"Misanthropical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Every thing that is plastic in Wieland's genius here showed itself in its highest perfection; and when that Phanias-Timon, condemned to an unhappy insipidity, finally reconciles himself to his mistress and to the world, one can well, with him, live through the misanthropical epoch. For the rest, we readily conceded to these works a cheerful aversion from those exalted sentiments, which, by reason of their easy misapplication to life, are often open to the suspicion of dreaminess. We pardoned the ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... name was not inappropriate, for a more morose, solitary, and misanthropical man never lived than Henry Dubarry, the builder of that house. He neither visited nor received visits, but remained selfishly 'shut-up' in the paradise of art and letters that he ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... reminiscences, injunctions and prohibitions controlling all the positions and relations of life, curious, quaint tales, ideal maxims and proverbs, uplifting legends, charming lyrical outbursts, and attractive enigmas side by side with misanthropic utterances, bewildering medical prescriptions, superstitious practices, expressions of deep agony, peculiar astrological charms, and rambling digressions on law, zoology, and botany, and when all this has been said, ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... tart, acetose, acerbitous, acrid; rancid, musty; curdled, loppered; imbittered, morose, misanthropic, unamiable, dour, cynical, surly, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... passed into other hands a year ago, but M. Topinard is still the cashier. M. Topinard, however, has grown gloomy and misanthropic; he says little. People think that he has something on his conscience. Wags at the theatre suggest that his gloom dates from his marriage with Lolotte. Honest Topinard starts whenever he hears Fraisier's ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... valiant tars, high-spirited half-pay officers, philanthropic Jews, virtuous courtezans, tender-hearted braziers, and sentimental rat- catchers!—(a little bluff or so, but all our very generous, tender- hearted characters are a little rude or misanthropic, and all ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... refer so contemptuously to the Chinese might profitably recall that when, in Dickens' "Christmas Carol,'' the misanthropic Scrooge says of the poor and suffering: "If he be like to die, he had better do it and decrease the ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... formidable party in the senate, he was the commander of the pretorian guard,—that is, of the only military force stationed in Italy,—and he had terrified with his implacable persecutions all those whom he had failed to win over through his promises or his favors. Could the duel between this misanthropic old man and this vigorous, energetic, ruthless climber end in any other way than with the defeat ...
— The Women of the Caesars • Guglielmo Ferrero
... the artist's wife's mother; but then I looked upon the whole address as a mystification, intended especially for myself. I made up my mind, of course, that the box and contents would never get farther north than the studio of my misanthropic friend in ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... beheld, nor mingled with the throng; But viewed them not with misanthropic hate; Fain would he now have joined the dance, the song, But who may smile that sinks beneath his fate? Nought that he saw his sadness could abate: Yet once he struggled 'gainst the demon's sway, And as in ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... better in copying the melody and misanthropic sentiments of Childe Harold, than the nervous and impetuous diction in which his noble biographer has embodied them. The attempt, however, indicates very considerable power; and the flow of the verse and the construction of the poetical period are imitated with ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... superiors, in the monastery, a stern unbending spirit, a rigid austerity, and unchanging severity of mental and physical discipline, characterized his whole bearing and daily conduct. Yet, his severity proceeded not from the superstition and bigotry of a weak mind or misanthropic feeling. Though his whole time and thoughts appeared devoted to the interest of his monastery, and thence to relieving and guiding the poor, and curbing and decreasing the intemperate follies and licentious conduct of the laymen, ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... Petronius, with a certain friendly indifference, "and I am neither so misanthropic as Barsus nor such a pedant as ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... the Elizabethan dramatists excepting Ford), unhinted, yet remained as an incubus in the consciousness of the playwrights and the public, was in their thoughts when they wrote and heard such savage misanthropic outbursts as those of Tourneur and of Marston. The sense of the rottenness of the country whence they were obtaining their intellectual nourishment, haunted with a sort of sickening fascination the imaginative ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... with my misanthropic guardian. I had lived at the cottage with uncle Amos from early childhood. I could faintly remember a weary waste of waters before I came to Parkville,—in which the cottage was located,—but nothing more. During the preceding year I had ...
— Seek and Find - or The Adventures of a Smart Boy • Oliver Optic
... replied Gobain; 'he has turned misanthropic. And he has his reasons for disliking women—well, if you want to know all that is ...
— Honorine • Honore de Balzac
... believe that Livingstone possessed a splenetic, misanthropic temper; some have said that he is garrulous; that he is demented; that he is utterly changed from the David Livingstone whom people knew as the reverend missionary; that he takes no notes or observations but such as those which no other person could read but himself, and it ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... who have reached the remote Opera House, fought their way past the misanthropic door-keeper, and gained their seats, are first reduced to a state of mental chaos by the performance of a maddening overture, and are then fitted to appreciate the play, which ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 6, May 7, 1870 • Various
... that always pictured, for the leaner on old rubbed and smoothed parapets at the sunset hour, a country not exactly blighted or deserted, but that had had its life, on an immense scale, and had gone, with all its memories and relics, into rather austere, in fact into almost grim and misanthropic, retirement. This was a manner and a mood, at any rate, in all the land, that favoured in the late afternoons the divinest landscape blues and purples—not to speak of its favouring still more my practical contention that ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... farewell to the few who, in the blight of fortune, called themselves their friends. The sadness of the parting moment had, to each of the pilgrims, its peculiar alleviations. Reuben, a moody man, and misanthropic because unhappy, strode onward with his usual stern brow and downcast eye, feeling few regrets and disdaining to acknowledge any. Dorcas, while she wept abundantly over the broken ties by which her simple and affectionate nature had bound ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... He was a socialist leveller. He threatened with ruin all the trades connected with either the established worship—as amongst the silversmiths at Ephesus—or with the luxuries and amusements of life. Those amusements in circus or amphitheatre he hated, and therefore appeared misanthropic. He not only stood aloof from the religious observances of the state and the household, but treated them with contempt ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... he beheld, nor mingled with the throng; But viewed them not with misanthropic hate: Fain would he now have joined the dance, the song; But who may smile that sinks beneath his fate? Nought that he saw his sadness could abate: Yet once he struggled 'gainst the Demon's sway, And as in Beauty's bower he pensive sate, Poured forth his unpremeditated ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... gloomy and misanthropic systems of religion arose, which painted their gods, like their despots, wicked and envious. To appease them, man offered up the sacrifice of all his enjoyments. He environed himself in privations, and reversed the order of nature. Conceiving his pleasures to ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... more faithful compliance with its most dismal exactions. To them there is nothing more unendurable than the monotonous round of general hospitalities and ceremonials, ludicrously misnamed pleasure. A detestation of wearisome formalities does not imply any clownish or misanthropic reluctance to remember that those who feel it live in a world with other people, and that a thoroughly social life is the only just ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... is not even so great in men as it is declared to be. It[265] is only people of a malicious disposition or those who have become somewhat misanthropic through misfortunes, like Lucian's Timon, who find wickedness everywhere, and who poison the best actions by the interpretations they give to them. I speak of those who do it in all seriousness, to draw thence evil conclusions, by which ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... poetry is smooth and graceful, frequently tinged with a shade of melancholy, but never despairing, cynical, or misanthropic. It never deals with the highest themes, nor rises to sublimity, but its influence is calculated to make the reader ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... the last degree unattractive, except to a misanthropic disposition; or to that, perhaps, of a stern theological polemic, when tempted to be pleased with every superfluity of evidence for overwhelming the opposers of the doctrine which asserts the radical corruption of our nature. As spread over a coarse and repulsive moral and physical scenery, ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster |
