"Individualism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... They maintain that no one should be bound by laws or even moral obligations of any kind, but that every body should be allowed to do exactly as he pleases. They desire to break up the actual social organization into mere individualism, with entire independence for each separate person. Their object is anarchy in the very truest sense of the word. They are only modest enough to decline the attempt to create a new order of things in the place of what they propose to destroy. That they intend to leave for ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 12, December, 1880 • Various
... religion developed in antiquity from those prevailing in modern times. The close association, nay, the inseparable bond, between religion and the state is only one of several determining factors that might be adduced, while the small scope permitted to individualism in matters of religious belief and practice in a country like Babylonia or Assyria was fraught with such peculiar results that all comparisons, even with other religions of antiquity, could only obscure and not ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... Church in two ways, spiritual and material,—to the Church which now is an institution not merely foreign but contrary to our nature,—Spain ought today to try to use in her own behalf. Spain's work ought to be to organize extra-religious individualism. ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... and reliance upon higher powers in or out of the body does not mean that we sacrifice our own abilities, nor do we thus become exempt from responsibility. Quite the reverse. It is the arrogance of individualism against which we protest. In fact, there is no abiding strength of purpose apart from the dependence every well-ordered mind should accord to the Infinite Light and Wisdom and the beneficial services which His ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita
... pitted against space. The rigid discipline sheltered them. They didn't have to think in a medium that might be too huge for their brains and emotions. Maybe it was more practical than rough-and-tumble individualism. He had a bitter picture of the whole solar system without a free mind in its whole extent—that is, if another gigantic blowup didn't ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... usury; "a royal priesthood," paralysed with the cant of hireling clergy; "a holy nation," rotten with the luxury of wealth, or embittered by the sting of poverty; "a peculiar people," deformed to Lucifer's own pleasure by the curse of caste; while, in this pandemonium of Individualism, the weak, the diffident, the scrupulous, and the afflicted, are thrust ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... medical work is that it admits of organization, and consequently of the distribution of the work in such a manner as to avoid wasting the time of highly qualified experts on trivial jobs. The individualism of private practice leads to an appalling waste of time on trifles. Men whose dexterity as operators or almost divinatory skill in diagnosis are constantly needed for difficult cases, are poulticing whitlows, vaccinating, changing unimportant dressings, prescribing ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... Lise, clinging to a native individualism and pride, preferred isolation to companionship with the other pieces of driftwood by which they were surrounded, and with which the summer season compelled a certain enforced contact. When the heat in the little dining-room grew unbearable, they were driven to take refuge on the front steps shared ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... protect the weak mind from the strong mind is an equal duty, and a far more difficult task. So far we have only partially succeeded. In this difficulty lies the whole problem. Socialism, so far as it attempts to repress individualism, and reduce mankind to an evenness opposed to all natural laws, is suicidal of the best in favor of mediocrity. But so far as it attempts to protect that mediocrity and weakness from the superior minds of the ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... the college through the maple walk with very different feelings from those he had entertained when he watched the sunset behind the towers. Then he had felt the glory of individualism, his own vivid power as opposed to the lethargy of institutions. But his recent experience had started the pendulum back, and now it swung to the other extreme. His self-confidence had been followed by an exhibition of weakness. ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... profession; their jibes and jests on the credulity of the public yet rang in his ears. What if she—his casual acquaintance of the day before—belonged to that yet greater class of dissemblers who ply their arts and simulations with more individualism and intelligence? ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... and its quickening of intellectual life in general, and in particular the value it set upon personality and individualism, the positions of the poets were reversed. For four hundred years now it can hardly be denied that Horace rather than Virgil has been the representative ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... which will, so to speak, "fit the feet of the wearers"? Then all questions of divorce could be settled by noble and exalted feeling and desire to do right and elevate the nation. But meanwhile, with the growth and encouragement of individualism, every little unit is giving forth his personal view (as I am doing in this paper!), perhaps many of them without the slightest faculty for looking ahead, or knowledge of how to make deductions from past events, ...
— Three Things • Elinor Glyn
... sure that the war itself had any great effect on either you or me—but it certainly ruined the old backgrounds, sort of killed individualism out ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... Positivist with Morin, an Evolutionist and Determinist with Guillaume, he had afterwards been touched by the fraternal dream of a new golden age which he had found in Bache's humanitarian Communism. And indeed even Janzen had momentarily shaken him by his fierce confidence in the theory of liberative Individualism. But afterwards he had found himself out of his depth; and each and every theory had seemed to him but part of the chaotic contradictions and incoherences of humanity on its march. It was all a continuous piling up of dross, amidst which he lost himself. Although Fourier had sprung from ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... the true utilitarian tradition? Here I must just notice a fact which is not always recognised. The utilitarians are identified by most people with the (so-called) Manchester doctrines. They are regarded as advocates of individualism and the laissez-faire or, as I should prefer to call it, the let-alone principle. There was no doubt a close connection, speaking historically; but a qualification must be made in a logical sense, which is very important ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... described. There is no individuality lurking behind the words of the ballad, and above all, no evidence of that individuality in the form of sentiment. Sentiment and individuality are the very essence of modern poetry, and the direct result of individualism in verse. Given a poet, sentiment—and it may be noble and precious enough—is sure to follow. But the ballad, an epic in little, forces one's attention to the object, the scene, the story, and away from ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... though appearing on the face of it the most modern of doctrines, is in a sense reactionary, like Catholicism, or knight-errantry, or Gothic architecture. That is, those who protest against the individualism of the existing social order are wont to contrast it unfavourably with the principle of association which is found everywhere in the Middle Ages. No mediaeval man was free or independent; all men were members one of another. The feudal system itself was an elaborate network ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... they are members of a corporate community and future citizens of a State, and that hereafter they have duties towards that State the performance of which is the only rational ground of their possession of rights as against the State. E.g., in many of our slums we have the best examples of individualism run mad, of the conception that the individual is a law unto his private self, and that all government is something alien, something forced upon the individual from the outside and impinging upon his private ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... of his whole life. As the creed which reconciled him to the world and bound him to his fellows ceases to affect him, he must be thrown back upon his own mere individuality, unless he can find another creed of equal or greater power to inspire and direct his life. And mere individualism is nothing, but anarchy. That this is so, was not indeed manifest to those who first expressed the individualistic principle: on the contrary, they seemed to themselves to have, in the assertion of individual right, not only an instrument for destroying the ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... common, and sometimes the dwellers on one side of a river were forced to live nearer to each other than to the dwellers on the other. Every man shut himself up in his own house: and it seemed that this jealous individualism, instead of growing weaker after centuries of neighborhood, was stronger than ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... under way for centuries, and the flood time of a slowly but steadily rising tide of protest against the enslavement of the intellect and the limitation of natural human liberties by either Church or State. The flood of individualism which characterized the second half of the eighteenth century demanded outlet, and, denied, it rose and swept away ancient privileges, abuses, and barriers—religious, intellectual, social, and political—and ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... even he knew. Alone with his bruised ambitions, his hectored egoism, his watery aims. Alone and plotting the ruin of those who had dared bid him halt in his mad, destroying career. Alone, this high priest of the caste of absolutism, of the old individualism which is fast hurrying into the realm of the forgotten. Alone, and facing a new century, with whose ideals his own ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... is just to list all the chaps and put a note to their play:—'Naylor minor must pass more. Football isn't the place for extreme individualism.' 'Ammersham shapes well as ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... Catholicism had passed over John's mind, crushing all individualism, and leaving it but a wreck of quaking mysticism. Twenty times a day the spectre of his conscience rose and with menacing finger threatened him with flames and demons. And his love was a source of continual suffering. How often did he ask himself ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... Rights vs. Social Duties.—The greatest weakness to be found in twentieth-century society is the disposition on the part of almost all individuals to place personal rights ahead of social duties. The modern spirit of individualism has grown strong since the Renaissance and the Reformation. It has forced political changes until absolutism has been yielding everywhere to democracy. It has extended social privileges until it has become possible ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... estate. He was in complete accord with the Rector and the sanitary authorities, and not infrequently complained that his tenants did not stay on the land. His wife was a Totteridge, and his coverts admirable. He had been, needless to say, an eldest son. It was his individual conviction that individualism had ruined England, and he had set himself deliberately to eradicate this vice from the character of his tenants. By substituting for their individualism his own tastes, plans, and sentiments, one might almost say his own individualism, and losing money thereby, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... vexed question, I lean toward the view of individualism pure and simple. It seems to me very difficult to admit that the great creator is only the result of his environment. Since this influence acts on many others, it is very necessary that, in great men, there should be in addition a personal ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... not to the object of thought, or as if it depended solely on the perceptions of our minds, and not at all on any objective reality which is independent of them, and which is equally true whether it be perceived by our minds or not. In this form it is a theory of Individualism, and has a strong tendency towards Skepticism. In the other aspect, Evidence is regarded as the sole and sufficient ground of Certitude, but it is viewed both objectively and subjectively;—objectively, as having its ground and reason in a reality that is independent of our perceptions, ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... concealment and moving in the dark can often inspire a terror which regular troops under discipline fail to engender. The Americans could not trust the natives, as it was impossible to tell the truthful from the treacherous. Nevertheless it was a kind of fighting which gave unusual scope for that American individualism, so strongly represented in the army, to which the romance of precisely this sort of thing had drawn just the class of men best fitted for the work. Scouting, counter scouting, surprise attacks, and ambuscades formed the daily news ...
— The Path of Empire - A Chronicle of the United States as a World Power, Volume - 46 in The Chronicles of America Series • Carl Russell Fish
... can go further still. Whence comes the idea that all measures inspired by the sentiment of solidarity are contrary to Nature's trend? Observe her carefully, and she will not give lessons only in individualism. Side by side with the struggle for existence do we not find in operation what Lanessan calls "association for existence." Long ago, Espinas had drawn attention to "societies of animals," temporary or permanent, and to the kind of morality ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... always run to individualism, and yet there is none which is capable of conceiving and carrying out a finer ideal of discipline. There is nothing in Roman or Grecian annals, not even the lava-baked sentry at Pompeii, which gives a more sternly fine object-lesson in duty than the young recruits of the British ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... works of many Augustan writers, too, it is easy to see how the enthusiasm for individualism, later to become one of the hallmarks of romanticism, actually sprang from an earlier faith in a God-directed universe of law and order. There is a kind of universal law of supply and demand, and the argument is simply that each link in the human chain, ...
— 'Of Genius', in The Occasional Paper, and Preface to The Creation • Aaron Hill
... Man helped to produce alike the anarchy of the first French Revolution and the remedial despotism of the Jacobins and their successor Napoleon; and the oscillation between under-government and over-government, between individualism and socialism has continued to this day. Each coincides with obvious human interests: the blessed in possession prefer a policy of laissez faire; they are all for Liberty and Property, enjoying sufficient means for doing ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... agree with the most fastidious, in asserting that inviolability of one's individualism, not by himself submitted for public observation, we contend for the right and duty of the utmost freedom in the dissection of what is thus submitted. Public speech, public action, public character, are adventures upon the sea of the world's opinion, and they must ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... something of a politician? He seems really to have wished his fellow-creatures to be fine, and to have been angry with them because they wished to be nothing of the sort. He did not understand that this passionate individualism, this sense of personal responsibility, this claim to private judgment, is what no modern State, be it democratic, bureaucratic or autocratic, can tolerate. Men long for the ease and assurance of ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... National Gallery, London, owns a St. Jerome, Madrid another. Mr. Frick's example belongs to the epoch of 1584 to 1594. Mr. Erich in New York possesses three pictures, St. Jerome, a portrait of St. Domingo de Guzman and a Deposition. El Greco is a painter admired by painters for his salt individualism. Zuloaga, the Spaniard, has several; Degas, two; the critic Duret, two; John S. Sargent, one—a St. Martin. Durand-Ruel once owned the Annunciation, but sold it to Mrs. H.O. Havemeyer, and the Duveens in London possess a Disrobing of Christ. ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... the harping on one string, Nature has secured individualism by giving the private person a high conceit of his weight in the system. The pest of society is egotists. There are dull and bright, sacred and profane, coarse and fine egotists. 'Tis a disease that, like influenza, falls on all constitutions. In the distemper known to physicians ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... to-day or to-morrow, but somewhere in a near future—we are going to unite our unfenced lawns in a concerted park treatment: a sort of wee horticultural United States comprised within a few city squares; but ever our American individualism stands broadly in the way, and our gardens almost never relate themselves to one another with that intimacy which their absence of boundaries demands in order to take on any special beauty, nobility, delightsomeness, of gardening. The true gardener—who, if he is reading ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... effected among the laboring classes will be the reduction of the wages of some at the same time that we raise those of others. Monopoly does not gain in respectability by belonging to the lowest classes of people, especially when it serves to maintain only the grossest individualism. The revolt of the silk-workers met with no sympathy, but rather hostility, from the porters and the river population generally. Nothing that happens off the wharves has any power to move them. Beasts of burden fashioned in advance for despotism, they will not mingle with ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... guarantee individualism against the masses, on the one hand, and the masses against the individual, on the other. In society as now organized, the many are slaves to a few favored individuals in a community. I should dread the bondage of individuals to the power of the mass, while Association, by identifying the ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... American Federation of Labour. There were many others, of course, but these were the best known. The Socialist leaders were W.J. Ghent, Rufus Weeks, Gaylord Wilshire and R.W. Bruere. Exponents of individualism were many, and most of them were brilliant. The most powerful address on behalf of labour was made by R. Fulton Cutting. There has been no attempt to bait an ecclesiastical hook to catch the masses. We have tried to make men think and to ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... too. Sometimes it seemed that the conflict was over for him and that he had sailed into a sure and quiet haven where no storm could reach him again. All that he had lacked was his; independence was his and the possibility of developing his own individualism. The ghosts of the ancestors were laid; Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, was no longer a mold that sought to grasp him and turn him into something he was not and did not wish to be. The plan was proving itself, demonstrating its ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... him get a Ford runabout, and in three months he is exultant in running as close as possible to every foot traveler and in exceeding the speed limit at any favorable chance. These are not beautiful expressions of our national spirit, but they serve to illustrate our instinctive individualism. ...
— The Soul of Democracy - The Philosophy Of The World War In Relation To Human Liberty • Edward Howard Griggs
... contradictory as the temperaments of the thinkers. A storehouse of illustration is at hand: Nietzsche advising the creative man to bite off the head of the serpent which is choking him and become "a transfigured being, a light-surrounded being, that laughed!" One might point to Stirner's absolute individualism or turn to Whitman's wholehearted acceptance of every man with his catalogue of defects and virtues. Some of these men have cursed each other roundly: Georges Sorel, for example, who urges workingmen to accept none ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... of the individualism and liberty of personal development, which, even for a Roman Catholic, were effects of the Reformation, that there was so much in Montaigne of the "subjective," as people say, of the singularities of personal character. Browne, too, bookish as he really is claims to give his ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... ready response to growing intelligence and individualism the principle of self-government has been planted in every civilized nation of the world. Before the force of this onward movement the most cherished ideals of conservatism have fallen. Out of the ashes of the old, phoenix-like has arisen a new institution, vigorous and strong, yea, one ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... of whose chief aims has ever been to mould life in all its varying relations according to the Law, and to make obedience to the commandments a necessity and a custom' (Lauterbach, Jewish Encyclopedia, ix. 326). Only the latest development of Judaism is away from this direction. Individualism is nowadays replacing the olden solidarity. Thus, at the Central Conference of American Rabbis, held in July 1906 at Indianapolis, a project to formulate a system of laws for modern use was promptly rejected. The chief modern problem in Jewish life is ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... Nietzsche may have furnished Prussian ambitions with congenial ammunition; but Bentham with his purely selfish interpretation of human nature and Marx with his doctrine of the class-struggle—the high priest of Individualism and the high priest of Socialism—cannot be acquitted of a similar charge. If the appeal has been made in a less crude and brutal form, and if the instrument of domination has been commercial and industrial rather than military, it is because Militarism is not the besetting ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... to temporal and physical conditions, and would be equally lacking if the country were an autocracy or oligarchy, there remains in the United States greater room for the development of idiosyncrasy than, perhaps, in any other country. It has been paradoxically argued by an English writer that individualism could not reach its highest point except in a socialistic community; i.e., that the unbridled competition of the present day drives square pegs into round holes and thus forces the individual, for the sake of bread ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... little strange that the Indians should so emphasize their national individualism at this particular time, inasmuch as six of them, the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, Creek, Seminole, and Caddo, professing to be still in strict alliance with the Southern States, had formed an Indian confederacy, had collectively ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... Aesthetic Education' and from some of his poems, notably 'The Ideal and Life', what seemed to be a message of aesthetic quietism; a message which appeared to say that the attainment of inward peace, freedom and harmony was the highest goal of human effort. Naturally enough the individualism and aestheticism of the Weimarian poets were not welcome doctrine to an excited generation that had caught a glimpse of an immense work to be done for the fatherland. The ever increasing pressure of social emotions ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... privately approved. There was not an eye in the number that was not hawk-clear; or a figure that was not nail-hard. These were fellows cut to a pattern of action, but even in their excellent average, one stood out with an individualism which immediately struck ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... a perfect embodiment of his own qualities. Robinson Crusoe became, we know, a favourite of Rousseau, and has supplied innumerable illustrations to writers on Political Economy. One reason is that Crusoe is the very incarnation of individualism: thrown entirely upon his own resources, he takes the position with indomitable pluck; adapts himself to the inevitable as quietly and sturdily as may be; makes himself thoroughly at home in a desert island, and, as soon as he meets a native, summarily ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... of leadership in this change in the American State. Business men and wage-earners began it, and the farmer has been forced to follow their example. The old type individualism of the landowning-operating farmer has long handicapped the farmer in his relations with other industrial groups. And it is with many mistakes and setbacks that he is now endeavoring to follow the example so ably set by the multimillionaires of the other groups. Better organization, ...
— Church Cooperation in Community Life • Paul L. Vogt
... the talk is more and more toward individualism, not self-effacing communism. As for myself I like the idea of the fight—for public recognition, I mean; and I don't think I'd be happy at all if things were made too smooth for me; if, for instance, in a socialized state ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... self-mortification. This is, in fact, the very lesson Christ teaches in these words. To find the life is the highest object of every man and the end for which he was created; yet this can be attained only by the losing of it for Christ's sake. Individuality can be preserved only by the sacrifice of Individualism. Let us break up this thought and consider it more ...
— Paradoxes of Catholicism • Robert Hugh Benson
... acting—the postulating a general principle based upon insufficient data, and the deduction from it of many and far-reaching practical consequences. This he had always strongly opposed. His essay of 1871, "Administrative Nihilism," was directed against a priori individualism; and now he proceeded to restate the arguments against a priori political reasoning in general, which seemed to have been forgotten or overlooked, especially by the advocates of compulsory socialism. And here it is possible to show in some detail the care he took, as was his way, to refresh ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... it came, did nothing to diminish this individualism of the religious outlook, but rather accentuated it. The whole emphasis of Protestantism was thrown upon the life of the individual soul in relation to GOD, to the comparative neglect of the importance of the conception of membership in the Church. To the ordinary worldling ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... revelation above individual reason, order above freedom and progress. But Ballanche made a sincere endeavour to unite in one system what was valuable in the opposed modes of thinking. He held with the theocratists that individualism was an impracticable view; man, according to him, exists only in and through society. He agreed further with them that the origin of society was to be explained, not by human desire and efforts, but by a direct revelation from God. Lastly, with De Bonald, he reduced the problem of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... certain adults as children who never grew up, we are referring to a much larger class than is commonly understood. All who attain mature years with fixations are to be regarded as children. All individualists belong here unless their individualism is merely a stepping stone to altruism. Indeed, we see in all men a desire to place themselves on a pinnacle. This craving seeks expression in a thousand acts. Even if outgrown it may assert itself in times of stress. It is of benefit at times when ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... who consciously adopted the maxims of the Prince de Ligne as their guide at the opening of this war, M. Maurice Barres has found the name of "Traditionalists." They are those who followed the tradition of the soldierly spirit of France in its three main lines, in its individualism, in its intelligence, in its enthusiasm. They endeavoured, in those first months of agony and hope, to model their conduct on the formulas which their ancestors, the great moralists of the past, had laid down for them. Henri Lagrange, who fell at Montereau in October 1915, at the age ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... secret soul; he will go up and down doing the works of a true member, and, to the astonishment of all, the work will be done with concert, though no man spoke. Government will be adamantine without any governor. The union must be ideal in actual individualism. ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... the two greatest factors in modern progress—education and organization. These two factors are really one, for education is a means to organization. Power unorganized is no longer power. Organization means strength and progress; individualism means weakness and decay. The English people have risen by organized effort to the mastery of the globe. They have created the cheapest and most efficient government, combining in the highest degree individual liberty and national power. They have created the greatest store of ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... the most earnest and original of poets. He has taken nothing from his contemporaries, but has imagined a message for himself, and has chosen to deliver it in terms that are wholly his own. For him the accidents and trivialities of individualism, the transitory and changing facts that make up the external aspect of an age or a character, can hardly be said to exist. He only concerns himself with absolutes—the eternal elements of human life and the immutable ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... uniting the farmers of America for any form of co-operative endeavor long ago became proverbial. The business of farming encouraged individualism; comparative isolation bred independence; and restricted means of communication made union physically difficult, even among those who might be disposed to unite. It was not strange, therefore, that the agricultural masses developed a state ...
— Chapters in Rural Progress • Kenyon L. Butterfield
... say at once that in discussing the status of the individual, we are not referring—at least, not directly—to the struggle between Individualism and Socialism. We know that individualists express the fear that under a socialist regime there would be an end to individual initiative, while socialists retort that the chief sin of the competitive system is {65} that it crushes and destroys individuality; but between the ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... has been told in hundreds and thousands of fragments—the anabasis that has had no katabasis—the literal going up of a people, as we shall see, from primitive husbandry and handicraft and a neighborly individualism, to another level, of machine labor, of more comfortable living, ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... slowly. "So," he said softly. "Your lack of caution and discretion is more understandable, then. You have been quite fortunate, I should say. Of course, extreme individualism is far from common now, and persons who combine extreme individualism with high empathic power are rare, but they do appear. And they are dangerous in the highest degree." ...
— The Best Made Plans • Everett B. Cole
... sacrifice yourself in such a topsy-turvy world, where popularity makes you unpopular with the people you love, and the only failure is cheap success, and the only individualist is the person who gives up all his individualism to serve a jolly ungrateful proletariat which ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... and will guess What books you doat on from your fav'rite mess," is a personal eccentricity, his attack on false criticism and his exhortation to judge for oneself are typical harbingers of late eighteenth-century individualism and ...
— Essays on Taste • John Gilbert Cooper, John Armstrong, Ralph Cohen
... be remarked, by the way, that Rolle is not inclined to substitute individualism for the authority of the Church; a change which has been brought against some mystics. There is immense emphasis laid, all through his writings, on the importance of conduct. The penetrating analysis, in ch. vi, of The Form of Perfect Living, of the possible sins humanity can commit on ...
— The Form of Perfect Living and Other Prose Treatises • Richard Rolle of Hampole
... have chosen to represent the artist's power in the direction of portraiture,—not only because of their wonderful merit as embodiments of individualism, but to illustrate a law which has not yet had its due influence in art, but which must be the very life of its next revival, when painting shall be borne up until ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... not simply for ourselves that we pray, nor do we pray by ourselves; it is of God's love that in the work of prayer we are associated with one another. There is nothing further from the divine plan of life than our present individualism. Our temptation is to be egotistic and self-centred; to want to approach God alone with our private needs and wishes. We incline to travel the spiritual way by ourselves; we want no company; we want no one ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... preoccupation with things medieval. The medieval tendency is in Goethe's Goetz von Berlichingen, the Hellenic in his Iphigenie. At first this medievalism was superficial, or at least external. Adventure, romance in the frankest sense, grotesque individualism—that is one element in medieval poetry, and with it alone Scott and Goethe dealt. Beyond them were the two other elements of the medieval spirit: its mystic religion at its apex in Dante and Saint Louis, and its mystic passion, passing ...
— Aesthetic Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... lawless friend. The banishment was only for ten years, and he had his nest already prepared with the Persian King. If you would understand the Greek spirit in its fullest perfection, study Themistocles. Rampant individualism, seeking personal pleasure, clamorous for the admiration of its fellows, but not restrained from secret falsity by any strong moral sense—that was what the Greeks ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... opposition between these contrasted sides of goodness is mirrored in the conflicting moral ideals of conservatism and radicalism, of socialism and individualism, which have never been absent from the societies of men, nor even, I believe, from those of animals. Conservatism insists on unity and order; radicalism on wealthy life, diversified powers, particular ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... Thomas are incompetent as leaders of industry because they do not see that Labour is full of men who can do things like this. I am proud, over in my country across the sea, to be cousin to a nation that is still the headquarters—the international citadel—of individualism upon the earth. The world knows if England does not, that this kind of individualism is the most characteristic, the most mighty and impregnable Dreadnought against that ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... all! In that sense, individualism is no doubt part of the evolutionary scheme; I quite agree with you. What I object to is the idea, conveyed in Spencer's title, that the man as a man can have interests or rights opposed to those of the State as a State. Your thorough individualist ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... influence, bred in these pioneers intellectual traits which constitute the basis of the American character. The single-handed and successful struggle with nature in the tense solitude of the forest developed a spirit of individualism, restive under control. On the other hand, the sense of sharing with others the arduous tasks and dangers of conquering the wilderness gave birth to a strong sense of solidarity arid of human sympathy. With the lure of free lands ever before ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... from neglect of these plain considerations that the fanatical individualism [Note 21] of our time attempts to apply the analogy of cosmic nature to society. Once more we have a misapplication of the stoical injunction to follow nature; the duties of the individual to the state are forgotten, and ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... this new principle asserted itself in the religious sphere. The individualism which was inherent in early Christianity, but which was present as a speculative content merely, had not been strong enough to counteract even the remains of corporate tendencies on the material side of things, in the decadent Roman Empire; and infinitely ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... community is not, as mathematicians would say, always of the same sign. To ignore this is the essential fallacy of the cult called Individualism. But in truth, a general prohibition in a state may increase the sum of liberty, and a general permission may diminish it. It does not follow, as these people would have us believe, that a man is more free where there is least law and more restricted where there ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... in the history of the world," he answered, "and they are all Pursuits. One is the pursuit of Unselfishness. 'Little children, love one another. He that seeks to save his soul shall lose it.' The second is the opposite of the first— Individualism. 'I am I. That is all I know, and I will seek out my own good always because that at least I can understand.' The third is the pursuit of God and Mysticism. 'Neither I matter nor my neighbour. I give up the world and every one ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... not despicable public buildings, founding universities, running a few public services. That 'politics' has a voice in these undertakings does not make them valueless. There are perceptible in the prairies, among all the corruption, irresponsibility, and disastrous individualism, some faint signs of the sense of the community. Take a very good test, the public libraries. As you traverse Canada from east to west they steadily improve. You begin in the city of Montreal, which is unable to support one, and pass through the dingy rooms and inadequate ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... individual human being too cruelly to the mere accidents of birth and fortune. Under such a system, in short, to those who have is given and from those who have not is taken away even that which they have. There are others again who still view individualism just as the vast majority of our great-grandfathers viewed it, as a system hard but just: as awarding to every man the fruit of his own labor and the punishment of his own idleness, and as visiting, in accordance with the stern but necessary ordination of our existence, the ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... felt—and it was certainly one of his most profound convictions—that the Multitude could never govern properly, could never regulate its own affairs, could never present England adequately to the view of the world, unless it cast aside the Individualism in which it had been nurtured, and made up its mind to act in and through the State. Perhaps his ideal of a State can best be described as an Educated Democracy, working by Collectivism in Government, Religion, and ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... that its true force lies in its marvellous insight and foresight—that it is, instead of a false and deceptive faculty, exactly the most accurate and truth-telling faculty which the human mind possesses; and all the more truth-telling, because, in its work, the vanity and individualism of the man himself are crushed, and he becomes a mere instrument or mirror, used by a higher power for the reflection to others of a truth which no effort of his could ever have ascertained; so that all mathematical, and arithmetical, and generally scientific truth, is, in comparison, truth ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... of feeling, which made Agathe think to herself, "Ah! how he loves me!" Alas, the hero loved but one person in the world, and that person was Colonel Philippe. His misfortunes in Texas, his stay in New York,—a place where speculation and individualism are carried to the highest pitch, where the brutality of self-interest attains to cynicism, where man, essentially isolated, is compelled to push his way for himself and by himself, where politeness does not exist,—in fact, even the minor events of Philippe's journey had developed in him ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... of the early period the hero of the people and the prophet of a deep and inward religion, he seemed also to have found, even more emphatically than had the Humanists, a far-reaching principle of individualism which took the key from the Church and put it into the hands of the Christian man himself. Salvation in its essence, he sees, is conferred upon no one from without. The soul is dependent for it upon no organization, no traditions, no dogma, no sacred performances. It is a transaction between ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... be admitted that the Kabyles, with a thousand faults, are far from the fatalism, the abuse of force and that merging of individualism which are found with the Islamite wherever he appears. Whence, then, have come these more humane tendencies, charitable customs and movements of compassion? There are respectable authorities who consider ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... existence. I do admit that the shock of spatial transference, no matter how slight, combined with the concrete awareness of a previous spatial relationship would be perhaps too much for the keenly sensitive individualism ..." ...
— The Doorway • Evelyn E. Smith
... Manchester friends, Froude imbibed Manchester principles. He had been half inclined to sympathise with the socialism of Louis Blanc and other French revolutionists. Manchester cured him. He adopted the creed of individualism, private enterprise, no interference by Government, and free trade. In these matters he did not, at that time, go with Carlyle, as in ecclesiastical matters he had not gone with Newman. His mind was intensely practical, though in personal questions of self-interest he was careless, ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... schoolmaster and as a don—a different spirit has grown up, a sense of corporate and social duty, a larger idea of national service, not loudly advertised but deeply rooted, and far removed from the undisciplined individualism of my boyhood. It has been a secret growth, not an educational programme. The Boer War, I think, revealed its presence, and the war we are now waging has testified to its mature strength. It has come partly ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the benefit of the industrial and military coalition. Nietzsche depicted in lines of fire the resurrection of heroism, his vision of the superman was that of an ardent soul, steeled by sufferings, meditating a tragic conception of life with serenity, and in his solitary individualism surmounting the infirmity of man and his own by the insistent will ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... can now see a furious beast charging upon a pigmy who awaits the onset with a coolness quite superior to Mr. Quatermain's heroics. That Siberian hunter evidently went out and tried to make a bag for his own hand, and I have no doubt that he carried out the principle of individualism until his last mammoth reduced him to pulp. There is no indication of organization, and, although the men of the great deltas were able to indulge in oysters with a freedom which almost makes me regret the advance of civilization and the decay of Whitstable, yet I cannot trace one ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... Carried a little farther what would it mean? Would it not be equally logical to say that the man who serves himself best serves the country best? It is the theory of narrow sectionalism, and by implication, at least, the theory of individualism as well. And sectionalism and individualism are two of the great ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... consideration. Horses run with their riders to death or victory, but fleeting beauty haunts no soul to the "doorway of the dead." The land is often pictured as lonely, but the lone way of a human being's essential self is not for this extravert world. The banners of individualism are carried high, but the higher individualism that grows out of long looking for meanings in the human drama is negligible. Somebody is always riding around or into a "feudal domain." Nobody at all penetrates it or penetrates democracy ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... I have often thought of him. This tardy esteem will be his sole recompense. The metaphysical paradise would be no place for him. His lively imagination, his high spirits, and his keen sense of enjoyment constituted him for a distinct individualism in his own sphere. My father's character was just the opposite, for he was inclined to be sentimental and melancholy. It was when he was advanced in years and upon his return from a long voyage that he gave me birth. ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... of human progress mankind has passed (through class rule, private property, and individualism in production and exchange) from the enforced and inevitable want, misery, poverty, and ignorance of savagery and barbarism to the affluence and high productive capacity of civilization. For all practical purposes, co-operative production has ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... the result is a failure, obvious to the passer-by. Separate and unsightly fires for cooking, and untidiness, because there are no "hours" for performing the light but necessary domestic work, are common objects of individualism on the camping ground. Yachts, which are self-maintaining, never have clothes hanging in the rigging after 8 a.m. when in harbour, and the self-respecting camp must not ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... and a half ago women indulged in little introspective analysis. They thought on broad lines, and honestly understood the strength of their emotions. Moreover, although Mary Wollstonecraft was unborn and "Emile" unwritten, Individualism was germinating; and what soil so quickening as the Tropics? Nevertheless, to admit was not to lay the question, and Rachael passed through many hours of torment before hers was settled. She was not unhappy, ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... which touch on politics do not imply that respect for the people thinking, feeling, and moving, in masses which is a common profession with the liberal leaders of the platform. Browning's liberalism was a form of his individualism; he, like Shakespeare, had a sympathy with the wants and affections of the humblest human lives; and, like Shakespeare, he thought that foolish or incompetent heads are often conjoined with hearts that in a high degree ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... accomplished. The father was a man of learning, a graduate of Yale and a clergyman. The mother was familiar with French and Italian, and no mean astronomer. Thus parented, it is not surprising that the Glastonbury sisters were of marked individualism as well as superior scholarship. They were more or less acquainted with Hebrew, Greek and Latin, and have made a translation of the Bible from these sources, giving its ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... knew that in ordinary life such solutions are rare. In the speeches of Jehovah he does not introduce an altogether new element, but emphasizes motifs already developed in the earlier dialogues. The effect of these speeches upon Job are threefold: (1) They rebuke his over-accentuated individualism. (2) They reveal the fundamental contrast between the infinite God and finite man. In the light of this revelation Job plainly recognizes his presumption and folly in attempting, with his limited outlook, to ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... motive and the reward, of the religious experience, is not altogether clear in an age that, for over two centuries, has more and more rejected the transcendental ideas of the human understanding. Yet the consequences of that rejection, in the increasing individualism of conduct which has kept pace with the growing subjectivism of thought, are now sufficiently apparent and the present plight of our civilization is already leading its more characteristic members, the ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... to free herself from this fettering life, where all is limitation and division. Its individualism appeared to her particularly clear when she thought of Owen. They had clasped and kissed in the hope to become part of the other's substance. They had sought to mingle, to become one; now it was in the hope of a union ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... becomes established as life grows more complex, as specific desires increase in number. Man is not, as thus seen in these genetic views of him, a self-tamed animal. He has not arrived at a precarious and unstable social condition out of a primitive individualism which is the essence of his warlike nature. On the other hand, he has not degenerated from some ideal pacific state. Ages ago he was already divinely human, and possessed those capacities both for cooeperation and antagonism out of ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... quite respectable qualms at times, seeing her the object of so much rough gallantry—qualms he stifled instantly as being in flat rebellion to his fine philosophy of individualism as applied to behaviour. His rights of man must be rights of women too. But, for all that, there was much comfort in the belief that Aurora showed no preference elsewhere. Quigley's prominence as a suitor was not due to any partiality on the part of the girl, but rather to ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... unrelated, irresponsible unit,—an atom without affinities! The home can be, if it will, the most antisocial force in existence, for it can, if it will, exist practically for itself. That excessive individualism, which is responsible for so many evils in our country, has encouraged this isolation. The girl who finds herself without a productive place at home at the same time finds none of the fine inspiration which comes ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... his turn, perceived that the tall man, ungainly as he was, affected a bizarre individualism in the matter of dress. His clothing cried out, rather than suggested, that it was expensive. His feet were cased in button shoes with fancy tops; his waistcoat, cut in the extreme of style, revealed that little strip of white which falsely advertises a second waistcoat beneath, ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... in the whole movement of civilization. That land may be called the idyllic one, a land of peace and of freedom from all struggle; the borderland between the natural and the civilized spheres. Man has risen out of the grossness of mere sensuous individualism, such as we see in Polyphemus and in other shapes of Fairyland; but he has not yet reached the conflicts of higher forms of society resulting from a pursuit of wealth, from ambition, from war. Here is a quiet half-way house on the ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... chronicle and commentary of the battles of another, battles which cover the same period and were fought broadly for the same causes. But the French Radical extremist could never see his way to subscribe to the Socialist creed. His stalwart individualism, in part temperamental, was also as a political working faith the result of a distrust of logic divorced from the experience and responsibility of actual administration. Somewhat similarly the English ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, March 19, 1919 • Various
... sagest saws had failed him. Such a contingency as this had never been foreseen by that dispenser of proverbs. It had lifted him out of himself. Matthew's sturdy individualism might have taken the form of liberalism, or perhaps materialism, if it had appeared two centuries later; but in the period in which his years were cast, the art of keeping close to the ground had not been fully learned. Matthew was filled with a sentiment which he neither knew ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... that any such distribution was possible. As one attempts a comprehensive view of those opening years of the new age, as one measures it against the latent achievement that later years have demonstrated, one begins to measure the blindness, the narrowness, the insensate unimaginative individualism of the pre-atomic time. Under this tremendous dawn of power and freedom, under a sky ablaze with promise, in the very presence of science standing like some bountiful goddess over all the squat darknesses ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... the eyes. It looked as if a kindergarten had been the selecting committee for an exhibition of the Royal Academy. It looked also as if the kindergarten had replaced the hanging committee also. It was a conglomerate massacre. It was pictorial anarchy. It was individualism baresark, amok, crazily frantic. And an execrably vile, nerve-destroying individualism ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... be anything material. This result was reached by both the materialistic and spiritualistic schools, and was only carried one step further by the Sophists, who maintained that even the being of things depended on the thinker. This necessarily led to skepticism, individualism, and disruption of the old social ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... his mind, one and the same. Quakerism means divine democracy. George Fox was the first forerunner, the John Baptist, of the new time,—leather-aproned in the British wilderness. Seeing the whole world dissolving into individualism, he did not try to tie it together, after the fashion of great old Hooker, with new cords of ecclesiasticism; but he did this,—he affirmed a Mount Sinai in the heart of the individual, and gave to the word person an INFINITE depth. To sound that word ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... Jack. "That is my specialty, you know. Individualism in a game may be spectacularly attractive, but it doesn't ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... against it. That was why he had escaped the commune without letting them get him into the nutrient bath in which the dreamers lived out their useless lives. His existence gave the lie to the pseudo-utopia he was dedicated to overthrowing. The called it individualism, but Nelson ...
— The Happy Man • Gerald Wilburn Page
... thoughtful students should turn to the works of a man who by actual experience, or by force of imagination, comprehended all the conditions of his own age, and exhibited in his life and in his writings an individualism of the noblest sort. The conservative and the reformer, the king and the radical, the priest and the heretic, the man of affairs and the man of letters, have taken their seats, side by side, on the scholars' benches, before the same teacher, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... the actions of the great corporations, or from the exercise of the necessary governmental power in a way which would do injustice and wrong to the corporations. Both the preachers of an unrestricted individualism, and the preachers of an oppression which would deny to able men of business the just reward of their initiative and business sagacity, are advocating policies that would be fraught with the gravest harm to the whole country. To permit every lawless capitalist, every law-defying corporation, ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... Canterbury. Roscelin (between 1050 and 1125), primarily a dialectician, rigidly applied his logic to theological dogmas. If we may judge from the accounts of his opponents, Anselm and Abailard, he took up a position of extreme individualism and denied reality alike to a whole and to the parts of which any whole is commonly said to be composed. The application of this principle to the doctrine of the Trinity landed him in tritheism, and he did not shrink from the reproach. Roscelin, a theologian by accident, was ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley
... dramatic are presented because they are suggestive of the unrestricted paths that you may tread in selecting your themes and deciding on your treatment of them in your playlets. True, they dangerously represent the trend of "individualism," and a master of stagecraft may be individual in his plot forms and still be great, but the novice is very likely to be only silly. So read and weigh these several theories with care. Be as individual ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... rights of the people were declared superior to the privileges of the rulers; revolution was justified; and the principles of eighteenth century individualism were made the foundation of the new political state. Aristocracy was swept aside and in its stead democracy ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing
... freezes desire. Equality engenders uniformity; and evil is got rid of by sacrificing all that is excellent, remarkable, extraordinary. Everything becomes less coarse but more vulgar. The epoch of great men is passing away; the epoch of the ant-hill is upon us. The age of individualism is in danger of having no real individuals. Things are certainly progressing, but ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... life is not without its charms, and it is small wonder that in all ages men of intellect have sought in some form of communistic association relief from the pressure of strenuous individualism. We may smile with condescension upon the busy sisters in their caps and gingham gowns, but, who knows, theirs may be ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... that period were rather shabby affairs. If you had the taste to make them splendid, which I would not be so rude as to question, the general poverty resulting from your extraordinary industrial system would not have given you the means. Moreover, the excessive individualism was inconsistent with much public spirit. Nowadays, there is no destination of the surplus wealth so popular as the adornment of the city, which all enjoy in equal degree. It is growing dark," he added. "Let us descend into the house; I want to introduce my wife and ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... worse than that, ten thousand times worse. She's jealous of your art! That's it! There you have it! She's jealous because she can't understand it, because it takes you away from her, because she can't share it. That's what's terrible about marriage—no liberty, no individualism, no seclusion, having to account every night for your actions, for your thoughts, for the things you dream—ah, the dreams! The Chinese are right, the Japanese are right. It's we Westerners who are all wrong. It's the creative ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... universal wisdom, as when he says: "To most men experience is like the stern lights of a ship, which illuminate only the track it has passed." He can give us in a sentence the central truth of politics, reconciling what is good in Individualism with what is good in Socialism in a score or so ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... sentiment. Both the German submissiveness (idealistic as it may be) and the Russian lawlessness (fed on the corruption of all the virtues) are utterly foreign to the Polish nation, whose qualities and defects are altogether of another kind, tending to a certain exaggeration of individualism and, perhaps, to an extreme belief in the Governing Power of Free Assent: the one invariably vital principle in the internal government of the Old Republic. There was never a history more free from political bloodshed than the ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... Dennison's offered variety. Life was dramatizing itself for her there. In Honora and Marna and Mrs. Barsaloux and those quiet yet intelligent gentlewomen, Mrs. Goodrich and Mrs. Applegate, in the very servants whose pert individualism distressed the mid-Victorian Mrs. Dennison, Kate saw working those mysterious world forces concerning which she was so curious. The frequent futility of Nature's effort to throw to the top this hitherto unutilized ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie |
