"Egotistic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... peculiar to the simple, but by no means short annals of the poor, and especially of the English poor. Yet, Christian, the impatient, the ardent, stood and listened with respectful and absorbed interest. Cottingham might be elderly, egotistic, long-winded, but at this period of her career, Christian's hot heart beat throb for throb with his, and the thought, as he said, of "that pore little bitch stoppin' out, and maybe spoilt, so that there'd be nothin' for us but to shoot her, through learnin' ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... Presidente always carried out her daughter's every wish and listened to her as if Mademoiselle was an oracle. What right have I to expect Mlle. Cecile to change her habits and ideas? Instead of a father and mother who indulge her every whim, she would find an egotistic man of forty; if she should resist, the man of forty would have the worst of it. So, as an honest man—I withdraw. If there should be any need to explain my visit here, I ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... of the feeling created by the present war, and I am afraid the sentiment has not abated a whit yet. Germans have done a good deal in attempts to detach the French from the English. They have told them that they are only the poor seduced tools of the base and egotistic Britishers, that Germans did not bear them any malice, that they rather pitied them and would fain be ready to come to terms with them. But declarations of this sort proved only how little the French mentality was understood this side of the Vosges. ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... views—to other people. I have entitled them the Midway Inn, partly from my own inveterate habit of story-telling, but chiefly from an image of his own, by which he once described to me, in his fine egotistic rolling style, the position he seemed to himself ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... will make it possible for all right thinking minds to unite efforts in building a universal religion, sufficient to satisfy the intellectual want of every people and of every time. Attempts, all-powerful, such as Papism and Mohammedanism, failed in their egotistic purposes to enforce upon the world an exotic structure. Neither the fires of Torquemadas, nor the sword of Islam could deter the bravery of civilization. The blood that was spilled by the millions ...
— Conversion of a High Priest into a Christian Worker • Meletios Golden
... Washington's great green tables for the gamblers of ambition all those years without learning the significance of eyes and tone. For one politician to speak thus venomously of another was sure sign that that other was of consequence; for John Branch, a very Machiavelli at self-concealment and usually too egotistic to be jealous, thus to speak, and that, without being able to conceal his venom—"Can it be possible," thought the old lady, "that this Craig is about to be a somebody?" Aloud she said: "He is a ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... "practical occultism," abnormal and egotistic though it be, may develop marvellous powers, at which we may wonder as we do at the skill of an acrobat or the pugilism of Sullivan. It cultivates a will power and a spirituality by which miraculous phenomena may be shown, ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, January 1888 - Volume 1, Number 12 • Various
... morrow. I have indeed sometimes wondered what would have happened if Chateaubriand had gone on writing novels, and had devoted to fiction the talent which he wasted on the mesquin[334] politics of the France of his later days and on the interesting but restricted and egotistic Memoires d'Outre-Tombe. It is no doubt true that, though old men have often written great poetry and excellent serious prose, nobody, so far as I remember, has written a great novel after seventy. For Quatre-Vingt-Treize, if it ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... though it has little beyond the wheels required for a trustworthy instrument, added to a good face and a pair of useful hands. The more wheels there are in a watch or a brain, the more trouble they are to take care of. The movements of exaltation which belong to genius are egotistic by their very nature. A calm, clear mind, not subject to the spasms and crises that are so often met with in creative or intensely perceptive natures, is the best basis for love or friendship.—Observe, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... the door-step studying Gray's Botany, which at odd moments in the winter I had attended to with her. My heart smote me for that egotistic contemplation of myself and my prospects which had led me ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... enemy's arrival he had laid the conditions before his colleague in service, General Moncton, commanding the forces on shore, and asked a reinforcement of troops for destitute Jamaica, if necessity arose. The result is best told in his own words; for they convey, simply and without egotistic enlargement, that settled personal characteristic, the want of which Jervis and Nelson in their day noted in many, and which Rodney markedly possessed. This was the capacity, which Sandwich eighteen years later styled "taking the great line of considering the King's whole dominions ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... this young girl, by the betrayal of such ignorance, made herself in conversation with a cultured young gentleman whose good opinion she was most anxious to win. And yet, to talk too much about books is not well; it often marks the pedantic and egotistic character. It is safe to say that unless one happens to meet a very congenial mind among conversers in general society, to introduce the subject of books is liable to be misconstrued. It is not very long since another popular modern novelist held up to scorn and ridicule the young woman whose ...
— Letters to a Daughter and A Little Sermon to School Girls • Helen Ekin Starrett
... natural and unavoidable issue of a born positivity of spirit, uninformed by scientific meditation. It exists in its coarsest and most childish kind in adventurous freebooters of the type of Napoleon, and in a noble and not egotistic kind in Oliver Cromwell's pious interpretation of the order of events by the good will ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... a neighbour of Mr. Slack's, but of an opposite turn of mind. They were accustomed to make occasional calls upon each other. Dredge was quiet and unassuming, and often allowed Slack to go on with his egotistic gibberish unchecked, which rather encouraged ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... "The egotistic emotions, weaknesses, and vanities of these few select minds are continually assailed by the temptations unceasingly murmured into their ears by the spirit of the age: 'Come with me! There you are servants, retainers, tools, ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche |
