"Unsocial" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... blessedness. It would have seemed natural for the boys to grow up 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
... rational beings, of properties holding them within 'delegated limits of power.' And in my opinion, they are as much entitled to a character of consistency as the generality of tribes on our continent. The secret of their shyness, and their unsocial and vindictive disposition, may better be accounted for, from the probable fact that they were inhumanly treated by the early discoverers of the island, the Portuguese and Spaniards. These monsters without doubt butchered and made havock of these poor ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... 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 a light as a flame." "Love is a severe critic. Hate can pardon ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... which I don't regret, nor 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 ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... own way. He is let alone in a way so terrible, that similar treatment would be social death to a man of culture. We repeat, there is nothing like absolute individuality, except among isolated and unsocial savages. In an advanced state of society, human interests become interrelated—a complete network of complexity; and what any particular individual does becomes a matter of interest to many, since the many are, to a certain extent, affected ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... offspring inclined her to a 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 ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... nothing of altruism and public spirit, either vanished or shrank to shadowy simulacra. In contemporary history currents and cross-currents, eddies and whirlpools, became so numerous and bewildering that it is not easy to determine the direction of the main stream. Unsocial tendencies coexisted with collectivity of effort, both being used as weapons against the larger community and each being set down as a manifestation of democracy. Against every kind of authority the world, or some of its influential sections, was up in revolt, and the ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... diagnosis that is probably wrong nine times in ten cases. Such a woman is a very dangerous teacher of sex-hygiene for adolescent girls; and a positive menace to older unmarried women who, if free from absorbing work, may spend their leisure in becoming more or less restless under the unsocial, if not unphysiologic, conditions of unwelcome celibacy. This is no imaginary danger. The reader of this will not be interested in details, but the author has received from physicians and others reliable information concerning several extremely abnormal women ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... few opportunities for serious conversation with her. There was always some butterfly or another flitting about, and when Philip showed by his manner that he was not pleased, Ruth laughed merrily enough and rallied him on his soberness—she declared he was getting to be grim and unsocial. He talked indeed more with Alice than with Ruth, and scarcely concealed from her the trouble that was in his mind. It needed, in fact, no word from him, for she saw clearly enough what was going ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... appear for his final 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 ...
— The Boy Life of Napoleon - Afterwards Emperor Of The French • Eugenie Foa
... go and love Mary. I was twice her age, an awkward, unsocial man, that would have blighted her youth. I was as wrong as wrong can be. But I never meant to tell her. I locked the grammar in my desk and the secret in my heart for a year. I couldn't bear to meet her in the village, and kept away from every place where she was ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... austerities, and solitude,—flight from the contaminating influences of the 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 a compassionate Creator ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord
... his son a tendency in the same direction. Fitzjames's hatred of all exaggeration, his resolute refusal to be either sentimental or optimistic, led him to insist upon the gloomy side of things. Moreover, he was still indolent; given to be slovenly in his work, and rather unsocial in his ways, though warmly attached to a few friends. My father, impressed by these symptoms, came to the conclusion that Fitzjames was probably unsuited for the more active professions for which a sanguine temper and ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... upon me moment by moment. There was in his manner a sort of refined coquetry of amiability which I found irresistible. It was combined with a frankness of sympathy and interest subtly flattering to a man of my unsocial habit of mind. I was conscious every now and then that he was drawing me out; but to be drawn out so gently and genially was, to me, a novel and delightful experience. It produced in me one of those effusions ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... the dramatic poets, on virtue and decency, Jeremy Collier, a non-juring clergyman, attacked the stage. His charge against the authors was unquestionably right; but his attack upon the stage itself, exhibited a disposition splenetic almost to misanthropy, and an austerity of principle urged to unsocial ferocity. In his fury he renounced the idea of reforming the stage; he was for abolishing it entirely. He attacked the poets with "unconquerable pertinacity, with wit in the highest degree keen and sarcastic, and with all those powers exalted ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... Not only is morality judged in terms of conduct, but it is judged according as the conduct is consistent. "Habits of conduct" make for morality or immorality. It is not the isolated act of heroism that makes a man moral, or the single unsocial act that makes a man immoral. The particular act may be moral or immoral, and the person be just the reverse. It is the organization of activity, it is the habits a man has that places him in one category or ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... hoof and I was sore for its dissolution. There was none left now that could remember the old days of the team save Lingo, and he grew crusty and somewhat crabbed. He was still the guardian of the sled, still the insatiable hand-shaker, but he grew more and more unsocial with his mates, and we heard his short, sharp, angry double bark at night more frequently than we used to. He reminded me of the complaining owl in Gray's "Elegy." He resented any dog even approaching the sled, resented the dogs moving ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... and then as a slight noise was heard at one corner of the cell, said softly, "Ah, my friends, my comrades, the rats! it is their hour—I am glad I put aside the bread for them!" His eye brightened as it now detected those strange and unsocial animals venturing forth through a hole in the wall, and, darkening the moonshine on the floor, steal fearlessly towards him. He flung some fragments of bread to them, and for some moments watched their gambols with a smile. "Manchino, the white-faced rascal! he beats all ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... railwaymen rather 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 it ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... either toiling in a situation or else looking for one with a 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 ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... a society based economically upon the institution of private property social life is impossible without respect (respect here refers to acts, not to mental attitude) for private property. Crimes against property are distinctly unsocial. But respect for the rights of property is rapidly disintegrating both among trust magnates and proletarians. The Natural Rights Philosophy[6] still has much vitality in the middle classes, but as a broad statement it will hold good that the millionaire or the proletarian who shows ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... In this unsocial mood, they refused an offered game of hare-and-hounds, and evading the singers on the gymnasium steps—the song was the "Gypsy Trail"—they sauntered on down the pergola to the lane, sprinkled with fallen apple blossoms. At ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... contented people? That, among themselves, is often proclaimed as undeniable; and certainly among themselves it may not always be safely denied. That, however, is not always the impression conveyed to him who only sojourns in their land, by the careworn faces, by the hurried steps, by the unsocial meals which he sees, or by the incessant party cries which he hears around him; by the fretful aspirations and the feverish hopes resulting from the unbounded space of competition open to them without check or barrier; and by the innumerable disappointments and heartburnings which ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... than to London.' The world has room for every type, so that it be not actively noxious, and this whimsical egotist may well have his place in the catalogue. He was, after all, in his life only a compendium, on a scale large enough to show their absurdity, of all those unsocial notions which Emerson in other manifestations found it needful to rebuke. Yet we may agree that many of his paradoxes strike home with Socratic force to the heart of a civilisation that wise men know to be too ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... of a French peasant than in all the boudoirs of Grosvenor square. . . . 'Frivolity and insipidity are the prevailing characteristics of conversation; and nowhere in Europe, perhaps, does difference of fortune or of station produce more unsocial or illiberal separation. Very few of those whom fortune has released from the necessity of following some laborious profession are capable of passing their time agreeably without the assistance of company; not from the spirit of gaity which ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... 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 stomach so slow a pastime ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... headach {sic}, the gentleman by a particular dislike to Mr. Taylor, who, he thought, had behaved in an ungentlemanly manner about a mortgage, in which they both happened to be interested. Mr. Graham was a man of a violent temper, and unsocial habits, generally taking little pains to conceal his feelings; and accordingly, his manner to Mr. Taylor was anything but flattering, though their acquaintance, at best, was but trifling. Mrs. Graham also disliked the whole family; and yet the intimacy between Jane and Adeline was allowed ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... my greatest intellectual privilege is my acquaintance with a philosopher. He is not one of those unsocial philosophers who put their best thoughts into books to be kept in cold storage for posterity. My Philosopher is eminently social, and is conversational in his method. He belongs to the ancient school of the Peripatetics, ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... mother as a cold- blooded English gentleman, with Norton's peculiar nature, would treat a mother—with polite but firm disregard of her claims. He has enough and to spare of will-power, but it is become degenerated into obstinacy. He fails because he wants too much, because he is unsocial at heart, and does not understand that life means giving as well as taking. His sexual passion finds expression in a religious fanaticism which is but the expression of utter selfishness, as all sexual passion is. In the company of Kitty he has ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... 