"Misanthropical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the noblest character, the tenderest sensibilities, the most refined and gentle qualities. Advancing age, a great and sorrowful loss, that of an only son by sudden death, induced him to withdraw from the society that had always welcomed his presence, but in his seclusion he did not grow misanthropical or morbid. His faith in God and men seemed to grow stronger and greater the nearer he approached the end, and in dying he was close to both. His nature was most generous and affectionate; and age, which so often dulls and hardens the finest characters, left his brilliant and ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth
... misanthropical to-day, as all bored people are now and then,' said Mr. Harthouse. 'Don't believe him, Mrs. Bounderby. He knows much better. I shall disclose some of his opinions of you, privately expressed to me, ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... not taken the trouble to write. His wife, dying soon after their daughter's marriage, he had taken to the wild life he had from that time forward led, believing that he himself was forgotten by his kindred, and endeavouring in a misanthropical spirit to banish from his mind all thoughts ...
— The Frontier Fort - Stirring Times in the N-West Territory of British America • W. H. G. Kingston
... mood most sympathetically tragic. His friends, whom we have mentioned, availed themselves of his return to pay him a simultaneous visit, and at the same time arrived Scythrop's friend and fellow-collegian, the Hon. Mr. Listless, a young gentleman devoured with a gloomy and misanthropical nil curo. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various
... training in worldliness which he had from Everard. His illusions were shattered ere he had cut his wisdom teeth, thanks to the tutelage of Sir Richard, who in giving him the ugly story of his own existence, taught him the misanthropical lesson that all men are knaves, all women fools. He developed, as a consequence, that sardonic outlook upon the world. He sought to take vos non vobis for his motto, affected to a spectator in the theatre of Life, with the obvious result that he became ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... faction must have been alike an object of aversion to Junius. His opinions on domestic affairs separated him from the ministry; his opinions on colonial affairs from the opposition. Under such circumstances, he had thrown down his pen in misanthropical despair. His farewell letter to Woodfall bears date the nineteenth of January, 1773. In that letter, he declared that he must be an idiot to write again; that he had meant well by the cause and the public; that both were given up; that there were not ten men who would act steadily ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... good company, sech a gent ain't. Don't go near him. It's ag'in the law in Texas to brand calves lonely an' forlorn that a-way, without stoppin' to herd 'em over to some well-known corral, an' the punishment it threatens, bein' several years in Huntsville, makes a gent when he's violatin' it a heap misanthropic, an' he don't hunger none for folks to come ridin' up to see about whatever he reckons he's at. Mebby later them visitors gets roped up before a co't, or jury, to tell whatever they may know. So, as I ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... difference between individuals in this respect. Some are naturally bright and jocund, and others are misanthropic and manufacture out of very trite materials a sort of snap-dragon wit, which flares up in an instant, is as soon out, and generally burns somebody's fingers. It may be urged on the contrary that many celebrated wits as Mathews, Leech, and others, have been melancholy men. ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... with either the established worship—as amongst the silversmiths at Ephesus—or with the luxuries and amusements of life. Those amusements in circus or amphitheatre he hated, and therefore appeared misanthropic. He not only stood aloof from the religious observances of the state and the household, but treated them with contempt ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... business slips up,' replied Jim, prodding the table with a pen in a misanthropic manner. 'Betting's the one thing he's absolutely down on. He got done rather badly once a few years ago. Believe he betted on Orme that year he got poisoned. Anyhow he's always sworn to lynch us if we made fools of ourselves ...
— The Pothunters • P. G. Wodehouse
... a grim old bull, roaming the prairie by himself in misanthropic seclusion; but there might be more behind the hills. Dreading the monotony and languor of the camp, Shaw and I saddled our horses, buckled our holsters in their places, and set out with Henry Chatillon in search of the game. Henry, not intending to take part in the chase, but merely ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... magisterial, magniloquent, maladroit, malfeasance, malignity, malleable, mandate, matutinal, medieval, mephitic, mercenary, mercurial, meretricious, metamorphose, meticulous, microcosm, misanthropic, misogyny, misprision, mitigate, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... to believe that Livingstone possessed a splenetic, misanthropic temper; some have said that he is garrulous, that he is demented; that he has utterly changed from the David Livingstone whom people knew as the reverend missionary ; that he takes no notes or observations but such as those which no other ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... the oval, demure face of his wife—she was always thinking of something foreign to life, and in her calm blue eyes something dark and misanthropic was flashing at times. Whenever she was free from household duties she seated herself in the most spacious room by the window, and sat there silently for two or three hours. Her face was turned toward the street, but the look of her eyes was so indifferent ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... an absolute theory the misanthropic gibes [boutades] of Rousseau at the invention of property and society, and without taking into account the statement so distinctly formulated by Rousseau on the impossibility of suppressing property and society once they had been established, he proposed as ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... to her father's chair and laid a timid hand on his shoulder. An immense gush of pity for him flooded her heart. If she had known this story before, she would have understood, and instead of thinking him unkind and misanthropic she would have tried to be a better daughter to him. The new-found knowledge illuminated all the past and seemed to ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... those which we know, there is not one so nearly redeemed by its ability and interest.... The girl is simply odious; but Mr. Buchanan is a poet—it would seem sometimes malgre lui, in this instance it is quand meme—and he dowers the worthless Effie with a rugged, half-misanthropic, steadfast lover, whose love, never rewarded, is proved by as great a sacrifice as fact or fiction has ever known, and who is almost as striking a figure ...
— Wild Nature Won By Kindness • Elizabeth Brightwen
... however, rendered him silent, instead of talkative. He drank that he might forget unpleasant memories, and drank without accomplishing his object. When the pair proceeded to the room where Mrs. Frere awaited them, Frere was boisterously good-humoured, North silently misanthropic. ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... court-yard has that look of placid cheerfulness which goes with the varied peaceful activities of farm labour and farm life. Chickens and ducks wander about it chattering complacently, an aged goat of a melancholy humour stands usually in one corner lost in misanthropic thought, and a great flock of extraordinarily tame pigeons flutters back and forth between the stone dove-cote rising in a square tower above the ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... explorers who have reached the remote Opera House, fought their way past the misanthropic door-keeper, and gained their seats, are first reduced to a state of mental chaos by the performance of a maddening overture, and are then fitted to appreciate the play, which proceeds after the ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 6, May 7, 1870 • Various
... a nature which is welcomed everywhere, because it is at home everywhere. The mere power and variety of his imagination cannot account for his influence; for the same power and variety might have been directed by a discontented and misanthropic spirit, or have obeyed the impulses of selfish and sensual passions, and thus conveyed a bitter or impure view of human nature and human life. It is, then, the man in the imagination, the cheerful, healthy, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... guard,—that is, of the only military force stationed in Italy,—and he had terrified with his implacable persecutions all those whom he had failed to win over through his promises or his favors. Could the duel between this misanthropic old man and this vigorous, energetic, ruthless climber end in any other way than with the defeat of ...
— The Women of the Caesars • Guglielmo Ferrero
... He, too, was misanthropic and unhappy; he tried to reason with himself that Isabella Gonzales was not worthy to render him thus miserable; that she was a coquette-an unfeeling, though beautiful girl; that even had he succeeded, and fortune ...
— The Heart's Secret - The Fortunes of a Soldier, A Story of Love and the Low Latitudes • Maturin Murray
... reader a little of the Parlement of Foules. The Man in the Moone (1606) is partly a recension of Endimion and Phoebe, but is a heterogeneous mass of weakly satire, of no particular merit. The Moon-Calfe (1627) is Drayton's most savage and misanthropic excursion into the region of Satire; in which, though occasionally nobly ironic, he is more usually coarse and blustering, in the style of Marston.[22] In 1605 Drayton brought out his first 'collected poems', from which the Eclogues and the Owle ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... requetes honoraire de son hotel, intendant de justice, police, et finances de la generalite de Tours," who lived in rue Saint Dominique, paroisse Saint-Sulpice. There was in Holbach's household for a long time an old Scotch surgeon, a homeless, misanthropic old fellow by the name of Hope, of whom Diderot gives a most interesting account. [14:16] These are the only names we have of the personnel of Holbach's household. His town house was in the rue Royale, ...
— Baron d'Holbach • Max Pearson Cushing
... to refer so contemptuously to the Chinese might profitably recall that when, in Dickens' "Christmas Carol,'' the misanthropic Scrooge says of the poor and suffering: "If he be like to die, he had better do it and decrease the surplus population,''—the Ghost ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... answered Petronius, with a certain friendly indifference, "and I am neither so misanthropic as Barsus nor such a pedant ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... little touches of her autobiography. This gifted lady was long an invalid. She could enter with rare sympathy into Cowper's attachments to animals. Her experience of the friendship of Flush is well told in the following lines, so different from Lord Byron's misanthropic ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... for the First Consul, whom he had followed to Egypt, but unfortunately his temper was gloomy and misanthropic, which made him extremely sullen and disagreeable; and the favor which Roustan enjoyed perhaps contributed to increase this gloomy disposition. In a kind of mania he imagined himself to be the object of a special espionage; and when his hours ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... it is the best one, but that does not affect the fact that it is almost infallible. It was reserved for Billy's father, however, by means of wise counsels, kindly given advice, and otherwise affectionate treatment, to save Billy from being turned into an obedient but misanthropic brute, and to lead him to accord his obedience, not because he could not help it, but because his father wished him ...
— Shifting Winds - A Tough Yarn • R.M. Ballantyne
... known their real deformity; and the poor lord who had carried them through his thirty-six years of life, had done it in constantly tormented and mortified pride. Those misshapen organs had an important agency in making him a misanthropic, morbidly sensitive, unhappy, desperate man. When he sang, he did not forget them; and the poor fools who turned down their shirt-collars, and imitated his songs, and thought they were inspired by his winged genius, had under them only a pair of ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... this period in a misanthropic state of mind, hating myself and every one about me. The company of Talbot had long been endured, not enjoyed; and I would gladly have availed myself of any plausible excuse for a separation. True, he was my friend, had proved himself so; but I was in no humour to acknowledge favours. Discarded ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... Bill, from being the pleasantest and most genial of fellows, he became a morose, misanthropic man. Dr. Franklin has a significant proverb,—"Silks and satins put out the kitchen-fire." Silks and satins—meaning by them the luxuries of housekeeping—often put out not only the parlor-fire, but that more sacred flame, the fire of domestic love. It is the greatest possible misery to a man ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... without a struggle, without a repugnance slightly misanthropic, that Chopin could be induced to open his doors and piano, even to those whose friendship, as respectful as faithful, gave them a claim to urge such a request with eagerness. Without doubt more than one of us can still remember our first improvised ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... the back of his chair.] That you must tell me. You have begun to wander about without a moment's peace. You cannot rest anywhere—neither at home nor abroad. You have become quite misanthropic ...
— When We Dead Awaken • Henrik Ibsen
... strange note!" murmured Overtop. "Young girls are not apt to complain of being burdens, or to take such misanthropic views of life. There is a man's hand in this. That wretch, Van Quintem, jr., without a doubt. Did you never warn Miss Minford ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... monstrous pile, Calling men brothers, crushing them the while; With air humane, a misanthropic brute; Ofttimes impulsive, sometimes over-'cute; Weak 'midst his choler, modest in his pride; Yearning for virtue, lust personified; Statesman and author, of the slippery crew; ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... above passages are quoted gives the same portrait of the writer, only seen in profile, as it were, which we have already seen drawn in full face in the story of "Morton's Hope." It is charged with that 'saeva indignatio' which at times verges on misanthropic contempt for its objects, not unnatural to a high-spirited young man who sees his lofty ideals confronted with the ignoble facts which strew the highways of political life. But we can recognize real conviction and the deepest feeling beneath his scornful rhetoric and his bitter laugh. ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... event which stands therefore at the apex of each series. This event is the knot which ties together the two strands of causation. Thus, in "Silas Marner," the culminating event, which is the redemption of Marner from a misanthropic aloofness from life, through the influence of Eppie, a child in need of love, is led up to by two distinct series of events, of which it forms the knot. The one series, which concerns itself with ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... Trinity College, Dublin. For his education he was indebted to an uncle, who made the boy feel the bitterness of his dependence. In after times he said that his uncle treated him like a dog. Swift's early experience seems to have made him misanthropic and hardened to consequences, for he neglected certain studies, and it was only by special concession that he was allowed to take his A.B. ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... through his bedroom. In this apartment he spent most of his time, though he went out to walk every day, while I was at school; but, if he saw me coming, he always retreated to the house. He was gloomy and misanthropic; he never went to church himself, though he always compelled me to go, and also to attend the Sunday school. He did not go into society, and had little or nothing to do with, or to say to, the people of Parkville. ...
— Breaking Away - or The Fortunes of a Student • Oliver Optic
... philosopher is not in every respect "the compleat gentleman," a citizen totus teres atque rotundus, his works are not profitable for the building up of that character. If it did, we must by parity of reasoning discard the discoveries of a misanthropic inventor and the theories of a bigamous chemist. We go to Plato and Catullus, to Shakespeare and Shelley, for what they have to give: if we go with our own pet notions of what that ought to be, we are naturally as disgusted as Herbert Spencer was with Homer and Tolstoy with Shakespeare. ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... somebody else's wife—but in reality a little Creole woman from New Orleans, with whom he had contracted a marriage, with other gambling debts, during a winter's vacation from his home in Virginia. At the end of two years she had died, succumbing, as differently stated, from perpetual wet feet, or the misanthropic idiosyncrasies of her husband, and leaving behind her a girl of twelve and a boy of sixteen to console him. How futile was this bequest may be guessed from a brief summary of Mr. Culpepper's peculiarities. They were the development of a singular form of aggrandizement and misanthropy. On ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... old bachelors conceals sexual anomalies. But even apart from this, the old celibate easily becomes shy, affected, misanthropic or misogynistic, at least if some energetic friend does not induce him to utilize his power of work in some useful sphere. At other times he lavishes exaggerated admiration on women and worships them in a ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... predominant note. Joy appeared to have passed away as a factor of life, and this creative impulse had nothing to take its place. That giant spot in high air was a plague of evil influence. It seemed like a new misanthropic belief which had fallen on human beings, carrying with it the ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... thinking on this point, when the luxuriant nature of the Pacific Islands arrested his attention. In fact, he had made up his mind for a voyage to the South Seas, when a night's reflection induced him to abandon the idea. "Were I misanthropic," he said, "such a locale would suit me. The thoroughness of its insulation and seclusion, and the difficulty of ingress and egress, would in such case be the charm of charms; but as yet I am not Timon. I wish the composure but not the depression of solitude. There must ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... smooth and graceful, frequently tinged with a shade of melancholy, but never despairing, cynical, or misanthropic. It never deals with the highest themes, nor rises to sublimity, but its influence is calculated to make the reader truer, nobler, ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... known the old smith well, and he also knew many things about the son and his destiny, yet no more than rumor entrusts to one person concerning another's life. Even this was enough to explain why Adam had become so reserved, misanthropic and silent a man, though even in his youth he certainly had not been what is termed a ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... whether comedies or tragedies, all bear the mark of his bitter and misanthropic spirit,—a spirit that seemed cursed by the companionship of its own thoughts, and forced them out through a well-grounded fear that they would fester if left within. His comedies of "The Malcontent," "The Fawn," and "What You Will," have no genuine mirth, though an abundance of scornful ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... years old, and though her life has been a constant battle with wrongs, she has not become misanthropic nor despondent. Knowing that progress is the law of life, she has full faith that the moral world, though moving slowly, is still moving in the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... gain possession of them, completed my disgust for everything around me, and fixed that inclination for solitude which has ever since been predominant. We shall have more than once occasion to remark the effects of a disposition, misanthropic and melancholy in appearance, but which proceed, in fact, from a heart too affectionate, too ardent, which, for want of similar dispositions, is constrained to content itself with nonentities, and be satisfied with fiction. It is sufficient, at present, to have traced the origin of a propensity ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... was a puzzle to all who knew her. She was a puzzle even to herself, and was wont to say, indifferently, that the problem was not worth a solution. For this beautiful girl of fifteen was somewhat bitter and misanthropic, a condition perhaps due to the uncongenial atmosphere in which she had been reared. She was of dark complexion and her big brown eyes held a sombre and unfathomable expression. Once she had secretly studied their reflection in a mirror, and the eyes awed and frightened her, and made her ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne
... author has succeeded better in copying the melody and misanthropic sentiments of Childe Harold, than the nervous and impetuous diction in which his noble biographer has embodied them. The attempt, however, indicates very considerable power; and the flow of the verse and the construction ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... vein of misanthropic irony in most of what Anthony Thurston said, but the other man had the same blood in ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... humors drove from him all neighborly society, and for a part of the time he was almost without domestics. In his misanthropic mood, when at variance with all human kind, he took to feeding crickets, so that in process of time the Abbey was overrun with them, and its lonely halls made more lonely at night by their monotonous music. Tradition adds that, at his ...
— Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey • Washington Irving
... though they were charming girls well worthy of being sought in marriage; and the story I heard was that three officers sojourning in the district had one day espied the three forlorn damsels over the garden hedge, and had forthwith begun to court them, much to the ire of the misanthropic, retired pawnbroker. That stern old gentleman ordered his daughters into the house, and then kept them in ...
— With Zola in England • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... describe the struggles and anguish of the two, who pass through a volume of distresses, he growing more cold, proud, severe, and misanthropic than ever, all of which is supposed to be the fault of naughty Miss Nathalie, who might have made a saint of him, could she only have found her highest pleasure in letting him have his own way. Her conscience distresses her; it is all her fault; at last, worn out in the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... aware that Mrs. Adelaide Curtis, of Albany, was the artist's wife's mother; but then I looked upon the whole address as a mystification, intended especially for myself. I made up my mind, of course, that the box and contents would never get farther north than the studio of my misanthropic friend, in Chambers Street, ...
— At Whispering Pine Lodge • Lawrence J. Leslie
... no one knows so little of his fellow-men as the cynical, misanthropic man, who walks in darkness because he hates his brother. Be sure that the truly wise and understanding man is he who by sympathy puts himself in his neighbours' place; feels with them and for them; sees with their eyes, hears with their ears; and therefore ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... the feverish anxieties of age, happy innocence by the consciousness of evil, confidence by doubt, faith by despair. We must chill our demonstrativeness, restrain our affections, blunt our sensibilities. We must cultivate conscience until we have too much of it, and become monkish, savage and misanthropic. The asceticism of manhood is apparent from the studied air with which everybody is on his guard against his neighbor. In a crowded car, men instinctively clutch their pockets, and fancy a pickpocket in a benevolent-looking old gentleman opposite. ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various
... sinister but, from the point of view of her owners, a useful career extending over many years, and, I should say, across every ocean of our globe. Having killed a man for every voyage, and perhaps rendered more misanthropic by the infirmities that come with years upon a ship, she had made up her mind to kill all hands at once before leaving the scene of her exploits. A fitting end, this, to a life of usefulness and crime—in a last outburst of an evil passion supremely satisfied on some wild ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... misanthropic systems of religion arose, which painted their gods, like their despots, wicked and envious. To appease them, man offered up the sacrifice of all his enjoyments. He environed himself in privations, and ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... into other hands a year ago, but M. Topinard is still the cashier. M. Topinard, however, has grown gloomy and misanthropic; he says little. People think that he has something on his conscience. Wags at the theatre suggest that his gloom dates from his marriage with Lolotte. Honest Topinard starts whenever he hears Fraisier's name mentioned. ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... Colonel Halkett, whose present temper discerned a healthy antagonism to misanthropic Radicals in the performance, 'all young people dance. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith |
