"Unsocial" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... But now and then he was visited by those gusts which come to the ascetic, when all life seemed suddenly caught up and devoured by a flame burning night and day, and going out mercifully, he knew not why, like a blown candle. However unsocial in the proper sense of the word, he by no means lacked company in these Oxford days. He knew many, both dons and undergraduates. His long stride, and determined absence of direction, had severely tried all those who could stomach so slow a pastime as walking for the sake of talking. The ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... coarse butcher's meat, which I don't regret, nor the alderman, a pinch o' snuff'—now, you know, I thought that was kind of me; but Miss Montenero took it all the wrong way, quite to heart so, you've no idear! After all, she may say what she pleases, but it's my notion the Jews is both a very unsocial and a very revengeful people; for, do you know, my lord, they wouldn't dine with us next day, though the alderman ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... to draw his taciturn housekeeper out did not succeed very well. She had that unsocial failing of reserved natures, silence habitually; and her reserve was always at its worst in the presence of the Captain's brilliant daughter. That youthful beauty fixed her blue eyes now and then on the dark, downcast face with an odd look—very ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... were solitary and unsocial. My uncle rarely spoke; he pointed for whatever he wanted, and the servant perfectly understood him. Indeed, his man John, or Iron John, as he was called in the neighborhood, was a counterpart of his master. He was a tall, bony old fellow, with a dry ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... family at this unaccountably unsocial behavior, their curiosity as to where he had been, their suspense as to what he did when alone so long in his bedroom, reached a tension that ...
— Tillie: A Mennonite Maid - A Story of the Pennsylvania Dutch • Helen Reimensnyder Martin
... of heaviness and pain; 10 And bare, at once, Captivity displayed Stands scoffing through the never-opened gate, Which nothing through its bars admits, save day, And tasteless food, which I have eat alone Till its unsocial bitterness is gone; And I can banquet like a beast of prey, Sullen and lonely, couching in the cave Which is my lair, and—it may be—my grave. All this hath somewhat worn me, and may wear, But must be borne. I stoop not to despair; 20 For I have battled with ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... at all played the part of Cinderella in the house. Her mother was exceedingly fond of her—partly, perhaps, because Nan alone took the trouble to humour all her mysterious nerve-miseries; while her sisters tolerated her, though they thought her unsocial. Even this dress, when it did appear—and a thousand times Nan had inwardly prayed that it might not be ready in time—was quite as pretty as theirs. It was very pretty indeed; but somehow, Nan, as she regarded herself in the big mirror, ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... and Mr. and Mrs. Graham, the lady being detained at home by a headach {sic}, the gentleman by a particular dislike to Mr. Taylor, who, he thought, had behaved in an ungentlemanly manner about a mortgage, in which they both happened to be interested. Mr. Graham was a man of a violent temper, and unsocial habits, generally taking little pains to conceal his feelings; and accordingly, his manner to Mr. Taylor was anything but flattering, though their acquaintance, at best, was but trifling. Mrs. Graham also disliked the whole family; and yet the intimacy between Jane and Adeline was allowed ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... to change after the war," said Phipps-Herrick, a big Harvard man from Bryn Mawr and a member of the Unsocial Socialists' Club. "We are going to make a new world. Must have a new education. Sweep away all the old stuff—languages, grammar, literature, philosophy, history, and all that. Put in something modern and practical. Montessori system for the little kids. Vocational ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke
... idle to prophesy. If mental culture ever succeeds in overcoming brutality and barbarism, and if it continues to make real progress, I do not think that any of the old systems of marriage will persist in their primary form. Primitive monogamy adapted to an unsocial savage condition, is incompatible with the social requirements which become more and more imposed upon humanity. Marriage by purchase and Islamite polygamy, which regard woman as merchandise and place her entirely under the dependence of man, ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... he is not altogether an unsocial being. Neither are his domestic habits always as invisible to the finite eye as he perhaps intends them to be. Tent-life has scant privacy, and the circumscribed accommodation of the Dean leads to frequent "slopping ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... after haranguing all and sundry, individually and collectively, on the economic unsoundness, the illogic, and the unsocial influence of War, took to her bed and stayed there until she found herself totally neglected. Arising and demanding an interview with the Commandant, she called him to witness that she entered a formal ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... something opposed to them has acquired an ephemeral propriety from the fancy of the great. But in real good breeding there is always a reason. It is far too little attended to in England in any class, though, from acting as a continual corrective to selfish and unsocial affections, it is peculiarly requisite in all. Good manners consist in a constant maintenance of self-respect, accompanied by attention and deference to others; in correct language, gentle tones of voice, ease, and quietness in movements and action. They repress no ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... They made her want to hug them, to protect them, to give them life. But this very love, based on pity and despair, was only a bondage and a pain to her. She loved best of all the animals, that were single and unsocial as she herself was. She loved the horses and cows in the field. Each was single and to itself, magical. It was not referred away to some detestable social principle. It was incapable of soulfulness and tragedy, which ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... from isolation and partly from absorption in labor, is the most unsocial man in New England. The farmers are comparatively few who go into society at all, who ever dine with their neighbors, or who take any genuine satisfaction in the company of the women whom their wives invite to tea. They may possibly ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... and besides, if you must know it, I ate an excellent game-breakfast two hours ago, while laggards like you were still abed." In the winter, which is the only season when I have been able to observe him, the shrike is to the last degree unsocial, and I have known him to stay for a month in one spot all by himself, spending a good part of every day perched upon a telegraph wire. He ought not to be very happy, with such a disposition, one would ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... shoulders in displeasure. "I thought to have lodged him in the solere chamber," said he; "but since he is so unsocial to Christians, e'en let him take the next stall to Isaac the Jew's.—Anwold," said he to the torchbearer, "carry the Pilgrim to the southern cell.—I give you good-night," he added, "Sir Palmer, with small ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... very anxious to attend Swanenburch's classes. He was a hesitating, awkward youth, and on this account was regarded as unsocial. For a year the boy looked on, listened, and made straight marks and curves and all that. He did not read, and the world of art was a ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... society, the expression of the separation and the alienation of man from man. The political democracy is Christian to the extent that it regards every individual as the sovereign, the supreme being, but it means the individual in his uncultivated, unsocial aspect, the individual in his fortuitous existence, the individual just as he is, the individual as he is destroyed, lost, and alienated through the whole organization of our society, as he is given under the dominance of inhuman conditions and elements, in a word, the individual who ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... aliens having no hostile disposition toward the people they were compelled to criticize; honourably granting, that this people has a great history. Even such has the Lion, with Homer for the transcriber of his deeds. But the gentle aliens would image our emergence from wildness as the unsocial spectacle presented by the drear menagerie Lion, alone or mated; with hardly an animated moment save when the raw red joint is beneath his paw, reminding him ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... were pleasing, because she seemed pleased. Alone, the scene would have been dull and insipid: the participation of it with her gave it relish. Let the gloomy monk, sequestered from the world, seek unsocial pleasures in the bottom of his cell! Let the sublimated philosopher grasp visionary happiness, while pursuing phantoms dressed in the garb of truth! Their supreme wisdom is supreme folly: and they mistake ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... an instant would I try to deceive you about us! Look at us closely, I ask, and—decide for yourself! I am forty-eight years old. I am inexcusably bad-tempered,—very quick to anger, and not, I fear, of great mercy. I am moody. I am selfish. I am most distinctly unsocial. But I am not, I believe, stingy,—nor ever intentionally unfair. My child is a cripple,—and equally bad-tempered as myself. No one but a mercenary has ever coped with her. And she shows it. We have lived alone for six years. All of our clothes, ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... Astor, the chief heir of John Jacob Astor's twenty million dollars, was fifty-six years old. A tall, ponderous man, his eyes were small, contracted, with a rather vacuous look, and his face was sluggish and unimpressionable. Extremely unsocial and taciturn, he never betrayed emotion and generally was destitute of feeling. He took delight in affecting a carelessly-dressed, slouchy appearance as though deliberately notifying all concerned that one with such wealth as he was privileged to ignore the formulas of punctilious society. ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... offspring inclined her to a permanent union, and doubtless natural selection favored the groups in which parents co-operated in caring for the offspring. But assuming a relation permanent enough to be called marriage, the man was still, as compared with the woman, unsettled and unsocial. He secured food by violence or cunning, and hunting and fighting were fit expressions ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... Richard was not unsocial in his habits; and soon became the husband of a fair-haired wife,—the daughter of a countryman who, like himself, had established commercial relations at Para. In a few years after, several sweet children called him "father,"—only two of whom survived to prattle in his ears this endearing appellation, ...
— Our Young Folks, Vol 1, No. 1 - An Illustrated Magazine • Various
... June 25, when happening to dine at Clifton's eating-house, in Butcher-row[1178], I was surprized to perceive Johnson come in and take his seat at another table. The mode of dining, or rather being fed, at such houses in London, is well known to many to be particularly unsocial, as there is no Ordinary, or united company, but each person has his own mess, and is under no obligation to hold any intercourse with any one. A liberal and full-minded man, however, who loves to talk, will break through ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... whose unsocial breast Locks from the world his useless stores. Wealth by the bounteous only is enjoyed, Whose treasures, in diffusive good employed, The rich return of fame and friends procure, And 'gainst a sad reverse a ...
— Book of Wise Sayings - Selected Largely from Eastern Sources • W. A. Clouston
... dangerous. But in his disappointment he yelled so loudly that Madame Bonaparte heard him; and as she had quite a fancy for her mameluke, I was sharply scolded. However, this poor Ali was of such an unsocial temperament that he got into difficulties with almost every one in the household, and at last was sent away to Fontainebleau, to take the ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... said little; but I didn't mind that. I had known him for years, and had always found something soothing and companionable in his long abstentions from speech. His silence was never unsocial; it was bland as a natural hush; one felt one's self included in it, not left out. He stroked his beard and gazed absently at me; and when we had finished our coffee and liqueurs we ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... meal the farm hands and negro house-servants remarked in Fownes not merely his customary unsocial silence, but an abstraction more obvious than usual. A gird or two from the rougher of his fellow-labourers was wholly unnoted by him, and though he ate heartily, it was with such entire unconsciousness ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... let us remember what was said before—that a man should cling to immortality, and leave behind him children's children to be the servants of God in his place for ever. All this and much more may be truly said by way of prelude about the duty of marriage. But if a man will not listen, and remains unsocial and alien among his fellow-citizens, and is still unmarried at thirty-five years of age, let him pay a yearly fine;—he who of the highest class shall pay a fine of a hundred drachmae, and he who is of the second class a fine of seventy drachmae; the third class shall pay sixty ...
— Laws • Plato
... shepherd, the moment he caught sight of me, put up his pipe, whistled to his dogs and rejoined the flock. I was dissatisfied with his unsocial retreat. I felt, with renewed force, that a note was lacking to the full harmony of my life, and I threw myself upon a bank. I tried not to see the artificial roads of the forest, alive with city carriages. I believed myself lost in a primeval wood, and I examined the state of my heart. I perceived ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... stature that tribal unions were found good. Among insects especially the biologist finds many types of organized living things, ranging widely from the solitary individual—a counterpart of something even more primitive than the most unsocial savage now existing—up to communities that rival human civilization, as regards the concerted effect of the diversified lives of the component units. The student of the whole of living nature is favored still more in that he learns how the make-up of such a simple ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... noisy that it caused his sable partner to thrust her vacant and circular countenance through an open window of the scullery of the villa, to demand the reason of a merriment that to her faithful feelings appeared to be a little unsocial. ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... that barbarous mixture of life and death, he called it, which no man will accept who has won the spirit of collective humanity. But he revolted not because he was tolerant of evil; on the contrary to damn sins was for him a weak and unsocial solution; evil had not to be damned but to be fought down. Whether this vision of Christ weeping because he could not save Judas was un-Christian, or more Christian than Christianity itself, we need not discuss here; ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... altruism and public spirit, either vanished or shrank to shadowy simulacra. In contemporary history currents and cross-currents, eddies and whirlpools, became so numerous and bewildering that it is not easy to determine the direction of the main stream. Unsocial tendencies coexisted with collectivity of effort, both being used as weapons against the larger community and each being set down as a manifestation of democracy. Against every kind of authority the world, or some of its influential sections, was up in revolt, and the emergence ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... in his own way. He is let alone in a way so terrible, that similar treatment would be social death to a man of culture. We repeat, there is nothing like absolute individuality, except among isolated and unsocial savages. In an advanced state of society, human interests become interrelated—a complete network of complexity; and what any particular individual does becomes a matter of interest to many, since the many are, to ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... natural for the boys to grow up together, their lives blending in childhood association and affection. It is interesting to think what the effect would have been upon the characters of both if they had been reared in close companionship. How would John's stern, rugged, unsocial nature have affected the gentle spirit of Jesus? What impression would the brightness, sweetness, and affectionateness of Jesus have made on the ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... my brother, for I was now alone, with no being at all assimilating in age, with whom I could exchange a word. Of late years, from being almost constantly at school, I had cast aside, in a great degree, my unsocial habits and natural reserve, but in the desolate region in which we now were there was no school; and I felt doubly the loss of my brother, whom, moreover, I tenderly loved for his own sake. Books I had none, at least such "as I cared about;" and with respect to the old volume, the wonders ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... difficult for him here: his external self; his character, ever so little shy and unsocial; his temperament, which was ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... the only one emasculated by his successor. What can be more august than our rites? The first dignitaries of the republic are emulous to administer them: nothing of low or venal has any place in them; nothing pusillanimous, nothing unsocial and austere. I speak of them as they were; before Superstition woke up again from her slumber, and caught to her bosom with maternal love the alluvial monsters of the Nile. Philosophy, never fit for the ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... will see the others going without knowing where or why, he will sometimes lose pleasures because he did not hear the talk that was going on around him and no one thought to tell him. This has a tendency to make him bitter and unsocial. ...
— What the Mother of a Deaf Child Ought to Know • John Dutton Wright
... them had taken a fancy to Mr. Travis; which certainly was not strange, for nature had not gifted him with many charms, either of personal appearance or manners. The rejection of his friendly proffers had caused him to take a dislike to Dick and Henry, whom he considered stiff and unsocial. ...
— Ragged Dick - Or, Street Life in New York with the Boot-Blacks • Horatio Alger
... the world and mortify the flesh: divergent systems of ritual, theology and self-denial promised happiness but all agreed in thinking it normal as well as laudable that a man should devote his life to meditation and study. Compared with this frame of mind the teaching of the Buddha is not unsocial, unpractical and mysterious but human, business-like and clear. We are inclined to see in the monastic life which he recommended little but a useless sacrifice but it is evident that in the opinion of his contemporaries ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... at bottom and even capable of inspiring genuine attachment in particular cases, never become generally popular. When Mr. Pennroyal was accused of stinginess, it was not considered that he had a great many liabilities to meet, and perhaps some big debts to pay off. When it was said that he was unsocial and cynical, it was forgotten that these very remarks were enough to make him so. And when he was blamed for neglecting his wife, and profiting by her demise—well, now, how is a gentleman to pay attentions to an idiot, or to be inconsolable when Providence gives him fifty thousand down ...
— Archibald Malmaison • Julian Hawthorne
... less dangerous on the other hand to disperse them, as they might reunite and make head again, being numerous, poor, and warlike. Therefore wisely weighing with himself, that man by nature is not a wild or unsocial creature, neither was he born so, but makes himself what he naturally is not, by vicious habit; and that again on the other side, he is civilized and grows gentle by a change of place, occupation, and manner of life, as beasts themselves that are wild by nature, become tame and ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... and unsocial, in a country where the common diet is of another nature. But I am sure sickness, lowness, and oppression, are much more so. These difficulties, after all, happen only at first, while the cure is about; for, when good health comes, all these oddnesses and specialities will vanish, and then ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... far to seek. The Clerici were a class debarred from domesticity, devoted in theory to celibacy, in practice incapable of marriage. They were not so much unsocial or anti-social as extra-social; and while they gave a loose rein to their appetites, they respected none of those ties, anticipated none of those home pleasures, which consecrate the animal desires in everyday existence as we ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... continued, blushing slightly, 'that tales of the weird kind were made to be told, not written. The action of a teller is wanted to give due effect to all stories of incident; and I hope that a time will come when, as of old, instead of an unsocial reading of fiction at home alone, people will meet together cordially, and sit at the feet of a professed romancer. I am going to tell my tales before a London public. As a child, I had a considerable power in arresting the attention ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... municipal corporations of that universal kingdom are not morally at liberty, at their pleasure, and on their speculations of a contingent improvement, wholly to separate and tear asunder the bands of their subordinate community, and to dissolve it into an unsocial, uncivil, unconnected chaos of elementary principles. It is the first and supreme necessity only, a necessity that is not chosen, but chooses, a necessity paramount to deliberation, that admits no discussion ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... unsocial life, it seemed to Fan; and yet she felt convinced in her mind that her teacher was warm-hearted, a lover of her fellow-creatures, and glad to be with them; and that she should seem so lonely and friendless, so apart even in her own home, puzzled ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... deficiency. It seemed as if the wilderness of knowledge expanded and grew more perplexed as I advanced. Every height gained only revealed a wider region to be traversed, and nearly filled me with despair. I grew moody, silent, and unsocial, but studied on doggedly and incessantly. The only person with whom I held any conversation was the worthy man in whose house I was quartered. He was honest and well meaning, but perfectly ignorant, and I believe would have liked me much better if I had not been so much addicted to reading. ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... pleasant. One great difficulty is that the farm is lonely. People write about the pleasures of solitude, but they are found only in books. He who lives long alone becomes insane. A hermit is a madman. Without friends and wife and child, there is nothing left worth living for. The unsocial are the enemies of joy. They are filled with egotism and envy, with vanity and hatred. People who live much alone become narrow and suspicious. They are apt to be the property of one idea. They begin to think there is no use in anything. They look upon ...
— The Ghosts - And Other Lectures • Robert G. Ingersoll
... cry, what an unsocial principle! Have we at last, with difficulty, brought it to the point that the accursed one-year examination[33] is abrogated, and now are we again to be condemned according to this so-called standard ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... Porter to misunderstand his curt speech and unsocial manner. She stared at him and colored slightly. Lifting her reins lightly, she said: "You certainly do not seem like most of the miners ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... were she constant long, Would leave us few adventures for our song. A wicked elfin roved this land around, Whose joys proceeded from the griefs he found; Envy his name: —his fascinating eye From the light bosom drew the sudden sigh; Unsocial he, but with malignant mind, He dwelt with man, that he might curse mankind; Like the first foe, he sought th' abode of Joy Grieved to behold, but eager to destroy; Round blooming beauty, like the wasp, he flew, Soil'd the fresh sweet, and changed the rosy ...
— Miscellaneous Poems • George Crabbe
... were carried into the heart of Asia, and raised those old dotard nations to a second youth; inspired them with power and light; flooded their lands with new and noble ideas, and brought sluggish and unsocial peoples into commerce, unity, ...
— Summerfield - or, Life on a Farm • Day Kellogg Lee
... a decided conviction that, anywhere but on the collar of his coat, or the date of monthly imprisonments, his distinguishing number was the most unpleasant and unsocial of the whole multiplication table, further proceeded to illustrate his remarks by proposing glasses two and three, to the great delight and inebriation of the small James Pipkin, who was suddenly aroused from a dreamy contemplation of two policemen, and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 9, 1841 • Various
... the unsocial character of Thoreau's theory of life has been one of the most serious charges against it, his fine series of thoughts on love and marriage in this volume become peculiarly interesting. "Love must be as much a light as a flame." ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... one at each end, With a smaller bulge and a hollow between; Patches of whortleberry and bay; Accidents of open green, Sprinkled with loose slabs square and gray, Like graveyards for ages deserted; a few Unsocial thistles; an elder or two, 50 Foamed over with blossoms white as spray; And on the whole island never a tree Save a score of sumachs, high as your knee. That crouch in hollows where they may, (The cellars where once stood a village, men say,) Huddling for warmth, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... political life he had been so generally feared that he was thought unsocial, and it is not difficult to explain the causes of that opinion. The life, morals, and fidelity of Piombo made him obnoxious to most courtiers. In spite of the fact that delicate missions were constantly intrusted to his discretion which to any other man about the court would ...
— Vendetta • Honore de Balzac
... the stomach as a centre. And the truth is, it is impossible for those men ever to participate of generous and princely joy, such as enkindles a height of spirit in us and sends forth to all mankind an unmade hilarity and calm serenity, that have taken up a sort of life that is confined, unsocial, inhuman, and uninspired towards the esteem of the world and the love of mankind. For the soul of man is not an abject, little, and ungenerous thing, nor doth it extend its desires (as polyps do their claws) unto eatables only,—yea, these are in an instant of time taken off by the ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... dining hours, so that, as Mr. Adams informed me, it was difficult to arrange a dinner that would not be broken up somewhat by an unexpected debate, or a division in the House of Commons. The precedence of rank had to be carefully observed. The unsocial habit of not introducing guests to each other tended to restrain conversation and make the dinner dull and heavy. Still the forms and usages in social life in London are much like those in Washington. But here the ordinary sessions of each House ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... says, "by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... living in isolated houses, had little incentive to industry. Their wants were few and easily satisfied, and their time was spent swinging in a hammock or in their favorite amusements. The obligation to serve in the militia forced them to abandon their indolent and unsocial habits and appear in the towns on Sundays for drill. They were thus compelled to be better dressed, and a salutary spirit of emulation was produced. This created new wants, which had to be supplied by increased labor, their manners were softened, and if their morals did ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk
... race-courses within one hundred and fifty miles of Boolabong. At such places Harry Heathcote was never seen. It would have been as easy to seduce the Bishop of Brisbane into a bet as Harry Heathcote. He had never even drank a nobbler with one of the Brownbies. To their thinking, he was a proud, stuck-up, unsocial young cub, whom to rob was a pleasure, and to ruin ...
— Harry Heathcote of Gangoil • Anthony Trollope
... the religious manners of Mary; partly by the cold and unsocial temper of William, who shunned excess, not perhaps because it was criminal, but because it was derogatory; partly by the political fashion of the day, which was to disown the profligacy that marked the partisans of the Stuarts; but, most of all, by ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... house thinking of the mighty Huw, till the door opened, and out came the dark-featured man, the poet's descendant, whom I saw when visiting the place in company with honest John Jones—he had now a spade in his hand and was doubtless going to his labour. As I knew him to be of a rather sullen unsocial disposition, I said nothing to him, but proceeded on my way. As I advanced the valley widened, the hills on the west receding to some distance from the river. Came to Tregeiriog a small village, which takes its name from the brook; Tregeiriog signifying the hamlet or village ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... an unsocial being whom no one greatly liked. He had been the first man to bring cattle into the Bad Lands, and it was some of his cattle, held by Ferris and Merrifield on shares, which Roosevelt had bought in the ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... was near happiness that morning,—unbelievably near. By nature unsocial, by habit, city inbred, artificially taciturn, there came with the primitive happiness of the moment the concomitant primitive desire for companionship. He smiled self-tolerantly when, obeying an instinct, he wound the lines around the seat, and went ahead to the man, who grinned companionably ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... charm grew upon me moment by moment. There was in his manner a sort of refined coquetry of amiability which I found irresistible. It was combined with a frankness of sympathy and interest subtly flattering to a man of my unsocial habit of mind. I was conscious every now and then that he was drawing me out; but to be drawn out so gently and genially was, to me, a novel and delightful experience. It produced in me one of those effusions of communicativeness to which, I am told, all reticent people ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... observed that though quite without morals of any kind, she is not ab initio or intrinsically a she-fiend like Valerie or Lisbeth. She does not do harm for harm's sake, nor even directly to gratify spite, greed, or other purely unsocial and detestable passions. She is a type of feminine sensuality of the less ambitious and restless sort. Given a decent education, a fair fortune, a good-looking and vigorous husband to whom she had taken a fancy, and no special temptation, and she might ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... He re-lived the barren years when, longing for love and companionship, he found solace in a cold pride that carried him along through school and into college, with a reputation for hard, unyielding work, and unsocial habits. ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... transcending the happiness of one's own soul. He just wanted to be saved and tried to love God for that purpose with all his might. But this careful self-cultivation made his religion self-centered; it was, compared even with the professions of the Protestants and of the Jesuits, personal and unsocial. ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... querists usually left some offering upon a stone, at a distance from his dwelling; if it was money, or any article which did not suit him to accept, he either threw it away, or suffered it to remain where it was without making use of it. On all occasions his manners were rude and unsocial; and his words, in number, just sufficient to express his meaning as briefly as possible, and he shunned all communication that went a syllable beyond the matter in hand. When winter had passed away, and his garden began to afford him herbs and vegetables, he confined himself ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... but one of the fragments,—a body fast rising at the time into a position of importance, which the split prevented it from ever fully realizing. The question of the fifty years with which the period began was that which fixed the Cameronian body, not merely in a condition of unsocial seclusion in its relation with all other churches, but even detached it from its allegiance to the State, and placed it in circumstances of positive rebellion. Perhaps the history of this latter body, as embodied in its older ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... a perpetual allowance of half-pay to all the armies of earth; or indeed, whilst my hand is in, I charge it with full pay. And I strictly enjoin upon my trustees and executors, but especially upon the man in the moon, if his unsocial lip has left him one spark of gentlemanly feeling, that he and they shall construe all claims liberally; nay, with that riotous liberality which is safe and becoming, when applied to a fund so inexhaustible. Yes, reader, my fund will be inexhaustible, because the ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... folks, and prophesied that any amount of evil would befall her. She did not know that it is a trait of human nature to condemn that, which, through ignorance, people cannot appreciate the value. Therefore she mourned in secret, and blamed herself for being unsocial, and tried hard to ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... often morose and unsocial—perhaps because he is not understood, perhaps because he falls so short of his own ideals. Often he does not find kindred spirits anywhere. I do not think we should drive such a man into conditions that hurt, but I do believe that if he is truly artistic, ...
— The Untroubled Mind • Herbert J. Hall
... had few opportunities for serious conversation with her. There was always some butterfly or another flitting about, and when Philip showed by his manner that he was not pleased, Ruth laughed merrily enough and rallied him on his soberness—she declared he was getting to be grim and unsocial. He talked indeed more with Alice than with Ruth, and scarcely concealed from her the trouble that was in his mind. It needed, in fact, no word from him, for she saw clearly enough what was going forward, and knew her ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... in most communities 90 per cent, or more of the citizens are law-abiding and would not consciously do anything to destroy the children of the commonwealth, it ought to be a simple matter to restrain the few that are lawless and unsocial. There can be no possible doubt that any community that is fully alive to its needs and responsibilities can bring about just such civic and social conditions as it may desire. To help accomplish these purposes, it is necessary that efficient ...
— Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training • Mosiah Hall
... recognition to many other injunctions of the Master and to many significant incidents in his public ministry. Exhaustive treatment of this subject is, of course, impossible here. Briefly it may be remarked, that Jesus looked upon wealth as tending oftentimes to foster an unsocial spirit. Rich men are liable to become enemies of the brotherhood Jesus sought to establish, by reason of their covetousness and contracted sympathies. The rich man is in danger of erecting false standards of manhood, of ignoring the highest ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... them to death, and at the same time he thought it wrong to suffer them to disperse, because they were not only numerous, but warlike and necessitous, and therefore would probably knit again and give future trouble. He reflected, that man by nature is neither a savage nor an unsocial creature; and when he becomes so, it is by vices contrary to nature; yet even then he may be humanized by changing his place of abode, and accustoming him to a new manner of life; as beasts that are ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... encounter a man who was certainly not commonplace, but who seems to have been devoid of either poetical or humanitarian fervour. He figures as intent upon his worldly interests, accumulating a massive fortune, and spending lavishly upon the building of Castle Goring; in his old age, penurious, unsocial, and almost churlish in his habits. His passion was to domineer and carry his point; of this the poet may have inherited something. His ideal of success was wealth and worldly position, things to which the poet was, ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... absolutely opposed to our present system, but our present system is wasteful, artificial, illogical, unsocial, and therefore vicious. I have said enough as to the falsities, the dangers and the failures of bulk-production through the operations of capitalism, the factory system and advertising, but its ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... vanity; with this vice he was possessed to a degree little short of madness. Benevolence to the whole species, and want of feeling for every individual with whom the professors come in contact, form the character of the new philosophy. Setting up for an unsocial independence, this their hero of vanity refuses the just price of common labour, as well as the tribute which opulence owes to genius, and which when paid, honours the giver and the receiver: and then he pleads his beggary as an excuse for ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... push this notion so far as it might be carried; because, if propagated, it might be of unsocial or unnatural consequence; since women of virtue would perhaps be more liable to suffer by the mistrusts and caprices or bad-hearted and foolish-headed husbands, than those who can screen themselves from detection by arts and hypocrisy, to ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... routine that is wearisome and debilitating to him, or tie him to her apron strings when he needs that occasional solitude which is one of the most sacred of human rights, he does so because he has no right to impose eccentric standards of expenditure and unsocial habits on her, and because these conditions have produced by their pressure so general a custom of chaining wedded couples to one another that married people are coarsely derided when their partners break the chain. ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... the conversation which ensued. He had again resumed his taciturn and unsocial demeanor, and now, with folded arms, he stood in the deep recess of a curtained window, sometimes looking gloomily out into the night, anon glancing at the little knot of adventurers, and personages of doubtful reputation, who occasionally added another to the meagre group that were ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... movement of the early Grecian style. They seem rather to be repelling extremes. But extremes meet more often than is supposed. And there really are some remarkable features of conformity even as to this point between the tendencies of Christian monachism and the unsocial sociality of Paganism. However, it is not with this view that we have pressed the parallel. Not by way of showing a general affinity in virtues and latent powers, and thence deducing a probable affinity in results, but ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... drink and sensuality while they preach penitence and the joys of chastity, and while extolling poverty enrich themselves to the loss of their neighbors. For these the sad and silent cloister; for us, the crystalline fountain and the shady grove; for them, the rude and unsocial life of dungeon-like strongholds; for us, the charm of social life and culture; for them, intolerance and tyranny; for us, a ruler who is our father; for them, the darkness of ignorance; for us, letters and instruction ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... Adj. secluded, sequestered, retired, delitescent[obs3], private, bye; out of the world, out of the way; " the world forgetting by the world forgot " [Pope]. snug, domestic, stay-at-home. unsociable; unsocial, dissocial[obs3]; inhospitable, cynical, inconversable|, unclubbable, sauvage[Fr], troglodytic. solitary; lonely, lonesome; isolated, single. estranged; unfrequented; uninhabitable, uninhabited; tenantless; abandoned; deserted, deserted ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... hand-brake, get my hands on the curved ends of the roofs, and muscle myself up to the decks; while my disappointed pursuers, clustering on the platform beneath like dogs that have treed a cat, howl curses up at me and say unsocial things about ...
— The Road • Jack London
... their benefit be it said that in a society based economically upon the institution of private property social life is impossible without respect (respect here refers to acts, not to mental attitude) for private property. Crimes against property are distinctly unsocial. But respect for the rights of property is rapidly disintegrating both among trust magnates and proletarians. The Natural Rights Philosophy[6] still has much vitality in the middle classes, but as a broad statement it will hold good ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... now no longer gloomy and unsocial; but, considering himself as master of a secret stock of happiness, which he could enjoy only by concealing it, he affected to be busy in all schemes of diversion, and endeavoured to make others pleased with the state, of which he himself was weary. ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... right to go and love Mary. I was twice her age, an awkward, unsocial man, that would have blighted her youth. I was as wrong as wrong can be. But I never meant to tell her. I locked the grammar in my desk and the secret in my heart for a year. I couldn't bear to meet her in the village, and kept away from every place where she was likely to be. Then she came to ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... understanding. Another essay attempts a vivacious criticism of "common honesty," the moral standard of the average decent citizen, a code of negative virtues and moral mediocrity which is content to avoid the obvious unsocial sins and concerns itself but little to enforce positive benevolence. The reader who would meet Godwin at his best should turn to the essay On Servants. Starting from the universal reluctance of the upper and middle classes to allow ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... misjudge him, for he is rather old-fashioned in manner and plain in speech, and may seem unsocial, because he does not seek society. But those who know the cause of this forgive any little short-comings for the sake of the genuine goodness of the man. David had a great trouble some years ago and suffered much. He is learning ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... was not naturally cold, or proud, or unsocial; but as surely as brains can turn, and hearts break, and women die of grief, she was crazy, ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... infinite variety of the trees of these forests. They do not grow in clusters or masses of single species, like our oaks, beeches, and firs, but every tree is different from its neighbour, and they crowd upon each other in unsocial rivalry, each trying to overtop the other. For this reason we see the great straight trunks rising a hundred feet without a branch, and carrying their domes of foliage directly up to where the balmy breezes blow and the sun's rays quicken. Lianas hurry up ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... great personal charm, take infinite pains to cultivate all the little graces and qualities which go to make up popularity. If people who are naturally unsocial would only spend as much time and take as much pains as people who are social favorites in making themselves popular, they ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... belonging to the ex-duke of Lucca. A fourth division of dwellings is the Bagni Caldi, the highest point of all, the occupants whereof have to descend as if from an eyrie, to gain any of the other localities. They are a set of whom little seems to be known—quaint and unsocial personages, venturing out at dusk like bats and owls, and looking grimly on all but their immediate neighbours: the gentlemen, mostly gouty, or otherwise disabled; the fairer sex, isolated and ancient, with a marked predilection for close straw-bonnets, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 431 - Volume 17, New Series, April 3, 1852 • Various
... appear to her to be wisdom to second the efforts of their oppressors for their degradation or their misery, and to seek no consolation in the amiable feelings of their fellow-creatures for the stern rigour of their unsocial government. But, independently of all general principles, Miss Dacre could not but believe that it was the duty of the Catholic gentry to mix more with that world which so misconceived their spirit. Proud in her conscious knowledge ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... There is in all of them something cold and light and thin, something belonging to the imagination alone, which indicates a man but little disposed to multiply his relations, his points of contact, with society. If we read the six volumes of Note-Books with an eye to the evidence of this unsocial side of his life, we find it in sufficient abundance. But we find at the same time that there was nothing unamiable or invidious in his shyness, and above all that there was nothing preponderantly gloomy. The qualities to which the Note-Books ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... grandeur of the building, the almost savage aspect of the domain, the many melancholy and time-honored memories connected with both, had much in unison with the feelings of utter abandonment which had driven me into that remote and unsocial region of the country. Yet although the external abbey, with its verdant decay hanging about it, suffered but little alteration, I gave way, with a child-like perversity, and perchance with a faint hope of alleviating my sorrows, to a display of more than regal ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... said. "Congratulate me!—But first I must repeat my message from Mr. Bloomfield, who insists upon it that you break through your unsocial rule, and dine with him to-day. And now again congratulate me! My father has returned from India. It was he whom we called the mysterious stranger. As to the conflicting reports which had been spread of him in England, you shall hear all at leisure. But he has returned!—and he has ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... the eighteenth century, and, more particularly, determined the beginnings and the essential character of the world-wide Methodist movement. His gentle life presents very little of dramatic incident: he was a reserved, somewhat unsocial boy, greatly devoted to study and to the reading of poetry. He was given a most thorough education, and, while completing his university career, became acquainted with Friedrich Schlegel, and remained his most intimate ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... attributing to his son a tendency in the same direction. Fitzjames's hatred of all exaggeration, his resolute refusal to be either sentimental or optimistic, led him to insist upon the gloomy side of things. Moreover, he was still indolent; given to be slovenly in his work, and rather unsocial in his ways, though warmly attached to a few friends. My father, impressed by these symptoms, came to the conclusion that Fitzjames was probably unsuited for the more active professions for which a sanguine temper and a power of quickly attaching others are obvious qualifications. He therefore ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... eggs of a white or creamy-white ground-color, speckled with rufous and lavender. During the season of incubation and brood rearing the nuthatches retire to the depth of the woods, and are quiet, secretive, and unsocial, seldom betraying ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... offence frequently originates with the accuser. England is as truly the natural enemy of France, as France is of England, and perhaps more so. Separated from the rest of Europe, she has contracted an unsocial habit of manners, and imagines in others the jealousy she creates in herself. Never long satisfied with peace, she supposes the discontent universal, and buoyed up with her own importance, conceives herself the only object pointed ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... with told me his history. He had lived there many years, and everybody knew him, but nobody liked him,—a cunning, foxy, grabbing old rascal; unsocial, suspicious, unutterably mean. Never in all the years of his life in the village had he given a sixpence or a penny to anyone; nor a cabbage, nor an apple, nor had he ever lent a helping hand to a neighbour nor shown any ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... acute Anstie remarked, more than thirty years ago, in his work on Neuralgia: "It is a comparatively frequent thing to see an unsocial, solitary life (leading to the habit of masturbation) joined with the bad influence of an unhealthy ambition, prompting to premature and false work in literature and art." From the literary side, M. Leon Bazalgette has dealt with the tendency of much modern literature ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... mine, and am ravenous. The idea of talking reason to a hungry man! I know of a nice quiet restaurant which, at this hour, we'll have almost to ourselves. You surely won't be so unsocial as ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... Commodore himself, how seldom does he exercise it in cases where humanity demands it? Three years is a long time to spend in one ship, and to be at swords' points with its Captain and Lieutenants during such a period, must be very unsocial and every way irksome. No otherwise than thus, at least, can the remissness of some surgeons in remonstrating against ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... of this period do not belong to that third sex after which, according to some, the human race has ever striven—the constructive and purposeful third sex. They are wholly sexless, unsocial and futile beings, the negation of every masculine or feminine virtue. Their independence fettered by the iron rules of the Vatican and of their particular order, these creatures had nothing to do; and like the rest of us under ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... tastes were quiet, and she usually preferred spending her evenings with her mother in the quiet of their own home, to mingling in scenes of mirth and gaiety; and it was only upon a few occasions that she attended parties, that her friends might not think her unsocial. At one of these parties she chanced to meet her former schoolmate, Miss Carlton, whose only sign of recognition was a very formal bow. This gave her no uneasiness; she cherished no malice towards Miss Carlton; but her ...
— Stories and Sketches • Harriet S. Caswell
... however, as placing my approval upon everything pertaining to the management of the schools under consideration. I do not deny that in some cases teachers are employed who are not possessed of the proper spirit for doing the best work among us. They are sometimes haughty, unsocial, and unsympathetic, and find themselves among us because there is offered better pay for less work than was found in their own neighborhoods. But these do not vitiate the schools; they are exceptions. I think, too, that the faculties ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... musing for some minutes; and then as a slight noise was heard at one corner of the cell, said softly, "Ah, my friends, my comrades, the rats! it is their hour—I am glad I put aside the bread for them!" His eye brightened as it now detected those strange and unsocial animals venturing forth through a hole in the wall, and, darkening the moonshine on the floor, steal fearlessly towards him. He flung some fragments of bread to them, and for some moments watched their gambols ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Arjuna, those worthy, humane sentiments of peace and kindness and that noble resolution to forego even the kingdom rather than to acquire it through the shedding of the blood of his relatives. How incongruous to build up the lofty structure of a faith upon so unethical, unsocial, and cruel ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... to a man of high powers. With all his genial sociability, he was in a way self-centered. His associates often thought him,—and Lamon shares the opinion—not only moody and meditative, but unsocial, cold, impassive; bent on his own ends, and using other men as his instruments. Partly we may count this as the judgment of the crowd to whom Lincoln's inner life was unimaginable. He shared their social hours, and then withdrew into thoughts and feelings and purposes ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... or rise in color. Her feelings had become so deep and earnest, so truly those of a woman standing on the assured ground of fealty to another, that she was beyond her former girlish sensitiveness and its quick, involuntary manifestations. She said gently, "Pardon me, Mr. Graham, for my unsocial abstraction. You deserve better treatment for all your efforts for our enjoyment ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... himself, and everybody else ought to go. It was as much a social gathering as the dinner at the market ordinary, or the annual audit dinner of their common landlord. The dissenter, who declined to pay church-rates, was an unsocial person. He had left the circle. It was not the theology that they cared about, it was the social nonconformity. In a spiritual sense, too, the clergyman was the father of the parish, the shepherd of the flock—it was a part of ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... circumstances, they drew no blood now. My life was changed; my experience had been varied since I left X——, but Hunsden could not know this; he had seen me only in the character of Mr. Crimsworth's clerk—a dependant amongst wealthy strangers, meeting disdain with a hard front, conscious of an unsocial and unattractive exterior, refusing to sue for notice which I was sure would be withheld, declining to evince an admiration which I knew would be scorned as worthless. He could not be aware that since then youth and loveliness had been to ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... brilliant and more impulsive. He has a surly, unsocial disposition and uncertain temper, but can be very polite when he chooses. He has been known to neglect his regular business to assist an embarrassed young man over a rail fence, or entertain a party of picnickers from the ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... even had a picture admitted into the Female Artists' Exhibition. She was further convicted of preferring long, solitary rides to joining the numerous equestrian parties got up in the summer; but as public opinion had unanimously agreed that she must be engaged to Fane, the unsocial trait was excused ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... "for I have always seen a great similarity in the turn of our minds. We are each of an unsocial, taciturn disposition, unwilling to speak, unless we expect to say something that will amaze the whole room, and be handed down to posterity with all the eclat ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... good-natured Welsh uncle were repugnant to his nature; and after becoming an orphan, the solitary boy had no human object on which the deep capacity for tenderness of his occult nature could be exerted. Thus forced by his fate into solitariness of habits, and secreted emotions, he was deemed unsocial, and reproached for what he felt was his misfortune—the being wholly misunderstood by those his early lot was cast among. Hence his perverted ardour of affection was misplaced on the lower living world—dog, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... of all its social, or rather unsocial, iniquities and falsehoods, of all ingratitude and envy, in striving for an honest regeneration of ourselves, and through ourselves of humanity at large, convincing one another that man has developed by degrees into ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... sect. In little religious sects, accordingly, the morals of the common people have been almost always remarkably regular and orderly; generally much more so than in the established church. The morals of those little sects, indeed, have frequently been rather disagreeably rigorous and unsocial. ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... gloom profound.—The sickly taper, By glimmering through thy low-brow'd misty vaults (Furr'd round with mouldy damps, and ropy slime), Lets fall a supernumerary horror, And only serves to make thy night more irksome. 20 Well do I know thee by thy trusty yew, Cheerless, unsocial plant! that loves to dwell 'Midst skulls and coffins, epitaphs and worms: Where light-heel'd ghosts, and visionary shades, Beneath the wan cold moon (as fame reports) Embodied, thick, perform their mystic rounds: No other merriment, dull tree! is thine. See yonder ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... them. It is most unpleasant to converse with such persons on subjects of taste, philosophy, or religion. Of course there is no reasoning with them: for they do not possess the facts, on which the reasoning must be grounded. Nothing is possible, but a naked dissent, which implies a sort of unsocial contempt; or, what a man of kind dispositions is very likely to fall into, a heartless tacit acquiescence, which borders too nearly ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... chronicler of the Leigh family, 'and his wife was his counterpart. The spirit of the pugnacious Theophilus dwelt not in him; nor that eternal love of company which distinguished the other brothers, yet he was by no means unsocial.' Towards the end of his life he removed to Bath, being severely afflicted with the gout, and here he died in 1763. His peaceful wife, Jane Walker, was descended on her mother's side from a sufficiently warlike family; ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... decency, Jeremy Collier, a non-juring clergyman, attacked the stage. His charge against the authors was unquestionably right; but his attack upon the stage itself, exhibited a disposition splenetic almost to misanthropy, and an austerity of principle urged to unsocial ferocity. In his fury he renounced the idea of reforming the stage; he was for abolishing it entirely. He attacked the poets with "unconquerable pertinacity, with wit in the highest degree keen and sarcastic, and with all those powers exalted and invigorated by just confidence in his cause."[3] ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... 'When we take into the computation what we have saved, and what we have gained, by this agreeable sail, it is a great deal.' He observed, 'it is very disagreeable riding in Sky. The way is so narrow, one only at a time can travel, so it is quite unsocial; and you cannot indulge in meditation by yourself, because you must be always attending to the steps which your horse takes.' This was a just and clear ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... In this unsocial mood, they refused an offered game of hare-and-hounds, and evading the singers on the gymnasium steps—the song was the "Gypsy Trail"—they sauntered on down the pergola to the lane, sprinkled with fallen apple blossoms. At the end of the lane, they came suddenly ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster |
