"Egoist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... journey, he did not listen to her reply, but plunged into an exact account of his own position at court and of his poverty and difficulties. His sister was weary, and an overpowering sense of loneliness possessed her; she had always known her brother to be an egoist, but a certain spontaneous, easy kindness had masked his self-love when he ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... could not suppress a tear. He was losing a sincere and unbounded affection. He had found in Dinah the gentlest La Valliere, the most delightful Pompadour that any egoist short of a king could hope for; and, like a boy who has discovered that by dint of tormenting a cockchafer he has killed it, ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... it out of Brenton, in the end, in spite of his growling. It's too bad of me to tell you; and yet it seems only fair that you should get at the truth of the situation. Besides—You know you are a fearful egoist, Reed; we all are, for that matter. Besides, it may make you a little bit more tolerant of Brenton, may lead you to smooth him down where I have been rubbing him the wrong way. In fact, you owe it to him, to atone for the volcanic effect you ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... lurked a life long in its devious and smiling expressions—expressions like a set of scenery pushed on and off as the order of the play demanded. Oh, the misery of it all! He, Monross, poet, lover, egoist, husband, to be confronted by this damnable defiance, this early-born hate! What had he done! And in the brain cells of the man there awakened a processional fleet of pictures: Rhoda wooed; Rhoda dazzled; Rhoda won; Rhoda smiling before the altar; ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... when surrounded by smaller birds. Here you have the dominative swans; there, the extremely sociable kittiwake-gulls, among whom quarrels are rare and short; the prepossessing polar guillemots, which continually caress each other; the egoist she-goose, who has repudiated the orphans of a killed comrade; and, by her side, another female who adopts any one's orphans, and now paddles surrounded by fifty or sixty youngsters, whom she conducts and cares for as if they all were ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... offspring are only saved from his attacks by large numbers of females and the young uniting in troops led by the mothers.[89] The polygamous families of monkeys are always subject to patriarchal rule. The father is the tyrant of the band—an egoist. Any protection he affords to the family is in his own interest, frequently he expels the young males as soon as they are old enough to give him trouble, the daughters, in some cases, he adds to his harem; only when old age has rendered him powerless are the tables turned, and ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... a little doggedly. "I have spent too many of my years on the treadmill. A man was born to be either an egoist and parcel out the earth according to his tastes, or to develop like Dartrey into a dreamer.—Curse you!" he added, suddenly shaking his fist at the tall towers of the Houses of Parliament. "You're like an infernal boarding-school, with ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... churches; my religion, if I had any, had neither rite nor symbol, and I believed in a God without form, without a cult, and without revelation. Poisoned, from youth, by all the writings of the last century, I had sucked, at an early hour, the sterile milk of impiety. Human pride, that God of the egoist, closed my mouth against prayer, while my affrighted soul took refuge in the hope of nothingness. I was as though drunken or insensate when I saw that effigy of Christ on Brigitte's bosom; while not believing in him myself I recoiled, knowing that ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... She fairly stamped her foot in vexation. "You are an egoist! You would play with the welfare of four million people to gratify your little personal desire for ...
— The Sign at Six • Stewart Edward White
... seen. A man of Minoret's build, and Minoret's wealth, at the head of such an establishment might well be called, without contradiction, the master of Nemours. Though he never thought of God or devil, being a practical materialist, just as he was a practical agriculturist, a practical egoist, and a practical miser, Minoret had enjoyed up to this time a life of unmixed happiness,—if we can call pure materialism happiness. A physiologist, observing the rolls of flesh which covered the last ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... had had that effect upon me. It is always the bad nigger who gets religion most strongly at the camp-meeting, and in my case 'getting religion' had taken the form of suppression of self. I never have been able to do things by halves, or even with a decent moderation. As an egoist I had been thorough in my egoism; and now, fate having bludgeoned that vice out of me, I found myself possessed of an almost morbid sympathy with ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... "I have been a blatant egoist all the afternoon, Judith. I didn't guess. Of course ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... self-devotion, his good will, and a little of that old rustic cunning, on this occasion enlisted in the service of a generous enterprise, undertook to scale the difficulties of the cloister, and the steep escarpments of the rule of Saint-Benoit. Father Fauchelevent was an old man who had been an egoist all his life, and who, towards the end of his days, halt, infirm, with no interest left to him in the world, found it sweet to be grateful, and perceiving a generous action to be performed, flung himself upon it like a man, who at the moment ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... imperfectly developed one. While the units of which it is composed have distinct and independent lives within certain limits, they are, outside of those limits, interdependent and inter-related. Man is governed by two great forces. On the one hand, he is essentially an egoist, ever striving to attain individual freedom; on the other hand, he is a social animal, ever seeking association and avoiding isolation. This duality expresses itself in the life of society. There is ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... point of resemblance to Meredith besides that which I have mentioned. She loves to portray men puffed up with self-approval. She, too, is a satirist of the male egoist. Her books are the most finished social satires in English fiction. They are so perfect in the delicacy of their raillery as to be charming. One is conscious in them, indeed, of the presence of a sparkling spirit. Miss ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... been made, as Desiree had prepared her trousseau, with a zest and gaiety which all were invited to enjoy. It is said that love is an egoist. Charles and Desiree had no desire to keep their happiness to themselves, but wore it, as ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... others, and tries to alleviate it, and in the combat with pain he insures his own happiness. A Catholic would say of St. Vincent de Paul or St. Charles Borromeo, 'He was a great saint.' I would say, 'He was a great egoist.' Let us render love to those who are swimming with us down the stream of life, and without pricking of conscience take joy ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... her up, hotly and jealously. "Do you know, Dounia, I was looking at you two. You are the very portrait of him, and not so much in face as in soul. You are both melancholy, both morose and hot-tempered, both haughty and both generous.... Surely he can't be an egoist, Dounia. Eh? When I think of what is in store for us ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... least his emotion will help him to divine the infinite. He sees, unexpectedly, his inmost soul revealed to him, he has exceeded the limits upon which he has hitherto looked as a matter of course; the barrier between him and the universe has fallen, the whole world belongs to him; the egoist becomes less selfish, the cruel man gentle, the dullard clairvoyant; every man feels that he has become greater and more human. This is neither illusion nor projection, nor is it a subtle, psychical deception—it is sober reality. Weininger's suspicion ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... my little friend," he said, when at last the door was closed, "there's a great deal of sound common sense in what you say. I may be an egoist—I dare say I am. I've been through the proper training for it, and I've started life again on a pretty one-sided basis, perhaps. But—have you ever ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... just that vein of conversation, half sentimentalising, half sensible, all profligate, which seldom fails to win the ear of a man both of imagination and of the world. "I will not; and, to vary the topic, I will turn egoist, and tell you ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... creations,—did not prevent the Nawab from understanding Byron, who never could forget himself at all; and who, with all his vivid impulses of generous sympathy for the oppressed, is nevertheless generally classed to-day as a colossal egoist. (Unjustly so, for no mere egoist would have toiled as he toiled for Greek emancipation, in the nerve-racking campaign which cost him ...
— Sonnets • Nizam-ud-din-Ahmad, (Nawab Nizamat Jung Bahadur)
... thoroughly commonplace. He never uttered an inspired word. He was an intense egoist. No subject was great enough to make him forget himself. Calhoun was a political Calvinist—narrow, logical, dogmatic. He was not an orator. He delivered essays, not orations. I think it was in 1851 that ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll |
