"Self-centered" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fluttering ribbons, and folds of drapery. Karl von Rosen would not have acknowledged himself as a woman-hater, that savoured too much of absurd male egotism, but he had an under conviction that women were, on the whole, admitting of course exceptions, self-centered in the pursuit of petty ends to the extent of absolute viciousness. He disliked women, although he had ...
— The Butterfly House • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... great, an unworldly person summoned from a cloister, with the vision of genius and the practical incapacity of one who has run away from life, hating men but loving all mankind, eloquent but inarticulate in a large way, incapable of true self expression in his chosen field of political action, so self-centered that he forgot the world's tragedy and merged it into his own, making great things little and little things great, one of "life's ironies," the everlasting refutation of the optimistic notion that when there is a crisis fate produces a man ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... On the whole, however, his isolated contemplation of what for so long he had taken as a matter of course depressed him. Life was unutterably and intensely selfish. Every little unit in that seething mass was so entirely, so strangely self-centered. None of them had any real love or friendliness for the millions who toiled around them, no one seemed to have time to take his eyes from his own work and his own interests. Burton became more and more depressed ...
— The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... warped to the shape of casuistry. If he had permitted the affliction, which God had visited upon him, to blind his eyes against duty to his daughter, he must rouse himself and remedy the matter. It was time to put such self-centered sin behind him and make amends. In this self-assumption of the plenary right to regulate the life of his daughter, or any one else, there was no element of self-reproach. He held God's commission and acted ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... the tragedy of overweening pride. The trouble with Coriolanus is not ambition, as is the case with Macbeth. He cares little for crowns, office, or any outward honor. Self-centered, self-sufficient, contemptuous of all mankind outside of his own immediate circle of friends, he dies at last because he refuses to recognize those ties of sympathy which should bind all men and all classes of men together. He leads ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... the clasping fingers up to Rhoda's sweet face. Molly was a squaw, dirty and ignorant. Rhoda was the delicate product of a highly cultivated civilization, egoistic, narrow-viewed, self-centered. And yet Rhoda, looking into Molly's deep brown eyes, saw there that limitless patience and fortitude and gentleness which is woman's without regard to class or color. And not knowing why, the white girl bowed ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... soldiery were all too excited by the special interest of the occasion, and too busy with making a racket of their own, for any individual, even the great Roussillon, to gain their eyes or ears. He in turn scarcely heard the tumult they made, so self-centered were his burning thoughts and feelings. A great occasion in Vincennes and he, Gaspard Roussillon, not recognized as one of the large factors in it! Ah, no, never! And he strode along the wall of ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... portrait. His eyes were on the bar, where his great hand turned and turned the glass, as if his mind were withdrawn a thousand leagues from the noisy scene about him. But for all that apparently wrapt and self-centered contemplation, Morgan knew the moment when Seth Craddock looked his direction and discovered him. At that moment he ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... metamorphosis! To her flashed a memory of this man, her other-time employer—keen and smooth-shaven, alert, well-dressed, self-centered, dominant, the master of a hundred complex problems, the directing mind of ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... After his divorce from Julia, Tiberius had not married again, and the offices of tenderness which a wife should have given him were discharged in part by his mother, but largely by his sister-in-law. No one exercised so much influence as Antonia over the diffident and self-centered spirit of the emperor. Whoever wished to obtain a favor from him could do no better than to intrust his cause to Antonia. There is no doubt, therefore, that Antonia checked her son, and in his society counterbalanced the influence ...
— The Women of the Caesars • Guglielmo Ferrero
... After all it might be better not to take this self-willed young woman too seriously. She had, at least, the virtue of truthfulness. She was entirely frank in the expression of her opinions. She might have many other redeeming qualities which would quite overbalance the disagreeably self-centered side of her character. ...
— Grace Harlowe's Return to Overton Campus • Jessie Graham Flower
... retention of Anna and Miranda Callender, who sat on camp-stools. The absent Constance was down in the town, just then bestowing favors not possible for any one else to offer so acceptably to a certain duplicate and very self-centered ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... could hardly refrain from crying out in her joy. It seemed to her that her dearest wish was about to come true. Two easier opponents, she thought, could not possibly have been selected: Lily Andrews would never be elected—she was too fat and plain; and Evelyn Hopkins—light, frivolous, self-centered girl that she was—was decidedly unpopular. The outcome of the business seemed assured in Ruth's favor; she was so certain of her own election, that she did not even bother to vote for herself, but instead cast her ...
— The Girl Scouts' Good Turn • Edith Lavell
... came! And she didn't just build the house over, she built all of us over. And built the whole world over for us all. Just with her pride in us! Just with the pride she made us feel in ourselves! And do you know, we were all such self-centered idiots, that it wasn't until after she was gone that we grasped what she'd done with us? We didn't know the glory and the wonder of her until after she ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... most fractious and self-centered of the individuals was the camp surgeon, highly trained and educated, and chosen because he seemed to have a way among men. Greeley was several times at the point of having him shot; the surgeon's death by starvation saved ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... months on a good compliment," he once said. Certain persistent correspondents, too self-centered to realize their lack of consideration, or the futility of their purpose, followed him relentlessly. Of one ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... hypersuggestible, frequent { in the mild depressions and in all victims of { self-attention. { Retardation { found in most depressions. { Deficiency { as in idiocy—the inability to form new concepts. { Acceleration { as in hypo-mania. { Poverty { as in the abnormally self-centered; { as in melancholia. { Rambling ideas { as in chronic insanity. { Flight of ideas { as in manias, hysterias, and acute deliriums. Disorders / Fixed ideas of < as in paranoia. Ideation Perversions (concepts change their meaning altogether) { ...
— Applied Psychology for Nurses • Mary F. Porter
... fixed in the catches. The chimney is too narrow to admit of the passage of even a child. This room, in fact, is as firmly barred in as if besieged. It has no communication with any other part of the house. It is as absolutely self-centered and isolated as if it were a fort in the sea or a log-hut in the forest. Even if any strange person is in the house, nay, in the very sitting-room of the deceased, he cannot get into the bedroom, for the house is one built for the poor, with no communication ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... hairs—please," said the very selfish and self-centered Stella. "I want your help. Do tell me how to get out of asking that girl to my party without offending her friends—for she ...
— Janice Day, The Young Homemaker • Helen Beecher Long
... at once into The Everlasting Yea. It is not enough that a man pass from the morbid and self-centered mood to an interest in the outward world that surrounds him. That might transform him simply into a curious but heartless dilettante, a mere tourist of the spirit, whose sole desire is to see and to take notes. But ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... conditions that may partly explain, to the ordinary healthy person, the real distress of mind into which these self-centered sufferers sink. The fear of a thunder storm, for example, creates profound dread and distress of mind in some people. The dread of dirt, of sharp instruments, of certain insects and animals, of darkness, of an ocean voyage, and of great heights, are common examples of this type of mind-distress ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... these west-bound travelers the savage and the half-civilized seemed to me to preponderate; this not to say that they were so much coarse and crude as they were fierce, absorbed, self-centered. Each man depended upon himself and needed to do so. The crew on the decks were relics from keel-boat days, surly and ugly of temper. The captain was an ex-pilot of the lower river, taciturn and surly of disposition. Our ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... entailed disadvantage—the deformed foot doubtfully hidden by the shoe, makes a restlessly active spiritual yeast, and easily turns a self-centered, unloving nature into an Ishmaelite. But in the rarer sort, who presently see their own frustrated claim as one among a myriad, the inexorable sorrow takes the form of fellowship and makes the imagination tender. Deronda's early-weakened ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... the group-centered society of the Indians in favor of a self-centered society, this attempt of 1656 was not ...
— Virginia Under Charles I And Cromwell, 1625-1660 • Wilcomb E. Washburn
... his creator 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 books ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... relation to American art, Mr. Gutzen Burglum said: "Puritanism has made us self-centered and hypocritical for so long, that sincerity and reverence for what is natural in our impulses have been fairly bred out of us, with the result that there can be neither truth nor individuality ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... the ambition natural to a man of high powers. With all his genial sociability, he was in a way self-centered. His associates often thought him,—and Lamon shares the opinion—not only moody and meditative, but unsocial, cold, impassive; bent on his own ends, and using other men as his instruments. Partly we may count this as the judgment of ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... reception by the most popular girl in college was an honor of which she had never dreamed. Only a few days before she had resigned all hope of even going, but through the magic of Grace Harlowe she was among the elect. For almost the first time in her self-centered young life, she was swept by a wholly generous impulse to do the best that lay within her in college if only for Grace's sake. While she listened to Mabel's gay sallies, answering them almost shyly, her mind was on the debt of gratitude she owed Grace, who, without mentioning her visit to Alberta ...
— Grace Harlowe's First Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... in an unoffending sheet of paper with her lead pencil. She wondered what Jean Brent's secret could possibly be, and how she could best reach this stubborn, self-centered freshman. And in her wholehearted effort to be of service to the girl, who apparently needed her help, she did not dream that she was laying the cornerstone of a house of ...
— Grace Harlowe's Problem • Jessie Graham Flower
... overcome obsessions is likely to be ignored by two classes: the self-centered individuals who see no reason for learning what they do not want to learn, and the individuals who have no time for, or interest in, self-training because of absorption in subjects of wider relation, as art, or science, or reform. The philosophy of ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... communal principle. The primitive segregative man, if there ever really was such a being, hardly deserves to be called man. Social qualities he had very slight, if at all; his altruistic actions and emotions were of the lowest and feeblest type. His life was so self-centered—we may not call it selfish, for he was not conscious of his self-centeredness—that he was quite sufficient to himself except for short periods of time. It was a matter of relative indifference to him whether his ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... the development of selfishness and the gratification of the appetites and passions. The utmost care, therefore, must be exercised by the parents, from the very beginning, if the affections and desires of the child are to be trained away from itself and not permitted to become self-centered. Happy is the child whose mother knows how to direct those earliest manifestations of love. The undisciplined senses and appetites easily degenerate into indulgence of passion, or grow into that moral control which delights ...
— Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training • Mosiah Hall
... independent jurisdiction among the cities. It is to the destruction of this identity of interests and of government which existed between country and city, that is owed the ultimate predominance of the latter, and its regaining its ancient position of a self-centered unity; although in its new form we find this depending on the principle of individual liberty, instead of being based on the principle of government by a central power. Whether this emancipation from the ...
— The Communes Of Lombardy From The VI. To The X. Century • William Klapp Williams
... the line Rutherford was damnably cool and efficient, a fatalist who went about his grim business unmoved. Back in rest billets he was always pursuing some woman, unearthing surplus stores of whisky or wine, intent upon dubious pleasures,—a handsome, self-centered debonair animal. ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... 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 never mentioning his own, courteous and ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... enemy.' Friendship, I realize, is precious and gained only after long days of probation. The tough fibers of the heart constitute its essence, not the soft texture of favors and dreams. We do not possess the friends we imagine, for the world is self-centered." ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... importance? His argument we find running somewhat as follows: "I am superior to you because I write poetry. What do I write poetry about? Why, about my superiority, of course!" Must we not conclude that the poet, with the rest of us, is speeding around the hippodrome of his own self-centered consciousness? ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... been an unwise mother my dear," said she, "and you stopped me just in time. I only now begin to realize my limitations. I've been self-centered and conceited." ...
— Ethel Hollister's Second Summer as a Campfire Girl • Irene Elliott Benson
... sufficiently terrifying to her, and she was willing to use any means that might offer to avert it. But it may be conceded, in bare justice, that in this stage of her development she was nothing worse than a self-centered young egoist, immature, and struggling, quite without malice, to make things come ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... remember that I accepted the arrangements made for my sister and me without much reflection, and everything that was planned for my advantage I took as a matter of course. I was no heartless monster, but a decidedly self-centered child. If my sister had seemed unhappy it would have troubled me; but I am ashamed to recall that I did not consider how little it was that contented her. I was so preoccupied with my own happiness that I did not half perceive the splendid devotion of ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... 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
... is the thing that must guide us," is the emphatic declaration of President Woodrow Wilson. The false assumption that "the end justifies the means has come from self-centered men, who see in their own interests the interests of the country, and do not have vision enough to read it in wider terms, the universal terms of equity ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... is indeed a shame that despite all our rhapsodies about the ancients we pay so little attention to our own possibilities. Struggling artists, weary souls lingering in the shadow of cold disdain! In our self-centered century, what inspiration do we offer them? The past may well look with pity at the poverty of our civilisation; the future will laugh at the barrenness of our art. We are destroying the beautiful in life. Would that some great ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... being talked about, even in praise. The approval of her own conscience, the consciousness of performing an unique and useful work, seems quite to suffice her. Few women are so self-reliant, self-sustained, self-centered. And in saying this we but echo the sentiments, if not the words, of an eminent divine who, like herself, was during the whole war devoted to a work similar in its purpose, and alike ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... the frailty and suspicion of human nature! The self-centered and self-satisfied citizens of San Pasqual had condemned the vegetable venture from the start. It had been too radical a departure from the desert order of things, and the fact that a mere stranger had conceived the idea sufficed to damn the enterprise even with those who gloried in the ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... dastardly to wrench away from her now, like some self-centered Joseph, leaving that beastly stab in her vanity.... And she was a stunning creature, lawless, elemental, hot and cold like the ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley |
