"Egoistic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... admit, and also suppressed or "repressed" impulses. As a result of being repressed they have the peculiarity of being in general inaccessible to consciousness. [Freud speaks particularly of crassly egoistic actuations. The criminal element in them is ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... wrath continued flinging undeserved insults at each other. I believe that never in their lives, even in delirium, had they uttered so much that was unjust, cruel, and absurd. The egoism of the unhappy was conspicuous in both. The unhappy are egoistic, spiteful, unjust, cruel, and less capable of understanding each other than fools. Unhappiness does not bring people together but draws them apart, and even where one would fancy people should be united by the similarity of their ...
— The Schoolmaster and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... individuality on which none may trespass. But in this case the barriers are thrown down; and thus the love of unrestrained activity is gratified. Finally, there is an exaltation of the sympathies. Egoistic pleasures of all kinds are doubled by another's sympathetic participation; and the pleasures of another are added to the egoistic pleasures. Thus, round the physical feeling forming the nucleus of the whole, are gathered the feelings produced ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... maintain that no dream is inspired by other than egoistic emotions. The ego in the dream does not, indeed, represent only my friend, but stands for myself also. I identify myself with him because the fate of his discovery appears to me typical of the acceptance of my own. ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... tutelage and a vehement struggle against the autocratic institutions which the young ruler, under Russian guidance, endeavoured to inaugurate. Both movements were symptomatic of the determination of a strong-willed and egoistic race, suddenly liberated from secular oppression, to enjoy to the full the moral and material privileges of liberty. In the assembly at Trnovo the popular party had adopted the watchword "Bulgaria for the Bulgarians," and a considerable anti-Russian contingent was included in its ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... had been as egoistic as love generally is, it would have been greater than the egoism of his vanity—or of his generosity, if you like—and all this could not have happened. He would not have hit upon that renunciation at which one does not know whether to grin or shudder. ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... place, moral conduct, which is nothing but the expression of Buddha-nature in action, implies the assertion of self and the furtherance of one's interests. On this point is based the half-truth of the Egoistic theory. Secondly, it is invariably accompanied by a feeling of pleasure or satisfaction when it fulfils its end. This accidental concomitance is mistaken for its essence by superficial observers who adhere to the Hedonistic theory. Thirdly, it conduces to the furtherance of the material and spiritual ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... purchase of stamps for these egoistic missives the remainder of the time passed, and before he realized the half-hour was gone, he saw his father standing ...
— Steve and the Steam Engine • Sara Ware Bassett
... the man who, making himself a slave to accumulation, absorbs an inordinate share of the trade or profession he is engaged in, makes life harder for all others engaged in it, and excludes from it many who might otherwise gain competencies. Thus, besides the egoistic motive, there are two altruistic motives which should deter ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... a Constitution is the immediate stultification of intellects. Art, science, public works, everything, is consumed by a horribly egoistic feeling, the leprosy of the time. Three hundred of your bourgeoisie, set down on benches, will only think of planting poplars. Tyranny does great things lawlessly, while Liberty will scarcely trouble herself to ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... peculiar to unsensitive and egoistic young men kept Hazlitt to his quest. His steady rise in his profession, the growing respect of his fellows for his name, fired him with a sense of success. Rachel had become the victim of this sense. Of all the men she knew Hazlitt grew to be the most unnecessary. But his persistence seemed ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... a contracting, compacting tendency which runs through the entire universe, outer and inner. It is in its inmost essence desire, the egoistic tendency, the focusing of will upon a definite aim so that consciousness contracts from its universal and absolute possibilities to a definite, limited, concrete something in particular, and thus negates everything else. Desire always disturbs the "Quiet" and brings contraction, ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... so much of the abler literature of our time is an unselfish revolt, or non-selfish revolt: it is an outcome of that larger spirit which conceives the self to be a part of the general social organism, and it is therefore neither egoistic nor altruistic. It finds a sanction in the new intelligence, and an inspiration in the finer sentiments of our generation, but the glow which chiefly illumines it is the glow of the great vision of a happier earth. It speaks of the ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... thermometer out of the window and begin with a sensible course of toughening; teach the child to know and to bear natural pain. Corporal punishment must be done away with not because it is painful but because it is profoundly immoral and hopelessly unsuitable. Repress the egoistic demands of the child when he interferes with the work or rest of others; never let him either by caresses or by nagging usurp the rights of grown people; take care that the servants do not work against what the parents are trying to insist on in ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key
... outward framework of sight and sense, which will, if rightly believed in and trusted, lead to the goal of eternal life, harmony of being, and union with God. So I accept my being led here. Am I superstitious or egoistic in believing this? This is, no doubt, disputed territory. Have we any objective rule to compare our faith with which would give us the measure of our superstition? How much of to-day would have seemed miraculous or superstitious to the past? I confess ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... game of dying. Donne, however, remained in all respects a fantastic to the last, as we may see in that hymn which he wrote eight days before the end, tricked out with queer geography, and so anciently egoistic amid its worship, as ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... she had come upon a dead man huddled up in the snow like a piece of offal. These things terrified her and she did not care about the larger issues. Her life had been always intensely personal—not selfish so much as vividly egoistic through her vitality. And now she was miserable, not because she was afraid for her own safety, but because she was face to face, for the first time, with the unknown and ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... for the right honorable gentleman to say, "I am the First Minister"—and by the by, I think the right honorable gentleman might as well adopt the phraseology of Walpole, and call himself the sole minister, for his speech was rich in egoistic rhetoric—it is all very well for him to speak of himself as the sole minister, for as all his cabinet voted against him, he is quite right not to notice them. I repeat, it is all very well for the right honorable gentleman to come forward to this table and say, ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... mathematics, and finally landed me in a partnership. Still I have always been a race-horse burdened with a pack, alas! I don't mean my hump, but the factory still steals a good deal of my time and brains, and if I didn't rise at five—But you have made me quite egoistic—it is the resemblance of our young days that has touched the spring of memories. But come! let me introduce you to my wife and my son Abraham. Ah, see, poor Fromet is signalling to me. She is tired of being left to battle single-handed. Would you ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... he would feel an uncontrollable impatience with the regime under which he lived. One of these was on the second Sunday of term. It was Rogers' turn to preach, and, as always, Gordon prepared himself for a twenty minutes' sleep till the outburst of egoistic rhetoric was spent. But this time, about half-way through, a few phrases floated through his mist of dreams and caught his attention. Rogers was talking about the impending confirmation service. With one hand on the lectern and the ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... of the calculation Soeren had not been without misgivings. He remembered how, in his student days, he had spoken largely of our duty towards posterity; how he had philosophically demonstrated the egoistic element in love, and propounded the ludicrous question whether people had a right, in pure heedlessness as it were, to ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... common stock is acted on by the same stimuli, in all the persons, at the same time. The response, as an aggregate, is a great storm of feeling, and a great impulse to the will. Hence the great influence of omens and of all popular superstitions on a crowd. Omens are a case of "egoistic reference."[34] An army desists from a battle on account of an eclipse. A man starting out on the food quest returns home because a lizard crosses his path. In each case an incident in nature is interpreted as a warning or direction to the army or the man. ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... there are one or two points of interest which may justify us in printing. The swinging of his stick and not knowing the sailor of Coruiskin, in particular, and the account of how he wrote the lives in the Bell Book particularly please me. I hope my own little introduction is not egoistic; or rather I do not care if it is. It was that old gentleman's blood that ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... as a martyr before all who knew anything of her story; why had she refused his money, if not that her case might seem all the harder? It were difficult to say whether he really believed this; in a nature essentially egoistic, there is often no line to be drawn between genuine convictions and the irresponsible charges of resentment. Mutimer had so persistently trained himself to regard Emma as in the wrong, that it was no wonder if he had lost the power of judging sanely in any matter connected with her. ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... read your Gray with care. A more difficult subject I can scarce fancy; it is crushing; yet I think you have managed to shadow forth a man, and a good man too; and honestly, I doubt if I could have done the same. This may seem egoistic; but you are not such a fool as to think so. It is the natural expression of real praise. The book as a whole is readable; your subject peeps every here and there out of the crannies like a shy violet - he could do no more - and his aroma ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... among us, not yet uttered but pressing towards utterance, which is much wiser than anything we have lately articulated or brought into word or action, our outlooks are rather lamentable. The great majority of the powerful and active-minded, sunk in egoistic scepticisms, busied in chase of lucre, pleasure, and mere vulgar objects, looking with indifference on the world's woes, and passing carelessly by on the other side; and the select minority, of whom better might have been expected, bending all their strength to ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... is the real business of conversion and of the character building that succeeds it; the harnessing of instinct to idea and its direction into new and more lofty channels of use, transmuting the turmoil of man's merely egoistic ambitions, anxieties and emotional desires into fresh forms of creative energy, and transferring their interest from narrow and unreal to universal objectives. The seven deadly sins of Christian ethics—Pride, Anger, Envy, Avarice, ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... the one egoistic and the other altruistic, actuated all the Roman emperors in varying degrees. The activity of Augustus in such matters comes out clearly in the record of his reign, which he has left us in his own ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... trying for you," said Raphael with a melancholy smile. He took up a galley-proof and began to correct it. To his surprise he came upon his own paragraph about Strelitski's resignation: it caused him fresh emotion. This great spiritual crisis had quite slipped his memory, so egoistic are the best of us at times. "Please be careful that Pinchas's autobiography does not crowd that out," ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... is also centuries old. There have been in later years glowing tributes to human rights even more than to justice, though the sentiment of rights is egoistic, while that of justice is in some measure altruistic. There have also been diverse opinions in the past, as now, as to the source, foundation, and nature of what are called Rights, as there were and are of justice. A brief review of these opinions and of ...
— Concerning Justice • Lucilius A. Emery
... up his mind about Jeremy. In spite of his dislike, even hatred of children, he had been coming slowly, during the last two years, to an affection for, and interest in, his nephew that was something quite new to his cynical, egoistic nature. It had leapt into activity at Christmas time, then had died again. Now as, flung first into his sister's bony arms, then on to the terrified spectacles of his niece Mary, he tried to recover himself, he was caught and held by that picture of his small nephew, seated, ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... he had done many things; he had influenced many people, and accomplished some good work; but what had he got out of it for himself? He was an Individualist at heart, as most men are, and he felt conscious of a claim which the world had not granted. It was almost a shock to him to feel the egoistic desire for personal happiness stirring strongly within him; the desire had been suppressed for so long, that when it once awoke it surprised him ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... fixity of definition which alone secures the stability of the commonwealth. A constitution which embodied abstract right alone would be an excellent thing for natures other than human, but since the great majority of men are extremely egoistic, unjust, inconsiderate, deceitful, and sometimes even malicious; since in addition they are endowed with very scanty intelligence there arises the necessity for a power that shall be concentrated in one man, a power that shall be above all law and right, and be completely irresponsible, nay, ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... fantasies in the history of social thought, represented in his case no more than a reaction against the great detractors of humanity. Rochefoucauld had surveyed mankind exclusively from the point of their vain and egoistic propensities, and his aphorisms are profoundly true of all persons in whom these propensities are habitually supreme, and of all the world in so far as these propensities happen to influence them. Pascal, on the one hand, leaving the affections and inclinations of a man very much on one side, ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3) - Essay 1: Vauvenargues • John Morley
... egoistic and self-contained, to take the trouble of hurting anybody, or get himself into trouble for love or hatred. He fell into disfavor not long after that unsuccessful little mission in the first Silesian War, of which the reader ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... month by month, in the "Pall Mall Magazine." In selecting, I have omitted those pieces which hang upon other people's books, plays, or pictures—a process of exclusion which, while giving unity to a possible collection of my critical writings in another volume, leaves the first selection exclusively egoistic. ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... hesitation that the direct inculcation of morality is wholly foreign to Egeria's conception of education. How, then, has the emancipation of the child from the first enemy of Man's well-being—from all those narrowing, hardening, and demoralising influences which we speak of collectively as egoistic or selfish—been effected in Utopia? By no other means than that of allowing the child's nature to unfold itself, on many sides of its being and under thoroughly favourable conditions. The twofold ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... of human life is different. We do not conceive life to be so rich in enjoyments, that it can afford to forego the cultivation of all those which address themselves to what M. Comte terms the egoistic propensities. On the contrary, we believe that a sufficient gratification of these, short of excess, but up to the measure which renders the enjoyment greatest, is almost always favourable to the benevolent affections. The moralization of the personal ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... sorrow until we know how to tune in with the Divine Will, whose 'right course' is often baffling to the egoistic intelligence. God bears the burden of the cosmos; He alone can give ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... dramatic action. The poetry of primitive races has no distinguishing characteristics except metre or rhythm. It is usually an oft-recurring expression of the same idea. Yet there are many fragmentary examples of lyric poetry, though it is mostly egoistic, the individual reciting his deeds or his desires. From the natives of Greenland we have the following about the hovering of the ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... we can draw an extremely practical conclusion. If, namely, we wish our trains of ideation and volition to be copious and varied and effective, we must form the habit of freeing them from the inhibitive influence of reflection upon them, of egoistic pre-occupation about their results. Such a habit, like other habits, can be formed. Prudence and duty and self-regard, emotions of ambition and emotions of anxiety, have, of course, a needful part to play in our lives. But confine them ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... The bad child, egoistic, undisciplinable, destructive, and quarrelsome, or the child who cannot be taught honesty, or the one who continually runs away, is an unending source of "nervousness" to his mother. As time goes on and the difficulty is seen to be fundamental, a battle between hostility ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... you and I are, as you say, young; we are good men, let us suppose; each of us desires happiness for himself.... But is that word, happiness, one that could unite us, set us both on fire, and make us clasp each other's hands? Isn't that word an egoistic one; I mean, isn't it ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... the completed political State is the generic life of man in contradistinction to his material life. All the assumptions of this egoistic life remain in existence outside the sphere of the State, in bourgeois society, but as the peculiarities ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... an old house which Chekhov described in "An Artist's Story," and which he was very eager to buy. Indeed from this time he began thinking of buying a country place of his own, not in Little Russia, but in Central Russia. Petersburg seemed to him more and more idle, cold and egoistic, and he had lost all faith in his Petersburg acquaintances. On the other hand, Moscow no longer seemed to him as before "like a cook," and he grew to love it. He grew fond of its climate, its people and its bells. He always delighted in bells. Sometimes in earlier ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... was ruffled, but never became part of the thought. Henry Adams roused no emotion; if he had roused a disagreeable one, he would have ceased to exist. The mind would have mechanically rejected, as it had mechanically admitted him. Not that Sumner was more aggressively egoistic than other Senators — Conkling, for instance — but that with him the disease had affected the whole mind; it was chronic and absolute; while, with other Senators for the most part, it ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... barriers of civil communities and create out of tribes a nation and out of the nations a world. As in the present day by means of our cosmopolitan literature the distinctions of civilized nations are done away, so Greek poetic art transformed the narrow and egoistic sense of tribal relationship into the consciousness of Hellenic nationality, and this again into the consciousness of a common humanity. But in Latium nothing similar occurred. There might be poets in Alba ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... very ugly, isn't it, Gioconda?" sighed Austin, as he lifted the large, white, fluffy animal upon his lap. "You're a great philosopher, my dear; I wish I were as wise as you. You're so scornful, so dignified, so divinely egoistic. But you don't mind being worshipped, do you, Gioconda? Because you know it's your right, of course. There—she's actually condescending to purr! Now we'll come and disport ourselves under the trees, and you shall watch the birds from a safe distance. I know your ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... . . . that if you really want to know what I do, you must forgive me for seeming egoistic. That is the tragedy of the literary person: his very existence is an assertion of his own mental vanity: he must pretend to be conceited even if ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward |
