"Self-centered" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... priest, who saw in the love of God a good in itself 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, ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... read this in his burning eyes as though it were written there in cold, black, selfish letters. A deep smouldering and immoderate anger seized her. That this man who had seemed such a power of softness should so show himself to be a thing of self-centered flint, wounded her; and Jane rebelled at wounds. For the moment they stared, seemingly hypnotized; until at last her voice came as low and expressionless as his had been ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... his reserve, lent him the false attitude of a rather cold, self-centered man, discouraging suggestions at first only to adopt them later in the most inexplicable fashion, and conferring favors in a ready-made impersonal manner which destroyed utterly their quality as favors. In reality his heart hungered ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... him three old sailors huddled on the prow and a ragged boy. They were veterans of the Mediterranean, silent and self-centered, accustomed to obey orders mechanically, without troubling themselves as to where they were going, ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... be sinking," he said. "I am afraid of a civil war." Dr. Franklin, according to Horace Walpole, said "he would furnish Mr. Gibbon with materials for writing the History of the Decline of the British Empire." With his country tottering, the self-centered but truthful Gibbon could not avoid mention of his personal loss, due to the fall of his patron, Lord North. "I was stripped of a convenient salary," he said, "after having enjoyed it about ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... that it is time we left these generalities," she insisted, "and you told me something rather more personal, something which I am very anxious to know. Tell me exactly why so self-centered a person as yourself should interest himself in a fellow-creature at all. It seems odd ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... which is something you will never know. God! Was there ever so self-centered a fool? Compassionate me, Heaven!" She rose, too, and turned to Mr. Caryll. "You, sir," she said to him, "you have been dragged into ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... officer, and, though men, and women, too, would have shrunk from saying it, the name that would have occurred to almost all was that of Blakely. And why? Simply because he stood alone, self-poised, self-reliant, said his few friends, "self-centered and selfish," said more than Mrs. Bridger, whereas a more generous man had never served at Sandy. That, however, they had yet to learn. But when a man goes his way in the world, meddling with no one else's business, and ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... impatient at what they considered her silly babyishness. This, of course, roused her to more strain. The overcare and the feeble, unintelligent sympathy that she had from some members of her family kept her weak and self-centered, and the ignorant, selfish impatience with which the others treated her increased her nervous strain. After this there followed various other worries and a personal sense of annoyance—all of which ...
— Nerves and Common Sense • Annie Payson Call
... taken a step. You have what you need to walk with, then forward! Take care not to fall, and use your forces with discretion. Potterers and scruple-mongers are soon reduced to inaction. It needs but a glimmer of common sense to perceive that man is not made to pass his life in a self-centered trance. ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... a forceful personality as well as a rather handsome man of perhaps thirty-five, heavy of build, swarthy of skin, and sloe-black of eye, like that of the Mexicans whose blood was reported to be in him. He looked crafty, confident, and self-centered. If Helen had never heard of him before that visit ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... reaction of feeling. Up to that moment, she had felt nothing but shocked and intensely self-centered horror at the disagreeableness of what had happened, and a wild desire to run away to some quiet spot where she would not have to think about it, where it could not make her unhappy, where her heart would stop beating so furiously. What had she ever done to have ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... Jerusalem. Yet everything hinged in Jerusalem. There had been the flood-light. Jerusalem was meant to be the gateway to the world. The irony of sin! The blinding of greed! The self-cheating of being self-centered! ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... do by winning mastery over self, by rising above all pride and greed and fear, by knowing that worldly losses and physical death can take nothing away from the truth and the greatness of our soul. The chick knows when it breaks through the self-centered isolation of its egg that the hard shell which covered it so long was not really a part of its life. That shell is a dead thing, it has no growth, it affords no glimpse whatever of the vast beyond that lies outside it. However pleasantly perfect and rounded it may be, it must be given a blow ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... would not alone broaden the outlook of the young people who took part. Mr. Fenton had a shrewd idea that it would awaken among the older people in Westhaven a wider vision of beauty. Like most small towns, Westhaven was too self-centered. Mr. Fenton did not wish the little New England village to share in the ...
— The Girl Scouts in Beechwood Forest • Margaret Vandercook
... extreme of being unscrupulous. Knowing what he desired, he was ready and willing to employ any means to attain his ends. No love for theories or principles, no fear of God or man, no sentimental aversion from bloodshed, nothing could deter him from striving to realize his vaulting but self-centered ambition. Finally, there was in his nature an almost paradoxical vein of poetry and art which made him human and often served him well. He dreamed of empires and triumphs. He reveled in the thought of courts and polished ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... have won nothing except an underpaid Government job, Henry has become rich and mighty. He had that indefinable, unacquirable faculty for making money, and he became a commanding figure in the financial world. He's dominant, he's self-centered, he's one-purposed; he's a rough-hewn block of a man, and his unbounded wealth, his power, and his contact with the world have never smoothed nor rounded him. He's just about the same now as when he was a section boss on his own railroad. His daughter Alicia ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... steal softly and silently along, watching his footsteps, hiding in the shadows, and thus he may see nature as she is. Likewise he who comes to the Bible full of self-importance with mind and heart self-centered sees not the natural beauty of the Bible. We must come to it effacing self, seeking not our own but the things of Christ, and we shall find it a mine of spiritual gold, a fountain of living water, a balm for every sorrow, a light in every dark hour—the one and only book that meets ...
— Heart Talks • Charles Wesley Naylor
... would be concerned with his opinion of the creation, is gratuitous. On his own premises, there is something too much of the ego here. The Education of Henry Adams, conceived as a study in the philosophy of history, turns out in fact to be an Apologia pro vita sua, one of the most self-centered and self-revealing ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various |
