"Self-centred" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 and temperament, ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various
... 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
... entirely substituted Christian 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 to do ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... for all—and as it 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 can ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... thine of stoic souls, who weigh Life well, and find it wanting, nor deplore; But in disdainful silence turn away, Stand mute, self-centred, stern, ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... one was compelled to guess her thoughts; and long since Camors had reflected as to what was passing in that self-centred soul. Inspired by his innate generosity, as well as his secret admiration, he took pleasure in heaping upon this poor cousin the attentions he might have paid a queen; but she always seemed as indifferent to them as she was to the opposite course of her involuntary ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... 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 ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... 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. ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... trials and tribulations, their empty theories and speculations into cacophony. Even so far back as Beethoven's day that autobiographical habit had begun. "Beethoven," says Old Fogy, is "dramatic, powerful, a maker of storms, a subduer of tempests; but his speech is the speech of a self-centred egotist. He is the father of all the modern melomaniacs, who, looking into their own souls, write what they see therein—misery, corruption, slighting selfishness and ugliness." Old Ludwig's groans, ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... spirits, the aptness to hope, the will to be happy WHICH I INHERIT FROM MY FATHER,' she writes. Was ever filial piety so irritating as hers? It is difficult to bear, with any patience, her praises of Dr. Mitford. His illusions were no less a part of his nature than his daughter's, the one a self-centred absolutely selfish existence, the other generous, humble, beautiful. She is hardly ever really angry except when some reports get about concerning her marriage. There was an announcement that she ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... the most intuitive men we ever met had a desk at a city office where several other gentlemen were doing business constantly, and often talking loudly. Entirely undisturbed by the many various sounds about him, this self-centred faithful man would, in any moment of perplexity, draw the curtains of privacy so completely about him that he would be as fully inclosed in his own psychic aura, and thereby as effectually removed from all distractions, as though he were alone in some ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... my old ward I remained there for a period of three weeks. At that time I was a very self-centred individual. My large and varied assortment of delusions of grandeur made everything seem possible. There were few problems I hesitated to attack. With sufficient provocation I even attacked attendants—problems in themselves; but such fights as I subsequently engaged in were ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... 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 Jasper Hardress—some ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... her gratitude." Even a child would feel that Juno really need not have been struck by lightning at all; even a child might wonder how many services, on this scale of gratitude, were adequate for the rest of the party whom the lightning had completely missed. And it was perhaps a little self-centred of Ready to thank God for her recovery on the grounds that she could "ill be spared" by a family rather short-handed ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... 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)
... sneer or an aspersion with unusual keenness, and so circumstanced as to be unusually exposed to them; we may have nerves very sensitive to pain, and be afflicted with a disease more 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 ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... themselves if they would try. But the Buddhism of the Pali Canon does not ignore the duties of loving and instructing others;[7] it merely insists on man's power to save himself if properly instructed and bids him do it at once: "sell all that thou hast and follow me." And the Mahayana, if less self-centred, has also less self-reliance, and self-discipline. It is more human and charitable, but also more easygoing: it teaches the believer to lean on external supports which if well chosen may be a help, but if trusted without discrimination become ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... who stood to lose all the things most of us strive for, people who valued neither comfort, nor money, nor the world's good word. That they took help, and even sacrifice, as a matter of course, seemed in them mere modesty and sound good sense; tantamount to saying, 'I am not so silly or self-centred as to suppose you do this for me. You do it, of course, for the Cause. The Cause is yours—is all Women's. You serve humanity. Who am I that I should ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... creature 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 ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... words once for all, my dear friend, and be clever. Men are entirely self-centred, and incapable of looking at things objectively. If you had a dog and wanted to make him fond of you, and fancied that of your hundred rare and excellent characteristics the mongrel would be sure to perceive one, and that that would be sufficient to make him devoted to you body ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy • Arthur Schopenhauer
... obvious. What are you waiting for? Now that Marion has behaved so shamefully, it is my dearest hope that you will marry Rose. I didn't mean to speak of it; but, really, you are changing, Donald, and I don't want to think of your becoming a self-centred ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... satisfactory, would it? Dick, on the other hand, is clever and brilliant. He will make his way; there will come a day, you are convinced, when a woman will be proud to bear his name. If only he were not so self-centred, if only he were ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... 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 ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... it's so. But I can do it! I might have expected it from a man who was so perfectly self-centred and absorbed. But I was such a fool—" Her tears ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... 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 ...
— The Castle Of The Shadows • Alice Muriel Williamson
... 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 ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... had 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 she almost too ...
— The Scarlet Car • Richard Harding Davis
... unlike his saturnine self-centred truculence of restraint. He impressed me; and even Sebright's steady, cool eyes grew perceptibly larger before this sarcastic fury. Castro choked; the rusty, black folds encircling him shook and heaved. Unexpectedly he thrust ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... unrecorded. They shine, and 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
... and ecstasies of imagery, and the drifting dullness and meanness of the life outside, filtered in some way into my boy mind. I saw that suffering was real and pressing, and so many suffered resignedly; and that imagery and my companionship with a God (I was highly "religious" then) worked in a self-centred circle. I never strayed from the deadly taint of some gentle form of egotism. I was then truly in a "vault." I did things for a system of ethics, not because of a fine rush of social brotherly intuition. My imagination was ever concerned with me and my prospects, my salvation. I honestly ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... the contrary made every effort to advance her happiness, not only by assuring to herself and husband an adequate income, but by doing all he could in other and less open ways to lessen any sense she might entertain of her mistake in preferring for her lifemate his self-centred and unstable brother. She should have adored him; but though she evinced gratitude enough, there is nothing to prove that she ever gave Frank Postlethwaite the least cause to cherish any other sentiment towards his brother than that of honest love and unqualified ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... 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
... situation. In the fable of the fox and the grapes, the action of the fox is due to the folly of a too fluent attention. Similarly, he who lets go his present hold of the web of interests simply because his eye happens to alight on another vantage-point, is as much the blind slave of novelty as the self-centred man is of familiarity. In both cases the fault is one of narrowness of range, of ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... 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
... frightfully self-centred. He seemed to be thinking about nothing but himself. In reality, however, he was not reflecting at all on the character and probable course of his life. It was all a matter of feeling and what concerned him was merely the comforts ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... intrusion of extraneous elements. The blessing 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 of many lives was the failure ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... and simple-hearted as they were, contented with their lot, and receiving all things so unquestioningly and thankfully, filled my life, and brought a great calm to a mind that had, hitherto, been somewhat self-centred and troubled by pessimistic doubts and fantastic dreams ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... propose to deduct the great class of what I shall call the Self-centred. These are they who not only were never canvassed, but didn't even so much as hear about it, who had probably given up newspapers as a war economy and were living quiet virtuous lives in out-of-the-way places. Add to them removals and conscientious objectors (less allowance for ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 19, 1916 • Various
... these congratulations and attended these rejoicings with unvarying equanimity and cheerfulness. There was nothing morbid or self-centred in the girl's attitude. People who did not know—and no one really did—and who saw her at mass on Sundays or walking arm-in-arm with Bela in the afternoons would say that she was perfectly happy. Not a radiant bride certainly, not a typical Hungarian ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... with Douglas Falloden? The antagonism between the man of Scroll's type—disinterested, pure-minded, poetic, and liable, often, in action to the scrupulosity which destroys action; and the men of Falloden's type—strong, claimant, self-centred, arrogant, determined—is perennial. Nor can a man of the one type ever understand the attraction for ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... giraffe, the hippopotamus, the gerenuk, and the camel, one of Africa's unbelievable animals. Nobody has bettered Kipling's description of him in the Just-so Stories: "A horn on his nose, piggy eyes, and few manners." He lives a self-centred life, wrapped up in the porcine contentment that broods within nor looks abroad over the land. When anything external to himself and his food and drink penetrates to his intelligence he makes a flurried fool of himself, rushing madly and frantically ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... sparrow, offensively cheerful upon a lamp-post. This self-centred little bird allowed a pebble to pass overhead and remained unconcerned, but, a moment later, feeling a jar beneath his feet, and hearing the tinkle of falling glass, he decided to leave. Similarly, and ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... given to cool deliberation in the critical moments of life. This chance-met girl, fragile as a flower and delicately tinted as a piece of porcelain, full of enthusiasm for her new surroundings and of a delight half shy, half spontaneous in the companionship of a man so unlike the blase, self-centred youths of her limited experience, had, for the time being, swept him off his feet. And men are apt to do unaccountable things during those hot-headed moments when the feet are actually off ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... barren of instruction to actual men. The Poet's self-centred seclusion was avenged by the furies of an irresistible passion pursuing him to speedy ruin. But that Power which strikes the luminaries of the world with sudden darkness and extinction, by awakening them to too exquisite a perception of its influences, dooms to ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... 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 ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... nothing to give to have her speak to him once again. His is the humblest and the worthiest sorrow, but such sorrow cannot affect John Norton. He has dreamed too much and reflected too much on the meaning of life; his suffering is too original in himself, too self-centred, and at the same time too much, based on the inherent misery of existence, to allow him to project himself into and suffer with any individual grief, no matter how nearly it might be allied to him and to his personal ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... Leek!" Nobody who had 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
... self-centred, whatever that may mean. He is certainly a very ambitious man, but his ambitions are large, and he makes no secret of them. He will make a great stir in the world ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... psychological process, Lenau's Weltschmerz therefore stands midway between that of Hoelderlin and Heine. It is more self-centred than Hoelderlin's and while the poet is able to diagnose the disease which holds him firmly in its grasp, he lacks those means by which he might free himself from it. Heine goes still further, for having become conscious of his melancholy, he ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... comment; but while their acumen and penetration were hardly inferior to her own, she felt an adult among people not completely grown up. It was as if they still retained more of the ingenuousness of primitive womanhood than she, and thus she "circumnavigated" them, while they, all too self-centred, had barely discovered in which hemisphere her shores were to be found. In this way the seniority of ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... officers and equerries the roles of Rosina in the Barbier de Seville and of Colette in the Devin du Village, the latter composed by the democratic philosopher, whose Contrat Social was to prove the Gospel of the Revolution.[158] Jean Jacques Rousseau, the solitary, self-centred Swiss engraver and musician, has described for us in words that will bear translation how an ineffaceable impression of the sufferings of the people was burnt into his memory, and the fire of an unquenchable hatred of their ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... father, the other was to 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
... each differ from each other only superficially, and, not unseldom, transfer their allegiance in pursuit of fatter game. The differences do impress one at first, but, as I say, they are mainly superficial. All are equally self-centred and true to type as parasites; though one brood is better dressed than another, and has a more formidable appetite. What makes rich pickings for the follower of one camp would leave the follower of another camp lean and hungry indeed. But the necessary scale of expenditure being higher ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... was to take part in a shameful conspiracy! He was to assist in ruining an innocent child's happiness! And he was deliberately to foster the raw material of a scandal in which he himself would be involved! He, the strong, obstinate, self-centred old man who had never, till Helen's advent, done anything except ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett
... 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
... and spirits, a world in which the supernatural was the only nature. He was lonely and reserved, then as always. It is not for nothing that in his sermons he expatiates so often on the impenetrability of the human soul. A nature so self-centred has always something hard and inhuman about it; he was loved, but loved little in return. And yet he craved for more affection than he could reciprocate. 'I cannot ever realise to myself,' he wrote once, 'that anyone ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... thoughts. But it must feed in order to assimilate; and each process implies the other as its correlative. A constant interest, therefore, in the joys and sorrows of our neighbours is as essential as quiet, self-centred rumination. It is when the eye 'has kept watch o'er man's mortality,' and by virtue of the tender sympathies of 'the human heart by which we live,' that ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... in a Connecticut village in the middle of the eighteenth century was very self-centred. Remote from towns,—for Hartford was only a village then,—the demands of farming life determined the round of days. Every one from childhood fell of necessity into his or her place as one of the workers, out doors and in, and the simplicity of the social ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... boys old enough to be soldiers and girls old 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
... the paroxysms of cutting, wrenching 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 ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... that we have no great men like those of the past; but such grand individualities as Hawthorne and Webster, or even self-centred characters like Horace Greeley, are no longer possible. Everywhere, in the college, in the market, and in society, war is waged upon originality and independence of character. It is the same in politics as in literature. Our ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... 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 enthusiast, with pure Gallic blood in his veins, who was ever ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... the very core, and moved by the strongest of altruistic impulses. In accordance with their respective characters, the first of these youths becomes a physician, and the other a clergyman. Then we have the sister of the physician, who becomes the wife of the clergyman, a noble, proud, self-centred nature, finely strung to the inmost fibre of her being. Then we have a woman of the other sort, clinging, abnormally sensitive, a child when the years of childhood are over, and made the victim of a shocking child-marriage ...
— Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson • William Morton Payne
... manners, which appeared to go with the dress, quite swept him away from his ordinary moorings, and he found himself tossed upon a tempestuous sea, the helpless sport of gusts of passion that at once surprised and humiliated him. It was an intolerably painful experience for the self-centred and self-controlled Samuel; and after a few months of this acute and humiliating suffering he was prepared to accept help ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... upon the blonde head. How Elmer unearthed such ancient history was a mystery to Florrie; but none the less she "hated" him for it. They saw a very great deal of each other, each serving as a sort of balance-wheel to the other's self-centred complacency. Perhaps the one subject upon which they could agree was Jim Galloway; Elmer still liked to look upon the gambler as a colossal figure standing serene among wolves, while Florrie could admit ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... animate beings. "Each animal or vegetable form remembers the next inferior and predicts the next higher. There is one animal, one plant, one matter, and one force." In its still wider application by poetry and philosophy, the idea of evolution gathers all being into one self-centred totality, and makes all finite existence a movement within, and a movement of, that final perfection which, although last in order of time, is first in order of potency,—the prius of all things, the active energy in all ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... 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
... 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 he never ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... indulging in personal quarrels and bickerings, or open scandal with her mate. A really noble and unselfish woman would never consider her personal emotion before her duty to God and to her neighbour. It is because the outlook of woman is as a rule so pitifully narrow and self-centred that she often makes a useless and unhappy wife, and shipwrecks ...
— Three Things • Elinor Glyn
... the monotony and loneliness of their inmates. I think the reputation of gravity, which was fixed upon Washington in his mature years, has been projected back over his youth. The actual records are lacking, but such hints and surmises as we have do not warrant our thinking of him as a self-centred, unsociable youth. On the contrary, he was rather, what would be called now, a sport, ready for hunting or riding, of splendid physical build, agile and strong. He liked dancing, and was not too shy to enjoy the society of young women; ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... certainly a very self-centred person," she remarked; "but do you know, I am really a little curious to know how you succeeded in ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... later; and not a little evidence that he only missed being such, even as it was, because of that mysterious curse which was epigrammatically expressed about him long ago (I really forget who said it first), "Good pages, no good book." So far from being self-centred or of limited interests, he could, as hardly any other man ever could, claim the hackneyed Homo sum, etc., as his rightful motto. He had, when he allowed himself to give it fair play, an admirable gift of tale-telling; he could create character, and ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... 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 above her, ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... utility. The employment of working men in the brewing of beer or the manufacture of chewing-gum may give large returns to an individual or a corporation, but the social utility of such activity is small. Business enterprise is naturally self-centred; the first interest of every individual or group is self-preservation, and business must pay for itself and produce a surplus for its owner or it is not worth continuing from the economic standpoint; but a business enterprise has no right selfishly to disregard the interests of its employees ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... charges—I saw the veiled and hooded Mabel shyly try to pull Mrs. Bronson into place with her, as near as possible to Sheridan. She must have suspected that there was trouble brewing, and guessed the cause. Her timid, self-centred little soul instinctively sought shelter in the neighbourhood of a friend, who would perhaps have been more than a friend, if he could. So she followed him, he not knowing what eyes the gray veil hid: but Mrs. Bronson broke away from the ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... intrigues of her enemies. She had eyes mainly for Emerson, and although in her glance there was good-fellowship, in her heart was hot resentment—first at him because he had awakened in her the warm interest she felt for him, and, second, at herself for harboring any such interest. Why should this self-centred youth, wrapped up in his own affairs to her own utter exclusion, give her cause to worry? Why should she allow him to step into her quiet life ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... ancients were 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 ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various
... "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 ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... rolling on its placid tide, Now whirling massy trunks uptorn, And waveworn crags, and farms, and stock, In chaos blent, while hill and wood Reverberate to the enormous shock, When savage rains the tranquil flood Have stirr'd to madness. Happy he, Self-centred, who each night can say, "My life is lived: the morn may see A clouded or a sunny day: That rests with Jove: but what is gone, He will not, cannot turn to nought; Nor cancel, as a thing undone, What once the flying hour has brought." Fortune, ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... 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 a force ...
— Right Above Race • Otto Hermann Kahn
... "give me advice, not as a self-centred, cautious, and orderly citizen of Manhattan, but as a young man whose heart leads his head every time! I want that sort of advice; and I can't ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... their children and children's children, change and develop with extraordinary rapidity. The conditions accentuate vices and virtues, energy and ruthlessness, all the good qualities and all the defects of an intense individualism, self-reliant, self-centred, far more conscious of its rights than of its duties, and blind to its own shortcomings. To the hard materialism of the frontier days succeeds the hard materialism of an industrialism even more intense and absorbing ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... but later it came to him by degrees that this rich, selfish, over-fed, over-pampered, and revoltingly idle landowner, whose sole mental and physical resources were confined to the dinner and card tables, had been capable of a genuine friendship for Malcourt. Self-centred, cautious to the verge of meanness in everything which did not directly concern his own comfort and well-being, he, nevertheless, was totally dependent upon his friends for a full enjoyment of his two amusements; for he hated to dine alone and he ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... passages, whether Rousseau was of a nature to have any feeling for the pathos of infancy, the bright blank eye, the eager unpurposed straining of the hand, the many turns and changes in murmurings that yet can tell us nothing. He was both too self-centred and too passionate for warm ease and fulness of life in all things, to be truly sympathetic with a condition whose feebleness and immaturity touch ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... side of that race either. I was half tempted, in the heat of argument, to blurt out to him the whole truth about the dear gentle old Progenitor; but I'm glad I didn't now. After all, it's no use to cast your pearls before swine. For Herbert's essentially a pig—a selfish self-centred pig; no doubt a very refined and cultivated specimen of pigdom—the best breed; but still a most emphatic and consummate pig for all that. Not the same stuff in him that there is in Ernest—a fibre or two wanting somewhere. But I mustn't ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... lay passive and undeveloped under the tides of passion, craving, brute-pride and crude ambitions. But the manhood was there, as his flawless courage and unconsidered kindness to women and children indicated. But he was self-centred, violent, brutally masterful. Women and children had always seemed to him (until now) helpless, harmless things, that had a right to the protection of men even as they had a right to remain ashore from the danger of wind and sea. The stag caribou and the dog-wolf have ...
— The Harbor Master • Theodore Goodridge Roberts
... 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 there was never ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... scorn, not always just, but always just in intention, a disdainful recluse, judging all human and divine affairs from a standpoint of imperturbable omniscience, Coventry Patmore charmed one by his whimsical energy, his intense sincerity, and, indeed, by the childlike egoism of an absolutely self-centred intelligence. Speaking of Patmore as he was in 1879, Mr. Gosse ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... 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 ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... confederates." Is there not something astounding about the use of the possessive pronoun in connection with the word "august," implying sovereignty? One wonders what part can they have to play, these confederates, led and dominated by a personality as jealous and self-centred as this ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... said the Bishop. "Self-centred, shallow natures are not capable of the sublime passion for motherhood; partly, no doubt, because they themselves possess no ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... too. She was not witty. He questioned whether she was essentially kind. She was not young; her age was an enigma. She had not a remarkable figure, nor unforgettable hair, nor incendiary eyes. She seemed too placid and self-centred for love. If she had loved, it must have been as she sat to photographers or occupied boxes on first nights—because 'they' would have it so. George was baffled to discover the origin of her prestige. He had to seek it in her complexion. Her complexion was indubitably miraculous. He enjoyed ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... to cure certain rather self-centred countries of affecting the morbid view that the people of the United States are lying awake nights contriving to devour them, when, in fact, it would be hard to find in a crowded street in the United States one in a thousand of the passersby who knew ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... follows. I would like to linger and talk to this sultry and self-centred being; I would like to wander with her through these rooms, imbibing their strange Oriental spirit—not your vulgar Orient, but something classic and remote; something that savours, for aught I know, of Indo-China, where ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... to her what was written in it. All the time that his eyes were occupied she watched him eagerly, a little anxiously. But by the time he had finished she had been intrigued for the moment out of her own self-centred thoughts, her fancies caught by all that underlay this crude tale of treasure and murder, of lust for gold, of ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... mining areas, that the Australian attains full consciousness of his own nationality; it is in places like this, and as clearly here as at the centre of the continent. To me the monotonous variety of this interminable scrub has a charm of its own; so grave, subdued, self-centred; so alien to the genial appeal of more winsome landscape, or the assertive grandeur of mountain and gorge. To me this wayward diversity of spontaneous plant life bespeaks an unconfined, ungauged potentiality ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... democracy, perhaps, tries this by pressure in more directions, and with a more continuous strain, than any other form of society. In Josiah Quincy we have an example of character trained and shaped, under the nearest approach to a pure democracy the world has ever seen, to a firmness, unity, and self-centred poise that recall the finer types of antiquity, in whom the public and private man was so wholly of a piece that they were truly everywhere at home, for the same sincerity of nature that dignified the hearth carried also a charm of homeliness into the forum. The phrase "a great ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... the open canal-sides in their barca. The yellow cap? The yellow O on their breasts? Badges of honor; since to be persecuted is nobler than to persecute. Why had they wished for emancipation? Their life was self-centred, self-complete. But no; they were restless, doomed to wander. He saw the earliest streams pouring into Venice at the commencement of the thirteenth century, German merchants, then Levantines, helping to build ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... since the drawing of lots, and Lady Newhaven remained in ignorance as to which of the two men had received his death-warrant. Few have found suspense easy to bear; but for the self-centred an intolerable element is added to it, which unselfish natures escape. From her early youth Lady Newhaven had been in the habit of viewing life in picturesque tableaux vivants of which she invariably formed the central figure. At her confirmation the Bishop, the white-robed ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... real friendship. The friend is afraid to intrude anything which has no direct reference to the patient's condition lest it should be thought irrelevant. No love even can long endure without complaint, silent it may be, an invalid who is entirely self-centred; and what an agony it is to know that we are tended simply as a duty by those who are nearest to us, and that they will really be relieved when we have departed! From this torture we may be saved if we early apprentice ourselves to the art of self-suppression and sternly ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... we pray by ourselves; it is of God's love that in the work of prayer we are associated with one another. There is nothing further from the divine plan of life than our present individualism. Our temptation is to be egotistic and self-centred; to want to approach God alone with our private needs and wishes. We incline to travel the spiritual way by ourselves; we want no company; we want no one between our souls and God. But that precisely is not the divine method. We come to God through Christ; ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... mirroring apparatus, which is to be taken care of and respected; but he is no goal, not outgoing nor upgoing, no complementary man in whom the REST of existence justifies itself, no termination—and still less a commencement, an engendering, or primary cause, nothing hardy, powerful, self-centred, that wants to be master; but rather only a soft, inflated, delicate, movable potter's-form, that must wait for some kind of content and frame to "shape" itself thereto—for the most part a man without frame and content, a "selfless" man. Consequently, ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... be effort in order to enter by it. For everything in our old self-confident, self-centred nature is up in arms against the conditions of entrance. We are not saved by effort, but we shall not believe without effort. The main struggle of our whole lives should be to cultivate self-humbling trust in Jesus Christ, and to 'fight the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... she had a personal appearance at all. Hitherto she had thought very little of herself. The world without had been, and always would be, much more to her than the world within. She was not to be one of those narrow, self-centred, morbid beings whose days are spent in introspection, and whose powers are wasted in futile efforts to set their own little peculiarities forth in such a way as to make them seem of consequence. She never at any time studied her own nature, ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... gave me warning, 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
... not unprepared for the reproach. She was herself frightened at the boy's savage obduracy, his self-centred insistence on his imaginings, his hardness and impatience and contempt of all restraint. It seemed to her as though fate had inspired the soul of her child with something of the foolish and torturing hatred which she had nursed during ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... a stout, conceited sixteen-year-old when her mother died, so spoiled and so self-centred that old Lady Frothingham had been heard more than once to mutter that the young lady could get down from her high horse and make herself useful, or she could march. But that was six years ago. And now—this! Magsie had evidently decided to make herself useful, but she had managed ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... King The dark self-centred Captain stood, And law and right and peace went down In that red sea of ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... possibly cancel this wedding of yours?" I asked when I had explained the impasse. Self-centred as ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, June 9, 1920 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... of pathos; and the additional remark which he throws in, as it were casually,—'He made the stars also,' cannot but move us to admiration. How childlike the simplicity of the soul which could so venture to deal with the inexplicable and tremendous problem of the Universe! How self-centred and sure the faith which could so arrange the work of Infinite and Eternal forces to suit its own limited intelligence! It is easy and natural to believe that 'God,' or an everlasting Power of Goodness and Beauty called by that name, 'created the heavens and the earth,' but one ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... explanation which people give to my desire for retirement and a life of contemplation. Well," he slowly added, with the halting utterance of one to whom each word is an effort, "I can see some justification for their conclusions now. I have been too self-centred, and too short-sighted to recognise my own folly. I might have known that anything out of the common course rouses a curiosity which supplies its own explanation at any cost to propriety or respect. I have courted my own doom. I am the victim of my own mistake. ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... pain or loneliness, and to Thornton's careless glance she appeared as she always did—pale, cold, and self-centred. ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... regarded me no more than a chauffeur they had hired by the hour. This left Polly who was beside me on the front seat, and myself, to our own devices. Our devices were innocent enough. They consisted in conveying the self-centred Lowells so far from home that they could not get back for supper and were so forced to dine with me. Polly, for as Polly I now thought of her, discovered the place. It was an inn, on the edge of a lake with an Indian name. We did not get home until late, but it ...
— The Log of The "Jolly Polly" • Richard Harding Davis
... he heard the voices and caught the sentences of instruction and comment; he saw boxes and bales hauled from the dock side to the deck and swung below with the rattling of machinery and chains. But these formed merely a noisy background to his mood, which was self-centred and gloomy. He was one of those who go back to their native land knowing themselves conquered. He had left England two years before, feeling obstinately determined to accomplish a certain difficult thing, but forces of nature combining with the circumstances of previous ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... it—I was proud and self-centred! In all our games, I would still be the Queen, because I was the tallest, the fairest, the wisest! I ...
— Henrik Ibsen's Prose Dramas Vol III. • Henrik Ibsen
... 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 best ...
— Progress and History • Various
... upon her in these days that all saw. Over her real wit and native vivacity, it was like a porcelain shade about a flame. One could look at it, and be glad of it, without winking. The brightness was all there, but there was a difference in the giving forth. What had been a bit self-centred and self-conscious—bright as if only for being bright and for dazzling—was outgoing and self-forgetful, and so softened. Leslie Goldthwaite read by it a new answer to some of her old questions. "What harm is there in it?" she had asked ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... fall.... Their growth becomes self-centred. The intellect expands at the expense of soul, a treacherous way that leads to the dark.... And then—a man must father his own children beautifully before he can ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... with Wentworth over the possession of Michael. Wentworth, a sedate, self-centred young man of three-and-twenty, of independent means, mainly occupied in transcribing the nullity of his days in a voluminous diary, had taken charge of him virtually from his first holidays, during which Michael's father had achieved ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... below. It is noticeable that the humanities which have so reluctantly yielded ground to the sciences are pretty uniformly adapted to shape the character of the student in accordance with a traditional self-centred scheme of consumption; a scheme of contemplation and enjoyment of the true, the beautiful, and the good, according to a conventional standard of propriety and excellence, the salient feature of which is leisure—otium ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... but intense truth. There was neither egoism, nor monotony, nor commonplace in it. It was all coloured with native imagination and a sense of true art. There is ample room in Art for these subjective idealisations of even the narrowest world. Shelley's lyrics are intensely self-centred, but no one can find in them either realism or egoism. The field in prose is far more limited, and the risk of becoming tedious and morbid is greater. But a true artist can now and then in prose produce most ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... Liberal policy. And then the book is concluded by two other elegies—in rhyme this time—The Stanzas written at the Grande Chartreuse and Obermann once more. They are, however, elegies of a different kind, much more self-centred, and, indeed, little more than fresh variations on "the note," as I ventured to call it before. Their descriptive and autobiographic interest is great, and if poetry were a criticism of life, there is plenty of that of them. The third ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... 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
... put the very finest sheets on the bed, they smell deliciously of lavender, and we had very good luck doing up the muslin curtains. It is pleasant to be expecting a guest, isn't it, Ellen? I have often thought, although I have never said so before, that our lives were too self-centred. We seemed to have no interests outside of ourselves. Even Elizabeth has been really nothing to us, you know. She seemed to have become a stranger. I hope her child will be the means of bringing ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1904 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... those qualities which go to form what is called depth of character. His humour and good-fellowship attract men to him: his power of understanding and sympathy tie them to him. He is the very antithesis of a self-centred man. His first question, when he meets you, is of yourself and your doings; he never speaks of himself. He is always more interested in the activities of others than in what he himself is doing. He is engrossed in his work; but ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... so. Walpole, however, was an egoist of an opposite kind to Montaigne. Walpole lived for his eyes, and saw the world as a masque of bright and amusing creatures. Montaigne studied the map of himself rather than the map of his neighbours' vanities. Walpole was a social being, and not finally self-centred. His chief purpose in life was not to know himself, but to give pleasure to his friends. If he was bored by Montaigne, it was because he had little introspective curiosity. Like Montaigne himself, however, he was much the servant of whim in his literary tastes. ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... disinterestedness and devotion. Friendship in its accepted sense is not the highest of the different grades in that relationship, but it has its place in the kingdom of love, and through it we bring ourselves into training for a still larger love. The natural man may be self-absorbed and self-centred, but in a truer sense it is natural for him to give up self and link his life on to others. Hence the joy with which he makes the great discovery, that he is something to another and another is everything to him. It is the higher-natural for which he has hitherto existed. It ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... sometimes experience when treating patients of a certain temperament can hardly be due altogether to suggestion. I have been informed by "magnetic" and "spiritual" healers that this feeling of exhaustion is very great when a self-centred, selfish person is being treated, and correspondingly less whenever a generous, large-souled individual is receiving the treatment. "Osteopaths" have told me the same thing. Those possessing an active mind and brain, and who are ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... don't know what I feel," I gulped, "or what I've said. I think I've been a self-centred ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... last with the spirit of a dismissed creed, he fretted in bonds from which he could never get wholly free. Intrepid, independent, steadfast, frugal, prudent, dauntless, he trampled on the pride of kings with the pride of Lucifer. He was clannish to excess, painfully jealous of proximate rivals, self-centred if not self-seeking, fired by zeal and inflamed by almost mean emulations, resenting benefits as debts, ungenerous—with one exception, that of Goethe,—to his intellectual creditors; and, with reference to men and manners around him at variance with ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... "You must think me self-centred! I was. For thirteen whole years I thought of nothing but myself, my miserable self, all shut up in that little town. I talked to no one. I did not even read—I used to sit in the dark of the cathedral nave and listen to the organ. I'd walk in the ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... notion of light and matter travelling through media previously existing, and being carried down, like a boat drifting down stream, by a flowing time which has a pace of its own, and imposes it on all existence. In reality, each "clock" and each landscape is self-centred and initially absolute: its time and space are irrelevant to those of any other landscape or "clock", unless the objects or events revealed there, being posited as self-existent, actually coincide with those revealed also in another landscape, ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... writings is his marvellous eye for, and sympathy with, Nature. He may be said to have done for Devonshire what Scott did for the Highlands. He has been described as "proud, shy, reticent, strong-willed, sweet-tempered, and self-centred." ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... be added, as contented, as though Fame had set him, with a blast of her golden trumpet, amongst the mighty Immortals. What lot can be happier than his? Secure in his impregnable egotism, ramparted about with mighty walls of conceit, he bids defiance to attack, and lives an enviable life of self-centred pleasure. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, VOL. 103, November 26, 1892 • Various
... simplicity of surrounding life supplies an impressive background for the elemental passions which reveal themselves in primitive or aboriginal force. Absence of standards, absence of amusements, the lack of contrast, these are a few of the causes that contribute towards the self-centred existence led by most inhabitants of rural communities. To prove this, one has but to think of a cripple, or a dwarf, or a drunken man, or a maniac; also, to revert to pleasanter images, of an unusual flower or ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... unconscious of its large bearings, gossiping about this person and that, with a free expenditure of very dogmatic opinion on the habits and ways which were not hers. But, on the whole, the picture emerged, and David had never liked her talk so well. The little self-centred thing had somehow been made to wonder and admire; which is much for all ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... salvation worth talking about is that which consists of an inner process of moral transformation, through which one passes over "the great divide" from a life that is self-centred and dominated by impulse and sin to a life that is assured of divine forgiveness, that has {xliii} conceived a passion for a redeemed inward nature, that is conscious of help from beyond its own resources, and that is dedicated to the task of making moral goodness ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... eastern wing of the Castle, and the two new-wedded couples passed the first days of their new happiness under one roof without the slightest constraint; for the Castle was vast enough for solitude when they desired it, and yet the solitude was not isolation or self-centred seclusion. ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... hers—a single spontaneously unselfish action on her part—which should have led us to suppose, to expect that she would rise high in any crisis? We were all at her feet. We never noticed that she was utterly self-centred, because we, with all the world, were ready to satisfy her lightest wish. No, no, it was we who were wrong—wrong in our estimate of her. We expected too much—we expected more than she was able to give—more than a woman of ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... 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 |
