"Misanthropy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... pretty sure to be atoned for by earnest endeavor in the end. With these are to be classed numerous other varieties: those who are "Hunkerish" on account of some strange spiritual obtuseness, or from misanthropy, or perverseness, or self-conceit, or a cold and sluggish temperament, or from weak, human sympathies governed by strong political prejudice,—together with those countless larvae and tadpoles, the small-fry of sons and nephews, of individuality yet undeveloped, who are conservative ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... such as hers; and the spirit of the young maiden, at all times given rather to a dreamy melancholy than to any very animated impulses, put on, in its new abiding-place, a garb of increased severity, which at certain moments indicated more of deep and settled misanthropy than any mere constitutionality ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... moonlight and starlight, pastoral idylls, the joys of spring, and winter excursions on the ice. Even Rousseau, the prophet of high mountains, was the child of the same sentimental, self-adoring time; a morbid strain, call it misanthropy, melancholy, what you will, underlay all his passion for Nature. It was Goethe who dissolved the spell which lay over the world, and, although born into the days of beautiful souls, moonshine poets, seraphic heaven stormers, pastoral poems, and La Nouvelle ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... were that they could make all things bend to their caprice, weave ingenious schemes of revenge, and live with the life in thirteen hearts, to say nothing of the unfailing pleasure of facing the 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 ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... Tory party and the Tory writers. Perhaps unconsciously—certainly not with the conviction of Shelley—Byron was on the side of the new movement in Europe; the spirit of Rousseau, the unrest of 'Wilhelm Meister,' the revolutionary seething, with its tinge of morbidness and misanthropy, its brilliant dreams of a new humanity, and its reckless destructive theories. In France especially his influence was profound and lasting. His wit and his lyric fire excused his morbidness and his sentimental posing as a waif, unfriended in a cold ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... delivered at Cambridge a few months ago. It was bound, therefore, to be predominantly literary in interest. At the same time, Mr. Whibley's political bias appears both in what he says and in what he keeps silent about. His defence of Swift against the charge of misanthropy is a defence with which we find ourselves largely in agreement. But Mr. Whibley is too single-minded a party politician to be able to defend the Dean without clubbing a number of his own pet antipathies in the process. He seems to think ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... stifle that laugh, Tellheim, I implore you! It is the terrible laugh of misanthropy. No, you are not the man to repent of a good deed, because it may have had a bad result for yourself. Nor can these consequences possibly be of long duration. The truth must come to light. The testimony of ...
— Minna von Barnhelm • Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
... misfortunes, he was not cast down. He had that lightness of temper which seems proper to most northern Italians, whereas those from the south are usually dark-mooded, sad-faced men. Nothing surpasses for unstudied misanthropy of expression the visages of different Neapolitan harpers who have visited us; but they have some right to their dejected countenances as being of a yet half-civilized stock, and as real artists and men of genius. Nearly all wandering violinists, as well as harpers, are of their race, ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... both had made their escape. The Ephebi had behaved treacherously by taking sides with their foe. But this was because they were not yet invested with their robes. He hoped to induce his father to do this as soon as he shook off his pitiable misanthropy. And he must also be persuaded to direct the pursuit of the fugitives. "This will not be difficult," he cried insolently, "for the old man appreciates beauty, and has himself cast an eye on the singer. If they capture her, I'll guarantee nothing, you 'King of kings!' for, spite of his grey beard, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... time coming. Before taking his disciple into his confidence, he tried to get the seeds of reason and kindness which he had sown in my heart to germinate. The most difficult fault to overcome in me was a certain haughty misanthropy, a certain bitterness against the rich and successful, as if their wealth and happiness had been gained at my own expense, and as if their supposed happiness had been unjustly taken from my own. The foolish vanity ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... speeches so simple, so pompous, so ludicrously solemn; parodied so artlessly from books, and spoken with smug chubby faces, and such an admirable aping of wisdom and gravity? Here is the book before me: it is scarcely fifteen years old. Here is Jack moaning with despair and Byronic misanthropy, whose career at the university was one of unmixed milk-punch. Here is Tom's daring Essay in defence of suicide and of republicanism in general, apropos of the death of Roland and the Girondins—Tom's, who wears the starchest tie in all the diocese, and would go to Smithfield rather than ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... at length over, Mr Codlin called the bill, and charging the ale to the company generally (a practice also savouring of misanthropy) divided the sum-total into two fair and equal parts, assigning one moiety to himself and friend, and the other to Nelly and her grandfather. These being duly discharged and all things ready for their departure, they took ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... remark that our species, alas! is not such as to be found particularly worthy of love when we know it more closely. Hatred of men, however, is always hateful: even though without any active hostility it consists only in complete aversion from mankind (the solitary misanthropy). For benevolence still remains a duty even towards the manhater, whom one cannot love, but to whom we can ...
— The Metaphysical Elements of Ethics • Immanuel Kant
... to avoid confounding misanthropy with the monastic vocation; it is not hypochondria, but the divine call, which leads to La Trappe. There is a special grace, which makes all young men who have never lived in the world long to bury themselves in silence and therein ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... wounded vanity, of that small, provincial misanthropy engendered in petty officials by vodka and a sedentary life, swarmed in his heart like mice. Waiting for the end of the mazurka, he went into the hall and walked up to his wife. Anna Pavlovna was sitting with her partner, and, flirting her fan and coquettishly dropping her eyelids, was ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... urged on Zora's behalf that she had reason for her misanthropy. It is not cheerful for a girl to discover within twenty-four hours of her wedding that her husband is a hopeless drunkard, and to see him die of delirium tremens within six weeks. An experience so vivid, like lightning must blast something in a woman's conception of life. Because ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... human. The baseness of him has its basal strength in his founding upon man. He is the only realist philosopher. Besides him Bacon is a dreamer. Machiavelli was and is the master misanthrope, and,—God help us!—we must admit that his misanthropy only too well is founded on fact. He seems to have been the most perfect incarnation of that "accomplished and infamous Italy," which gave us the Borgias and the terrible Elizabethan plays of Tourneur, Webster and ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... his keenest irony and bitterest sarcasms. In his last years he even became cynical and rugged and vulgar, in which we may of course trace the influence of his tavern associates. It is to his credit that he did not sink into Byronic misanthropy and bitter self-lacerating scorn, or even ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... least meant to season the misanthropy with irony (he might be compared with Meredith for some slightly cryptic views of "the Comic Spirit"), is rather poor stuff, and certainly shows no improvement or likelihood of improvement on the earlier productions. It is even somewhat lamentable, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... The very contiguity of his enemy, beneath whatever mask the latter might conceal himself, was enough to disturb the magnetic sphere of a being so sensitive as Arthur Dimmesdale. There had been a period when Hester was less alive to this consideration; or, perhaps, in the misanthropy of her own trouble, she left the minister to bear what she might picture to herself as a more tolerable doom. But of late, since the night of his vigil, all her sympathies towards him had been both softened and invigorated. ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... she called to me from her seat by the fire, 'Come here, you little piece of innocence, I want to talk to you; why do you always creep into a remote corner of the room away from everybody? Is it modesty, or misanthropy, that drives ...
— Dwell Deep - or Hilda Thorn's Life Story • Amy Le Feuvre
... that I often expressed the wish that I was able to put several thousand dollars at his service for scientific investigation.... The whole case has saddened me more than I can express. I have to fight hard against misanthropy, friend Vail, and I have found the best antidote to be, when the fit is coming on me, to seek out a case of suffering and to relieve it, that the act in the one case may neutralize the feeling in the other, and thus restore ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... self-forgetfulness, as well as in his anchoritical seclusion. This is particularly evident in the incomparable scene where the cynic Apemantus visits Timon in the wilderness. They have a sort of competition with each other in their trade of misanthropy: the Cynic reproaches the impoverished Timon with having been merely driven by necessity to take to the way of living which he himself had long been following of his free choice, and Timon cannot bear the thought of being merely an imitator ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... hope; her cheeks were almost purple; her fingers looked like sausages. In a moment it dawned upon Lucien how it was that Vernou was always so ill at ease in society; here was the living explanation of his misanthropy. Sick of his marriage, unable to bring himself to abandon his wife and family, he had yet sufficient of the artistic temper to suffer continually from their presence; Vernou was an actor by nature bound never to pardon ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... by Macaulay of Mr. Crisp's wounded vanity and consequent misanthropy is absurdly overcharged. In the first place, bis play of "Virginia," which was first produced at Drury Lane on the 25th of February, 1754, actually achieved something like a suc'es d'estime. It ran eleven nights, no contemptible run for ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... individualist. That he had a tender side, a talent for friendship, may be noted in the affectionate intercourse he maintained for years with Corot, Millet, Rousseau, Dupre, Geoffroy, the sculptor Pascal, and others. He was very impulsive and had a good heart with all his misanthropy, for he was an idealist reversed. The etching of him by Loys Delteil is thus described by a sympathetic commentator: "Daumier was very broad-shouldered, his head rather big, with slightly sunken eyes, which must, however, have had an extraordinary ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... misanthropy and cherished desolation the supper was so inviting that he was tempted to partake of it heartily. Then incasing himself in his ample dressing-gown he placed his slippered feet on the fender before a cheery fire, lighted a choice Havana, and proceeded to be miserable ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... civil war. On both sides there was, undoubtedly, enough of crime and enough of error to disgust any man who did not reflect that the whole history of the species is made up of little except crimes and errors. Misanthropy is not the temper which qualifies a man to act in great affairs, or to judge ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay |
