"Self-centred" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... He was 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 Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... honestly; "I don't. Babe hasn't the make-up for a professional woman in any line. She is too self-centred, too impetuous. She needs something to humanize her womanhood, not make an abstract thing of her. I'd rather see Babe a gentle, loving woman than the greatest light of ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... you—well, that would hardly be 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 ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... marriage 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 ...
— The Scarlet Car • Richard Harding Davis
... the Infirmary for a few days," she said; "the child is really not well. She is growing too fast and she is morbid and self-centred. Every one thinks of her as seventeen and she has just turned fifteen. Then after she is back again let the facts be made known about the letters; that's only fair to Sally May and to Catherine; but do it as casually as possible. ...
— Judy of York Hill • Ethel Hume Patterson Bennett
... contentions in chapter xxxiv., "A good many truths, but served up with bitter herbs, not with love": on chapter xxxvii., "Beautiful poetry, but a very bleak and barren picture of God; hard, arbitrary, selfish, self-centred, striking terror into His works, and compelling obedience and service. Nature cannot reveal Him, Elihu!" On the next chapter, "The God of nature turns the picture, and behold it is no more destruction and blind force, but beneficence and gracious design and beauty,"—and so on to the end, ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... was 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 ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... so far back as Beethoven's day that autobiographical habit had begun. "Beethoven," says Old Fogy, is "dramatic, powerful, a maker of storms, a subduer of tempests; but his speech is the speech of a self-centred egotist. He is the father of all the modern melomaniacs, who, looking into their own souls, write what they see therein—misery, corruption, slighting selfishness and ugliness." Old Ludwig's groans, of course, we can stand. He was not only a great ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... a 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 mercilessly applies the lash of self-irony, and ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... 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 interest. He knew his weakness in this direction, ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... "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 ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... The self-centred element in Erasmus must needs increase accordingly as he in truth became a centre and objective point of ideas and culture. There really was a time when it must seem to him that the world hinged upon him, and that it awaited the redeeming word from him. What a widespread enthusiastic following he ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... if she was playing a part; but she was playing one, and doing it well. Her little way was that of a nasty-tempered, self-centred woman, made spiteful by being called upon to leave a place ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... 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
... 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. But," he continued, with ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... a sublime representative of self-centred womanhood. Rising to the heights of self-consciousness and of self-respect, she takes her soul into her own keeping, and though her position both as wife and as queen are jeopardized, she is true to the Divine aspirations ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... childish curiosity that the moon seemed always to retreat when I ran towards her, and to pursue when I fled. It was a very significant symbol. Stand a little apart, and things of their own accord will come more than half-way. Nobody ever goes to meet a loafer. Self-centred, domesticated persons attract. What would be the value of the heavens, if we could bring the stars into our lap? They cannot be approached or appropriated. Upon the highest mountain the horizon sinks you in a valley, and far aloft in night and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... make. They had grown into very friendly relations this last month. Warwick Hall had widened Ethelinda's horizon, until she was able to take an interest in many things now outside of her own narrow self-centred circle. ...
— The Little Colonel's Chum: Mary Ware • Annie Fellows Johnston
... 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 menyecske whose laughter echoes from end ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... sciences have been intruded into the scholar's discipline from without, not to say from 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 cum dignitate. ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... not been perception or emotion that I have practised, but the art of expressing what I have perceived and felt. Of course, I wish with all my heart and soul that it were otherwise; but it seems that I have drifted so far into these tepid, sun-warmed shallows, the shallows of egoism and self-centred absorption, that there is no possibility of my finding my way again to the wholesome brine, to the fresh movement of the leaping wave. I am like one of those who lingered so long in the enchanted isle of Circe, listening ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... no greater obstacle to the development of the best qualities in a young woman than the possession of such unusual beauty. From her cradle she is made to realize its power, and men and women teach her in a thousand unconscious ways to be selfish and self-centred. She receives attentions, and her acquaintance is sought, with no effort on her part, while more gifted and deserving companions are unnoticed. She is made to realize that she is one to be served, where less attractive girls are taught to ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... them; we may have nerves very sensitive to pain, and be afflicted with a disease very painful. Virtue will not help us, and it is not meant to help us. It is not even its own reward, except for the self-centred and - I had almost said - the unamiable. No man can pacify his conscience; if quiet be what he want, he shall do better to let that organ perish from disuse. And to avoid the penalties of the law, and the ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... crumpled napkin, sloppy finger-bowl, nut-shells and cigarette-ash. For ten minutes he could rest; conversation with either of his companions threatened to be as difficult as it was unnecessary. John Gaymer, in upbringing, intellect, habits of mind and method of speech, belonged to a self-centred world which cheerfully defied subjugation by a brigade of Byrons, reinforced by a division of Wesleys and an army of Rousseaus; for him there was one school and no other, one college and no other, one regiment, ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... felt. Then there is nothing left to take its place—no prosaic sense of duty, no steady habit, no enduring interest in work. As these two human beings drifted further and further apart from their common love and their common interest, the idealistic man became more self-centred, more unsocial, more fiercely individual, and the emotional and sensual woman became more self-indulgent, more hostile to any philosophy—anarchism such as Terry's, with its blighting idealism—which limited her simple joy in life and ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... 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
... a little; evidently no thought of yielding had come to him before. We were passing the house that used to belong to that strange book-lover and recluse, Beckford. I looked up at the blank windows, and thought of that curious, self-centred life in the past, surrounded by every luxury, able to indulge every whim; and then I looked at my companion's pale, tortured face, and thought of the life he had elected to lead in the hope of saving one whom duty bound him to honour. After all, ...
— Derrick Vaughan—Novelist • Edna Lyall
... 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 ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... making, as Wordsworth says, the very thought of country life a thought of refuge; and that was what, so long in populous city pent, he longed to find, and found. It was his home, where he could possess his soul, could be self-centred and serene. "This," says Ruskin, "is the true nature of Home; it is the Place ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... 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 of resource; it unveils ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... He noticed a change in Lily so marked that even his self-centred nature could not fail to observe it. This girl, whom he had thought pretty, fanciful, tenderhearted and gently sympathetic, who had attracted his confession by her quick and feminine receptiveness, now seemed developed into a woman of strength and purpose, full of calm and of dignity. Her shining ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... candidates." It was Bea's voice that spoke. "If Miss Brett completes her quota of lines this month she will undoubtedly have the best chance in the election, even if she is personally unpopular. She is exceedingly self-centred, you know, and does not trouble herself even to appear interested in anybody else. Her manner is unfortunate. However she is unquestionably the ablest writer in the class though little Laura Wallace is a close second. Berta ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... 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 ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy • Arthur Schopenhauer
... further claim to notice that it is the signal expression of the spirit of its time, though we can no longer call it the modern spirit. The book perfectly renders the disillusion, languor and sentimentality which characterise a self-centred scepticism. It is the record, indeed, of a morbid mind, but of a mind gifted with extraordinary acuteness and with the utmost delicacy of perception. Amiel wrote also several essays and poems, but it is for the "Intimate Diary" alone that ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... defending him. It is myself that I would like to defend, and I cannot. I remember that I accepted the arrangements made for my sister and me without much reflection, and everything that was planned for my advantage I took as a matter of course. I was no heartless monster, but a decidedly self-centred child. If my sister had seemed unhappy it would have troubled me; but I am ashamed to recall that I did not consider how little it was that contented her. I was so preoccupied with my own happiness ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... 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
... 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 ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... myself," he said. "I was still utterly self-centred when I came to this room today and allowed you to talk to me—when I asked you to see me to-night as we parted at the club. I sha'n't tell you the thoughts that unconsciously were in my mind when I asked that favor. You must understand ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... you may ask, do I dwell on all this? It is because these are the true Advent voices for us, coming as they do to rouse us out of narrow preoccupation, to open our eyes to the sinfulness of sin, to make us feel that the self-centred, isolated, self-seeking life is a life of a low type, and to stir us with social and religious ...
— Sermons at Rugby • John Percival
... 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 George has assumed a new aspect to his mother and to Kathryn. They're ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... than any one of its members whether teacher or student. In a small family at home conditions have been more or less made for her, just as they are for other girls. Yet she knows that the school life is complicated and complex, and it is impossible for her to feel neglected where a more self-centred or spoiled girl fails to see that in this new life she is called upon to play a minor part but nevertheless a part upon which the school must rely for its esprit de corps. She goes with ease from the somewhat unmethodical life of the home to the highly organized ...
— A Girl's Student Days and After • Jeannette Marks
... 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 came and her ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... false Mysticism. It leads to the heartless doctrine, quite unworthy of the man, that public calamities are to the wise man only stage tragedies—or even stage comedies.[145] The moral results of this self-centred individualism are exemplified by the mediaeval saint and visionary, Angela of Foligno, who congratulates herself on the deaths of her mother, husband, and children, "who were great obstacles in the way ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... Lord Arranmore's unusual kindness to me," Brooks remarked. "Lord Arranmore is one of the most self-centred men I ever knew—and the least impulsive. Why, therefore, he should go out of his way to do me a kindness I ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... 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
... authentic mark of a truly spiritual man.[155] In this phrase is concealed the link between the social and personal aspects of the spiritual life. It means that our passional nature with its cravings and ardours, instead of making self-centred whirlpools, flows out in streams of charity and power towards all life. And we observe too that the Ninth Perfection of the Buddhist is such a state of active charity. "In his loving, sympathizing, joyful and steadfast mind ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... intensest life,' conveys something more than the writer's actual psychological state. The feverish desire of life became gradually modified into a more or less active intellectual and imaginative curiosity; but the sense of an individual, self-centred, and, as it presented itself to him, unconditioned existence, survived all the teachings of experience, and often indeed unconsciously imposed itself ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... tension was felt by the Honourable George, I had no means of knowing. I dare say not, as he is self-centred, being seldom aware of anything beyond his own immediate sensations. But I had reason to believe that the Klondike woman had divined some menace in our attitude of marked indifference. Her own manner, ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... self-centred and silent man, absorbed in getting and spending, always taking care to have much of the one, and no more than he could help of the other. Sara was a nervous and sensitive little woman, hungering for communion and for sympathy. She got little of either ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine
... so taciturn one was compelled to guess her thoughts; and long since Camors had reflected as to what was passing in that self-centred soul. Inspired by his innate generosity, as well as his secret admiration, he took pleasure in heaping upon this poor cousin the attentions he might have paid a queen; but she always seemed as indifferent to them as she was to the opposite course of her involuntary ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... patient, noble, holy life than could be taught by a thousand sermons from the most eloquent lips." He paused, and then continued in a tone of deep feeling, "I may well say so! I shudder to think what a weak, useless, self-centred being I should have been ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... when I was leading a solitary and self-centred moral life, I was much taken up with abstract thoughts on man's destiny, on a future life, and on the immortality of the soul, and, with all the ardour of inexperience, strove to make my youthful intellect solve those ...
— Boyhood • Leo Tolstoy
... actually the RISE OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS—that is, the coming of the mind to a more or less distinct awareness of itself and of its own operation, and the consequent development and growth of Individualism, and of the Self-centred attitude ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... afterward? He even began to doubt if there was anything before—if there was any just—— He paused and shivered as the thought came to him. And he was glad he paused. To question the Deity was to rank himself at once with a sect he had always despised as self-centred fools, and pitied them as purblind creatures who were ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... than another" ("Theologia Germanica"), involves a denial of the nihilistic view that all the creatures are "ein lauteres Nichts."[21] It would be easy to find such passages in all the fourteenth-century mystics, but it cannot be denied that on the whole their religion is too self-centred. There are not many maxims so fundamentally wrong-headed and un-Christian as Suso's advice to "live as if you were the only person in the world."[22] The life of the cloistered saint may be abundantly justified—for the spiritual activity of some of them has been of far ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... common day, his philosophy passed from discovery to acceptance, and all unknown to him his pen fell into a common way of writing. The faculty of reading which has added fuel to the fire of so many waning inspirations was denied him. He was much too self-centred to lose himself in the works of others. Only the shock of a change of environment—a tour in Scotland, or abroad—shook him into his old thrill of imagination, so that a few fine things fitfully ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... 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 ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... feeling, the very deepest and most intense emotion could have made the quiet, self-contained 'man o' God' as Mrs. Spruce called him, speak to her as he had done,—and she also knew that only the most bitter malice and cruel under-intent to do mischief could have roused Roxmouth, usually so coldly self-centred, to the white heat of wrath which had blazed out of him that evening. Between these two men she stood—a quite worthless object of regard, so she assured herself,—through her, one of them was like to have his name torn to shreds in the foul mouths of up-to-date salacious slanderers,—and ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... 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 Mrs. Nichol, in one of her immature efforts at self-realisation, ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... 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 us nearer ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1904 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... never known a woman like Rose; a woman so poised and self-centred, so cultivated, so capable of deep and just reflections, and so religious. His experience with women had not been fortunate, as has been seen in this narrative; and, insensibly to himself, Rose was beginning to exercise an influence over him. The ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... 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 ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... had passed 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 ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... forward and upward by the path of sacrifice, until the summit of the cross-crowned mountain of life is gained; and all heads are aureoled by a light which, like that of the Transfiguration, dawns and deepens from within. This cannot be till we have ceased to be self-centred, and have ...
— A Christmas Faggot • Alfred Gurney
... not barren of instruction to actual men. The Poet's self-centred seclusion was avenged by the furies of an irresistible passion pursuing him to speedy ruin. But that Power which strikes the luminaries of the world with sudden darkness and extinction, by awakening them ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... trust, and that will create love and that will ensure obedience. Faith leads to righteousness because, in the very act of trusting God, I come out of myself, and going out of myself and ceasing from all self-admiration and self-dependence and self-centred life is the beginning of all good and has in it the germ of all righteousness, even as to live for self is the mother tincture out of which ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... 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 too ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... problems of heredity than in any meaning it may have for the problems of form. More significant is the revolt against the cell-theory started by Sedgwick[520] and Whitman,[521] on the ground that the organism is something more than an aggregation of discrete, self-centred cells. ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... 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 ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... at a first causal glance, there was nothing very remarkable about either of them. One was old; the other more than middle-aged. Both were in evening-dress,—both smoked idly, and apparently not so much for the pleasure of smoking as for lack of something better to do, and both seemed self-centred and absorbed in thought. They had been conversing for some time, but now silence had fallen between them, and neither seemed disposed to break the heavy spell. The distant roar of constant traffic in the busy thoroughfares of the metropolis sounded in their ears like muffled thunder, ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... 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,' ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... sink her love for her own decorum in devotion to the world in general, and to Swithin in particular. To counsel her activities by her understanding, rather than by her emotions as usual, was hard work for a tender woman; but she strove hard, and made advance. The self-centred attitude natural to one in her situation was becoming displaced by the sympathetic attitude, which, though it had to be artificially fostered at first, gave her, by degrees, a certain sweet sense that she was rising ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... 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 ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... adopted son if I choose to make him so—will explain nothing. He has, in fact, nothing more to say to you. You and he are quits so far as regards obligations. Your paths in life lie apart. You are one of the self-centred, sedentary loiterers by the way. For him," she added, throwing out suddenly her brown, withered hand, aflame with jewels, "there lie different things. Something he knows; something he has learned; much there is yet for him to learn. He will go on his way, undisturbed by ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... fellow-men he had forged a self-centred, confident way to the front; and had met there not ultimate achievement, but a young girl, Valerie West. Through her, somehow, already was coming into his life and into his work that indefinite, elusive quality—that something, the existence of which, ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... was that there was a danger in all this talk of water or air or other material symbol, or even of the indefinite or characterless as the original of all,—the danger, namely, that one should lose sight of the idea of law, of rationality, of eternal self-centred force, and so be carried away by some vision of a gradual process of evolution from mere emptiness to fulness of being. Such a position would be not dissimilar to that of many would-be metaphysicians among evolutionists, ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... dropped from her like a mantle, and she was possessed by a burning longing to comfort and save. In the midst of the fog and darkness God had sent to her a great opportunity. She rose to it with a dignity which seemed to set the restless, self-centred Betty of an hour ago years behind. Her fingers tightened on the stranger's arm; she spoke ...
— Betty Trevor • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... so allied machines were of weekly occurrence? And what would be the effect on our own public if giant raids on British towns were of weekly occurrence? Let us make the most of our aerial chances, and so forestall betrayal by war-weariness, civilian pacifism, self-centred fools, ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... possessed of 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 he is interested in it as in something outside himself, ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... feels him and melts, and it flows, and the things, strange sweet things that were locked up in it, it sings as it runs, for love of him. Each plant tries to bear at least one fragrant little flower for him; and the world that was dead lives, and the heart that was dead and self-centred throbs, with an upward, outward yearning, and it has become that which it seemed impossible ever to become. There, does that satisfy you?" she asked, looking down at Gregory. "Is that how you like ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... recognise his relative place and value; if he gains his purposes by selfishness, by climbing over others, by indifference to human pain or suffering—oblivious to human welfare—his ways are the ways of the jungle. His mind and his life are purely sordid, grossly and blindly self-centred—wholly material. He gains his object, but by Divine law not happiness, not satisfaction, not peace. He is outside the Kingdom of Heaven—the kingdom of harmony. He is living and working out of harmony with the ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... 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 more ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... He could not mistake what had happened. The woman had surged to the surface at last—the real woman, passionate, self-centred, undisciplined, but so piteous, after all, in this sudden subjection to the one tenderness that survived in her. She loved him and was jealous of her rival. That was the instinct which had swept all others aside. At ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... the woman Allan Gerard had chosen, Flavia thought in bitter wonder; this self-centred, hysterical girl whose love could not survive the marring of her lover's outward beauty. Isabel could not bear to go to him; the irony of it sank deep into the girl who could scarcely bear to stay away. But Flavia turned to the mute Rupert, holding ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... he is 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
... joyful. It was not based on dreamy imagination; it was based on the historic person of Christ. It was not the result of mystic exaltation; it was the result of a study of the Gospels. It was not, above all, self-centred; it led him to seek for fellowship with others. As the boy devoured the Gospel story, he was impressed first by the drama of the Crucifixion; and often pondered on the ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... her desire for revenge. At the same time, she would not delay to inflict any injury, big or little, which would wound the object of her revenge and still leave him uncertain as to the source of the evil. She was a cold, self-centred woman, with many a thought of her own which never found expression, not even by so much as the glint of ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... 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 herself on their first meeting, ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... to wrest Andrew Dean from Lilian Swetnam! He 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 to ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett
... you. This is the spirit of continual prayer.[60] One of the most intuitive men we ever met had a desk at a city office where several other gentlemen were doing business constantly, and often talking loudly. Entirely undisturbed by the many various sounds about him, this self-centred faithful man would, in any moment of perplexity, draw the curtains of privacy so completely about him that he would be as fully inclosed in his own psychic aura, and thereby as effectually removed from all distractions, as though ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... these I 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. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 19, 1916 • Various
... their short bodies and bullet heads. The Brahman stands apart from both, tall and slim, with finely-modelled lips and nose, fair complexion, high forehead, and slightly cocoanut shaped skull—the man of self-centred refinement. He is an example of a class becoming the ruling power in a country, not by force of arms, but by the vigor of hereditary culture and temperance. One race has swept across India after another, dynasties have risen and fallen, religions have ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... it—I was proud and self-centred! In all our games, I would still be the Queen, because I was the tallest, the fairest, the ...
— Henrik Ibsen's Prose Dramas Vol III. • Henrik Ibsen
... would not yield to the temporary distortion of facts in the newspapers—at all events, it would not yield with a rush. Whether there was any chance of insidious sapping was precisely what the country was too indifferent to discover. Indifferent, apathetic, self-centred—until whenever, down the wind, across the Atlantic, came the faint far music of the call to arms. Then the old dog of war that has his kennel in every man rose and shook himself, and presently ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... the extent 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
... Nikolaus Franz Niembsch Edler von Strehlenau, 1802-1850). A gifted musician, Lenau was also a master of the melody of words, and his nature-feeling was unusually deep and true. Abnormally proud, self-centred and sensitive as he was, Lenau was born to unhappiness and disillusionment; his journey to America, begun with the most generous anticipations, ended in homesickness and bitter disappointment. Before he had reached middle life, his genius went out in the darkness of insanity. The picturesque and ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... friezes of the Parthenon, is something quite distinct from the beauty of a naked boy playing with an arrow, or a troop of Athenian citizens on horseback. These are the deathless forms of the happy Olympians, high above the cares and turmoil of the finite, self-centred and independent. It is the Paradise age of the world, before the knowledge of good and evil, before sin and death came; the worship of the Visible, when God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. Hence the air of repose, of eternal duration, that marks these figures. They ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... 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 ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... Pilot, in the glory of his prime, Lies in woe-impelling silence, dead before his hour or time, Victim of a mind self-centred in ...
— Poems of Power • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... of his strong robust figure, the Conde had an excessively nervous and impressionable temperament. The slightest emotion upset him and excited him to an indescribable extent. Such intense sensibility was the result of heredity as well as education. His father, Colonel Campo, had been a self-centred sensitive man, of such keen susceptibility that he was quite a martyr to it the last years of his life. Everybody in Lancia recollected the interesting touching episode which closed the ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... self-centred we are!" Mrs. Valentin murmured, leaning across to claim a look from Elsie. "I realize it the moment we get outside our own little treadmill. We do nothing but take thought for what we shall eat and drink and wherewithal we shall be clothed. I haven't thought ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... had reached its full possibilities in her as yet—hatred for her benefactor. Other more feminine passions might indeed flare up in Olga Ivanovna's heart with abnormal and painful violence... but she had not the cold pride, nor the intense strength of will, nor the self-centred egoism, without which ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... in Afric's burning sand—to be precise, at the Cape—that, on the approach of danger, the ostrich secreted his self-centred head, and here from time to time his plumes were plucked from him ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 22, 1914 • Various
... thirteen-year-old Catie made known her matrimonial plans. Mrs. Brenton liked Catie well enough, but not too well. She could have dreamed of another sort of wife for her boy, for Catie's crudeness occasionally irritated her, Catie's self-centred ambition, her intervals of density sometimes came upon Mrs. Brenton's nerves. However, girls were scarce upon the horizon of the Brentons. Catie was not perfect; but, at least, she might be infinitely worse. And Scott would be sure to need ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... the telephone and the will had been there to confess to Cranbourne that her allegiance to his side existed no longer, but even in this her honesty had broken down. She saw herself, as she hesitated on the threshold, a wretched mercenary creature—the sport of greed and jealousy—self-centred and governed by thought of gain. It was not a pleasant reflection. For the doubtful blessing of being wife to an unscrupulous millionaire she had deafened her ears to the call of every ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... King The dark self-centred Captain stood, And law and right and peace went down In that red sea ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... 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 paralyzing abuses. And if we look ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... best 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 ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... 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 ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... Sikh. Warriors and statesmen came and went; but there was no egress, and no wish ... in normal times to leave their homes. The outside world was far, and from all accounts inferior to the pleasant valley.... So the Kashmiris lived their self-centred life, ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... her spoon against her saucer. Was there no power equal to teaching this masterful, self-centred creature that a woman was a woman and not a cold abstraction composed merely of the generalized attributes of the race, male and female alike? She had been his guide to-night, when she might have left him to his own helpless flounderings: might he not try now to show some slight shade of interest ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... it all: of smiling, with tears raining upon her heart, of listening to the complaints of customers, the grievance of poor Bessie upstairs—poor unreasonable, self-centred Bessie, whom yet she so loved—when she was herself like to drown in trouble. If only the girls could find homes—Deleah she knew would provide for Franky—she would shut up the hateful shop, would give up the humiliating struggle—she being an ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann
... exuberance. It indeed seemed an admirable plan. It relieved him from the nightmare of his wife's continual presence, and this he expressed to himself by thinking that it relieved her from his. It was not that he was deficient in sympathy for her, for in his self-centred way he was fond of her, but he could sympathise with her just as well at Ashbridge. He could do no good to her, and he had not for her that instinct of love which would make it impossible for him to leave her. He would also be spared the constant irritation of ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... 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 ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... temptation. This man had yielded. Prosperity was so unchanging with him that he had come to trust it, and did not feel the need of trusting anything else. He was strong enough to stand alone: so strong that he tried to stand without God. If he was like many self-centred men of our own time he probably did not admit this. But it is not profession which reveals where a man puts his trust. It is the practice and discipline of life, betraying us by a hundred commonplace ways, in spite of all the orthodoxy we boast. It is sorrow and duty ...
— Four Psalms • George Adam Smith
... breath they drew as they left his tent and found themselves again in the rich, warm, healthy world. He did not blame them. In their places, he would no doubt have felt just the same. But he was inevitably driven more and more into himself, and in his dogged efforts to get away from self-centred thought he turned with a sturdy determination to fancies about remote things, and especially to imaginings of the boy—the little fellow who loved him, and who, thank God, was not as yet "sorry for ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan |
