"Self-centred" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... 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 ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... 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
... 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 leaders of civilization. ...
— Is civilization a disease? • Stanton Coit
... 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
... introspective 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 ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... 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
... 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, if that were possible. The alliance ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... 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
... company. This is 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 community ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... 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
... 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 is ...
— Progress and History • Various
... 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
... 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 ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... 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 of my ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... 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
... 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 refused ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... 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
... 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 ...
— Derrick Vaughan—Novelist • Edna Lyall
... 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
... 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. ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine
... 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
... 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. ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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 a place which ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett |
