"Misanthropy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... darker passions that he delights to dwell. All love excepting the half-mystic passion which he still felt for his buried Beatrice, had palled on the fierce and restless exile. The sad story of Rimini is almost a single exception. I know not whether it has been remarked, that, in one point, misanthropy seems to have affected his mind, as it did that of Swift. Nauseous and revolting images seem to have had a fascination for his mind; and he repeatedly places before his readers, with all the energy ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... would be, if every rogue was found out, and flogged coram populo! What a butchery, what an indecency, what an endless swishing of the rod! Don't cry out about my misanthropy. My good friend Mealymouth, I will trouble you to tell me, do you go to church? When there, do you say, or do you not, that you are a miserable sinner, and saying so do you believe or disbelieve it? If you are a M. S., don't you deserve correction, and aren't you grateful if ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... the island, Legrand had built himself a small hut, which he occupied when I first, by mere accident, made his acquaintance. This soon ripened into friendship—for there was much in the recluse to excite interest and esteem. I found him well educated, with unusual powers of mind, but infected with misanthropy, and subject to perverse moods of alternate enthusiasm and melancholy. He had with him many books, but rarely employed them. His chief amusements were gunning and fishing, or sauntering along the beach and ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... subtle and far-reaching sentence, which made a strong impression upon Bentham. "In order to love mankind," he writes, "we must expect little from them." This might, on the lips of a cynic, serve for a formula of that kind of misanthropy which is not more unamiable than it is unscientific. But in the mouth of Helvetius it was a plea for considerateness, for indulgence, and, above all, it was meant for an inducement to patience and sustained endeavour in all dealings with masses of men in society. "Every ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... into exile, and severely punish Dion; but 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 ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the old building and the outer world; but leading to the modern chateau there was a broad and handsome avenue. It was an ideal residence: when "Black Michael" desired company, he could dwell in his chateau; if a fit of misanthropy seized him, he had merely to cross the bridge and draw it up after him (it ran on rollers), and nothing short of a regiment and a train of artillery could fetch him out. I went on my way, glad that poor ...
— The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
... impulsive manner of a young man; while there was a consistent moderation in his opinions which—however it might weigh against his success as a party-man—yet sprang from conviction, and was a guard against misanthropy. ...
— St George's Cross • H. G. Keene
... us after dinner, 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 you ...
— Dwell Deep - or Hilda Thorn's Life Story • Amy Le Feuvre
... inequalities of condition, selfishness, and egotism the mainsprings of life. We see energies misdirected, and art corrupted. All noble aspirations have fled, and the good and the wise retire from active life in despair and misanthropy. Poets flatter the tyrants who trample on human rights, and sensuality and Epicurean pleasures absorb the depraved thoughts of ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... saw him first, Mohun had been cynical, bitter, full of gloomy misanthropy. Something seemed to have hardened him, and made him hate his species. In the bloom of early manhood, when his life was yet in the flower, and should have prompted him to all kind and sweet emotions, he was a stranger to all—to charity, good-will, ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... to Normandy, I landed at Jersey. The little, secluded bays of that island are the most perfect poetry of the sea. They are types of the spot in which Horace, in his poetic mood of imaginary misanthropy, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... epoch of their publication until now have remained the wonder and the delight of successive generations. Their realism, humorous invention, ready wit, unsparing irony, and keen ridicule have exercised as potent an attraction as their gloomy misanthropy has repelled. Among minor satires are his scathing attacks in prose and verse on the war party as a ring of Whig stock-jobbers, such as Advice to the October Club, Public Spirit of the Whigs, &c., the Virtues ...
— English Satires • Various
... deformity. Characters he did not seek to draw, but he made a personage the medium of incarnating a quality. Harpagon is not a miser; he is Avarice speaking and doing. Alceste is not a person; he is Misanthropy personified. ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... person, Edward, and then I may perhaps hear you," replied Grahame, from whom the sight of his young friend appeared to have banished all misanthropy. "What I can, however, have to do with your fate, I know not, except that I will acquit you of all intentional eaves-dropping, if it be that which troubles you; and what can Mr. Myrvin have said to rob you ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume II. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes • Grace Aguilar
... Abecedary, Volubility Acacia, Friendship Acacia, Rose, Elegance Acacia, Yellow, Secret Love Acanthus, The Fine Arts Acalia, Temperance Achillea Millefolia, War Achimenes, Such worth is rare Aconite, Misanthropy Adonis, Flos, Sad memories Agnus Castos, Coldness Agrimony, Thankfulness Almond (common), Indiscreet Almond (flowering), Hope Almond, Laurel, Perfidy Allspice, Compassion Aloe, Affliction Amaranth (Globe), Immortal Amaranth (Cockscomb), Foppery Amaryllis, ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... 'Satanically,' as they held, at moral conventions, and yet rather denounced the hypocrisy and the heartlessness of precisians than insulted the real affections. He covered sympathy with human suffering under a mask of misanthropy, and attacked war and oppression in the character of a reckless outlaw. Full of the affectation of a 'dandy,' he was yet rousing all Europe by a cry of pure sentimentalism. It would be absurd to attribute any definite doctrine to Byron. His scepticism in religious matters was ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... did—presented him as a very naughty but intensely clever child, with the monkey element in humanity thrown into utmost prominence. But it is better not to do so. Panurge has some Yahooish characteristics, but he is not a Yahoo—in fact, there is no misanthropy in Rabelais.[104] He is not merely impish (as in his vengeance on the lady of Paris), but something worse than impish (as in that on Dindenault); and yet one cannot call him diabolic, because he is so intensely human. It is customary, and fairly correct, to describe his ethos ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... because he sees, or thinks he sees, falsehood everywhere masquerading as virtue. His foremost duty was to pluck the mask from the false virtues which strutted everywhere through the society and literature of France. Voltaire recognized nothing else in La Rochefoucauld but this sardonic misanthropy, this determination to prove that man is guided solely by self-interest. This Voltaire thought was the seule verite contained in the "Maximes," and in a measure he was right. The moralist saw amour-propre as an Apollyon straddling right ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... 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
... should have indulged in a little morbid misanthropy on such an occasion was not surprising. But I take leave to think that he was wrong in his philosophy; we do make new friends when we lose our old friends, and the heart is capable of cure as is the body; were it ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... unfamiliar to the public and has difficulties of its own. Tennyson has combined action, proceeding somewhat spasmodically, with a skilful study of character, showing us the exaggerated sensibility of a nature which under the successive influence of misanthropy, hope, love, and tragic disappointment, may easily pass beyond the border-land of insanity. In the scene where love is triumphant, Tennyson touches the highest point of lyrical passion; but there are jarring notes introduced in the satirical descriptions ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... which the patient investigation of German writers have discovered in the archives of Italy. A tolerable knowledge, however, of the occurrences of that reign will be sufficient to convince us that Charles V. was not sincerely religious until age, infirmities, and misanthropy, had brought upon him the misfortunes which attended the last years of his life, and induced him to abdicate the crown, and retire to the solitudes of Yuste. It is already known that, at the beginning of Luther's rebellion against the Roman church, Charles resolved to ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... which Mr. Pickwick and his two disciples were engaged was, it will be remembered, to convert Mr. Tupman from his resolution to forsake the world in a fit of misanthropy, induced by ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... the comfortable fruits of your misanthropy," answered the youth; "your laudable scheme of detaching yourself from the bonds of society, and of moving in a superior sphere of your own. Had you not been so peculiarly sage, and intent upon laughing at mankind, you could never have been disconcerted by such a pitiful ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... efforts ill directed, than of society: but the ill success of my own efforts, aided perhaps by the prejudices which I received from my father, have preponderated; and made me it may be too frequently incline to melancholy, and misanthropy. What can be said? Are not the rich and powerful continually oppressing talents, genius, and virtue? Is the general sense of ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... my dinner alone! let me think of it. But in they come, and make it absolutely necessary that I should open a bottle of orange; for my meat turns into stone when any one dines with me, if I have not wine. Wine can mollify stones; then that wine turns into acidity, acerbity, misanthropy, a hatred of my interrupters—(God bless 'em! I love some of 'em dearly), and with the hatred, a still greater aversion to their going away. Bad is the dead sea they bring upon me, choking and deadening, ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... Lyoff Tolstoy. The difference of their attitude to life was determined by the difference of the ways in which they turned their backs on their unfulfilled dreams. Nikolai quenched his ardor in skeptical derision, Lyoff renounced his unrealized dreams with silent reproach, and Sergei with morbid misanthropy. The greater the original store of love in such characters, the stronger, if only for a time, is their resemblance to ...
— Reminiscences of Tolstoy - By His Son • Ilya Tolstoy
... and you observe how he permits his lingering disapproval of the man to intrude upon his description of him. The truth is that—as there is ample testimony in his prolific writings—is lordship was something of a misanthropist. It was, in fact, his misanthropy which drove him, as it has driven many another, to authorship. He takes up the pen, not so much that he may carry out his professed object of writing a chronicle of his own time, but to the end that he may vent ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... and elegant satire against the follies and bad taste of his age. Moreover, his numbers of the Spectator are distinguished for elevation of sentiment, and moral purity, without harshness, and without misanthropy. He wrote three sevenths of that immortal production, and on every variety of subject, without any attempt to be eloquent or intense, without pedantry and without affectation. The success of the work was immense, ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... whatever may be their faults, are at least acknowledged in wit and courtesy preeminent. We hope that the French who come to us will not become, in these respects, Americanized, and substitute the easy sneer, and use of such terms as "ridiculous," "virtuous misanthropy," &c., for the graceful and poignant raillery of their native land, which ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... of sour misanthropy; but woe betide the ignoble prose-writer who should thus dare to compare notes with the world, or ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... result of such an education by such an educator. Danvers was acutely suspicious, saved from cynicism and misanthropy by his vanity only. He was the familiar combination of credulity and incredulity, now trusting not at all and again trusting with an utter incapacity to judge. Had he been far more attractive personally, he might still have failed to find genuine affection. ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... observed some who had a little refinement of manners, at the commencement of their captivity, and regarded the situation and feelings of others near them, with complacency, but have lost it all, and sunk into a state of misanthropy. We, Americans, exercise too little ceremony at best, but some of our prisoners lost all deference and respect for their countrymen, and became mere hogs, the stronger pushing the weaker aside, ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... sometimes almost suspecting, and at other times rejecting distrust, was by this proof of his friend's treachery, bereft of all fortitude and patience. Wounded by the neglect of the world, his confidence in Walter had been his preservative from misanthropy; and when vexed at the recollection of his own imprudent frankness and folly, in provoking the resentment of powerful foes, he soothed his galled spirit by considering, that the guileless simplicity of his nature, which had raised those foes, ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... long that day, and only endeavored to ascertain the color of misanthropy. He created on me especially the impression of being bored with other people, weary of everything, hopelessly disillusioned and disgusted with himself as well ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... longer, as in the former characters, with a steady light, but plays in fitful coruscations amid feigned gayety and extravagance. In Lear, it is the flash of sudden inspiration across the incongruous imagery of madness; in Timon, it is obscured by the exaggerations of misanthropy." ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... this effusion, shall I say, of my misanthropy or my vanity to mention the subject which first put my pen in my hand. The Baron d'Holbach, whom I saw at Paris, told me that there was one under his eye that was translating your Theory of Moral Sentiments, and desired ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... while he roused again, and began putting advertisements for Ida in the principal newspapers of Germany, and making random visits to towns all about to consult directories and police records. A singular sort of misanthropy possessed him. He cursed the multitude of towns and villages that reduced the chances in his favor to so small a thing. He cursed the teeming throngs of men, women, and children, in whose mass she was lost, as a jewel in a mountain of rubbish. Had he possessed the power, he would in those ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... this shattered intellect, expressing at random its disjointed thoughts, as a disordered clock strikes by chance any hour, and the majestic serenity of the scene around me? I felt it instinctively. My misanthropy gave way; I became indulgent towards myself and mankind, and the wounds of my heart closed once more. My despair was soothed, and soon the sun of the tropics, which tinges all things with gold, dreams as well as fruits, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... from a solitary picnic upon his house-boat," Sabatini explained, suavely. "We cannot have our friends cultivating misanthropy." ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... no liberty for French books to wander backwards and forwards without inspection and seizure. Why, do remember that we are in Italy after all! Nevertheless, I will tell you what we have done: transplanted our subscription from the Italian library, which was wearing us away into a misanthropy, or at least despair of the wits of all Southerns, into a library which has a tolerable supply of French books, and gives us the privilege besides of having a French newspaper, the 'Siecle,' left with us every evening. Also, this library admits (is allowed to admit on ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... might realize man's insignificance among the blind forces of nature, he could accept it philosophically and die with his soul uncorroded by misanthropy, that final and uncompromising admission of failure. The misanthrope was the supreme failure of life because he had not the intelligence to realize, or could not reconcile himself to, the incomplete condition ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... of hate. disaffection, disfavor; alienation, estrangement, coolness; enmity &c. 889; animosity &c. 900. umbrage, pique, grudge; dudgeon, spleen bitterness, bitterness of feeling; ill blood, bad blood; acrimony; malice &c. 907; implacability &c. (revenge) 919. repugnance &c. (dislike) 867; misanthropy, demonophobia[obs3], gynephobia[obs3], negrophobia[obs3]; odium, unpopularity; detestation, antipathy; object of hatred, object of execration; abomination, aversion, bte noire; enemy &c. 891; bitter ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... 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 my ...
— Minna von Barnhelm • Gotthold Ephraim Lessing |