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 Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... came uppermost, and revealed the feelings of the moment with utter want of reserve. His self-controlled companions wondered, ridiculed, misinterpreted, and made fewer hits as well as fewer misses. His anxiety to "get in and share," made him, according to Johnson, an "unsocial" companion. "Goldsmith," he said, "had not temper enough for the game he played. He staked too much. A man might always get a fall from his inferior in the chances of talk, and Goldsmith felt his falls too keenly." He had certainly some trials of temper in Johnson's company. "Stay, stay," ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... prey? Indeed, sir, I wish the innocent sparrows no harm; and besides, if you must know it, I ate an excellent game-breakfast two hours ago, while laggards like you were still abed." In the winter, which is the only season when I have been able to observe him, the shrike is to the last degree unsocial, and I have known him to stay for a month in one spot all by himself, spending a good part of every day perched upon a telegraph wire. He ought not to be very happy, with such a disposition, one would think; but he seems to be well contented, and ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... is not far to seek. The Clerici were a class debarred from domesticity, devoted in theory to celibacy, in practice incapable of marriage. They were not so much unsocial or anti-social as extra-social; and while they gave a loose rein to their appetites, they respected none of those ties, anticipated none of those home pleasures, which consecrate the animal desires in everyday existence as we know it. ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... had mine, and am ravenous. The idea of talking reason to a hungry man! I know of a nice quiet restaurant which, at this hour, we'll have almost to ourselves. You surely won't be so unsocial as to ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... true; but it is wholly attributable to the progress of the human intellect, which, day by day, is demonstrating that man's emotional and moral nature can find its highest enjoyment and its most perfect development only in the complete subordination of the selfish and unsocial passions, to those which promote universal toleration ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... boy who played there looking back across the years strong in the conviction that it could not have been improved, and yet the picture of a child at solitary play is not, after all, the ideal picture. Our laboratory, while it must accommodate the unsocial novice and make provision for individual enterprise at all ages and stages, must be above all the place where the give and take of group play will develop along with block villages and other ...
— A Catalogue of Play Equipment • Jean Lee Hunt
... nations of Europe in 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 conquest ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... 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 since ...
— Try and Trust • Horatio Alger
... majority of saints of this period do not belong to that third sex after which, according to some, the human race has ever striven—the constructive and purposeful third sex. They are wholly sexless, unsocial and futile beings, the negation of every masculine or feminine virtue. Their independence fettered by the iron rules of the Vatican and of their particular order, these creatures had nothing to do; and like ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... people who live in cities are not moved by oratory; they are unsocial, unimaginative, unemotional. They see so much and hear so much that they cease to be impressed. When they come together in assemblages they are so apathetic that they fail to generate magnetism—there ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... admit that, at the moment, she could think of no such person. But her mind fastened at once on the vulgar, hopeful fact that the unsocial ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... criticize; honourably granting, that this people has a great history. Even such has the Lion, with Homer for the transcriber of his deeds. But the gentle aliens would image our emergence from wildness as the unsocial spectacle presented by the drear menagerie Lion, alone or mated; with hardly an animated moment save when the raw red joint is beneath his paw, reminding him of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the only man that he knew who was using the opportunities given by the college for all they were worth, and really getting out of "the old curric" that mental discipline which it professed to impart. Though rather taciturn, he was not unsocial, and was fond of his pipe in the evening. He liked a joke, especially if it was of a definite kind, and at some one's expense touching a characteristic weakness of the man. There was at bottom something a little hard about him, though every one agreed that he was a good ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... in the present state of public opinion in almost every existing social atmosphere, would be a purely anarchistic course. It would mean a fatherless home, and since the woman will have to play the double part of income-earner and mother, an impoverished and struggling home. It would mean also an unsocial because ostracized home. In most cases, and even assuming it to be right in idea, it would still be on all fours with that immediate abandonment of private property we have already discussed, a sort of suicide that helps ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... I was told, inkyos; a social, or rather unsocial state, which in their case may be rendered unwidowed dowagers; since, in company with their husbands, they had renounced all their social titles and estates. Their daughters-in-law now did the domestic drudgery, while they devoted their days thus ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... the 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
... she made to his unsocial mood. The ravine path revealed unexpected wildness and freshness. The peace of twilight had already descended there. Miss Hitchcock strolled on, apparently forgetful of fatigue, of the distance they were putting between them and the club-house. Sommers respected the charm ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... 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 ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... in truth, present to the mind a long series of the most direful objects, assassinations, rebellions, anarchy, tyranny, and religion itself, either cruel, or gloomy and unsocial. An historian who would paint it in its true colours must take the pencil of Guercino or Salvator Rosa. But the most agreeable imagination can hardly figure to itself a more pleasing scene of private ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... 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 ...
— Vendetta • Honore de Balzac
... 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, ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... all its social, or rather unsocial, iniquities and falsehoods, of all ingratitude and envy, in striving for an honest regeneration of ourselves, and through ourselves of humanity at large, convincing one another that man has developed by degrees into earth's fairest creature, destined for good and happiness, ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... indiscriminate ridicule, was recorded of this hat, except once, when a group of little children in front of Judge Custis's house began to whisper and titter, and one, bolder than the rest, the Judge's daughter, gravely walked up to the unsocial man; it was the first of May, and he was in his ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... lives, he is not altogether an unsocial being. Neither are his domestic habits always as invisible to the finite eye as he perhaps intends them to be. Tent-life has scant privacy, and the circumscribed accommodation of the Dean leads to frequent ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... ought to go. It was as much a social gathering as the dinner at the market ordinary, or the annual audit dinner of their common landlord. The dissenter, who declined to pay church-rates, was an unsocial person. He had left the circle. It was not the theology that they cared about, it was the social nonconformity. In a spiritual sense, too, the clergyman was the father of the parish, the shepherd of the flock—it ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... about the pleasures of solitude, but they are found only in books. He who lives long alone becomes insane. A hermit is a madman. Without friends and wife and child, there is nothing left worth living for. The unsocial are the enemies of joy. They are filled with egotism and envy, with vanity and hatred. People who live much alone become narrow and suspicious. They are apt to be the property of one idea. They begin to think there is no use in anything. They ...
— The Ghosts - And Other Lectures • Robert G. Ingersoll
... unsocial in his habits; and soon became the husband of a fair-haired wife,—the daughter of a countryman who, like himself, had established commercial relations at Para. In a few years after, several sweet children called him "father,"—only two of whom survived to prattle in his ears this endearing ...
— Our Young Folks, Vol 1, No. 1 - An Illustrated Magazine • Various
... 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 ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... continued, blushing slightly, 'that tales of the weird kind were made to be told, not written. The action of a teller is wanted to give due effect to all stories of incident; and I hope that a time will come when, as of old, instead of an unsocial reading of fiction at home alone, people will meet together cordially, and sit at the feet of a professed romancer. I am going to tell my tales before a London public. As a child, I had a considerable power in arresting ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... Lochleven obeyed 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 ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... a solitary cottage, the boatman furnished us with a few details of the history and character of its last inmate, an Orkney fisherman, that would have furnished admirable materials for one of the darker sketches of Crabbe. He was, he said, a resolute, unsocial man, not devoid of a dash of reckless humor, and remarkable for an extraordinary degree of bodily strength, which he continued to retain unbroken to an age considerably advanced, and which, as he rarely ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... aggravated his complaints; and the solitude in which Mr. Levett and Mrs. Williams had left him, rendered his life very gloomy. Mrs. Desmoulins[797], who still lived, was herself so very ill, that she could contribute very little to his relief[798]. He, however, had none of that unsocial shyness which we commonly see in people afflicted with sickness. He did not hide his head from the world, in solitary abstraction; he did not deny himself to the visits of his friends and acquaintances; but at all times, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... but perceive that his condition, though eligible when compared with what it once was, was likewise disastrous and humiliating, compared with his youthful hopes and his actual merits. For such a one to mope away his life in this unsocial and savage state was deeply to be deplored. It was my duty, if possible, to prevail on him to relinquish his scheme. And what would be requisite, for that end, but to inform ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... Roy" canoe has, of late years, come much into fashion as a racing and pleasure boat. Whatever the advantages of this craft may be, it has this disadvantage, that it can hold only one person; so that it may be styled an unsocial craft, the company of one or more friends being impossible, unless, indeed, one or ...
— Man on the Ocean - A Book about Boats and Ships • R.M. Ballantyne
... unions were found good. Among insects especially the biologist finds many types of organized living things, ranging widely from the solitary individual—a counterpart of something even more primitive than the most unsocial savage now existing—up to communities that rival human civilization, as regards the concerted effect of the diversified lives of the component units. The student of the whole of living nature is favored still more in that he learns how the make-up of such a simple organism as ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... felt 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 ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... during the brief hour of Mr. Pierson's stay he was watched very closely, and the watcher was disappointed that no attempt was made at a private interview with Captain Monroe, who very plainly (Masterson thought, ostentatiously) showed himself in a rather unsocial mood, walking thoughtfully alone on the lawn, and making no attempt to speak, ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... Released from this unsocial companion, he soon arrived at a French post, where the sentinel of the advanced guard requested the honour of his permission to ask for his passports. On his failing to produce any, he was entreated to pardon the liberty he took of conducting him to the commandant—but it was his duty, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 530, January 21, 1832 • Various
... building, the almost savage aspect of the domain, the many melancholy and time-honored memories connected with both, had much in unison with the feelings of utter abandonment which had driven me into that remote and unsocial region of the country. Yet although the external abbey, with its verdant decay hanging about it, suffered but little alteration, I gave way, with a child-like perversity, and perchance with a faint ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... 'Behold, he cries, Earth! Ocean! Air above, 'And hail the DEITIES OF SEXUAL LOVE! 'All forms of Life shall this fond Pair delight, 'And sex to sex the willing world unite; 'Shed their sweet smiles in Earth's unsocial bowers, 'Fan with soft gales, and gild with brighter hours; 'Fill Pleasure's chalice unalloy'd with pain, 'And give ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... Coventry, keep at arm's length, draw a 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^; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... his misery and discomfort must be sought farther back in his life. His surly speech, his unsocial temper, spoke of a mind ill at ease,—the remembrance of the past made the ...
— Famous Islands and Memorable Voyages • Anonymous
... 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, ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... risk.' Not for an instant would I try to deceive you about us! Look at us closely, I ask, and—decide for yourself! I am forty-eight years old. I am inexcusably bad-tempered,—very quick to anger, and not, I fear, of great mercy. I am moody. I am selfish. I am most distinctly unsocial. But I am not, I believe, stingy,—nor ever intentionally unfair. My child is a cripple,—and equally bad-tempered as myself. No one but a mercenary has ever coped with her. And she shows it. We have lived alone for six years. All of our clothes, and most of our ways, need mending. I am not ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... 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
... familiars of old; did not promote them to offices,—nisi essent idonei, unless they chanced to be fit men! Whence great discontent among certain of these, who had contributed to make him Abbot: reproaches, open and secret, of his being 'ungrateful, hard-tempered, unsocial, ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... the social with the moral order, and Dewey, in his Democracy and Education, makes statements which suggest that the purely economic order, in which man becomes a means rather than an end to other men, is unsocial, if ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... did, and the proposition remained uncontroverted. Therewith the discourse died; and the miles that remained were made in unsocial silence. Dolly feared she had given some pain, but doubted it could not be very great; and she was glad to have the explanation over. Perhaps the pain was more than she knew, although Lawrence certainly was not a desperate wooer; nevertheless, he was disappointed, ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... as unsocial as the cadet now in arrest, it was no joke to be confined to his tent even for the space of a week, except when engaged in official duties; and to be obliged, two afternoons in a week, to march in full equipment and carry his piece, for three hours in the barracks quadrangle under the watchful ...
— Dick Prescotts's Fourth Year at West Point - Ready to Drop the Gray for Shoulder Straps • H. Irving Hancock
... 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 other ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... in his new purchase another stranger arrived, and took up his abode in the best apartments of the house. The new-comer, a man of about fifty years of age, and evidently, from his dress and gait, a sea-faring person, was as reserved and unsocial as his landlord. His name, or at least that which he chose to be known by, was Wilson. He had one child, a daughter, about thirteen years of age, whom he placed at a boarding-school in the adjacent town. He seldom saw her; the intercourse between the father and daughter being principally ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... varied by all forms, and pushed on to all excesses, it may become a question whether by them our happiness is as much improved, or our individual character as well formed as in a society not so heterogeneous and unsocial as that crowd termed, with the sort of modesty peculiar to our times, "a small party:" the simplicity of parade, the humility of pride engendered by the egotism which multiplies itself in proportion to the numbers ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... unrestrained, to be free in the wildest sense, to do what they pleased under the impulse of the moment, this was their leading characteristic. Who cannot see that such a trait was hostile to civilization, and would prevent obedience to law—would make the uncultivated warrior unsocial and solitary, and lead him, in after- times, when he got possession of the lands of the conquered Romans, to build his castle on inaccessible heights and rugged rocks? Hence isolated retreats, wild adventures, country life, the pleasures of the chase, ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... the 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 an eloquent speech at Newington Butts, had pointed, amidst ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse
... or even, if he is a man of great intellect, in solitude. For the more a man has in himself, the less he will want from other people,—the less, indeed, other people can be to him. This is why a high degree of intellect tends to make a man unsocial. True, if quality of intellect could be made up for by quantity, it might be worth while to live even in the great world; but unfortunately, a hundred fools together will not ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life • Arthur Schopenhauer
... conciliated, but by softer 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, and which nothing is required to remove ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... is 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 believe that if ...
— The Untroubled Mind • Herbert J. Hall
... 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 ...
— The Third Great Plague - A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People • John H. Stokes
... 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 an odd look—very like a ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... was novel-reading; and to the many "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 ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... supposed themselves possessed of peculiar privileges; and all professions, oaths, laws, and engagements, had, in a great measure, lost their influence over them. The bands of society were every where loosened; and the irregular passions of men were encouraged by speculative principles, still more unsocial and irregular. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... for social ministry. The unsocial lives come out of unsocial homes. The home that exists for itself alone trains lives that exist only for themselves; these are the homes that throw the sand of selfishness into the wheels of society; they ultimately effect social suicide through selfishness. ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... foundation of the universe; but it is fatal to all society and is especially hostile to the State. Perhaps the Church of the thirteenth century might have found a way to use even this principle for a good purpose; certainly, the influence of Saint Bernard was sufficiently unsocial and that of Saint Francis was sufficiently unselfish to conciliate even anarchists of the militant class; but Saint Thomas was working ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... 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 for poetry ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... way,— Two rocky bulges, one at each end, With a smaller bulge and a hollow between; Patches of whortleberry and bay; Accidents of open green, Sprinkled with loose slabs square and gray, Like graveyards for ages deserted; a few Unsocial thistles; an elder or two, 50 Foamed over with blossoms white as spray; And on the whole island never a tree Save a score of sumachs, high as your knee. That crouch in hollows where they may, (The cellars where once stood a village, men say,) Huddling for ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... after the war," said Phipps-Herrick, a big Harvard man from Bryn Mawr and a member of the Unsocial Socialists' Club. "We are going to make a new world. Must have a new education. Sweep away all the old stuff—languages, grammar, literature, philosophy, history, and all that. Put in something modern and practical. Montessori system for the little kids. Vocational ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke
... ourselves that we were incapable of a cooperative effort strong enough to kill him or cast him out. Rude as was our social organization, he was, nevertheless, too rude to live in it. He tended always to destroy the horde by his unsocial acts. He was really a reversion to an earlier type, and his place was with the Tree People rather than with us who were in the process ...
— Before Adam • Jack London
... 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 old volume, the ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... wonder what happens to the modern pirates; I mean the men who, had they lived 200 years ago, would have been pirates. What do they find to exercise their undoubted, if unsocial, talents and energies to-day? Many, I think, find openings of an adventurous financial kind in ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse
... the bottom, 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 Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... regarding its inhabitants is so uniformly meagre, as to attest the absence of intercourse; and the writers of all nations, Romans, Greeks, Arabians, Chinese and Indians, concur in their allusions to the unsocial and ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... be 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 his ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... 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
... sorrow, love; or even from the turbulent emotions of the mind, from anger, jealousy, revenge, "she must not look to have" in the sympathetic bosoms of hearers or spectators; her only operant power is terror, a frigid and unsocial passion, and hence perhaps it is that no actress, at least in modern times, has been found fully adequate to the task; the according testimony indeed of the best living or recent opinions may warrant a belief that Mrs. Pritchard displayed ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... vexatiously withheld from him, being deemed a pledge of servitude to a preacher whom the people had not chosen, and who fed them with garbage instead of wholesome food. Even his own tithe-holder, farmer Humphreys, was led away by the delusion. He was a man of rough manners and gloomy unsocial disposition, but he had hitherto never ventured to rebel, farther than occasionally to absent himself from church, on the Sunday after every admonition which Dr. Beaumont from time to time privately gave him to abstain from too free indulgence at market. ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... circumstances which would rapidly improve their acquaintance, was as plain to him as if he had heard it confessed in so many words. If he had only remained in the gallery, he might have become acquainted with the form of persuasion used to induce a man so unsocial as Romayne to accept an invitation. "I have myself to blame," he thought bitterly, "for ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins
... gallantly unfurled To furnish and accommodate a world, To give the Pole the produce of the sun, And knit the unsocial climates ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... storm of wind and rain from the west, which, had it caught the smack in which I sailed on the Firth, would have driven us all back to Fraserburgh, and, as the vessel was hardly sea-worthy at the time, perhaps a great deal further. The passage had been stormy; and a very noble, but rather unsocial fellow-passenger—a fine specimen of the golden eagle—had been sea-sick, and evidently very uncomfortable, for the greater part of the way. The eagle must have been accustomed to motion a great deal more rapid ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... Peter living a romance! He could be concerned in a dozen and never dream it. They would not interest him even if he did notice them. And I'll prove it to you." Mr. Pierce raised his voice. "We are discussing romance, Peter. Won't you stop that unsocial tramp of yours long enough to give us your opinion ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... 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 ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... and 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 of cow's ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... something belonging to the imagination alone, which indicates a man but little disposed to multiply his relations, his points of contact, with society. If we read the six volumes of Note-Books with an eye to the evidence of this unsocial side of his life, we find it in sufficient abundance. But we find at the same time that there was nothing unamiable or invidious in his shyness, and above all that there was nothing preponderantly gloomy. The qualities ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... now. My life was changed; my experience had been varied since I left X——, but Hunsden could not know this; he had seen me only in the character of Mr. Crimsworth's clerk—a dependant amongst wealthy strangers, meeting disdain with a hard front, conscious of an unsocial and unattractive exterior, refusing to sue for notice which I was sure would be withheld, declining to evince an admiration which I knew would be scorned as worthless. He could not be aware that since then youth and loveliness had been to me everyday objects; that I had studied them ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... is the responsible one, she has many hard struggles to do the right thing in the right way. Sarah is two years younger. She is the peculiar one, with her love for all kinds of animals about the farm, and her unsocial, stubborn disposition. Her unruly ideas lead her into numerous troubles before she changes her mind. Shirley is the baby and pet of six years. As she gets her own way so often, she is badly spoiled and receives many hard knocks before she begins to appreciate the comfort and ...
— Nobody's Girl - (En Famille) • Hector Malot
... society of literary folk do not inspire in his bosom any frantic anxiety to abandon his own way of life. He had a furtive and foolish notion that these people are of no importance whatever. These coteries, these at-homes, and flat philosophies are not the real thing. It sounds unsocial and unconventional, no doubt, but it is a question so far unsettled in the author's mind whether any genuine artist loves his fellows well enough to co-habit with them on a literary basis. For some mysterious reason the real men, the original living forces in literature, do not ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... however young, have still to lament talents misapplied, opportunities neglected, profitless labour, and disastrous idleness. The dreary aspect of the large and ill-lighted room—the close-curtained boxes—the unsocial look of every thing and body about suited the habit of my soul, and I was on the verge of becoming excessively sentimental—the unbroken silence, where several people were present, had also its effect upon me, and I felt oppressed and dejected. So sat I for an ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 2 • Charles James Lever
... 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 ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... seaports never cease to lament the progress of steam. They point out that all the money made in the brig colliers goes into few hands, and is carried away to be spent in London and Torquay, and Cannes, and Paris, by the great coalowners. They say, too, that the new race of seamen are unsocial beings who do no good to any town that the steamers run from. The modern "hand" comes into the river, say, at dusk; sees his vessel put under the coal spout, jumps ashore to buy a loaf and a few herrings, and then goes off to sea by three in the morning. ...
— The Romance of the Coast • James Runciman
... his intimacy. He delighted at times in throwing off his mantle of prophecy, and unbending even to jollity, in his home life and among friends. The presence of a stranger was a check to such exuberance. And it was not from any unsocial habit that he fell into this restraint. It was because he found that the unguarded words of a public man are often given a weight they were not intended to bear. If he unbent as one might whose every word has not come to be thought of value, it led to misunderstandings. ...
— Whittier-land - A Handbook of North Essex • Samuel T. Pickard
... I had for disquiet on this passage was the want of society. The captain and mate could spin their yarns and discuss subjects of nautical philosophy; but the mate, naturally unsocial and taciturn, seldom spoke to me, and the captain never honored me by entering into familiar conversation, excepting when he had indulged in an extra glass, and Mr. Campbell was not on deck. At ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... most unpleasant to converse with such persons on subjects of taste, philosophy, or religion. Of course there is no reasoning with them: for they do not possess the facts, on which the reasoning must be grounded. Nothing is possible, but a naked dissent, which implies a sort of unsocial contempt; or, what a man of kind dispositions is very likely to fall into, a heartless tacit acquiescence, which borders too ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... These 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 grounds ...
— The Crow's Nest • Clarence Day, Jr.
... socialist! The word pleases me! At every epoch, my dear friend, there are adjectives which form the pass-words of ambition! Before 1789 a man called himself an economist; in 1815 he was a liberal; the next party will call itself the social party—perhaps because it is so unsocial. For in France you must always take the opposite sense of a ...
— Mercadet - A Comedy In Three Acts • Honore De Balzac
... that I now saw a little more of my aunt, but she was in every way an unsocial being; and to a timid child she was as a plant beneath a thick covering of ice; I should cut my hands in endeavouring to get at it. So I was entirely thrown upon my own resourses. The neighbouring minister was engaged to give me lessons in reading, ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
... for the eternal PEOPLE, and of calm, passionless disdain for that capricious charlatan, the momentary PUBLIC, which made Ernest Maltravers an original and solitary thinker; and an actor, in reality modest and benevolent, in appearance arrogant and unsocial. "Pauperism, in contradistinction to poverty," he was wont to say, "is the dependence upon other people for existence, not on our own exertions; there is a moral pauperism in the man who is dependent on others for that support ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... was sitting by one of the windows talking with Matteo, who had just come up from the Campagna. He had an unsocial habit of eating alone, and, as he ate nothing when down in the vineyard, always wanted his supper as soon as he came up. The table was set for him with snow-white cloth and napkin, silver knife, fork and spoon, ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... all he vouchsafed before he went back to the unsocial nook where, afternoon by faithful afternoon, he read away at a fat ...
— The Rose Garden Husband • Margaret Widdemer
... moment he caught sight of me, put up his pipe, whistled to his dogs and rejoined the flock. I was dissatisfied with his unsocial retreat. I felt, with renewed force, that a note was lacking to the full harmony of my life, and I threw myself upon a bank. I tried not to see the artificial roads of the forest, alive with city carriages. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various |
