"Egoism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... composed, when one comes to analyse it, of two chemical elements; of what might be called aesthetic egoism and of what we know as philosophic scepticism. Let us deal with the former of these ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... as is natural, deal chiefly with the desires and hopes of the worshiper, and often do not rise above mere egoism. Their object is to secure blessing, and the blessing is often, perhaps generally, of a nonmoral character—wealth, children, triumph over enemies. Desire for moral purity appears in some Hebrew hymns, and perhaps in some Babylonian. Of the modes ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... of the habit of making life a consecutive series of absorbing preoccupations are numerous. The practice narrows the sphere of one's interests and activities, tends to introspective egoism, and robs the present of much of its savour. But, now and again, it has its compensations. Save for a single week-end of rather pensive moping, the end of my love affair changed the colour of my ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... large, until it is almost pain to be "saved" by them—these things are in Poe's true manner; for it is not "Helen" that he has ever loved, but her body, her corpse, her ghost, her memory, her sepulchre, her look of dead reproach! And these things none can take from him. The maniacal egoism of a love of this kind—its frozen inhumanity—can be seen even in those poems which stretch yearning hands towards Heaven. In "Annabel Lee," for instance, in that sea-kingdom where the maiden lived who had no ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... thoughts of Clara he deferred till he should be back at home. He thought much more about her sister Anna. 'There,' he thought, 'is an exquisite, charming creature. What delicate comprehension of everything, what a loving heart, what a complete absence of egoism! And how girls like that spring up among us, in the provinces, and in such surroundings too! She is not strong, and not good-looking, and not young; but what a splendid helpmate she would be for a sensible, cultivated man! That's ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... find in it some agreeable youth who should admire her, and desire to make her his own for ever. Compare this simple and natural longing with the insatiate greed and ambition of one of our own sex, I urged him, and then talk to me, if you can, of this poor girl's selfishness! A young man has more egoism in an hour than a young girl has in her whole life. She thinks she wishes some one to be devoted to her, but she really wishes some one to let her be devoted to him; and how passively, how negatively, she must manage to accomplish ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... any personal animus, although the same cannot be said of those he criticizes. These, like d'Annunzio, whose limitations he points out—his egoism, his lack of human sympathy—are often very bitter, and accuse the penetrating critic of want of courtesy. This seriousness of purpose runs like a golden thread through all Croce's work. The flimsy superficial ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... child had its room—except Jimmie and Johnnie, who shared one. And each room was the fortress of an egoism, the theatre of a separate drama, mysterious, and sacred from the others. Jimmie could not remember having been in Janet's room—it was forbidden by Alicia, who was jealous of her sole right of entree—and nobody would have dreamed of violating ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... the necessity of his isolation and excused himself for it: "Some day, when my works are developed, you will realise that it required many an hour to think out and write so many things; then you will absolve me for all that has displeased you, and you will pardon, not the egoism of the man (for he has none), but the egoism of the ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... self-possession of the old soldier thoroughly accustomed to dealing with men in difficult moments, threw in a word or two occasionally. Although a grave, even a rather sad-looking man, he was evidently entertained by Miss Van Tuyn's volubility and almost passionate, yet not vulgar, egoism. Probably he thought such a lovely girl had a right to admire herself. She talked of herself in modern Paris with the greatest enthusiasm, cleverly grouping Paris, its gardens, its monuments, its pictures, its brilliant men ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... here only to examine the simplest reactions of the individual, necessarily produced by rubbing up again the external world; reactions which become persistent forms of experience that are approximately as self-evident as the libido itself. The degree of egoism which is active in the elementary tendencies must, according to the experience of psychoanalysis, be considered very great. For this purpose I have selected in what follows an excessively egotistical expression for the "titanic" aspect, the retrospective form, of ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... not be so fond of Gwynplaine. To live in the life of another is perilous. Egoism is a good root of happiness. Men escape from women. And then Gwynplaine might end by becoming infatuated with you. His success is so great! You have no idea how ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... lovable even in their contentment and desire to be kind, how mediocre they all were, and capable of what insipid cruelty to one another! There was Mrs. Thornbury, sweet but trivial in her maternal egoism; Mrs. Elliot, perpetually complaining of her lot; her husband a mere pea in a pod; and Susan—she had no self, and counted neither one way nor the other; Venning was as honest and as brutal as a schoolboy; poor old Thornbury merely trod his round like a horse in ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... envelope of some insensitive tissue which can protect from evil that which it would otherwise harm by contact. If this be an ordered selfishness, then we should pause before we condemn any one for the vice of egoism, for there may be deeper root for its causes than ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... ambition; and even that she finds obstructed and baffled. At the same time she learns that another woman has had the courage to love and venture all, where she, in her cowardice, only hankered and refrained. Her malign egoism rises up uncontrolled, and calls to its aid her quick and subtle intellect. She ruins the other woman's happiness, but in doing so incurs a danger from which her sense of personal dignity revolts. Life has no such charm ...
— Hedda Gabler - Play In Four Acts • Henrik Ibsen
... with this "not marble nor the gilded monuments" theme, the sixteenth century would quite eclipse the nineteenth or twentieth. But the egoism of our writers goes much further than this parental satisfaction in their offspring. It seems to have needed the intense individualism of Rousseau's philosophy, and of German idealism, especially the conception of "irony," or ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... Rowland looked at him for some moments; it seemed to him that he had never so clearly read his companion's strangely commingled character—his strength and his weakness, his picturesque personal attractiveness and his urgent egoism, his exalted ardor and his puerile petulance. It would have made him almost sick, however, to think that, on the whole, Roderick was not a generous fellow, and he was so far from having ceased to believe in him that he felt just now, more than ever, that all this was but the painful ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... is a religion nurtured by this class of whom I speak. In their humble surroundings the love of self, the desire to possess things, the cherished need for luxuries, crowd out the feelings that make character. They are but one manifestation of the egoism of the unmarried ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... afternoon, Eleanor comprehended how far behind she really was in this warfare between egotism and egoism. She began to understand that the first expressed stubbornness and selfishness which eventually would result in unhappiness for all concerned; while egoism meant exactly what Polly was trying to demonstrate for herself—that upright fearless stand for Truth, and the sacrifice of everything that interfered with the perfect working out of the ...
— Polly and Eleanor • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... often come perilously near to bombast; and this is why, again, as a man, his vanity was almost as great as his genius. He had good reason to be vain, and yet, if he had possessed a gleam of humor, he would never have allowed his egoism to make him arrogant. As it was, he felt himself exalted above other mortals. Whatever he did or said or wrote was right because he did it or ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... neutrality where his own claims are concerned, a singular self-mastery and justice of mind, in matters where with most men the sense of their own personality is wont to be so exacting and so easily irritated. The history of intellectual eminence is too often a history of immoderate egoism. It has perhaps hardly ever been given to any one who exerted such influence as Mr. Mill did over his contemporaries, to view his own share in it with such discrimination and equity as marks every page ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 3 (of 3) - Essay 2: The Death of Mr Mill - Essay 3: Mr Mill's Autobiography • John Morley
... others on the essential question. Strange, is it not? But quite a common experience, I believe. Besides, I don't actually care twopence what any other philosopher has replied to my question. In this, each man must be his own philosopher. There is an instinct in the profound egoism of human nature which prevents us from accepting such ready-made answers. What is it to us what Plato thought? Nothing. And thus the question remains ever new, and ever unanswered, and ever of dramatic interest. The singular, the highly singular thing is—and ...
— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett
... to the land and yearn for a farm, it's a good thing. But these farms are just the same as six feet of earth. To retreat from town, from the struggle, from the bustle of life, to retreat and bury oneself in one's farm—it's not life, it's egoism, laziness, it's monasticism of a sort, but monasticism without good works. A man does not need six feet of earth or a farm, but the whole globe, all nature, where he can have room to display all the qualities and peculiarities ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... it was of no great antiquity; for, but a very few years back, Henry had been a miniature tyrant too, and ruled it over his kingdom of six sisters with all the hideous egoism of a pampered "son and heir." Although in the very middle class of society into which Henry Mesurier was born, the dignity of eldest son is one but very contingently connected with tangible inheritance, it is none the less vigorously kept up; and, ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... much heartburning and conscientious scrupling, he was mastered by a healthier spirit of self-assertion, which made him rebel against the uselessness of the conflict, and doggedly resolve to put an end to it, he was only enabled to stand firm by summoning to his aid all the strengthening egoism, which is latent in every more or less artistic nature. To the mother, in her honest narrowness, the son's choice of a calling which she held to be unfitting, was something of a tragedy. She allowed no item of her duty to escape her, and moved about the house as ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... respect the sovereign husband resembles the Sovereign State. The Sovereign State, as it has survived from Renaissance days in our modern world, may be made up of admirable people, yet as a State they are forced into an attitude of helpless egoism which nowadays fails to commend itself to the outside world, and the tendency of scientific jurists to-day is to deal very critically with the old conception of the Sovereign State. It is so with the husband in the ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... was jealous of the fiddle, and being proud in her way, she became more and more quiet and reticent, and drew herself aloof from me, although, wrapped up as I was in the double egoism of art and boyhood, I failed to notice this. I have been sorry since that any shadow of misunderstanding should have clouded the closing days of our partnership. It is late to regret now, however. When my fiddle was added to our belongings, ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al
... then, that all is ended; it seems that, with the cessation of the worship and mystification of humanity by itself, the theological problem is for ever put aside. The gods have gone: there is nothing left for man but to grow weary and die in his egoism. What frightful solitude extends around me, and forces its way to the bottom of my soul! My exaltation resembles annihilation; and, since I made myself a God, I seem but a shadow. It is possible that I am still a ME, but it is very ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... manifestations to us; or, finally, the unconditioned par excellence—the unconditioned in Ontology—the being on which all other being depends. It is of course possible to identify any one of the three first with the last. It is possible to adopt a system of Egoism, and to maintain that all phenomena are modes of my mind, and that the substance of my mind is the only real existence. It is possible to adopt a system of Materialism, and to maintain that all phenomena are modes of matter, and that the material substance of the world is the only real existence. ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... metaphysic of Buddhism' might be abandoned; surely metaphysicians, too, have religious needs and may have warm hearts. At the same time I will not deny that I prefer the northern variety of Buddhism, because I seem to myself to detect in the southern Buddhism a touch of a highly-refined egoism. Self-culture may or may not be combined with self-sacrifice. In the case of the Buddha it was no doubt so combined, as the following ...
— The Reconciliation of Races and Religions • Thomas Kelly Cheyne
... moment the tide of the younger man's feelings was set flowing. In a moment the egoism of the lover made a generous nature forget all else but the passion that absorbed him. In a moment the thought that this man was Nan's father, and that the dearest wish of his life was that he, Jeff, should marry his daughter, ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... so he contemplated marriage and political activity. He wished everything, but resolved on nothing. At that time his college chums asked him for money for a common cause. He knew what that common cause was, and at the time took no interest in it whatever, but from a feeling of fellowship and egoism gave the money, that it might not be thought that he was afraid. Those who took the money were arrested; a note was found from which it was learned that the money had been given by Kryltzoff. He was arrested, taken to the police station, ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... the present, the spirit of the time, angel of the dawn who is neither night nor day; they found him seated on a lime sack filled with bones, clad in the mantle of egoism, and shivering in terrible cold. The anguish of death entered into the soul at the sight of that specter, half mummy and half fetus; they approached it as the traveler who is shown at Strasburg the daughter of an old count of Sarvenden, embalmed ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... upon pigeons, of course attributed to earthly owners, but said to be undecipherable. I'd do it, ourselves, only that would be selfish. That's more of the Intermediatism that will keep us out of the firmament: Positivism is absolute egoism. But look back in the time of Andree's Polar Expedition. Pigeons that would have no publicity ordinarily, were often reported ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... English literature who thus stand out of the tradition, who are without ancestors, Donne and Browning. Each seems to have certain qualities almost greater than the qualities of the greatest; and yet in each some precipitation of arrogant egoism remains in the crucible, in which the draught has all but run ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... tyrant may be gratified. Louis commanded; Versailles arose, a palace of rare delight for princes and nobles, for wits and courtly prelates, for grave philosophers and ladies frail as fair. A palace and a hell, a grim monument to regal egoism, created to minister to the inflated vanity of a despot, an eternal warning to mankind that the abuse of absolute power is an accursed thing. Every flower, in those wide gardens has been watered with the tears of stricken souls; every stone in that vast pile of buildings was cemented with ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... bodies work when, instead of being associated together, they are separate. The same spectacle is apparent on contemplating castes and associations; their isolation is the cause of their egoism. From the top to the bottom of the scale the legal and moral powers which should represent the nation represent themselves only, while each one is busy in its own behalf at the expense of the nation. The nobility, in default of the right to meet together and to vote, exercises its influence, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... of the family, whom an irregular life, play, and countless other costly follies have robbed of all dignity. Between his appetites and his role of father he has decided for the former, and he slowly drifts toward the most abject egoism. ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... who enjoy the favour of our middle classes, those who best represent their rather narrow ideas, their somewhat prescribed views, their rather superficial scepticism, and their at times somewhat excessive egoism, display profound alarm at this new power which they see growing; and to combat the disorder in men's minds they are addressing despairing appeals to those moral forces of the Church for which they formerly professed so much disdain. They talk to us of the bankruptcy ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... orthodox political economy—the laisser-faire system—the philosophy of competition or supply and demand, and it was incessantly denounced by Carlyle as Mammon worship, as 'devil take the hindmost,' as 'pure egoism'; 'the shabbiest gospel that had been taught among men.' He declared that in the long run no society could flourish, or even permanently cohere, if the only relation between man and man was a mere money tie. ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... German edition. Much to her after regret, she was then too much engrossed by other work to be able to accede to his proposal. The relations between Hans Andersen and his translator were marred, we are told, by the extreme sensitiveness and egoism of the Dane. Mrs. Howitt narrates, as an example of his childish vanity, the following little incident which occurred during his visit to England in the ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... acquaintance with the new. This letter from a busy youth of three and twenty, breathes of seventeen: the sickening alternations of conceit and shame, the expense of hope IN VACUO, the lack of friends, the longing after love; the whole world of egoism under which youth stands ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... be merely sensualism in its intensest form; it is peculiarly a woman's temptation; the scientific name for it (since you throw science at my head) is 'negative egoism.' You yourself are quite capable of it; for you cannot get rid of the results of your training ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... supreme moral law of rational religion, the love, that is to say, that holds the balance between egoism and altruism, between self-love and love of others. "Do to others as you would they should do to you." This natural and highest command had been taught and followed thousands of years before Christ said: ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel
... itself. Without demanding absolutism I do desire a predominant democratic character in our national enterprises, rather than a confused muddle or struggle of interests where nothing really emerges except the egoism of ...
— National Being - Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity • (A.E.)George William Russell
... discussion in a jocular tone. I submitted to her several obvious arguments, dictated apparently by common sense but in reality by my secret compassion. Mrs Fyne brushed them aside, with the semi-conscious egoism of all safe, established, existences. They had known each other so little. Just three weeks. And of that time, too short for the birth of any serious sentiment, the first week had to be deducted. They would hardly look ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... to him, the forest guard cannot take legal proceedings against the offender, and it is just as well, for our egoism, which is inclined to see in the acorn only a garland of sausages, would have annoying results. The oak calls the whole world to enjoy its fruits. We take the larger part because we are the stronger. That ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... introspective egoism would not have bestowed a thought at such a moment on the possibility of the Vicomte, M. de Comaing, or anyone else appearing on the scene. But Frederick had been too many times the dupe of these very glances to compromise himself by a ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... is notorious that America, which once was the progressive nation, has been for a generation in a comatose state in the matter of social ideas. It is high time that our college women should stand solid against the blind superstition, whose mother is fear and whose father is egoism, that women can not be trusted in ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... revivals" that "some gain a religious vocabulary rather than a religious experience?" Is there a descendant of the Puritans who will not relish the fair play of this? "They might give the name of piety to much that was only Puritanic egoism; they might call many things sin that were not sin, but they had at least the feeling that sin was to be avoided and resisted, and color-blindness, which may mistake drab for scarlet, is better than total blindness, ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... Mesias, merchant tailor and outfitter, 5 Eden Quay, b) hospitality extended and received in kind, reciprocated and reappropriated in person, c) comparative youth subject to impulses of ambition and magnanimity, colleagual altruism and amorous egoism, d) extraracial attraction, intraracial inhibition, supraracial prerogative, e) an imminent provincial musical tour, common current ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... instructed, but this was because, moreover, the men distrusted Greek culture. When literature, science, and Hellenic philosophy were admitted into the great Roman families as desired and welcome guests, neither the authority, nor the egoism, nor yet the prejudices of the men, sought to deprive women of the joy, the comfort, the light, that might come to them from these new studies. We know that many ladies in the last two centuries of the republic not only learned to ...
— The Women of the Caesars • Guglielmo Ferrero
... and books—which used to adorn the house in Half Moon Street. But the man himself! He has altered very little in personal appearance. He still moves briskly, and, except that his hair is nearly white, I could imagine him to be the same hero that I used to worship. But his egoism has grown upon him to such an extent that his mind is hardly recognisable. He still talks brilliantly and suggestively at times; and I find myself every now and then amazed by some stroke of genius in his talk, some ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... picture of that youth which we see—youth reduced to ineffectiveness by fatalism and by the egoism of the lyric nature which longs to gain dramatic freedom, but cannot achieve it. It is one of a series of portraits, wonderfully traced psychological studies of the Russian dreamers and incompatibles of last mid-century, ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... quiet confidence. It was one of Banneker's elements of strength, which subsequently won for him his unique place, that he was always too much interested in estimating the man to whom he was talking, to consider even what the other might think of him. It was at once a form of egoism, and the total negation of egotism. It made him the least self-conscious of human beings. And old Horace Vanney, pompous, vain, the most self-conscious of his genus, felt, though he could not analyze, ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... pardon, old man. It isn't that at all. The truth is"—and his voice broke—"I have lied to myself and to the world these many years. Much of it hasn't been my fault, but I must pay the price just the same. I am blind. That has led me to a sort of clamorous egoism which carried me on and on until I came to feel that I was really doing something. At last, I know that I am a narrow human parasite, worthless, utterly worthless. A blind, clinging, grasping, vagrant beast, fed upon the mercy of too kind-hearted humanity. ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... I can tell, I may say I have always loved this one beyond all other children of Shakespeare. The too literal egoism of this profession will not be attributed by any candid or even commonly honest reader to the violence of vanity so much more than comical as to make me suppose that such a record or assurance could in itself be matter of interest to any man: but simply to the real ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... the whole of his past life concentrated itself on this moment when the gates of the Universe rolled back, and he advanced to meet the representatives of its Greatest People. He thought, in the simple, natural egoism of a man who has lived a life cut off from others, that they would understand this ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... Clara until he should reach home again. He meditated a great deal more about her sister Anna.—"Here now," he said to himself, "is a wonderful, sympathetic being! What a delicate comprehension of everything, what a loving heart, what absence of egoism! And how comes it that such girls bloom with us, and in the provinces,—and in such surroundings into the bargain! She is both sickly, and ill-favoured, and not young,—but what a capital wife she would make for an honest, well-educated man! That is the person with whom one ought to fall ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... egoism, rooted in his nature and trained by his philosophy. It must die, if at all, violently, painfully, and—in silence. The truer and more constant the soul, the more complete the destruction of its idol. Character is not always the slow growth of years: often do ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... faith which was singularly literal; his views upon religion were uncritical to crudeness; he had no sense of humour. Compared with Disraeli's, his attitude towards life strikes one as that of an ingenuous child. His very egoism was simple-minded; through all the labyrinth of his passions there ran a single thread. But the centre of the labyrinth? Ah! the thread might lead there, through those wandering mazes, at last. Only, ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... each other. And of the three qualities, which are gradually characterised by each, in order of priority is consciousness which is called the mind. The seventh is intelligence and after that comes egoism; and then the five senses, then the soul, then the moral qualities called sattwa, rajas and tamas. These seventeen are said to be the unknown or incomprehensible qualities. I have described all this to thee, what else dost thou ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... followed by ELIZABETH and PHOEBE. ANNYS is somewhat changed from the grave, dreamy ANNYS of a short week ago. She is brimming over with vitality—excitement. There is a decisiveness, an egoism, about her that seems new to her. The women's skirts make a flutter. A breeze seems to have entered. ANNYS runs to her husband. For the moment the election fades away. They are all smiles, tenderness for ...
— The Master of Mrs. Chilvers • Jerome K. Jerome
... world of men with a hidden misanthropy, a sense that they were armed against their kind, and could retire into themselves with one idea which the most remarkable men had not,—all this constituted a religion of pleasure and egoism which made fanatics of the Thirteen. The history of the Society of Jesus was repeated for the Devil's benefit. It was ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... came three times a week to pursue his philosophic studies with Professor Darbois. This arrangement had been contrived by the hypocrite, Adhemar Meydieux. He did not mistake the Count's infatuation for his goddaughter. A marriage of such wealth and aristocratic connections flattered his foolish egoism, and he was sworn to attempt everything that would bring about ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... existence. It was odd, too, that in all this random converse, not a fact of his past life, and scarce a name, should ever cross his lips. A profound reserve kept watch upon his most unguarded moments. He spoke continually of himself, indeed, but still in enigmas; a veiled prophet of egoism. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... natural and rational for him to govern his actions with a concern for the community. There was a time when this relation of dependence was viewed as external, a barter of goods between the individual and society, sanctioned by an implied contract. Thomas Hobbes, whose unblushing materialism and egoism stimulated by opposition the whole development of English ethics, conceived morality to consist in rules of action which condition the stability of the state, and so secure for the individual that "peace" which self-interest teaches him is essential ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... and factory; feminine virtue can be made the object of commerce, and yet woman is not allowed to defend directly the interests of her sex, owing to one of those aberrations of the moral sense that spring from the crass egoism and brutal ...
— The Woman and the Right to Vote • Rafael Palma
... thought that I had earned some right to apply this obvious distinction to any foreign country, since I have consistently applied it to my own country. If the egoism is excusable, I am myself an Englishman (which some identify with an egoist) and I have done my best to praise and glorify a number of English things: English inns, English roads, English jokes and jokers; even to the point of praising the roads for ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... beautiful. The story ended with the lonely and terrible surrender of her religion. He was profoundly interested. Once or twice he was appalled. Did he take this woman, he must assume responsibility for every part of her. She was so wholly without egoism that she would give herself up without reservation and expect him to guide her. That would be all very well with the ordinary woman; but with a nature of high ideals, and possibly of transcendent passions,—was he equal to the task? ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... Yet still I cried to myself, "Onward!" because I have studied, more than you give me credit for, the geography of the great summits of humanity, which you tell me are so cold. Did you not say that Goethe and Byron were the colossi of egoism and poetry? Ah, my friend, there you shared a mistake into which superficial minds are apt to fall; but in you perhaps it came from generosity, false modesty, or the desire to escape from me. Vulgar minds may mistake the effect of toil for the development of personal character, ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... and poets and musicians of the present day. For a life sincerely spent between the Temple and the Vineyard, between devotion and honest labour, producing to one man of all mankind some positive good, is not to be compared with the life which oscillates continuously between egoism and vanity, quackery and cowardice, selfishness and pretence, and which never rises, do what it may, above ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... mean yourself you should say "mich" (myself)", so she at once rapped "mich!" "And after yourself?" "Dich!" ("thee," the familiar of you commonly used in German). A frank remark, at all events, and without the taint of human egoism! ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann
... always be justified merely on the ground that it is explicable. But to explain was something—all but everything at the time of her appearance in literature. Every novel she wrote made for charity—for a better acquaintance with our neighbour's woes and our own egoism. Such an attitude of mind is only possible to an absolutely frank, even Arcadian, nature. She did what she wished to do: she said what she had to say, not because she wanted to provoke excitement or astonish the multitude, ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... song. He had never felt so lonely THERE. In his rigid self-examination he thought Kitty right in protesting against the effect of his youthfulness and optimism. Yet he was also right in being himself. There is an egoism in the highest simplicity; and Barker, while willing to believe in others' methods, never abandoned his own aims. He was right in loving Kitty as he did; he knew that she was better and more lovable than she could believe ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... misdoings of his subordinates in Ireland. He certainly had the makings of a chivalrous figure, and perhaps even a great man. One thinks that he began his descent unconsciously, and that carelessness rather than any inherent badness led gradually to an egoism which has proved fatal to his ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... you at his finger-ends. But the Vicar with his eyes shut could see clearly that if Gwenda married Rowcliffe the unpleasant event would have its compensation. He would be rid of an everlasting source of unpleasantness at home. He didn't say to himself that his egoism would be rid of an everlasting fear. He said that if Rowcliffe married Gwenda he would ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... getting off into wildernesses and free places where I could give it a breathin' chance without running the risk of being locked up as a crazy man." He laughed as he said it, but his heart was in the words. "You know all that; haven't I told you often enough? It's not a morbid egoism, or what their precious academic books so stupidly call 'degenerate,' for in me it's damned vital and terrific, and moves always to action. It's made me ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... egoism had heard itself expressed in the mention of Bruce's baby—the third generation. But by the great sorcery wherewith Nature has protected herself, this mammoth sense of self, when it extends unto the next generations, becomes a keeper of the race. Ebenezer had been touched, ...
— Christmas - A Story • Zona Gale
... turns to Avarice, the intellectual desire survives the sensual. Money, which represents all the good things of this world, and is these good things in the abstract, now becomes the dry trunk overgrown with all the dead lusts of the flesh, which are egoism in the abstract. They come to life again in the love of the Mammon. The transient pleasure of the senses has become a deliberate and calculated lust of money, which, like that to which it is directed, is symbolical in its nature, ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... brilliant Court at which she was for long the most lustrous ornament. It is only by stray touches, a casual remark, a chance phrase, that we, as it were, gauge her temperament in all its wiliness, its egoism, its love of supremacy, and its shallow worldly wisdom. Yet it could have been no ordinary woman that held the handsome Louis so long her captive. The fair Marquise was more than a mere leader of wit and fashion. If she set the mode in the shape of a petticoat, or devised ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... the fellow's egoism put Casanova in a rage for the second time since they had left their prison. But, as before, he conquered it, and without uttering a word he proceeded to unfasten the coil of rope. Making one end of it secure under Balbi's arms, he bade the monk lie prone upon the roof, his feet pointing downwards, ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... by completely remodelling his characters. So Guntram rejects Freihild's love. He sees he has fallen, even as the others, under the curse of sin. He had preached charity to others when he himself was full of egoism; he had killed Robert rather to satisfy his instinctive and animal jealousy than to deliver the people from a tyrant. So he renounces his desires, and expiates the sin of being alive by retirement from the world. But the interest of the act does not lie in this anticipated denouement, which since ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... psychic and subconscious tendencies were anti-idealistic. And apart from this divergence of congenital tendencies Mr. Darrow and Prof. Foster had a great deal in common. They both loved argument. They both doted upon seizing an idea and energizing it with their egoism. They were, in ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... stopped me, interrupting the whole concourse to do so. "Where's that other bag?" he demanded severely. I was annoyed—like the people who were following us—but I had to admire him all the same. At his age no doubt it may be demanded that a ship be put about for a bag left behind. When this childish egoism is maintained well into life, large fortunes may be made. It is, perhaps, the only way. As soon as a man can relate his personal affairs to those of the world, and understands how unimportant he really is, from that moment he becomes a failure. Some men never ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... in Synge's work may have been partly the projection of his sickness, just as the invalid Stevenson delighted in the creation of powerful ruffians; but the brooding on his own death is quite modern, and is, I think, part of the egoism that is so distinguishing a feature in contemporary poetry. So many have abandoned all hope of a life beyond the grave, that they cling to bodily existence with almost gluttonous passion, and are filled with self-pity at the thought of their own death and burial. ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... a peremptory voice, saying, "Now, Emery, don't spoil the child," or "Lily, dear, can't you find anything better to do than tease your uncle?" In it all Chip had found two subjects of wonderment: first, the strange egoism of this middle-aged woman who could see nothing in the expansion of her husband's affections but what was stolen from herself; and then, the extraordinary freak of marital loyalty that could keep a man like Emery Bland, with ...
— The Letter of the Contract • Basil King
... law nature is separated from God, so it is the limits of its egoism which separates the self from him. He has willingly set limits to his will, and has given us mastery over the little world of our own. It is like a father's settling upon his son some allowance within the limit of which he is free to do what ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... best of us are monsters of iniquity and egoism, cruelty and corruption; and our planet (a very heaven for warmth and brilliancy and beauty, in spite of earthquakes and cyclones and tornadoes) is a very hell through the creatures that people it—a shambles, a place of torture, a grotesque and ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... perhaps not often been better instanced than by his acceptance of the inevitable to-day—his acceptance of it on the arrival, at the end of a quarter-of-an hour, of that element of obligation with which he had all the while known he must reckon. A quarter-of-an-hour of egoism was about as much as he, taking one situation with another, usually got. Mrs. Rance opened the door—more tentatively indeed than he himself had just done; but on the other hand, as if to make up for this, she pushed forward even more briskly on seeing ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... veneration which made her see all that he did with the moral indistinctness, without which there could not be the perfect filial devotion that makes the family a union in good report and evil. She had not even that, by no means repellent, secondary egoism which upholds us in doing ungrateful things that abstract good may follow. Opposition, which becomes delightful when we can call it persecution, had no charm for her. If her father had suddenly adopted the ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... he is wrong in supposing that the astral reverberation of the podasma (one in six) could possibly be ratiocinated on the coleoptic intensity! Perhaps he will deny that he ever said so. But did he mean it? To me this has been the sweet familiar study of a lifetime, and, without boastful egoism, I may say I am considered, by all who know anything about the matter, a first-rate authority on this subject, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 16, 1890 • Various
... very near Rochefoucauld's own. "Take self-love from love, and little remains," might be an extract from that Doomsday Book of Egoism in which Rochefoucauld was so deeply read. "Self-love is the Love of a man's own Self, and of everything else, for his own Sake": so begins his terrible analysis of human motives, and no man escapes from a perusal of it without ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... corollary—that from everything that we shut out we are ourselves shut out. When we shut our door on the wind, it would be equally true to say that the wind shuts its door on us. Whatever virtues a triumphant egoism really leads to, no one can reasonably pretend that it leads to knowledge. Turning a beggar from the door may be right enough, but pretending to know all the stories the beggar might have narrated is pure nonsense; and this is practically ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... From his own great egoism, his years of heart-ache, sorrows, and shames, the priest's heavy thought slowly lifted and centered upon the child's beautiful face. The animated little figure before him radiated such abundant life that he himself caught the infection; and with it his ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... the State cries out that its very life is at stake, social selfishness must cease and party hatred be hushed. The individual must forget his egoism, and feel that he is a member of the whole body. He should recognize how his own life is nothing worth in comparison with the welfare of the community. War is elevating, because the individual disappears before the great conception of the ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
... is not merely the Poet whom we recognise to-day; you have a much greater claim to our homage. In an age in which egoism and the eager thirst for riches prevails, you have, in the noble work which you have performed, displayed the virtues of benevolence and self-sacrifice. You yourself have put them into practice. Ardent in the work of charity, you have gone wherever misery and poverty had to be relieved, and all that ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... its second genus, moral desires, is divided into five species, and the phenomena of the fourth genus, affection, are subdivided into two other species, amongst which is the love of oneself—a legitimate propensity, no doubt, but one which, when it becomes exaggerated, takes the name of egoism. ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... of the terrace that evening with footsteps still eager notwithstanding his long walk. The splendid egoism of youth had already triumphed, the tragedy of the day had become a dim thing. He himself was moving forward and onward. He glanced up at the familiar window, feeling a slight impulse of disappointment when he received no welcoming ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... written in the book of the world's destinies that Germany was bound to win. It was not only, as we are too ready at the first glance to believe, the megalomania of an autocrat drunk with vanity, the gross vanity of some brainless buffoon; it was not the warlike impulses, the blind infatuation and egoism of a feudal caste; it was not even the impatient and deliberately fanned envy and covetousness of a too prolific race close-cramped on a dreary and ungrateful soil: it was none of these that let loose the hateful war. All these causes, adventitious or fortuitous ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... began madly to enjoy all the pleasures which money could buy—and, of course, such pleasures became irksome to me. Then I launched out into the world of fashion—and that, too, soon palled upon me. I fell in love with fashionable beauties and was loved by them, but my imagination and egoism alone were aroused; my heart remained empty... I began to read, to study—but sciences also became utterly wearisome to me. I saw that neither fame nor happiness depends on them in the least, because the happiest people are the uneducated, ...
— A Hero of Our Time • M. Y. Lermontov
... not convinced that egoism on the part of the child is justified. Just as little are they convinced of the possibility that evil can be ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key
... him, at his solemn face that simmered with excited egoism. Barbara could see that he was playing—playing in his ponderous, fatuous way, at being her young, her not more than twenty-five years old son. He turned with a sudden, sportive, caracoling movement, to find a chair for himself. He was sitting on it now, close beside his mother, and she ...
— Mr. Waddington of Wyck • May Sinclair
... God. The highest aim of thinking is to read the divine plan. All spirits are attracted by perfection. The supreme perfection is God, of whom love is an emanation. Love is gain; hate is loss; pardon, the recovery of lost property; misanthropy a prolonged suicide; egoism the utmost poverty. If every man loved all mankind, every man would possess the world. If we comprehend perfection it becomes ours. If we plant beauty and joy, beauty and joy shall we reap. If we think clearly we ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... we suppose that what so closely resembles demoniacal possession can have come about through something engrafted on to the soul as a mechanism foreign to its inner nature, {135} or through conscious deliberation which adheres always to a bare egoism, and is utterly incapable of such self-sacrifice for the sake of offspring as is displayed by ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... to solve the great problem of his policy, how to get money, yet not account for it. Not that Charles cared for money in itself, or had far-reaching projects of tyranny (he failed to enter into Stafford's scheme); but he had inherited a boundless egoism, and content with his own petty self, had little sympathy with the dead heroism of the Tudor age, none at all with the nascent ardor of democracy. The extension of the ship-tax to the inland counties was met by Hampden's passive resistance ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... the expediency of relieving the philosopher from the necessity of being in plain and business-like relations with indifferent persons for a certain number of hours in the week. Such relations do as much as a doctrine to keep egoism within decent bounds, and they must be not only a relief, but a wholesome corrective to the tendencies of ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 10: Auguste Comte • John Morley
... was so deeply conscious of it that, when he entered the house, on learning the hopeless condition of the duke, no expression of pity, no regrets of any sort, had escaped him, only the ferocious word of human egoism, "I am ruined!" And this word kept recurring to his lips; he repeated it mechanically each time that he awoke suddenly afresh to all the horror of his situation, as in those dangerous mountain storms, when a sudden flash of lightning illumines the abyss to its depths, showing ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... unmistakably as the most extravagant of objective superstitions. In brief, what he saw in Christian ethics, under all the poetry and all the fine show of altruism and all the theoretical benefits therein, was a democratic effort to curb the egoism of the strong—a conspiracy of the chandala against the free functioning of their superiors, nay, against the free progress of mankind. This theory is the thing he exposes in "The Antichrist," bringing to the business his amazingly chromatic and ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... different species from their wives and daughters—a species provided by a material Providence, who supplies their other appetites. The poor little butterflies are glad, for a short time, to put up with stupidity and egoism for the sake of a temporary relief from sordid discomfort and gloom. Of course, I am not speaking of the women who, without economic pressure, lead an illicit life. There are a few of these women who are more than able to protect themselves, and ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
... but they give orders for and profit from such acts, and they must possess the motivation and psychology of criminals. We define people as criminals when they suffer from psychological aberrations of an antisocial character, usually paranoid—excessive egoism, disregard for the rights of others, inability to recognize the social necessity for mutual cooeperation and confidence. On Home Time Line, we have universal psychological testing, for the purpose of detecting and ...
— Time Crime • H. Beam Piper
... 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
... the final flower of that growth. He was himself fresh and delicate and pure; but that is the business of a flower. Though he had to preach a hard rationalism in religion, a hard competition in economics, a hard egoism in ethics, his own soul had all that silvery sensitiveness that can be seen in his fine portrait by Watts. He boasted none of that brutal optimism with which his friends and followers of the Manchester School expounded their cheery negations. There was about Mill even a sort of embarrassment; he ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... few among the more dignified senators, a few among the more sober praetorian tribunes, revolted in their heart at this insane exhibition of egoism, these perpetual outrages on common sense and dignity; but they were few and their influence small, and they were really too indolent, too comfortable in their luxurious homes to do aught but accept ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... is her intense egoism and her abundant self-assertion under all circumstances. It often seemed to us as if for her the world revolved, with passing show, around a pivot from which she regarded it as existing only for what it meant for her career. These qualities have led ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... even cannibalism. That's not all. He ended by asserting that for every individual, like ourselves, who does not believe in God or immortality, the moral law of nature must immediately be changed into the exact contrary of the former religious law, and that egoism, even to crime, must become not only lawful but even recognized as the inevitable, the most rational, even honorable outcome of his position. From this paradox, gentlemen, you can judge of the rest of our eccentric and paradoxical friend ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... until it takes complete possession of him. This love is usually made up of two components: a sex instinct, and feelings of sympathy and interest which hark back to primal times. And this love, in its true sense, should stand for an affection purified from egoism. ...
— Sex - Avoided subjects Discussed in Plain English • Henry Stanton
... intensity, insensibility to fatigue, the "roughing it" of the mind. He did not want to rough it. Nor was he greatly talented. But he was just sharp enough to see, as he believed, a short and perhaps easy way to a thing that his conceit desired and that his egoism felt it could love. Being only a boy, he had never, till this time, deliberately looked on life as anything. Now he set himself, in his, at first, youthful way, to look on it as burlesque—to see it in caricature. How to do that? He studied the ...
— The Folly Of Eustace - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... still stronger reason she owes them no duty of respect or good-will. What is called humanity has no meaning for the German. The mot of William II., "Humanity for me stops at the Vosges," is not merely an instance of national egoism. The German Emperor feels that what is for the present beyond his empire can only acquire value when it shall ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... sympathetically and vivaciously set forth in W. Lyon Blease's Emancipation of English Women (1910), a book, however, which makes no claim to be judicial or impartial; the author regards "unregulated male egoism" as the source of the difficulties in the way ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... fact. "The Millennium must come," says Darwin (ii. 387), "before nations love each other:" I add that first Homo alalus seu Pithecanthropus must become Homo Sapiens and cast off his moral slough—egoism and ignorance. Mr. Cleveland, in order to efface the foul stigma of being the "English President," found it necessary to adopt the strongest measures in the matter of "Fisheries;" and the "Irish vote" must quadrennially be bought at the grave risk of national complications. ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... me that if my love is deep and pure enough, it will modify my whole life, and of itself, without hindrance from circumstances, appear perfectly in all my actions and relations? This is the old heresy, this is the error of the individualism and egoism which has hindered us so long. Let us meet ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... Such Egoism as this, though lacking the angel grace of unconsciousness, has a stoical grandeur that commands respect. Indeed, in all that Margaret spoke, wrote, or did, no cynic could detect the taint of meanness. Her elation came not from opium fumes of vanity, inhaled in close chambers of ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... all the calamities that men bring upon one another would altogether disappear, and the Golden Age would be renewed. At the same time Mencius exposed the fallacies of the speculations of Yang Chu, 4th century B.C., who founded a school of ethical egoism as opposed to the exaggerated altruism of Mo Ti. According to Mencius, Yang Chu would not have parted with one hair of his body to save the whole world, whereas Mo Ti would have sacrificed all. Another early philosopher is Hsuen Tz[)u], 3rd century B.C. He maintained, in opposition ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... disciples that there are four things from which the master was entirely free. "He had no foregone conclusions, no arbitrary predeterminations, no obstinacy, and no egoism." Contrary to the rule of most reformers or leaders of opinion, he always regarded himself as a learner as well as teacher. It is related of Confucius that he at one time desired a governmental position, thinking that through its occupancy he might the better disseminate ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... insatiable and insolent greed of persons of this kidney. He had discounted her speech somewhat, supposing it infected with such prejudice as the recollection of private wrongs will breed even in generous natures. Now he began to fear her strictures had been just. The egoism of the unsuccessful is a moral disease, destructive of all sense of proportion. Those suffering from it must be reckoned as insane; not sick merely, but actually mad with self-love. Smyth, to gain his play a hearing, would beggar him—Iglesias—without scruple ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... offer of Sir H. Campbell-Bannerman to preside over the Local Government Board was promptly accepted. The workman first took his place in the Cabinet when Mr. John Burns, at the age of forty-seven, went to the Local Government Board—to the complete satisfaction of Mr. Burns. For the robust egoism of Mr. Burns is largely a class pride. His invincible belief in himself is part of an equally invincible belief in the working class. His ambitions thrive on the conviction that whatever Mr. John Burns does, that the working class does in the person of their representative. Always does he identify ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... which are of the most profound we know. These relations when established compel us to acknowledge our duties to one another and give us a delight in discharging them. This delight in turn becomes the power, which opens the eyes to the realization of the great principle of self-sacrifice. Egoism and altruism are not to be mutually exclusive. To seek our own happiness is not to be indifferent to the happiness of society. For what is happiness? not pleasure, but self-realization, and we cannot realise ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll
... Christianity started as a disciple of Hegel, but soon reversed the Hegelian principle, and pronounced the spiritual world to be a fiction of the mind. Man belongs essentially to the earth, and is governed by his senses. Self-interest is his only motive, and egoism his sole law of life. It was only what might be expected, that the ultimate consequences of this philosophy of the senses should be drawn by a disciple of Feuerbach, Max Stirner,[1] in whose work, The Individual and His Property, the virtues of egoism are extolled, and contempt is poured ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... passions as anger, jealousy, hatred, and the like, and the awakening of noble emotions such as sympathy, mercy, generosity, and what not. It is a mode of Enlightenment, as it is the dispelling of illusion and of doubt, and at the same time it is the overcoming of egoism, the destroying of mean desires, the uplifting of the moral ideal, and the disclosing of ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... others to the good of the species—as existing in an animal which is not conscious of a self, these appetites will neither be selfish nor unselfish in the sense in which we apply these terms to man. Where there is no ego there can be no alter-ego, and therefore neither egoism nor altruism. The idea of the self as a permanent unity to which all the different tendencies are referred, and the rise in consequence of a new desire of pleasure, distinct from the desires of particular objects, are essential to egoism. The idea of an alter-ego, ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... art. Their leader, Leconte de Lisle, in the preface of his Poemes antiques (1853), scornfully dismissed Romanticism as a second-hand, incoherent, and hybrid art, compounded of German mysticism, reverie, and Byron's stormy egoism. Sully Prudhomme addressed a sterner criticism to the shade of Alfred de Musset—the Oscar Wilde of the later Romantics[6]—who had never known the stress of thought, and had filled his poetry with light love and laughter and voluptuous despairs; ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... the Saints in representing him as from the very cradle surrounded with aureole and nimbus! As if the finest and most manly of spectacles were not that of the man who conquers his soul hour after hour, fighting first against himself, against the suggestions of egoism, idleness, discouragement, then at the moment when he might believe himself victorious, finding in the champions attracted by his ideal those who are destined if not to bring about its complete ruin, at least to give it its most terrible blows. Poor Francis! The last years of his life ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... world that should be very beautiful. During his musical education he had seen enough to realize that side by side with great talent, with a warm impulse toward beauty, with an ardor that counts labor as nothing, or as delight, may exist coldness, meanness, the tendency to slander, egoism almost inhuman in its concentration, the will to climb over the bodies of the fallen, the tyrant's mind, and the stony heart of the cruel. Art, so it seemed to Claude, often hardened instead of softening the nature of man. That, no doubt, was because artists were generally ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... last self-interest; in fact, Herbert Spencer declares that there is no sane thought or rational act but has its root in egoism. ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... history, the manner of life on the frontier and who has also been in contact with these scarlet-coated riders, not only finds it necessary to read between the lines for the facts but will enjoy the ingenious efforts of these men to avoid anything savouring of egoism. Without being so intended some of these reports are positively humorous on account of this determination to keep "display" in the background. Here is a gem of that type. It is a report written by Corporal C. Hogg, who was stationed at North Portal on the Soo ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... perfectly sane. His excitement, the fury of his eyes when he spoke of the triumphs of will, seemed to give the clue to his transformation. The insane perpetually glorify themselves, and are transcendent egoists. Surely the egoism of insanity had peeped out in Valentine's diatribe upon the eternity of a strong man's individual will. The night of the trance had been a strange crisis of his life. He had seemed to recover from it, to come back from that wonderful simulation of ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... a year later. Still in good clothes, but unhealthy, and at his last half-crown; four and twenty, travelled, and possessed of the elements of culture, he had only just begun to realise the fact that men labour for their daily bread. Was it the peculiar intensity of his egoism that so long blinded him to common anxieties? Even as the last coins slipped between his fingers, he knew only a vaguely irritable apprehension. Did he imagine the world would beg for the honour of feeding ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... about it—ever. I've actually thought that I was in love—oh, ever so many times: sometimes with you. What's the use? The only things I've ever been faithful to are the dressmaker, dancing, and what in moments of supreme egoism I am pleased ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... So-and-so, in whom, &c., &c. . . . I was even ready to write in that strain about him. If he had not enlisted my sympathies he had done better for himself—he had gone to the very fount and origin of that sentiment he had reached the secret sensibility of my egoism. I am concealing nothing from you, because were I to do so my action would appear more unintelligible than any man's action has the right to be, and—in the second place—to-morrow you will forget my sincerity along with the other lessons ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... loathing for life, an illuminated contempt for men and women, had long ago taken possession of him. This philosophic attitude was the product of his egoism. He felt himself the center of life and it became his nature to revolt against all evidences of life that existed outside himself. In this manner he grew to hate, or rather to feel an impotent ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... happy. But now... Oh, now I'm thinking of that generous, humane woman, so long-suffering with my contemptible failings—not that she's been altogether long-suffering, but what have I been with my horrid, worthless character! I'm a capricious child, with all the egoism of a child and none of the innocence. For the last twenty years she's been looking after me like a nurse, cette pauvre auntie, as Lise so charmingly calls her.... And now, after twenty years, the child clamours to be married, sending letter after letter, ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... him very much," they said between themselves. They were indeed reaping the harvest of egoism ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... laugh, the assent of his egoism. But his satisfaction had nothing personal in it. He was pleased because justice, abstract justice, had been done. But she suspected his sincerity. He did things for you, not because he liked you, but for some other reason; and he would be so ...
— The Romantic • May Sinclair
... by Otto Pfleiderer,[6] and other German writers. It was from the impressions made on man by the powers of nature, these scholars hold, and not from his belief in spirits, that his religion came. But it was not necessarily due to pure egoism, as Von Hartmann represents; the earliest religions need not, they hold, have been a mere attempt at bribery. The motives which first caused man to worship the heavenly powers surely arose from other needs ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... the hand that pressed like a weight upon him. Even before this time he had observed a little discrepancy between his father's words and deeds, between his wide liberal theories and his harsh petty despotism; but he had not expected such a complete breakdown. His confirmed egoism was patent now in everything. Young Lavretsky was getting ready! to go to Moscow, to prepare for the university, when a new unexpected calamity overtook Ivan Petrovitch; he became blind, and hopelessly ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... Egoism, moral cowardice, and sexual excess play a part in much neurasthenia, but relatives must not forget, in their indignation at these laxities, that the patient really is ill; it is unkind, unjust and useless to tell an ailing man the unpalatable truth ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... love with Jurii, and reasons with cold patience against her subsequent remorse. It is clear that Artsybashev believes that for some time to come women will not accept the gospel of uncompromising egoism. ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... a prodigy. Now let us investigate, in good faith, the causes of this psychological anomaly. Does there exist in you, as in many women, a certain pride in self, a love of your own loveliness, a refinement of egoism which makes you shudder at the idea of belonging to another; is it the thought of resigning your own will and submitting to a superiority, though only of convention, which displeases you? You would seem to me a thousand times fairer for it. Can love formerly have brought you suffering? You ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... us more thoroughly investigate the matter. Egoism is a quality so deeply rooted in every personality that it is on egotistical ends only that one may safely rely in order to ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... that my anxiety about this work is wholly at an end, and that now I may begin another effort at offering something new in a similar manner. Judge then, can you blame my conviction which rids me of all egoism, of all the small passions of ambition? Surely not. Ah, that I might be able to communicate to all of you some of the blissful ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... secrecies, our defences; we open ourselves; touches that would be intolerable from common people become a mystery of delight, acts of self-abasement and self-sacrifice are charged with symbolical pleasure. We cannot tell which of us is me, which you. Our imprisoned egoism looks out through this window, forgets its walls, and is for those brief moments released ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... experience. Each for himself without regard to others or even without thought of a future day of reckoning seems to be the maxim of national conduct among the Balkan peoples. The spirit of strife and division possesses them; they are dominated by the uncontrolled instinct of national egoism and greed. The second Balkan War, alike in its origin, course, and conclusion, was a bald exhibition of the play of these primitive and ...
— The Balkan Wars: 1912-1913 - Third Edition • Jacob Gould Schurman
... two representatives was cold. Halifax feared that the proposed route would turn to St John both the grain trade of the west and that of the Gulf of St Lawrence. Howe personally was depressed and sullen. Probably his latent egoism was beginning to show itself. He was asked to {114} sacrifice his scheme, his darling, and to aid in a plan patched up by others. Long conferences were held. Eventually the financial terms were amended in favour of Nova Scotia, and her government, ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant
... over in a flash, but Annie fell back from the window with all the egoism in her dulled nature torn awake. A more normal mother, of a more refined type, might have thought what she had seen meant nothing but a rude flirtation; Annie's blood told her differently. If she had merely heard of the matter her lack of visualising power would have saved her from sensation; ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... true, would not contradict the truth of this statement. It would simply indicate that their social responsiveness is employed on their own behalf, not that it does not exist. But the statement is not true as matter of fact. The facts which are cited in support of the alleged pure egoism of children really show the intensity and directness with which they go to their mark. If the ends which form the mark seem narrow and selfish to adults, it is only because adults (by means of a similar engrossment in their day) have mastered these ends, ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey |
