lacked company in these Oxford days. He knew many, both dons and undergraduates. His long stride, and determined absence of direction, had severely tried all those who could ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the alderman, a pinch o' snuff'—now, you know, I thought that was kind of me; but Miss Montenero took it all the wrong way, quite to heart so, you've no idear! After all, she may say what she pleases, but it's my notion the Jews is both a very unsocial and a very revengeful people; for, do you know, my lord, they wouldn't dine with us next day, though the alderman ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... by unbelievers that religion is dull, unsocial, uncharitable, enthusiastic, a damper of human joy, a ...
— Parker's Second Reader • Richard G. Parker
... gnawing and hopelessly preoccupying anxiety. He stared out of the window at the exploitation roads of suburbs, and rows of houses all very much alike, either emphatically and impatiently to let or full of rather busy unsocial people. Near Wimbledon he had a glimpse of golf links, and saw two elderly gentlemen who, had they chosen, might have been gentlemen of grace and leisure, addressing themselves to smite little hunted white balls great distances with the utmost bitterness ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... if they could have read my heart, as I crept up to bed by the back way, comforting myself with the reflection, 'They will take no hurt from me,' - they would not have thought mine a morose or an unsocial nature. ...
— George Silverman's Explanation • Charles Dickens
... returned in the dark with fear. Meanwhile the character of this young man, so sweet and tender to Sidney, was gradually becoming more hard and stern to others. He had now climbed to the post of command in that rude establishment; and premature command in any sphere tends to make men unsocial and imperious. ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 2 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... my brother, for I was now alone, with no being, at all assimilating in age, with whom I could exchange a word. Of late years, from being almost constantly at school, I had cast aside, in a great degree, my unsocial habits and natural reserve, but in the desolate region in which we now were there was no school; and I felt doubly the loss of my brother, whom, moreover, I tenderly loved for his own sake. Books I had none, at least such 'as I cared about'; and with respect to the ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... which made him much less dangerous. But in his disappointment he yelled so loudly that Madame Bonaparte heard him; and as she had quite a fancy for her mameluke, I was sharply scolded. However, this poor Ali was of such an unsocial temperament that he got into difficulties with almost every one in the household, and at last was sent away to Fontainebleau, to take the place ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... unsocial. My uncle rarely spoke; he pointed for whatever he wanted, and the servant perfectly understood him. Indeed, his man John, or Iron John, as he was called in the neighborhood, was a counterpart of his master. He was a tall, bony old fellow, with a dry wig that seemed made ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... heaviness and pain; 10 And bare, at once, Captivity displayed Stands scoffing through the never-opened gate, Which nothing through its bars admits, save day, And tasteless food, which I have eat alone Till its unsocial bitterness is gone; And I can banquet like a beast of prey, Sullen and lonely, couching in the cave Which is my lair, and—it may be—my grave. All this hath somewhat worn me, and may wear, But must be borne. I stoop not to despair; 20 For I have battled with mine agony, And made me wings ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... no scaly fish, and it came out that the shellfish were caught by women, widows who had no men to obey or please, who had children, or who wanted francs to buy gewgaws or tobacco; and a few unsocial men fishers who did not abide by the common interests of ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... fellow men. There is an old saying "that kissing goes by favor," and doubtless it is true that other valuable things go the same way. People naturally like to do business with their friends, with those who are personally agreeable to them. It takes a long time for the unsocial or the unfriendly man to make himself personally agreeable to strangers, or, in fact, to very many people, ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... dissonant effect. He was out of keeping with the rest of the Personae Dramatis. There was as little link between him and them as betwixt himself and the audience. He was a third estate, dry, repulsive, and unsocial to all. Individually considered, his execution was masterly. But comedy is not this unbending thing; for this reason, that the same degree of credibility is not required of it as to serious scenes. The degrees ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... pursued the grave-digger, "I'm by inclination a social man, an' the nature o' my avocation, so to speak, is a wee unsocial. Fowk are that curious. Noo, when I gang into the square o' a forenicht, the lads 'll cry oot, 'Dinna be lookin' my gate, Saunders, an' wonnerin' whether I'll need a seven-fit hole, or whether a six-fit yin will pass!' Or maybe the bairns'll ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... than of the great community of Derby, while Sir Allan Smith as plainly represents engineering employers rather than Croydon. There used to be a powerful trade which chose as its motto "Our trade is our politics." Most of us have regarded that as an unsocial doctrine, yet the growing representation of interests suggests that ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... often morose and unsocial—perhaps because he is not understood, perhaps because he falls so short of his own ideals. Often he does not find kindred spirits anywhere. I do not think we should drive such a man into conditions that hurt, but I do ...
— The Untroubled Mind • Herbert J. Hall
... sufficient for the flocks. The farms are large, usually of at least six thousand acres, so one seldom sees a farmhouse. The farmers are all of Boer stock. They lead a lonely life in a silent and melancholy nature, but their habitual gravity has not made them unsocial, for they are fond of riding or driving in their waggons to visit one another on all occasions of festivity or mourning. Every ten or fifteen miles there is a station, and here the British element in the population ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... was always uncomfortable and depressing, it was little more cheering at home. His parents, as all the neighbors believed, had been unhappily married, and, though the mother died in his early childhood, his father remained a moody, unsocial man, who rarely left his farm except on the 1st of April every year, when he went to the county town for the purpose of paying the interest upon a mortgage. The farm lay in a hollow between two hills, separated from the road ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... examination. Whether it was because his teachers pitied his poverty, and wished him to have a chance for himself, or whether because, as some would have us believe, they wished to be rid of a scholar who criticised their methods, and was fault-finding, unsocial, and "exasperating," it is at least certain that the boy took his examinations, and passed them satisfactorily, standing number forty in a class ...
— The Boy Life of Napoleon - Afterwards Emperor Of The French • Eugenie Foa
... 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 and in ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... in showing attentions to her more favoured guests, Mrs. Tudor did not perceive the cold, uncomfortable, unsocial feeling that had crept over the rest ...
— Home Scenes, and Home Influence - A Series of Tales and Sketches • T. S. Arthur
... to the race. The instinct to reproduce is as fundamental as the instinct of self-preservation and the desire for food. A social order which disregards it or defies it will meet defeat. To an alarming extent the tendency of the present economic system is to create unsocial impulses by making the normal gratification of sexual instinct in marriage and the assumption of the responsibility of a family more and more difficult. The cost of living is steadily rising without a corresponding certainty on the part of a large proportion of young men that they ...
— The Third Great Plague - A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People • John H. Stokes
... any society, who practises what is allowed, is not a dishonest man.' BOSWELL. 'So then, Sir, you do not think ill of a man who wins perhaps forty thousand pounds in a winter?' JOHNSON. 'Sir, I do not call a gamester a dishonest man; but I call him an unsocial man, an unprofitable man. Gaming is a mode of transferring property without producing any intermediate good. Trade gives employment to numbers, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... good-natured efforts to draw his taciturn housekeeper out did not succeed very well. She had that unsocial failing of reserved natures, silence habitually; and her reserve was always at its worst in the presence of the Captain's brilliant daughter. That youthful beauty fixed her blue eyes now and then on the dark, downcast face with ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... the presence of our charming companion. They were pleasing, because she seemed pleased. Alone, the scene would have been dull and insipid: the participation of it with her gave it relish. Let the gloomy monk, sequestered from the world, seek unsocial pleasures in the bottom of his cell! Let the sublimated philosopher grasp visionary happiness, while pursuing phantoms dressed in the garb of truth! Their supreme wisdom is supreme folly: and they mistake for happiness the mere absence of pain. Had they ever felt the solid pleasure of one generous ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... has just been said one might conclude that the spirit of Hamsun is fundamentally unsocial. So it is, in a way, but only in so far as we have come to think of social and urban as more or less interchangeable terms. He has a social consciousness and a social passion of his own, but it is decentralized, one might say. He knows ...
— Pan • Knut Hamsun
... the subject was dismissed, and her guests returned to their ordinary conversation. Except the doctor and Daisy. She was overwhelmed, and he was gravely unsocial. ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell
... was a Jim Cox in town who had a clock to fix, so he went to his house and got the job. He entered into conversation with Jim while engaged in repairing the clock, but found him a surly, uncommunicative, unsocial man, but Fox was a thoroughly good fellow and did not mind an occasional rebuff. So he took up the conversation, explained what was the matter with the clock, gave an interesting description on the works of clocks in general, and finally partially thawed Jim out. "By the ...
— The Expressman and the Detective • Allan Pinkerton
... descends from the top of the village hill will pass pretty mansions set apart from their neighbors in leafy and flowery solitudes wherein the most unsocial hermit might find elbow-room enough; he will see little cottages which stand nearer to the roadside, as if they shunned isolation and wished to share in the life that often fills the highway in front of them. Farther down the houses become more companionable; ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... State insists pretty effectually now upon the participation of the lender in the borrower's risks. This, however, is only one part of a series of limitations of the same character. It is felt that to buy simply in order to sell again brings out many unsocial human qualities; it makes a man seek to enhance profits and falsify values, and so the samurai are forbidden to buy to sell on their own account or for any employer save the State, unless some process of ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... themselves that the corruptions of India would escape amidst the dissensions of Parliament. They are disappointed. They will be disappointed in all the rest of their expectations which they have formed upon everything, except the merits of their cause. The Commons will not have the melancholy unsocial glory of having acted a solitary part in a noble, but imperfect work. What the greatest inquest of the nation has begun its highest tribunal will accomplish. At length justice will be done to India. It is true that ...
— The Works Of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IX. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... that my friends are not quite satisfied with the account you have given of them in your clever novel entitled "An Unsocial Socialist." You already understand that I consider it my duty to communicate my whole history, without reserve, to whoever may desire to be guided or warned by my experience, and that I have no sympathy whatever with the spirit in which one of the ladies concerned ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... regular army had been the first step. Several causes had contributed to this. In the first place, the Socialists had condemned the army system as unsocial. Privates, they pointed out, were forbidden to hob-nob with colonels, though the difference in their positions was due to a mere accident of birth. They demanded that every man in the army should be a general. Comrade Quelch, in ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse
... many other injunctions of the Master and to many significant incidents in his public ministry. Exhaustive treatment of this subject is, of course, impossible here. Briefly it may be remarked, that Jesus looked upon wealth as tending oftentimes to foster an unsocial spirit. Rich men are liable to become enemies of the brotherhood Jesus sought to establish, by reason of their covetousness and contracted sympathies. The rich man is in danger of erecting false standards ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... crusade against dicing, drabbing, and company-keeping. We will meet for dinner in Saint Sepulchre's Church; we will dine in the chancel, drink our flask in the vestry, the parson shall draw every cork, and the clerk say amen to every health. Come man, cheer up, and get rid of this sour and unsocial humour. Credit me, that the Puritans who object to us the follies and the frailties incident to human nature, have themselves the vices of absolute devils, privy malice and backbiting hypocrisy, and spiritual pride in all its presumption. There is much, too' in life which we must see, were ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... by environment, found himself incapable of any intellectual or physical exertion. He could not work. He could not even loaf alone. Brady was an indifferent companion, subject to fits of absence of mind,—more unsocial ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... the ambition natural to a man of high powers. With all his genial sociability, he was in a way self-centered. His associates often thought him,—and Lamon shares the opinion—not only moody and meditative, but unsocial, cold, impassive; bent on his own ends, and using other men as his instruments. Partly we may count this as the judgment of the crowd to whom Lincoln's inner life was unimaginable. He shared their social hours, and then withdrew into thoughts and feelings ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... St. Pierre, he looked upon the useful and necessary etiquettes of life as so many unworthy prejudices. Instead of conforming to them, he sought to trample on them. In addition, he evinced some disposition to rebel against his commander, and was unsocial with his equals. It is not, therefore, to be wondered at, that at this unfortunate period of his existence, he made himself enemies; or that, notwithstanding his great talents, or the coolness he had exhibited in moments of danger, he should have been sent back to France. Unwelcome, ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... the unsocial character of Thoreau's theory of life has been one of the most serious charges against it, his fine series of thoughts on love and marriage in this volume become peculiarly interesting. "Love must be as much ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... above common folks, and prophesied that any amount of evil would befall her. She did not know that it is a trait of human nature to condemn that, which, through ignorance, people cannot appreciate the value. Therefore she mourned in secret, and blamed herself for being unsocial, and tried hard to be patient ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... furnish an example of the harm that can be done when man follows the absurd and unsocial decrees of an ascetic individual written in a barbaric age and maintained as law in a more advanced period. The enlightened physician holds that it is not good for a man not to touch a woman; and one wonders what would have become of our race if all women had carried ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... I might have been successful in other quarters, but I did not care to try. I left New York in disgust, and, going West, I buried myself in the forest, where I built a rude cabin, and there I have lived since, an unsocial, solitary life. Years have passed ...
— Try and Trust • Horatio Alger
... machine of the motor one. But just for this reason, if the damming-up be liberated, not in the channels of healthy assimilation, and duly correlated growth, but in the forced discharges of violent emotion, followed by conditions of melancholy and by certain unsocial tendencies, then the promise of genius ripens into eccentricity, and the blame ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... must necessarily compromise upon the favorable hereditary action of a majority of the traits on the two family lines. One must relinquish any quest for perfection. After eliminating the individuals possessing the grossly unsocial traits below the dividing line of social fitness, one must choose with respect to a majority of socially fit traits, in addition to the elements of personal congeniality and affinity. The two last-named elements, however, ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk
... himself becomes less social, less rational, less manly; if he falls from the highest type, which seeks self-realization through a critical intelligence and emotional control, to one of those lower types which manifest only the primitive virtues of power; if he becomes unsocial, the social organization, whatever its apparent merits, is failing to achieve its supreme object. If, on the contrary, the man is becoming ever better as a human being, more rational, more sympathetic, with an ever broadening ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson |
