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More "Self-centred" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... however, for once so self-centred that she could think of no sorrow but her own. She noticed nothing particular in Molly's lagging step, and guessed of no special sorrow ...
— Red Rose and Tiger Lily - or, In a Wider World • L. T. Meade
... I would like to linger and talk to this sultry and self-centred being; I would like to wander with her through these rooms, imbibing their strange Oriental spirit—not your vulgar Orient, but something classic and remote; something that savours, for aught I know, of Indo-China, where Mrs. Nichol, in one of her immature efforts ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... common sense and common good: No mimic; from his breast his counsel drew, Believed the eloquent was aye the true; He bridged the gulf from th' alway good and wise To that within the vision of small eyes. Self-centred; when he launched the genuine word It shook or captivated all who heard, Ran from his mouth to mountains and the sea, And burned in noble hearts proverb ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... grace upon her in these days that all saw. Over her real wit and native vivacity, it was like a porcelain shade about a flame. One could look at it, and be glad of it, without winking. The brightness was all there, but there was a difference in the giving forth. What had been a bit self-centred and self-conscious—bright as if only for being bright and for dazzling—was outgoing and self-forgetful, and so softened. Leslie Goldthwaite read by it a new answer to some of her old questions. "What harm is there in it?" she had asked herself on their first meeting, when Sin ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... the rarest quality in human life. It is the poise of a great nature, in harmony with itself and its ideals. It is the moral atmosphere of a life self-centred, self-reliant, and self-controlled. Calmness is singleness of purpose, absolute confidence, and conscious power,—ready to be focused in an instant to ...
— The Majesty of Calmness • William George Jordan
... with threads of gold interwoven in the stuff, and a collar of lace turned back at the throat gave her the aspect of an old Italian picture—a sort of 'Portrait of a lady,—Artist unknown.' Not a pleasant portrait, perhaps—but characteristic of a certain dull and self-centred type of woman. We were soon seated at table—a table richly, yet daintily, appointed, and adorned with the costliest flowers and fruits. The men who waited upon us were all Easterns, dark-eyed and dark-skinned, and wore the Eastern dress,— ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... sense of duty, no steady habit, no enduring interest in work. As these two human beings drifted further and further apart from their common love and their common interest, the idealistic man became more self-centred, more unsocial, more fiercely individual, and the emotional and sensual woman became more self-indulgent, more hostile to any philosophy—anarchism such as Terry's, with its blighting idealism—which limited her simple joy in life and in ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... their special and great opportunity of generous service for the common good, and yet through that very opportunity comes their special temptation. The poor are saved by their lot from many temptations of self-centred and frivolous luxury, but are much tempted {218} by their poverty itself. The healthy have a great gift of God, but they are tempted by that very gift to recklessness, inconsiderateness and self-injury. ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... things, in sweeping away the slave-trade, necessitated a less crude formula for the still invincible instinct of expansion, and in Kipling a prophet arose, of a genius akin to that of the Old Testament, to spiritualize the doctrine of the Chosen People. The mission which in Thomson is purely self-centred becomes in Kipling almost as universal as the visions ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill
... Creek. The French and Bohemian boys were spirited and jolly, liked variety, and were as much predisposed to favor anything new as the Scandinavian boys were to reject it. The Norwegian and Swedish lads were much more self-centred, apt to be egotistical and jealous. They were cautious and reserved with Emil because he had been away to college, and were prepared to take him down if he should try to put on airs with them. The French boys liked a bit of swagger, and they were always delighted to hear about anything new: ...
— O Pioneers! • Willa Cather
... eastern wing of the Castle, and the two new-wedded couples passed the first days of their new happiness under one roof without the slightest constraint; for the Castle was vast enough for solitude when they desired it, and yet the solitude was not isolation or self-centred seclusion. ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... propose to deduct the great class of what I shall call the Self-centred. These are they who not only were never canvassed, but didn't even so much as hear about it, who had probably given up newspapers as a war economy and were living quiet virtuous lives in out-of-the-way places. Add to them removals and conscientious ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 19, 1916 • Various
... commensurate with her desire for revenge. At the same time, she would not delay to inflict any injury, big or little, which would wound the object of her revenge and still leave him uncertain as to the source of the evil. She was a cold, self-centred woman, with many a thought of her own which never found expression, not even by so much as ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... loss of pay and rank, Brigadier Generals who would soon be Colonels again, and Colonels who would soon be Majors. To have been, through long uneventful unmental years, a peace-time soldier puts the imagination in jeopardy and is apt to breed a self-centred fatuity, which the inexperienced may easily mistake for deliberate naughtiness. Yet these brave men, who hate peace and despise civilians, have many human qualities. They are generally polite to women, and they are kind to animals and to those of their inferiors who show them proper deference ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... deepest and most intense emotion could have made the quiet, self-contained 'man o' God' as Mrs. Spruce called him, speak to her as he had done,—and she also knew that only the most bitter malice and cruel under-intent to do mischief could have roused Roxmouth, usually so coldly self-centred, to the white heat of wrath which had blazed out of him that evening. Between these two men she stood—a quite worthless object of regard, so she assured herself,—through her, one of them was like ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... never get wholly free. Intrepid, independent, steadfast, frugal, prudent, dauntless, he trampled on the pride of kings with the pride of Lucifer. He was clannish to excess, painfully jealous of proximate rivals, self-centred if not self-seeking, fired by zeal and inflamed by almost mean emulations, resenting benefits as debts, ungenerous—with one exception, that of Goethe,—to his intellectual creditors; and, with reference to men and manners ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... petty trials and tribulations, their empty theories and speculations into cacophony. Even so far back as Beethoven's day that autobiographical habit had begun. "Beethoven," says Old Fogy, is "dramatic, powerful, a maker of storms, a subduer of tempests; but his speech is the speech of a self-centred egotist. He is the father of all the modern melomaniacs, who, looking into their own souls, write what they see therein—misery, corruption, slighting selfishness and ugliness." Old Ludwig's groans, of course, we can stand. He was not only a great musician, but ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... one was compelled to guess her thoughts; and long since Camors had reflected as to what was passing in that self-centred soul. Inspired by his innate generosity, as well as his secret admiration, he took pleasure in heaping upon this poor cousin the attentions he might have paid a queen; but she always seemed as indifferent to them as she was to the opposite ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... It was Bea's voice that spoke. "If Miss Brett completes her quota of lines this month she will undoubtedly have the best chance in the election, even if she is personally unpopular. She is exceedingly self-centred, you know, and does not trouble herself even to appear interested in anybody else. Her manner is unfortunate. However she is unquestionably the ablest writer in the class though little Laura Wallace is a close second. ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... Wentworth over the possession of Michael. Wentworth, a sedate, self-centred young man of three-and-twenty, of independent means, mainly occupied in transcribing the nullity of his days in a voluminous diary, had taken charge of him virtually from his first holidays, during which Michael's father had achieved the somewhat tedious task of drinking himself to death. ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... learn the lesson which, sooner or later, the proudest, most scornful, most self-centred of human souls must learn, or must die of loneliness for the want of learning, that humanity is one and indivisible; and the man who shuts himself apart from his fellows, above all, the man who thus shuts himself apart because ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... another of a different kind. The second creed was scientific and self-centred; it had its origin in the Liberal movement of the sixties, when reforms set in, even in governmental circles. The Czar, Alexander II., in 1861 freed the serfs from the control of their lords, and allotted to them part of the plots which they had hitherto worked on ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... her to make. They had grown into very friendly relations this last month. Warwick Hall had widened Ethelinda's horizon, until she was able to take an interest in many things now outside of her own narrow self-centred circle. ...
— The Little Colonel's Chum: Mary Ware • Annie Fellows Johnston
... always disinterested; and the moderns are not always narrow, self-centred and cold. The ancients paid, though with comparative infrequency, the tax imposed upon mortals, and thought of their own gratification and ease; and the moderns are not utterly disqualified for ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... time was to both lovers like a leaf blown back from Eden. The weather, as if in chime with their mood, was simply exquisite; and after the more imperative duties at the museum were over, they passed the hours together, walking, riding, or boating on the river, as utterly self-centred, and as foolishly happy as if one were not a thorough-going business man, and the other a studious worker and writer, beginning to make a reputation for herself. Just then the world, with its ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... Oliel was a self-centred and silent man, absorbed in getting and spending, always taking care to have much of the one, and no more than he could help of the other. Sara was a nervous and sensitive little woman, hungering for communion and for sympathy. She got little of either from ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine
... yet—thinking it over, as I have thought it over so often—was there ever a single action of hers—a single spontaneously unselfish action on her part—which should have led us to suppose, to expect that she would rise high in any crisis? We were all at her feet. We never noticed that she was utterly self-centred, because we, with all the world, were ready to satisfy her lightest wish. No, no, it was we who were wrong—wrong in our estimate of her. We expected too much—we expected more than she was able to give—more than a woman of her character was able to give. She simply acted as she had ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... equally surrounded by their camp followers, who each differ from each other only superficially, and, not unseldom, transfer their allegiance in pursuit of fatter game. The differences do impress one at first, but, as I say, they are mainly superficial. All are equally self-centred and true to type as parasites; though one brood is better dressed than another, and has a more formidable appetite. What makes rich pickings for the follower of one camp would leave the follower of another camp lean and hungry indeed. But the necessary scale of expenditure being higher in one division ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... came out. Huddled into the seat that rides forward was a beautiful girl, very much dishevelled and weeping bitterly, with her head upon one of those coarse white pillows which the Pullman Company provides. Her roses lay upon the seat opposite. She was so self-centred in her misery that she was not aware that the door had been opened, a head thrust in and withdrawn, and the door closed. But she was sure that a still, small voice had suddenly spoken in her mind, and said: "Brace up." Presently she stopped crying, as became one who had been made the subject of a ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... produced by either of these classes. She found that such epithets as 'good,' 'violent,' 'gentle,' and 'cruel' could not be applied to him in their ordinary senses. He was in truth a being who stood self-centred, and apart from the sympathies, passions, and enthusiasms of his kind, habitually regarding men, not as fellow-creatures, but as mere counters in a game; a will of colossal strength; an intellect of clear, cold, transcendent power, solely governed by the imperturbable ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... itself in its plains and hills and fields and cities, in its smoke and cloud-land, as on some huge altar, to supreme destiny, a nation freed before heaven by the mighty, daily, childlike joy of its own life. I see it as a nation full of personalities, full of self-contained, normally self-centred, self-delighted, self-poised men—men of genius, men who balance off with a world, men who are capable of being at will magnificently self-conscious or unconscious, self-possessed and self-forgetful—balanced men, comrades and equals of a world, neither ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... to the verge of pathos; and the additional remark which he throws in, as it were casually,—'He made the stars also,' cannot but move us to admiration. How childlike the simplicity of the soul which could so venture to deal with the inexplicable and tremendous problem of the Universe! How self-centred and sure the faith which could so arrange the work of Infinite and Eternal forces to suit its own limited intelligence! It is easy and natural to believe that 'God,' or an everlasting Power of Goodness and Beauty called by that name, 'created the heavens and the earth,' but one ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... almost angrily round at her beloved books and drawings; for they spoke a message to her which they had never spoken before, of self-centred ambition. 'Yes,' she said aloud to herself, 'I have been selfish, utterly! Art, poetry, science—I believe, after all, that I have only loved them for my own sake, not for theirs, because they would make me something, feed my conceit ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... is, we see, an entirely false and artificial conception. It is not only ill-adjusted to the hygienic facts of the case but it fails even to invoke any genuinely moral motive, for it is exclusively self-regarding and self-centred. It only becomes genuinely moral, and truly inspiring, when we transform it into the altruistic virtue of self-sacrifice. When we have done so we see that the element of abstinence in it ceases to be essential, "Self-sacrifice," writes the author of a thoughtful book on the sexual life, "is acknowledged ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... contemporaries who fought and died for their country. He was not a hero, and he knew it. The heroes of his poems and plays were always soldiers, men of action, and in his most original work, the extraordinary Undivine Comedy, he levelled the most damaging indictment against the self-centred egotism of the poet that has ever been penned by a man of letters. And the bitterness of the portrait is only heightened by the fact that it was largely inspired by self-criticism; his letters and his life afford only too frequent justification for the ...
— Kosciuszko - A Biography • Monica Mary Gardner
... put the very finest sheets on the bed, they smell deliciously of lavender, and we had very good luck doing up the muslin curtains. It is pleasant to be expecting a guest, isn't it, Ellen? I have often thought, although I have never said so before, that our lives were too self-centred. We seemed to have no interests outside of ourselves. Even Elizabeth has been really nothing to us, you know. She seemed to have become a stranger. I hope her child will be the means of bringing us ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1904 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... academical life was that it entailed a certain amount of social intercourse; it compelled one to come into contact with a large variety of people. Without this Hugh felt that his outlook would have become narrow and self-centred. He knew of course that there would be times when it would seem to him that his life was an ineffective one, when he would envy the men of affairs, when he would wonder what, after all, his own ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... view that all the creatures are "ein lauteres Nichts."[21] It would be easy to find such passages in all the fourteenth-century mystics, but it cannot be denied that on the whole their religion is too self-centred. There are not many maxims so fundamentally wrong-headed and un-Christian as Suso's advice to "live as if you were the only person in the world."[22] The life of the cloistered saint may be abundantly justified—for the spiritual activity of some of them has been of far greater service ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... are afraid it is generally not death that they fear. Their fear is a physical and instinctive shrinking from hurt, shock, and the unknown, which instinct obtains the mastery only through surprise, or through the exhaustion of the mind and will, or through a man being excessively self-centred. It is not the fear of death rationally considered; but an irrational physical instinct which all men possess, but which ...
— A Student in Arms - Second Series • Donald Hankey
... that Socialism is an antidote to and a check upon excessive individualism and holds up to a busy and self-centred and far from perfect world, grievances to be remedied, wrongs to be righted, ideals to be striven for, it is ...
— Right Above Race • Otto Hermann Kahn
... had since his return from Syria become even more silent, more self-centred than before. Many called him morose and voted him either treacherous or secretly ambitious; others averred that he was either very arrogant or frankly dull. Certain it is that he held himself very much aloof from the society of his kind and persistently ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... sat in the screened upper balcony with Vivian. He liked her. She was a keen-witted, plain-spoken young woman, with few false ideals and no subtlety. She was less snobbish than arrogant. Of all the Wrandalls, she was the least self-centred. Leslie never quite understood her for the paradoxical reason that she ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... unlike his saturnine self-centred truculence of restraint. He impressed me; and even Sebright's steady, cool eyes grew perceptibly larger before this sarcastic fury. Castro choked; the rusty, black folds encircling him shook and heaved. Unexpectedly he thrust ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... to it, Peter, but I expect you've got a lot to go through before you're clear of things. Now I'm going to be brutal. The fact is that you're too self-centred. People never do anything in the world so long as they are wondering whether the world's going to hurt them or no. Those early years of yours made you morbid. You've got a temper and one or two other things that want a lot of holding down and that takes up your ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... is led forward and upward by the path of sacrifice, until the summit of the cross-crowned mountain of life is gained; and all heads are aureoled by a light which, like that of the Transfiguration, dawns and deepens from within. This cannot be till we have ceased to be self-centred, and have become Christ-centred. ...
— A Christmas Faggot • Alfred Gurney
... think me self-centred! I was. For thirteen whole years I thought of nothing but myself, my miserable self, all shut up in that little town. I talked to no one. I did not even read—I used to sit in the dark of the cathedral nave and listen to the organ. I'd walk in the orchards and the woods. I would wonder, wonder, ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... had forged a self-centred, confident way to the front; and had met there not ultimate achievement, but a young girl, Valerie West. Through her, somehow, already was coming into his life and into his work that indefinite, elusive ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... a very self-centred person," she remarked; "but do you know, I am really a little curious to know how you succeeded in ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... burning sand—to be precise, at the Cape—that, on the approach of danger, the ostrich secreted his self-centred head, and here from time to time his plumes were plucked from him ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 22, 1914 • Various
... the park his mind seemed forever revolving lines and scenes. In the midst of her attempt to amuse him, to divert him, he returned to his theme. He invited her judgments and immediately forgot to listen, so morbidly self-centred was he. ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... the events of the day very thoroughly. If anything, he was more alarmed over our predicament than I. He seemed to sense the danger that attended my decision to shelter and protect this cool-headed, rather self-centred young woman at the top of my castle. To me, it was something of a lark; to him, a tragedy. He takes everything seriously, so much so in fact that he gets on my nerves. I wish he were not always looking at things through ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... envy you; and a husband that no other girl envies you—well, that would hardly be satisfactory, would it? Dick, on the other hand, is clever and brilliant. He will make his way; there will come a day, you are convinced, when a woman will be proud to bear his name. If only he were not so self-centred, if ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... all. The man in him lay passive and undeveloped under the tides of passion, craving, brute-pride and crude ambitions. But the manhood was there, as his flawless courage and unconsidered kindness to women and children indicated. But he was self-centred, violent, brutally masterful. Women and children had always seemed to him (until now) helpless, harmless things, that had a right to the protection of men even as they had a right to remain ashore from the danger of wind and sea. The stag caribou and the dog-wolf have the ...
— The Harbor Master • Theodore Goodridge Roberts
... look as if she was playing a part; but she was playing one, and doing it well. Her little way was that of a nasty-tempered, self-centred woman, made spiteful by being called upon to leave ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... became plain to her that the punishment she administered to herself was always more severe than any one else would have prescribed. Sometimes punishment was decided upon by the community as a whole. By degrees the girls all began to realize "the social spirit" for the first time in their self-centred, individualistic lives. ...
— The Cricket • Marjorie Cooke
... up the long winding stairs to the show-room over the front door where their labors were to begin, she appeared to Dennis the very embodiment of grace and beauty. And yet she seemed so cold and self-centred, so devoid of warm human interest in the great world of love, joy, and suffering, that she repelled while ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... directions, and with a more continuous strain, than any other form of society. In Josiah Quincy we have an example of character trained and shaped, under the nearest approach to a pure democracy the world has ever seen, to a firmness, unity, and self-centred poise that recall the finer types of antiquity, in whom the public and private man was so wholly of a piece that they were truly everywhere at home, for the same sincerity of nature that dignified the hearth carried also a charm ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... How self-centred is man, and how darkly do his own petty interests overshadow the giant things of life. Thrones may totter and fall, monarchs pass to the limbo of memories, whilst we wrestle with an intractable collar-stud. Had another than Inspector Sheffield been driving to Buckingham Palace that ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... said Tanty, hastily. Comfortably egotistic old ladies have an instinctive dislike to painful topics. And that Rupert's sorrow for his young wife had been, if self-centred and reserved, of an intense and prolonged nature was ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... him start a little; evidently no thought of yielding had come to him before. We were passing the house that used to belong to that strange book-lover and recluse, Beckford. I looked up at the blank windows, and thought of that curious, self-centred life in the past, surrounded by every luxury, able to indulge every whim; and then I looked at my companion's pale, tortured face, and thought of the life he had elected to lead in the hope of saving one whom duty bound him to honour. After all, which life was the most worth ...
— Derrick Vaughan—Novelist • Edna Lyall
... from the prying eyes of Whisper Cove. 'Twas from me, then, that the maid withdrew into a deeper shadow, as though, indeed, 'twas not fit that we should be together. I was hurt: but fancied, being stupid and self-centred, that 'twas a pang of isolation to which ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... it—I was proud and self-centred! In all our games, I would still be the Queen, because I was the tallest, the fairest, the wisest! I ...
— Henrik Ibsen's Prose Dramas Vol III. • Henrik Ibsen
... a woman like Rose; a woman so poised and self-centred, so cultivated, so capable of deep and just reflections, and so religious. His experience with women had not been fortunate, as has been seen in this narrative; and, insensibly to himself, Rose was beginning to exercise an influence over him. The sphere ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... penetration were hardly inferior to her own, she felt an adult among people not completely grown up. It was as if they still retained more of the ingenuousness of primitive womanhood than she, and thus she "circumnavigated" them, while they, all too self-centred, had barely discovered in which hemisphere her shores were to be found. In this way the seniority of ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... salvation worth talking about is that which consists of an inner process of moral transformation, through which one passes over "the great divide" from a life that is self-centred and dominated by impulse and sin to a life that is assured of divine forgiveness, that has {xliii} conceived a passion for a redeemed inward nature, that is conscious of help from beyond its own resources, ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... do I dwell on all this? It is because these are the true Advent voices for us, coming as they do to rouse us out of narrow preoccupation, to open our eyes to the sinfulness of sin, to make us feel that the self-centred, isolated, self-seeking life is a life of a low type, and to stir us with social ...
— Sermons at Rugby • John Percival
... an important enterprise, supporting a population of 8,000 souls, and its eight smelters are of a capacity of 150 tons daily, giving an output of copper of 11,500 tons per annum. With its own railways, harbour, and town, the enterprise is a self-centred ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... is self-centred, whatever that may mean. He is certainly a very ambitious man, but his ambitions are large, and he makes no secret of them. He will make a great stir in ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... to receive confidences, have a morbid fear of giving them. Perhaps it is because I was so much alone, so self-centred, ...
— The Dangerous Age • Karin Michaelis
... And then the book is concluded by two other elegies—in rhyme this time—The Stanzas written at the Grande Chartreuse and Obermann once more. They are, however, elegies of a different kind, much more self-centred, and, indeed, little more than fresh variations on "the note," as I ventured to call it before. Their descriptive and autobiographic interest is great, and if poetry were a criticism of life, there is plenty of that ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... spirit, withdrawn from the crowd and hating the voices of the world, can afford to lose touch with the secret of Rousseau; with what his self-centred and ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... not a moment longer than she must. But, as the days passed, logic, calm, even reason, forsook him, till no lover of twenty-one was ever in sorer plight than he. Truly Nathalie herself could hardly have guessed the depths to which she had plunged this quiet and self-centred man. She had, nevertheless, the consideration to keep her word. It was but eleven days after her departure, nine after the funeral of her husband, before Ivan found himself shut alone into that room where she had first greeted him, holding her ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... majestic bearing; admired the terse contour of her head and noticed, not without a sigh, her small selfish ear. Madame Patel was nearing forty and her November hair had begun to whiten, but in her long gray eyes was invincible youth, poised, self-centred youth. She was deliberate in her movements and her complexion a clear brown. Chardon followed her example, eating and drinking, for they were exhausted by the ordeal of hearing under the most ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... chance lay in playing the repentant and tearful adorer of a mistress cruel and fair if somewhat mature—a very familiar role for him—his cry was all for the restoration of lost pecuniary privileges; and his mistress would naturally have none of a lover so self-centred. Despairing of the Queen's favour, he was rash enough to pose as a popular champion, declaiming against the intriguers who were selling England to the Infanta, and drawing round him the young hot-heads and scape-graces of the nobility, ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... said, "give me advice, not as a self-centred, cautious, and orderly citizen of Manhattan, but as a young man whose heart leads his head every time! I want that sort of advice; and I can't give it ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... who stood to lose all the things most of us strive for, people who valued neither comfort, nor money, nor the world's good word. That they took help, and even sacrifice, as a matter of course, seemed in them mere modesty and sound good sense; tantamount to saying, 'I am not so silly or self-centred as to suppose you do this for me. You do it, of course, for the Cause. The Cause is yours—is all Women's. You serve humanity. Who am I that I ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... a certain proclivity towards ploughing a solitary furrow and becoming self-centred. There are no doubt important differences. The Englishman's sense of nature is both keener and more concrete; while the Spaniard's knowledge of human nature is not barred by the subtle inhibitions ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... aptness to hope, the will to be happy WHICH I INHERIT FROM MY FATHER,' she writes. Was ever filial piety so irritating as hers? It is difficult to bear, with any patience, her praises of Dr. Mitford. His illusions were no less a part of his nature than his daughter's, the one a self-centred absolutely selfish existence, the other generous, humble, beautiful. She is hardly ever really angry except when some reports get about concerning her marriage. There was an announcement that she was engaged to one of her own clan, and the news spread among her friends. The romantic ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... of the pages of this journal, which I copy word for word from the manuscript lying before me, I give the reader. Call the dead writer an egotist, if you will: wonder at Callender's love for this self-centred nature; I think she was an artist, and as an artist, her experience is of value ...
— A Village Ophelia and Other Stories • Anne Reeve Aldrich
... process, Lenau's Weltschmerz therefore stands midway between that of Hoelderlin and Heine. It is more self-centred than Hoelderlin's and while the poet is able to diagnose the disease which holds him firmly in its grasp, he lacks those means by which he might free himself from it. Heine goes still further, for having become conscious of ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... between a man's heart and the yearning heart of God on the other side. And until that barrier is swept away, until the whole nature receives a new set, until it is delivered from the love of evil, and from its self-centred absorption, and until conscience has taken into grateful hands, if I might so say, the greatest of all gifts, the assurance of the divine forgiveness, I, for one, do not believe that deep, vital, and ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... The self-centred element in Erasmus must needs increase accordingly as he in truth became a centre and objective point of ideas and culture. There really was a time when it must seem to him that the world hinged upon him, and that it awaited the redeeming word from him. What a widespread enthusiastic ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... and half his feelings had hurried for weeks past towards prayer. In his extremity he had not prayed or thought of praying. A cool, self-centred, self-preserving something in his mind had taught him to command all his own forces for one purpose. Would he have been damned if he had lost the power to pray before that cunning mentor of the flesh ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... their dressing and correct intervals. Much had to be done. We inclined first to the left and then to the right and it was very trying. Men began to drop and I could not help them now that I had lost touch with them. Then I began to lose all interest. I had become purely self-centred—if the whole platoon had collapsed I am afraid I should not have been concerned. I had almost got to such a state that if the Turks had suddenly appeared from the wood I should not have cared what the consequences ...
— The Seventh Manchesters - July 1916 to March 1919 • S. J. Wilson
... crumpled napkin, sloppy finger-bowl, nut-shells and cigarette-ash. For ten minutes he could rest; conversation with either of his companions threatened to be as difficult as it was unnecessary. John Gaymer, in upbringing, intellect, habits of mind and method of speech, belonged to a self-centred world which cheerfully defied subjugation by a brigade of Byrons, reinforced by a division of Wesleys and an army of Rousseaus; for him there was one school and no other, one college and no other, one regiment, club, restaurant, music-hall, tailor, hairdresser and ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... but varying shades of grey. Neither are we sheep or goats, but moral alpacas, all of us,—something between a sheep and a goat. But no less are we divided into two clear-cut classes. Each of us puts himself of his own volition into the class of the self-centred, or the self-forgetting, and in the act marks himself ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... so. But, oh, Patty, how I do dislike her! She's changed so. When I saw her some years ago, she was sweet and gentle, but not so fidgety and self-centred." ...
— Patty's Butterfly Days • Carolyn Wells
... rich, selfish, over-fed, over-pampered, and revoltingly idle landowner, whose sole mental and physical resources were confined to the dinner and card tables, had been capable of a genuine friendship for Malcourt. Self-centred, cautious to the verge of meanness in everything which did not directly concern his own comfort and well-being, he, nevertheless, was totally dependent upon his friends for a full enjoyment of his two amusements; for he hated to dine ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... It is noticeable that the humanities which have so reluctantly yielded ground to the sciences are pretty uniformly adapted to shape the character of the student in accordance with a traditional self-centred scheme of consumption; a scheme of contemplation and enjoyment of the true, the beautiful, and the good, according to a conventional standard of propriety and excellence, the salient feature of which is leisure—otium cum dignitate. In language veiled by their own habituation to the archaic, ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... in winter; but beyond all this it yielded calm, tranquillity, repose, making, as Wordsworth says, the very thought of country life a thought of refuge; and that was what, so long in populous city pent, he longed to find, and found. It was his home, where he could possess his soul, could be self-centred and serene. "This," says Ruskin, "is the true nature of Home; it is ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... flag is worthy of the best traditions of the Teutonic race. Nevertheless, this cannot alter the ethical truth, which stands apart from any considerations of nationality; nor can it affect the conclusion that the German Nation has been plunged into this abyss by its scheming statesmen and its self-centred and highly neurotic Kaiser, who in the twentieth century sincerely believes that he is the proxy of Almighty God on earth, and ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... to have been an absolutely self-centred man. He was to all appearance constitutionally unable to import into his mind any considerations but those which affected his own personal comforts and likings and indulgences and occasional love of display. ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... "I don't. Babe hasn't the make-up for a professional woman in any line. She is too self-centred, too impetuous. She needs something to humanize her womanhood, not make an abstract thing of her. I'd rather see Babe a gentle, loving woman than the greatest light ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... occurrence? And what would be the effect on our own public if giant raids on British towns were of weekly occurrence? Let us make the most of our aerial chances, and so forestall betrayal by war-weariness, civilian pacifism, self-centred fools, ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... married, and regarded me no more than a chauffeur they had hired by the hour. This left Polly who was beside me on the front seat, and myself, to our own devices. Our devices were innocent enough. They consisted in conveying the self-centred Lowells so far from home that they could not get back for supper and were so forced to dine with me. Polly, for as Polly I now thought of her, discovered the place. It was an inn, on the edge of a lake with an Indian name. We did not get home until late, but it had been such a successful party ...
— The Log of The "Jolly Polly" • Richard Harding Davis
... intention, a disdainful recluse, judging all human and divine affairs from a standpoint of imperturbable omniscience, Coventry Patmore charmed one by his whimsical energy, his intense sincerity, and, indeed, by the childlike egoism of an absolutely self-centred intelligence. Speaking of Patmore as he was in 1879, Mr. Gosse says, in ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... little Will was two years old his parents viewed life, its good and its evil, much as other Moor folks contemplated it. Phoebe's heart was still sweet enough, but she grew more selfish for herself and her own, more self-centred in great Will and little Will. They filled her existence to the gradual exclusion of wider sympathies. Miller Lyddon had given his grandson a silver mug on the day he was baptised, though since that time the old man held more aloof from the ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... hidden, like those lanterns that were hidden under the coats of the lantern-bearers. But there is, very surely, some screen, sensitive to its rays, on which that light is thrown, that will some day show us what we have been too self-centred to realise, and will dazzle us with the devotion to which we are now too much ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... noticed a change in Lily so marked that even his self-centred nature could not fail to observe it. This girl, whom he had thought pretty, fanciful, tenderhearted and gently sympathetic, who had attracted his confession by her quick and feminine receptiveness, now seemed ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... of the ideal and hatred of what is servile and sordid, an ardent love of Nature, an intense love of life and movement. These things are reflected in every variety of word and figure. He is not the poet of the romantic type, self-centred, filling his verse with the echoes of his own loves and joys and woes, nor is his poetry as large as humanity; Provence, France, the Latin race, are the limits beyond which it has ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... awful picture of the world under the effects of such a curse. A place without unselfishness, without self-sacrifice, without heroism, without chivalry, without loyalty, without laughter, and without children! Every man standing alone, isolated, self-centred, self-cursed, outlawed, loveless, marriageless, going headlong to degeneracy and death! Such might be God's punishment on this cruel and wicked city for ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... makes a sort of volte face and everyday, worldly comforts and successes or little failures drop out of your line of sight, and change their values. Mothers are beginning to clutch at their sons; and even self-centred fathers and selfish pretty sisters look at their male relatives with questioning, with a hint of respect or even awe in it. Perhaps the women feel it more than the men. Good-looking, light-minded, love-making George has assumed a new aspect to his mother and to Kathryn. They're secretly yearning ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... waste and wall, He thrusts his cushions red; O'er burdock rank, o'er thistles tall, He rears his hardy head: Within, without, the strong leaves press, He screens the mossy stone, Lord of a narrow wilderness, Self-centred ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... could disregard calling dishes, chickens, half-churned butter, unfinished ironing, unmilked cows or an irate husband with a placidity that was worthy of the old Greek gods. Martin was dumbfounded to the point of stupefaction. He was too thoroughly self-centred, however, to let other than his own preferences long dominate his Rag-weed's actions. Her first duty was clearly to administer to his comfort, and that was precisely what she would do. It was ridiculous, the amount of time she gave to that baby—out of all rhyme and reason. If she wasn't feeding ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... it's so. But I can do it! I might have expected it from a man who was so perfectly self-centred and absorbed. But I was such a fool—" Her tears ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... is not barren of instruction to actual men. The Poet's self-centred seclusion was avenged by the furies of an irresistible passion pursuing him to speedy ruin. But that Power which strikes the luminaries of the world with sudden darkness and extinction, by awakening them to too exquisite a perception of its influences, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... Francis of Assisi, and Thomas a Kempis. A Kempis shows religion fled from the active world with its strifes and temptations, sedulously cultivating a pure, devout, unworldly virtue; feeding on the contemplation of heavenly splendors and infernal horrors; self-centred and inglorious. The opposite type is Frances, a joyful prophet of glad tidings to the poor; ardent, sympathetic, heroic; touched with the beauty of nature and the appeal of the animal creation; exalting simplicity and poverty like an ancient philosopher; seeking the needy and sorrowful like ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... made to religion is that it produces a narrow, self-centred type of mind. That type of religion cannot be right, regardless of its doctrinal orthodoxy, which produces a wrong type of men and women. But may not failure here be accounted for by the selfish basis on which men build the plea for what ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... have been struck by lightning at all; even a child might wonder how many services, on this scale of gratitude, were adequate for the rest of the party whom the lightning had completely missed. And it was perhaps a little self-centred of Ready to thank God for her recovery on the grounds that she could "ill be spared" by a family rather ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... inventions, ideas, discoveries, and new social contacts which marked the first decade of the present century. No doubt even the World-War has been precipitated by the sudden inrush of these unprecedented forces, and the realization of their trend by the self-centred ...
— Is civilization a disease? • Stanton Coit
... that were locked up in it, it sings as it runs, for love of him. Each plant tries to bear at least one fragrant little flower for him; and the world that was dead lives, and the heart that was dead and self-centred throbs, with an upward, outward yearning, and it has become that which it seemed impossible ever to become. There, does that satisfy you?" she asked, looking down at Gregory. "Is that how you ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... having directed the letters she imagined the postal arrangement to be somewhat irregular. After Benediction she would ask Veronica what time the letters left the convent. And looking across the abyss which separated them, she saw her passionate self-centred past and Veronica's little transit from the schoolroom to the convent. It seemed strange to her that she never had what might be called a girl friend. But she had arrived at a time when a woman friend was a necessity, ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... Where another man would say, "It is a fine day," Mr. Moore says, "Seen through my temperament, the day appeared fine." Where another man would say "Milton has obviously a fine style," Mr. Moore would say, "As a stylist Milton had always impressed me." The Nemesis of this self-centred spirit is that of being totally ineffectual. Mr. Moore has started many interesting crusades, but he has abandoned them before his disciples could begin. Even when he is on the side of the truth he is as fickle as the children ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... come and grow in the sunshine and the rain." He finds that two-thirds of the reforms for which men labour would not be needed if the artificialities of society were abandoned. He is, of course, unpractical and self-centred. Listen to Thoreau, the arch-enemy of the social treadmill, and ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... the most intuitive men we ever met had a desk at a city office where several other gentlemen were doing business constantly, and often talking loudly. Entirely undisturbed by the many various sounds about him, this self-centred faithful man would, in any moment of perplexity, draw the curtains of privacy so completely about him that he would be as fully inclosed in his own psychic aura, and thereby as effectually removed from all distractions, as though ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... easily; we pass our lives in reasonable strife with nature, exercising not one side of ourselves only, but all sides, taking the keenest pleasure in all the life of the world. So it is a point of honour with us not to be self-centred; not to suppose that the world must cease because one man is sorry; therefore we should think it foolish, or if you will, criminal, to exaggerate these matters of sentiment and sensibility: we are no more inclined to eke out ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... either. I was half tempted, in the heat of argument, to blurt out to him the whole truth about the dear gentle old Progenitor; but I'm glad I didn't now. After all, it's no use to cast your pearls before swine. For Herbert's essentially a pig—a selfish self-centred pig; no doubt a very refined and cultivated specimen of pigdom—the best breed; but still a most emphatic and consummate pig for all that. Not the same stuff in him that there is in Ernest—a fibre ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... government of the new State. The quarrel is aggravated by religious difference, Croats being Roman Catholics and Serbs Orthodox. A number of the separatist leaders, the chief of whom is Radic, an ex-bookseller, languish in gaol. These are evidently self-centred people. If they think that Europe would tolerate another independent Slav State with passports, frontiers, tariffs, armies, and the rest, surely they are mad. And if on the other hand, they would like to revert to ruined Austria ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... in order to enter by it. For everything in our old self-confident, self-centred nature is up in arms against the conditions of entrance. We are not saved by effort, but we shall not believe without effort. The main struggle of our whole lives should be to cultivate self-humbling trust in Jesus Christ, and to 'fight the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... have been in the rhythm and rhyme of his verse, but in the main he recognized the old established laws which have been accepted as regulating both. In short, with all his originality, he worked in Old World harness, and cannot be considered as the creator of a truly American, self-governed, self-centred, absolutely independent style of thinking and writing, knowing no law but its own sovereign ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... social evolution. The whole significance of adolescence lies in the bursting into activity of feelings hitherto dormant, and the quickening of a desire for communion with a larger social life. The individual becomes less self-centred, more alive to, and more responsive to the claims of others; he displays tendencies towards what the world calls self-sacrifice, but which mean, in the truest sense, self-realisation. That these changes are often expressed ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... conceited sixteen-year-old when her mother died, so spoiled and so self-centred that old Lady Frothingham had been heard more than once to mutter that the young lady could get down from her high horse and make herself useful, or she could march. But that was six years ago. And now—this! Magsie had evidently decided to make herself useful, but she had managed ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... is of God's love that in the work of prayer we are associated with one another. There is nothing further from the divine plan of life than our present individualism. Our temptation is to be egotistic and self-centred; to want to approach God alone with our private needs and wishes. We incline to travel the spiritual way by ourselves; we want no company; we want no one between our souls and God. But that precisely is not the divine method. We come to God through Christ; we come in association with the members ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... therefore, "Before Abraham was—I AM," Jesus announced himself to be the eternal, self-centred, supreme being, Almighty God. When he said this, and because they understood him, because they knew exactly what he meant by these words, the Jews took up stones ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman
... ladies; but only one feeling had reached its full possibilities in her as yet—hatred for her benefactor. Other more feminine passions might indeed flare up in Olga Ivanovna's heart with abnormal and painful violence... but she had not the cold pride, nor the intense strength of will, nor the self-centred egoism, without which any passion passes ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... dress, quite swept him away from his ordinary moorings, and he found himself tossed upon a tempestuous sea, the helpless sport of gusts of passion that at once surprised and humiliated him. It was an intolerably painful experience for the self-centred and self-controlled Samuel; and after a few months of this acute and humiliating suffering he was prepared to accept help from ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... there was anything before—if there was any just—— He paused and shivered as the thought came to him. And he was glad he paused. To question the Deity was to rank himself at once with a sect he had always despised as self-centred fools, and pitied them as purblind creatures who were in some degree ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... allegiance to his side existed no longer, but even in this her honesty had broken down. She saw herself, as she hesitated on the threshold, a wretched mercenary creature—the sport of greed and jealousy—self-centred and governed by thought of gain. It was not a pleasant reflection. For the doubtful blessing of being wife to an unscrupulous millionaire she had deafened her ears to the call of ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... Darius feebly, in the wreck, not of his workshop, but of his religion. And Edwin fled down the steps, pushing the mystified apprentices before him, and followed by the men. In the yard the journeyman, entirely self-centred, was hopping about on ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... the personal is based; and it is of the utmost importance to keep the two aspects before us concurrently, because reliance on the growing fullness of the individual life to the neglect of the social evolution is likely to empty that life itself of its true content, to leave the self-centred visionary absorbed in the contemplation of some ideal perfection within himself, while the world outside him from which he ultimately derives his notions, is toiling and suffering from the want of those very elements which he ...
— Progress and History • Various
... if happiness did come to her, and Maud had not come back, how terrible that would be, for it would mean that she had forgotten Maud, forgotten her wrong-doing; that she had become again the self-loving, self-centred being that had ...
— The Girls of St. Olave's • Mabel Mackintosh
... part, at least, escaped from abject slavery to appetite; it sometimes rises superior to fear. But it is evidently self-centred. The animal may have forgotten the claims of his dead ancestors, he is certainly fully alive to his own interests. Can he even partially rise superior to prudential considerations, as he has to some extent to the claims of appetite? ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... of their inmates. I think the reputation of gravity, which was fixed upon Washington in his mature years, has been projected back over his youth. The actual records are lacking, but such hints and surmises as we have do not warrant our thinking of him as a self-centred, unsociable youth. On the contrary, he was rather, what would be called now, a sport, ready for hunting or riding, of splendid physical build, agile and strong. He liked dancing, and was not too shy to enjoy the society of young women; indeed, ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... by the Honourable George, I had no means of knowing. I dare say not, as he is self-centred, being seldom aware of anything beyond his own immediate sensations. But I had reason to believe that the Klondike woman had divined some menace in our attitude of marked indifference. Her own manner, when it could be observed, grew increasingly defiant, ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... accepted sense is not the highest of the different grades in that relationship, but it has its place in the kingdom of love, and through it we bring ourselves into training for a still larger love. The natural man may be self-absorbed and self-centred, but in a truer sense it is natural for him to give up self and link his life on to others. Hence the joy with which he makes the great discovery, that he is something to another and another is everything to him. It is the higher-natural for which ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... Self-centred thought of any kind hangs about the thinker, and most men surround their mental bodies with a shell of such thoughts. Such a shell obscures the mental vision and facilitates the formation ...
— A Textbook of Theosophy • C.W. Leadbeater
... the dark-skinned, flat-nosed, thick-lipped low castes of non-Aryan origin, with their short bodies and bullet heads. The Brahman stands apart from both, tall and slim, with finely-modelled lips and nose, fair complexion, high forehead, and slightly cocoanut shaped skull—the man of self-centred refinement. He is an example of a class becoming the ruling power in a country, not by force of arms, but by the vigor of hereditary culture and temperance. One race has swept across India after another, dynasties have risen and fallen, religions have spread ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... more good, teaches more truth by the example of a patient, noble, holy life than could be taught by a thousand sermons from the most eloquent lips." He paused, and then continued in a tone of deep feeling, "I may well say so! I shudder to think what a weak, useless, self-centred being I should have ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... A. E. J. Rawlinson, Dogma, Fact and Experience, p. 16. "All the virtues in the Aristotelian canon are self-contained states of the virtuous man himself .... In the last resort they are entirely self-centred adornments or accomplishments of the good man; and it is significant of this self-centredness of the entire conception that the qualities of display (megaloprepeia) and highmindedness, or proper pride (megalopsychia), are insisted on as integral elements ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... of the academical life was that it entailed a certain amount of social intercourse; it compelled one to come into contact with a large variety of people. Without this Hugh felt that his outlook would have become narrow and self-centred. He knew of course that there would be times when it would seem to him that his life was an ineffective one, when he would envy the men of affairs, when he would wonder what, after all, his own performance amounted to. But Hugh felt that the great lack ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... of this journal, which I copy word for word from the manuscript lying before me, I give the reader. Call the dead writer an egotist, if you will: wonder at Callender's love for this self-centred nature; I think she was an artist, and as an artist, her experience ...
— A Village Ophelia and Other Stories • Anne Reeve Aldrich
... The calm, self-centred Anglo-Saxon temperament—the almost fatalistic acceptance of failure without reproach yet without despair, which Percy's letter to him had evidenced in so marked a manner—was, mayhap, somewhat beyond the comprehension of this young ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... ever made to religion is that it produces a narrow, self-centred type of mind. That type of religion cannot be right, regardless of its doctrinal orthodoxy, which produces a wrong type of men and women. But may not failure here be accounted for by the selfish basis on which men build the plea for ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... Even so far back as Beethoven's day that autobiographical habit had begun. "Beethoven," says Old Fogy, is "dramatic, powerful, a maker of storms, a subduer of tempests; but his speech is the speech of a self-centred egotist. He is the father of all the modern melomaniacs, who, looking into their own souls, write what they see therein—misery, corruption, slighting selfishness and ugliness." Old Ludwig's groans, of course, we can stand. He was not only a great musician, but also a great man. It is ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... details and adding to them until her power might be commensurate with her desire for revenge. At the same time, she would not delay to inflict any injury, big or little, which would wound the object of her revenge and still leave him uncertain as to the source of the evil. She was a cold, self-centred woman, with many a thought of her own which never found expression, not even by so much as the glint of ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... not always disinterested; and the moderns are not always narrow, self-centred and cold. The ancients paid, though with comparative infrequency, the tax imposed upon mortals, and thought of their own gratification and ease; and the moderns are not utterly disqualified for acts ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... this evening that will call you home, or to Kamchatka, or to Ecuador, or anywhere, on unavoidable business. No, it is not because I loathe the sight of you or for any melodramatic reason of that sort. It is because, I think, I had fancied you to be not completely self-centred, after all, and I cannot bear to face my own idiocy. Why, don't you realize it was only yesterday you borrowed money from ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... causal glance, there was nothing very remarkable about either of them. One was old; the other more than middle-aged. Both were in evening-dress,—both smoked idly, and apparently not so much for the pleasure of smoking as for lack of something better to do, and both seemed self-centred and absorbed in thought. They had been conversing for some time, but now silence had fallen between them, and neither seemed disposed to break the heavy spell. The distant roar of constant traffic in the busy thoroughfares of the metropolis sounded ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... needed attention she could disregard calling dishes, chickens, half-churned butter, unfinished ironing, unmilked cows or an irate husband with a placidity that was worthy of the old Greek gods. Martin was dumbfounded to the point of stupefaction. He was too thoroughly self-centred, however, to let other than his own preferences long dominate his Rag-weed's actions. Her first duty was clearly to administer to his comfort, and that was precisely what she would do. It was ridiculous, the amount of time she gave to that baby—out of all rhyme and ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... of his usual exuberance. It indeed seemed an admirable plan. It relieved him from the nightmare of his wife's continual presence, and this he expressed to himself by thinking that it relieved her from his. It was not that he was deficient in sympathy for her, for in his self-centred way he was fond of her, but he could sympathise with her just as well at Ashbridge. He could do no good to her, and he had not for her that instinct of love which would make it impossible for him to leave her. He would also be spared the constant irritation ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... one feeling had reached its full possibilities in her as yet—hatred for her benefactor. Other more feminine passions might indeed flare up in Olga Ivanovna's heart with abnormal and painful violence... but she had not the cold pride, nor the intense strength of will, nor the self-centred egoism, without which any passion ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... to pieces, and he was aware of it. For one thing, he recognised the physical change setting in; for another, his cool, selfish, self-centred equanimity was being broken down; the rigorous bodily regime from which he had never heretofore swerved and which alone enabled him to perform the exacting social duties expected of him, he had recently neglected. He felt the impending bodily ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... favorite candidates." It was Bea's voice that spoke. "If Miss Brett completes her quota of lines this month she will undoubtedly have the best chance in the election, even if she is personally unpopular. She is exceedingly self-centred, you know, and does not trouble herself even to appear interested in anybody else. Her manner is unfortunate. However she is unquestionably the ablest writer in the class though little Laura Wallace is a close second. Berta knew her at home and is very fond of her. Laura and Berta's ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... felt was that there was a danger in all this talk of water or air or other material symbol, or even of the indefinite or characterless as the original of all,—the danger, namely, that one should lose sight of the idea of law, of rationality, of eternal self-centred force, and so be carried away by some vision of a gradual process of evolution from mere emptiness to fulness of being. Such a position would be not dissimilar to that of many would-be metaphysicians among evolutionists, who, not content with the doctrine of evolution as a theory ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... than another" ("Theologia Germanica"), involves a denial of the nihilistic view that all the creatures are "ein lauteres Nichts."[21] It would be easy to find such passages in all the fourteenth-century mystics, but it cannot be denied that on the whole their religion is too self-centred. There are not many maxims so fundamentally wrong-headed and un-Christian as Suso's advice to "live as if you were the only person in the world."[22] The life of the cloistered saint may be abundantly justified—for the spiritual activity of some of them has been of far greater ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... up to it, Peter, but I expect you've got a lot to go through before you're clear of things. Now I'm going to be brutal. The fact is that you're too self-centred. People never do anything in the world so long as they are wondering whether the world's going to hurt them or no. Those early years of yours made you morbid. You've got a temper and one or two other things that want a lot of holding down and that ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... napkin, sloppy finger-bowl, nut-shells and cigarette-ash. For ten minutes he could rest; conversation with either of his companions threatened to be as difficult as it was unnecessary. John Gaymer, in upbringing, intellect, habits of mind and method of speech, belonged to a self-centred world which cheerfully defied subjugation by a brigade of Byrons, reinforced by a division of Wesleys and an army of Rousseaus; for him there was one school and no other, one college and no other, one regiment, club, restaurant, music-hall, tailor, hairdresser ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... that the entirely self-centred man—the Robinson Crusoe of a desert island of egoism—is unhappy. At least if he is not he belongs to a low intellectual and moral type: the proof being that all development above the level of the oyster and the slug has involved ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... dark-skinned, flat-nosed, thick-lipped low castes of non-Aryan origin, with their short bodies and bullet heads. The Brahman stands apart from both, tall and slim, with finely-modelled lips and nose, fair complexion, high forehead, and slightly cocoanut shaped skull—the man of self-centred refinement. He is an example of a class becoming the ruling power in a country, not by force of arms, but by the vigor of hereditary culture and temperance. One race has swept across India after another, dynasties have ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... fear dropped from her like a mantle, and she was possessed by a burning longing to comfort and save. In the midst of the fog and darkness God had sent to her a great opportunity. She rose to it with a dignity which seemed to set the restless, self-centred Betty of an hour ago years behind. Her fingers tightened on the stranger's arm; she spoke ...
— Betty Trevor • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... of that placid, motherly face breaking into lines of anguish while the gray old head bowed in weakness, completely unmanned the self-centred young scientist, and bending ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... Serbs they should be the dominant party in the government of the new State. The quarrel is aggravated by religious difference, Croats being Roman Catholics and Serbs Orthodox. A number of the separatist leaders, the chief of whom is Radic, an ex-bookseller, languish in gaol. These are evidently self-centred people. If they think that Europe would tolerate another independent Slav State with passports, frontiers, tariffs, armies, and the rest, surely they are mad. And if on the other hand, they would like to revert to ruined Austria ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... representative of self-centred womanhood. Rising to the heights of self-consciousness and of self-respect, she takes her soul into her own keeping, and though her position both as wife and as queen are jeopardized, she is true to the Divine ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... been bidden to perform some household task, and obeyed, she had gone to her own room and wept, and told herself that her mother would never have put such things on her. She had no one in whom to confide. She was not a girl to have unlimited intimates among other girls at school. She was too self-centred, and, if the ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... recognized the old established laws which have been accepted as regulating both. In short, with all his originality, he worked in Old World harness, and cannot be considered as the creator of a truly American, self-governed, self-centred, absolutely independent style of thinking and writing, knowing no law but its own sovereign will ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... full of smouldering fire, drew an awful picture of the world under the effects of such a curse. A place without unselfishness, without self-sacrifice, without heroism, without chivalry, without loyalty, without laughter, and without children! Every man standing alone, isolated, self-centred, self-cursed, outlawed, loveless, marriageless, going headlong to degeneracy and death! Such might be God's punishment on this cruel and wicked city ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... of it all: of smiling, with tears raining upon her heart, of listening to the complaints of customers, the grievance of poor Bessie upstairs—poor unreasonable, self-centred Bessie, whom yet she so loved—when she was herself like to drown in trouble. If only the girls could find homes—Deleah she knew would provide for Franky—she would shut up the hateful shop, would give up the humiliating struggle—she being an earthen vessel—to swim ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann
... Out!" cried Darius feebly, in the wreck, not of his workshop, but of his religion. And Edwin fled down the steps, pushing the mystified apprentices before him, and followed by the men. In the yard the journeyman, entirely self-centred, was hopping about on one leg ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... either! Lawrence, without country, creed, profession, or territorial obligation, was one of those sons of rich men who form, in any social order, its loosest and most self-centred class. In his set, frank egoism was the only motive for which one need not apologize. But in Chilmark it was not so. Far other forces were in play in the lives of the Stafford family, and Laura Clowes, and Lord Grantchester ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... things can make no impression on a hide-bound mind. As Trine somewhere puts it—"The man who is always thinking of himself generally looks as if he were thinking of something disagreeable." The self-centred mind is a mind closed to other things, and to this extent it is nearly always unbalanced and distorted. Under these conditions such inspiration as it may receive is liable to be of an uncouth and bizarre nature. Hatred, malice, ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... fashion in which the thirteen-year-old Catie made known her matrimonial plans. Mrs. Brenton liked Catie well enough, but not too well. She could have dreamed of another sort of wife for her boy, for Catie's crudeness occasionally irritated her, Catie's self-centred ambition, her intervals of density sometimes came upon Mrs. Brenton's nerves. However, girls were scarce upon the horizon of the Brentons. Catie was not perfect; but, at least, she might be infinitely worse. And Scott would be sure to need a practical wife, to counteract his habitual disregard ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... The boy's little declaration stirred all the latent motherhood in her. His fortunes at once passed so very far beyond, and fell so far short of, the ordinary lot. She wondered whether, and could not but trust that, this old friend and newcomer was not too self-centred, too hardened by ability and success to appreciate the intimate pathos of the position. Ormiston read ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... gravity, which was fixed upon Washington in his mature years, has been projected back over his youth. The actual records are lacking, but such hints and surmises as we have do not warrant our thinking of him as a self-centred, unsociable youth. On the contrary, he was rather, what would be called now, a sport, ready for hunting or riding, of splendid physical build, agile and strong. He liked dancing, and was not too shy to enjoy the society of young ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... spirited to suit Boston commercialism,—who went westward in 1858 to seek his fortune, nor have I ever heard of his return. The child Pansie, frisking with her kitten —a more simple, ingenuous, and self-centred, but also less sympathetic nature than the Pearl of Hester Prynne—may have been studied from Hawthorne's daughter Rose. There also lived at Concord in Hawthorne's time a man with the title of Colonel, a pretentious, self-satisfied person, ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... of events which led to her public humiliation; and I haven't a shadow of doubt that the names of the actors in the tragedy which broke up my life vanished completely from her memory. As you may have noticed, Chloe is a self-centred woman. Her sympathies are not deep, nor her interests wide. Her own life is a good deal more interesting to her than the lives of other people—it is generally so with strong characters, I believe—and after all, her own tragedy has been so appalling that she may be excused if she has not a very ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... Carnaby? Such a woman might surely have sold herself to great advantage; and yet—odd incongruity—she did not impress one as socially ambitious. Her mother, the ever-youthful widow, sped from assembly to assembly, unable to live save in the whirl of fashion; not so Sibyl. Was she too proud, too self-centred? And what ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... the flaming raptures of the mystical Gothic, which finds utterance in all these soaring shafts of stone; the Romanesque lives self-centred, in reserved fervour, brooding in the depths of the soul. It may be summed up in this saying of Saint Isaac's: In mansuetudine et in tranquillitate, simplifica ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... explanation for this strangely self-centred life? Those who knew him best seemed to think so. In the first place he had sprung from an unfortunate stock. Events of an unusual and tragic nature had marked the family of both parents. Nor had his parents themselves been exempt from this seeming fatality. Antagonistic in tastes ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various
... Everybody played who didn't dance, and vice versa, but nobody seemed to play for the mere sake of winning money. And while the influx of week-end guests by the Friday evening boat brought the number at Gosnold House up to twenty-two, they were all apparently amiable, self-centred folk of long and intimate acquaintance with one another as well as with their hostess and all her neighbours on the Island. Of that dubious crew of adventurers she had been led to expect ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... the screened upper balcony with Vivian. He liked her. She was a keen-witted, plain-spoken young woman, with few false ideals and no subtlety. She was less snobbish than arrogant. Of all the Wrandalls, she was the least self-centred. Leslie never quite understood her for the paradoxical reason that she ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... have been an absolutely self-centred man. He was to all appearance constitutionally unable to import into his mind any considerations but those which affected his own personal comforts and likings and indulgences and occasional love of display. There were times ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... earnest; but it is false Platonism and false Mysticism. It leads to the heartless doctrine, quite unworthy of the man, that public calamities are to the wise man only stage tragedies—or even stage comedies.[145] The moral results of this self-centred individualism are exemplified by the mediaeval saint and visionary, Angela of Foligno, who congratulates herself on the deaths of her mother, husband, and children, "who were great obstacles ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... love for her own decorum in devotion to the world in general, and to Swithin in particular. To counsel her activities by her understanding, rather than by her emotions as usual, was hard work for a tender woman; but she strove hard, and made advance. The self-centred attitude natural to one in her situation was becoming displaced by the sympathetic attitude, which, though it had to be artificially fostered at first, gave her, by degrees, a certain sweet sense that she was rising above self-love. That maternal element which had from ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... possibly cancel this wedding of yours?" I asked when I had explained the impasse. Self-centred ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, June 9, 1920 • Various
... LENAU (the pen-name of Nikolaus Franz Niembsch Edler von Strehlenau, 1802-1850). A gifted musician, Lenau was also a master of the melody of words, and his nature-feeling was unusually deep and true. Abnormally proud, self-centred and sensitive as he was, Lenau was born to unhappiness and disillusionment; his journey to America, begun with the most generous anticipations, ended in homesickness and bitter disappointment. Before he had reached middle life, his genius went out in the darkness of insanity. The picturesque ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... Monsignor, and having directed the letters she imagined the postal arrangement to be somewhat irregular. After Benediction she would ask Veronica what time the letters left the convent. And looking across the abyss which separated them, she saw her passionate self-centred past and Veronica's little transit from the schoolroom to the convent. It seemed strange to her that she never had what might be called a girl friend. But she had arrived at a time when a woman friend was a necessity, and it now suddenly occurred to her that there would be something wonderfully ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... of Pragmatism is to bring Philosophy into relation to real Life and Action. So far from regarding Thought as a self-centred, self-enclosed activity, Pragmatism insists upon replacing it in its context among the other functions of life, and in measuring its value by its effect upon them. So far, again, from regarding the abstract intellect as ...
— Pragmatism • D.L. Murray
... Bleak House, the culminating story That marks the zenith of his swift career, All the great qualities that won him glory, As writer and reformer too, appear: Righteous resentment of abuses hoary, Of pomp and cant, self-centred, insincere; And burning sympathy that glows unchecked For those who sit ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 5, 1917 • Various
... of detail with which the facts of ordinary life are recorded, and the clearness with which the individual character of numberless real persons stands out from the historic background.... The Icelanders of the Saga-age were not a secluded self-centred race; they were untiring in their desire to learn all that could be known of the lands round about them, and it is to their zeal for this knowledge, their sound historical sense, and their trained memories, that we owe much information regarding the British Isles themselves from the ninth ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various
... to deduct the great class of what I shall call the Self-centred. These are they who not only were never canvassed, but didn't even so much as hear about it, who had probably given up newspapers as a war economy and were living quiet virtuous lives in out-of-the-way places. Add to them removals and conscientious objectors (less ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 19, 1916 • Various
... know it—I was proud and self-centred! In all our games, I would still be the Queen, because I was the tallest, the fairest, the ...
— Henrik Ibsen's Prose Dramas Vol III. • Henrik Ibsen
... been fixed, but, when the Reform Party offered Peabody a high place on its ticket, he asked, in order that he might bear his part in the cause of reform, that the wedding be postponed. To the postponement Miss Forbes made no objection. To one less self-centred than Peabody, it might have appeared that ...
— The Scarlet Car • Richard Harding Davis
... cantankerous self-righteousness, whom nobody could please or satisfy, but indeed when he was most pitiless about the faults of his race or nation he was really reproaching himself, and when he seemed more egotistical and introspective and self-centred he was really ransacking himself for a clue to that same confusion of purposes that waste the hope and strength of humanity. And now through the busy distresses of the night it would have perplexed a watching angel to have drawn the line and shown when Mr. Britling, ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... bed, they smell deliciously of lavender, and we had very good luck doing up the muslin curtains. It is pleasant to be expecting a guest, isn't it, Ellen? I have often thought, although I have never said so before, that our lives were too self-centred. We seemed to have no interests outside of ourselves. Even Elizabeth has been really nothing to us, you know. She seemed to have become a stranger. I hope her child will be the means of bringing ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1904 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... he had forged a self-centred, confident way to the front; and had met there not ultimate achievement, but a young girl, Valerie West. Through her, somehow, already was coming into his life and into his work that indefinite, elusive quality—that something, ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... at any object long enough to be able to write about it, one feature comes to assume an importance that sets it far above all others. To a writer who has looked long at a man, he may shrink to a cringing piece of weakness, or he may grow to a strong, self-centred power whose presence alone inspires serenest trust. Hawthorne, standing in St. Peter's, saw only the gorgeous coloring; proportions, immensity, and sacredness were as nothing to the harmonious brilliancy of this ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... strengthened again in me the exact apprehension and suspicion which the Douglas letter had bred. Oscar I knew was too self-centred, went about too continually with admirers to have any understanding of popular feeling. He would be the last man to realize how fiercely hate, malice and envy were raging against him. I wanted to warn him; but hardly knew how to do it effectively and without offence: I made up my mind to ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... had the advantage of Leek's acquaintance would have said "Poor Leek!" For Leek's greatest speciality had always been the speciality of looking after Leek, and wherever Leek might be it was a surety that Leek's interests would not suffer. Therefore Priam Farll's pity was mainly self-centred. ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... but he and I have been thrown together a good deal of late. A young man upon whom, mark my words, success, if it ever comes, will have the worst effects. I dislike him. Sally. He is, I think, without exception, the most selfish and self-centred young man of my acquaintance. He reminds me very much of old Billy Fothergill, with whom I toured a good deal in the later eighties. Did I ever tell you the story of Billy ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... so taciturn one was compelled to guess her thoughts; and long since Camors had reflected as to what was passing in that self-centred soul. Inspired by his innate generosity, as well as his secret admiration, he took pleasure in heaping upon this poor cousin the attentions he might have paid a queen; but she always seemed as indifferent to them ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... I wrote to Mr. Fraser to send me Magazine, and I have now received four numbers of the Sartor Resartus, for whose light thanks evermore. I am glad that one living scholar is self-centred, and will be true to himself though none ever were before; who, as Montaigne says, "puts his ear close by himself, and holds his breath and listens." And none can be offended with the self-subsistency of one so catholic and jocund. And 't is good to have ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... prayer.[60] One of the most intuitive men we ever met had a desk at a city office where several other gentlemen were doing business constantly, and often talking loudly. Entirely undisturbed by the many various sounds about him, this self-centred faithful man would, in any moment of perplexity, draw the curtains of privacy so completely about him that he would be as fully inclosed in his own psychic aura, and thereby as effectually removed from all distractions, ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... in relation to sin, that repentance can be evoked in the soul. Of all terms in the vocabulary of religion, repentance is probably the one which is most frequently misused. It is habitually applied to experiences which are not even remotely akin to true penitence. The self-centred regret which a man feels when his sin has found him out—the wish, compounded of pride, shame, and anger at his own inconceivable folly, that he had not done it: these are spoken of as repentance. But they are not repentance ...
— The Atonement and the Modern Mind • James Denney
... and we misuse the opportunity and it becomes our temptation. The rich have their special and great opportunity of generous service for the common good, and yet through that very opportunity comes their special temptation. The poor are saved by their lot from many temptations of self-centred and frivolous luxury, but are much tempted {218} by their poverty itself. The healthy have a great gift of God, but they are tempted by that very gift to recklessness, inconsiderateness and self-injury. ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... retreat when I ran towards her, and to pursue when I fled. It was a very significant symbol. Stand a little apart, and things of their own accord will come more than half-way. Nobody ever goes to meet a loafer. Self-centred, domesticated persons attract. What would be the value of the heavens, if we could bring the stars into our lap? They cannot be approached or appropriated. Upon the highest mountain the horizon sinks you in a valley, and far aloft ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... million English people have thus been spending their lives self-centred, content to make their living, to enjoy life, and to behave kindly to their fellows, there has grown up in Germany a nation, a people of sixty millions, who believe that they belong together, that their country has the first call on them, whose children go to school because ...
— Britain at Bay • Spenser Wilkinson
... Virginia was not a self-centred girl, and at any other time she would have been surprised at the encouragement given to this new whim of hers by her half-brother; she would have sought some underlying cause, for George Trent—who was her mother's son by a first marriage—was nearly five years older than she, and rather piqued ...
— The Castle Of The Shadows • Alice Muriel Williamson
... rarest quality in human life. It is the poise of a great nature, in harmony with itself and its ideals. It is the moral atmosphere of a life self-centred, self-reliant, and self-controlled. Calmness is singleness of purpose, absolute confidence, and conscious power,—ready to be focused in an instant to meet ...
— The Majesty of Calmness • William George Jordan
... their environment stamped its frosty seal on man and woman; and by the time that little Will was two years old his parents viewed life, its good and its evil, much as other Moor folks contemplated it. Phoebe's heart was still sweet enough, but she grew more selfish for herself and her own, more self-centred in great Will and little Will. They filled her existence to the gradual exclusion of wider sympathies. Miller Lyddon had given his grandson a silver mug on the day he was baptised, though since that time the old man held more aloof from the life of Newtake than Phoebe understood. Sometimes ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... life; but it has the further claim to notice that it is the signal expression of the spirit of its time, though we can no longer call it the modern spirit. The book perfectly renders the disillusion, languor and sentimentality which characterise a self-centred scepticism. It is the record, indeed, of a morbid mind, but of a mind gifted with extraordinary acuteness and with the utmost delicacy of perception. Amiel wrote also several essays and poems, but it is for the "Intimate Diary" alone that his name ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... seems to me, too, the lot of the world—with those men who are rested, with the surplus men, the men who want to work more not less, who are still and gentle and strong in their hearts, steady in their imaginations, great men—men who are not driven to being self-centred or driven to being class-centred, who ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... must. But, as the days passed, logic, calm, even reason, forsook him, till no lover of twenty-one was ever in sorer plight than he. Truly Nathalie herself could hardly have guessed the depths to which she had plunged this quiet and self-centred man. She had, nevertheless, the consideration to keep her word. It was but eleven days after her departure, nine after the funeral of her husband, before Ivan found himself shut alone into that room where she had first greeted him, holding her answer in ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... deceived me. Now that my sympathy with her made me more keenly alive to her distress, I saw the deep pain in her pale face, and the unnatural look of grief in one so young. She tied on her hat in her old, hopeless way, and the ivory smoothness of her face spoke of self-centred and silent suffering. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... distance. It bore an unfamiliar note, upon the strangeness of which he dwelt for a detached instant. Then its meaning broke in upon his consciousness from all sides, and lighted up his heavy face with the glow of a conqueror's self-centred smile. He bent his eyes upon her, and noted with a controlled exaltation how her glance in turn deferred to his, and fluttered beneath it, and shrank away. He squared his big shoulders and lifted his head. Still holding her jewelled hand in his, he turned and led her toward the sofa. ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... A reckless and dashing rider, yet mindful of his horse's needs; good-humored by nature, but quick in quarrel; independent of circumstance, yet shy and sensitive of opinion; abstemious by education and general habit, yet intemperate in amusement; self-centred, yet possessed of a childish vanity,—taken altogether, a characteristic product of the Western plains, which ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... answer you," she said. "My adopted son—for he is my adopted son if I choose to make him so—will explain nothing. He has, in fact, nothing more to say to you. You and he are quits so far as regards obligations. Your paths in life lie apart. You are one of the self-centred, sedentary loiterers by the way. For him," she added, throwing out suddenly her brown, withered hand, aflame with jewels, "there lie different things. Something he knows; something he has learned; much there is yet for him to learn. He will go on his way, undisturbed by ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... wonderful fortune did not overwhelm Nat as it had me. He was much stronger than I. Every stroke of his pencil during the last year had developed and perfected his soul. He was fast coming to have that consciousness of power which belongs to the true artist, and makes a life self-centred. ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... produced on her by Bonaparte was generically different from that produced by either of these classes. She found that such epithets as 'good,' 'violent,' 'gentle,' and 'cruel' could not be applied to him in their ordinary senses. He was in truth a being who stood self-centred, and apart from the sympathies, passions, and enthusiasms of his kind, habitually regarding men, not as fellow-creatures, but as mere counters in a game; a will of colossal strength; an intellect of clear, cold, transcendent power, solely governed by the imperturbable ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... that's so. But, oh, Patty, how I do dislike her! She's changed so. When I saw her some years ago, she was sweet and gentle, but not so fidgety and self-centred." ...
— Patty's Butterfly Days • Carolyn Wells
... "How horribly self-centred you are! You will talk as if you were in some special sort of quarantine. I keep on telling you it's the same for ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... soft-hearted; no match at all for the lady. The thought of her walking the lawns or the drawing-rooms of Crosby Ledgers as the betrothed of the heir stirred in Arthur Meadows's wife a silent, and—be it confessed!—a malicious convulsion. Such mothers, so self-centred, so set on their own triumphs, with their intellectual noses so very much in the clouds, deserved such sons! She promised herself to keep her own counsel, and ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward
... argument, to blurt out to him the whole truth about the dear gentle old Progenitor; but I'm glad I didn't now. After all, it's no use to cast your pearls before swine. For Herbert's essentially a pig—a selfish self-centred pig; no doubt a very refined and cultivated specimen of pigdom—the best breed; but still a most emphatic and consummate pig for all that. Not the same stuff in him that there is in Ernest—a fibre ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... lately married, and regarded me no more than a chauffeur they had hired by the hour. This left Polly who was beside me on the front seat, and myself, to our own devices. Our devices were innocent enough. They consisted in conveying the self-centred Lowells so far from home that they could not get back for supper and were so forced to dine with me. Polly, for as Polly I now thought of her, discovered the place. It was an inn, on the edge of a lake with an Indian name. ...
— The Log of The "Jolly Polly" • Richard Harding Davis
... a poet lies in the universality of his sympathies. And women are not sympathetic, because they are intensely self-centred. ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... strive for, people who valued neither comfort, nor money, nor the world's good word. That they took help, and even sacrifice, as a matter of course, seemed in them mere modesty and sound good sense; tantamount to saying, 'I am not so silly or self-centred as to suppose you do this for me. You do it, of course, for the Cause. The Cause is yours—is all Women's. You serve humanity. Who am I that ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... of the different grades in that relationship, but it has its place in the kingdom of love, and through it we bring ourselves into training for a still larger love. The natural man may be self-absorbed and self-centred, but in a truer sense it is natural for him to give up self and link his life on to others. Hence the joy with which he makes the great discovery, that he is something to another and another is everything to him. It is the higher-natural for which he has hitherto existed. It ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... their splendour is hidden, like those lanterns that were hidden under the coats of the lantern-bearers. But there is, very surely, some screen, sensitive to its rays, on which that light is thrown, that will some day show us what we have been too self-centred to realise, and will dazzle us with the devotion to which we are now ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... surrounded by their camp followers, who each differ from each other only superficially, and, not unseldom, transfer their allegiance in pursuit of fatter game. The differences do impress one at first, but, as I say, they are mainly superficial. All are equally self-centred and true to type as parasites; though one brood is better dressed than another, and has a more formidable appetite. What makes rich pickings for the follower of one camp would leave the follower of another camp lean and hungry indeed. But the necessary scale of ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... rites and observances for those of the Hindu religion. And they apparently have large satisfaction in them. The old Hindu idea of the supreme value of asceticism is largely yielding to a Christian altruism which abandons self-centred, self-seeking, activity in favour of loving sympathy for, and an endeavour ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... provocative of these beliefs was actually the RISE OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS—that is, the coming of the mind to a more or less distinct awareness of itself and of its own operation, and the consequent development and growth of Individualism, and of the Self-centred attitude in human thought ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... would like to linger and talk to this sultry and self-centred being; I would like to wander with her through these rooms, imbibing their strange Oriental spirit—not your vulgar Orient, but something classic and remote; something that savours, for aught I know, of Indo-China, where Mrs. Nichol, in one of her immature efforts ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... enough to be victims—your life makes a sort of volte face and everyday, worldly comforts and successes or little failures drop out of your line of sight, and change their values. Mothers are beginning to clutch at their sons; and even self-centred fathers and selfish pretty sisters look at their male relatives with questioning, with a hint of respect or even awe in it. Perhaps the women feel it more than the men. Good-looking, light-minded, love-making ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... you may ask, do I dwell on all this? It is because these are the true Advent voices for us, coming as they do to rouse us out of narrow preoccupation, to open our eyes to the sinfulness of sin, to make us feel that the self-centred, isolated, self-seeking life is a life of a low type, and to stir us with social and ...
— Sermons at Rugby • John Percival
... question it raises? Its message is that the cause of weakness lies in the inner life of the soul. It is in some break of harmony with the Good, some dissociation from the True. In the commencement of the poem we find that the God Shiva, the Good, had remained for long lost in the self-centred solitude of his asceticism, detached from the world of reality. And then Paradise was lost. But Kumara-Sambhava is the poem of Paradise Regained. How was it regained? When Sati, the Spirit of Reality, through humiliation, suffering, ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... if sleep had not only repaired the ravages of fatigue upon the tissues of his brain and body, but had mended the tissues of his soul as well. His thoughts were fluent in fresh channels, his interests no longer the interests of the Michael Lanyard he had known, no longer self-centred, the interests of the absolute ego. He was concerned less for himself, even now when he should be most gravely so, than for another, for the girl Lucia Bannon, who was nothing to him, whom he had yet to know for twenty-four hours, but of whom he could not cease ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... if there was anything before—if there was any just—— He paused and shivered as the thought came to him. And he was glad he paused. To question the Deity was to rank himself at once with a sect he had always despised as self-centred fools, and pitied them as purblind creatures who were ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... depths it feels him and melts, and it flows, and the things, strange sweet things that were locked up in it, it sings as it runs, for love of him. Each plant tries to bear at least one fragrant little flower for him; and the world that was dead lives, and the heart that was dead and self-centred throbs, with an upward, outward yearning, and it has become that which it seemed impossible ever to become. There, does that satisfy you?" she asked, looking down at Gregory. "Is that how ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... safe to say that no struggle recorded in the annals of antiquity, or of the middle age, surpasses it in importance or in historical interest. The war was to decide whether the conqueror of the world was to be self-centred Rome; or whether it should be a nation of traders, commanded by a powerful general who dictated to them their policy,—a nation not adapted to unite the different peoples in bonds of sympathy,—one whose success would, ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... conclusion sent the blood tingling to her cheek. There was something, too, inconceivably lonely in the situation. The unfurnished vacant room, the half-lights, the monstrous doll, whose very size seemed to give a pathetic significance to its speechlessness, the smallness of the one animate, self-centred figure,—all these touched more or less deeply the half-poetic sensibilities of the woman. She could not help utilizing the impression as she stood there, and thought what a fine poem might be constructed from this ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... drawing to an end. Soon it will be spring once more; I shall go out into the fields, and shake away these thoughts of discouragement and fear which have lately too much haunted my fireside. For me, it is a virtue to be self-centred; I am much better employed, from every point of view, when I live solely for my own satisfaction, than when I begin to worry about the world. The world frightens me, and a frightened man is no ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... Woman, self-centred, would never be absorbed by any relation; it would be only an experience to her as to man. It is a vulgar error that love, a love, to Woman is her whole existence; she also is born for Truth and Love in their universal energy. Would she ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... pain. His suffering was supreme. All else in the world shrank into insignificance beside it. No thoughts of Dora fortified him; no mother's face came to comfort him; nor that of any human being he had ever known. He was just Smith—self-centred—alone; just Smith, fighting and suffering and struggling for his life. His anguish found expression in the ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... eyes are opened. To-day we stand a self-centred nation. We have seen so much of English consistency, of English nobleness, we have so learned to prize English honor and English generosity, that there is not a living American, North or South, who values English opinion, on any point of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... loosely built, rather slouching fellow; a typical young Australian of a certain class; not unintelligent, rather lazy, given to drawl in his speech, and extremely self-centred. He had been eyeing Finn all this while with growing interest, ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... extravagance of his speech there ran a deeper note than I had believed Harry Underwood to be capable of sounding. As his eyes met mine and I saw that there was something as near suffering in them as the man's self-centred careless nature was capable of feeling ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... was leading a solitary and self-centred moral life, I was much taken up with abstract thoughts on man's destiny, on a future life, and on the immortality of the soul, and, with all the ardour of inexperience, strove to make my youthful intellect solve those questions—the questions which constitute the ...
— Boyhood • Leo Tolstoy
... I can do it! I might have expected it from a man who was so perfectly self-centred and absorbed. But I was such a fool—" Her tears came ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... suggested to him the sacrifices she had made. He knew them, still he did not know them in their fulness; he was grateful, but his gratitude did not compass the splendid self-effacing devotion with which she denied herself the glorious career that had lain before her. Morbid and self-centred, he could not understand. Since her return from Quebec she had sought to give a little touch of gaiety to their life, and she had not the heart to interfere with his constant insistence on the little dignities of the position of Seigneur, ironical as they all were in her eyes. She had sacrificed ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... circumstanced as to be unusually exposed to them; we may have nerves very sensitive to pain, and be afflicted with a disease very painful. Virtue will not help us, and it is not meant to help us. It is not even its own reward, except for the self-centred and - I had almost said - the unamiable. No man can pacify his conscience; if quiet be what he want, he shall do better to let that organ perish from disuse. And to avoid the penalties of the law, and the minor ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... cruelty, delight, loyalty, revolt, jealousy. She had never from her birth until now felt love for any one. She had never been awakened. Even her affection for her father had been dutiful rather than instinctive. She had provoked love, but had never given it. She had been self-centred, compulsive, unrelenting. She had unmoved seen and let her husband go to his doom— it was his doom and death so far ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... mistress cruel and fair if somewhat mature—a very familiar role for him—his cry was all for the restoration of lost pecuniary privileges; and his mistress would naturally have none of a lover so self-centred. Despairing of the Queen's favour, he was rash enough to pose as a popular champion, declaiming against the intriguers who were selling England to the Infanta, and drawing round him the young hot-heads and scape-graces of the nobility, in the ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
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