The Egoist

“ The egoist withers like a solitary barren tree; but pride, ambition, as the active effort after perfection, is the source of all that is great.... Yes! a man must prune away the stubborn egoism of his personality to give it the right of self-expression.’
‘Can you lend me a pencil?’ Pigasov asked Bassistoff. ”

“ The conception which is, perhaps, most closely associated with Egoism is that denoted by the words ‘my own interest.’ The Egoist is the man who holds that a tendency to promote his own interest is the sole possible, and sufficient, justification of all his actions. But this conception of ‘my own interest’ plainly includes, in general, very much more than my own pleasure. It is, indeed, only because and in so far as ‘my own interest’ has been thought to consist solely in my own pleasure, that Egoists have been led to hold that my own pleasure is the sole good. ”

“ Perhaps—perhaps sometimes you have thought I had forgotten that evening. I may be an egoist. I expect most men are egoists. And perhaps I am the egoist you say I am. Often one doesn’t know what one is. ”

“ What is not supposed to be my concern! [2] First and foremost, the good cause [3] , then God's cause, the cause of mankind, of truth, of freedom, of humanity, of justice; further, the cause of my people, my prince, my fatherland; finally, even the cause of Mind, and a thousand other causes. Only my cause is never to be my concern. "Shame on the egoist who thinks only of himself!" ”

“ Consider him indulgently: the Egoist is the Son of Himself. He is likewise the Father. And the son loves the father, the father the son; they reciprocate affection through the closest of ties; and shall they view behaviour unkindly wounding either of them, not for each other's dear sake abhorring the criminal? They would not injure you, but they cannot consent to see one another suffer or crave in vain. ”

“ And both are Egotists equally with me.
Egotist, not egoist, is my word: it and not the idealized one is the 'winged word.'
It is made of glow and gleam and splendor, that Ego. I would be its votary. ”

“ It is this crushing exposure of the wide-spread plague, the extension and mingling of its fibres, the crudity and coarseness of its very refinement and super-fastidiousness, that gives ‘The Egoist’ a scientific as well as an artistic value, and commands for it in English literature a place apart. ”

“ If arrested growth is the chief source of [279] malignant egoism, there is an obvious remedy for the deadly malady. The egoist must re-enter the path of self-realisation. His great enemy is his lower self ”

“ They become irrational and irresponsible under the influence of their ideals. They will not only destroy others, but they will quite often sink their own interests, and rush madly to destroy themselves as a sacrifice to the all-devouring ideal. Curious, is it not, to one who looks on with a philosophical mind?
But the egoist has no ideals, for the knowledge that his ideals are only his ideals, frees her from their domination. She acts for his own interest, not for the interest of ideals. ”

“ Nothing at all, because the egoist is to himself the warder of the human, and has nothing to say to the State except "Get out of my sunshine." ”

“ The Egoist surely inspires pity. He who would desire to clothe himself at everybody's expense, and is of that desire condemned to strip himself stark naked, he, if pathos ever had a form, might be taken for the actual person. ”

“ I have listened for years to the prattle of men who call themselves egoists. It is a [Thirty-five] title by which they have sought to identify me. To label a mystery suffices for its dismissal and thus they seek to dismiss me. There is in egoism, however, a depth to which all but myself are blind. I have found this depth in myself and out of it rises a definition which I must consider cautiously. There is but one egoist and that is He who, intolerant of all but Himself, sets out to destroy all but Himself. Egoism is the despairing effort of man to return to his original Godhood ”

“ Ownness works in the little egoist, and procures him the desired—freedom. [Pg 216]
Thousands of years of civilization have obscured to you what you are, have made you believe you are not egoists but are called to be idealists ("good men") . Shake that off! Do not seek for freedom, which does precisely deprive you of yourselves, in "self-denial"; but seek for yourselves, become egoists, become each of you an almighty ego. ”

“ This then is the world: an infinity of things all of which have however their root in us. Not in “us” as we are represented ordinarily in the midst of things; not in the empirical and abstract “us” which feeds the vanity of the empty-headed egoist, of him who has not the faintest notion of what he really is, who can therefore think of himself only as enclosed within the tight husk of his own flesh and of his particular passions. ”

“ The egocentric predicament in this aspect purports to compel the admission by the "altruist" that since whatever he chooses to do must be his act and is obviously done because he wishes, for good and sufficient reasons of his own, to do it, therefore he is an egoist after all—perhaps in spite of himself and then again perhaps not. ”

“ But it is too much to say that the professional moralist and the plain man normally regard pure egoism with favor and find it natural. In spite of our cynical maxims and our inclination to seek for ulterior motives for apparently altruistic acts, we abhor the thorough-going egoist, and we are not inclined to look upon the phenomena, let us say, of the family life, as manifestations of self-seeking. ”

“ First, the egoist calls life a war without mercy, and then he takes the greatest possible trouble to drill his enemies in war. To preach egoism is to practise altruism. ”

“ While it will fancy that those whom it possesses are without exception men, these have meanwhile become without exception egoists, each of whom utilizes it according to his egoistic powers and ends. Against the egoists "human society" is wrecked ”

“ If the grounds of humility are found only in social convenience, they may be quite trivial and temporary. The egoists may be the martyrs of a nobler dispensation, agonizing for a more arduous ideal. To judge from the comparative lack of ease in their social manner, this seems a reasonable suggestion. ”

“ Expressed morally, to love one's neighbour and to live for others and for other things may be the means of protection employed to maintain the hardest kind of egoism. This is the exceptional case in which I, contrary to my principle and conviction, take the side of the altruistic instincts; for here they are concerned in subserving selfishness and self-discipline. The whole surface of consciousness—for consciousness is a surface—must be kept free from any one of the great imperatives. Beware even of every striking word, of every striking attitude! ”

“ I had no alternative, therefore, but to write as the recollections flashed into my mind, or not at all. I must bear cheerfully, therefore, whatever rebuke my egotism—seeming or real—brings upon me, as ordained by my task. ”

“ In the warmth of our discussion we were losing sight altogether of one of the two concave mirrors which distort other people’s moral distortions for us even more wildly than they are distorted to begin with—I mean, our own egotism. ”

“ But worse than 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 as chorea, the patient sometimes turns round, and continues to spin slowly on one spot. Is egotism a metaphysical varioloid of this malady? ”

“ His life, in which so much that was good was mixed, with so much that was bad, lighted up the whole domain of egotism with its glare, and made one feel how near the best and the worst were to each other, and how they sometimes touched without absolute division in texture and color. ”

“ But this egoism would mean humanity's ruin, it would mean humanity's suicide and annihilation: it would certainly mean humanity's degradation. When such egoism says: "I will have all," the only decent retort is deafness. When such egoism says: "I have as much right to live and flourish as the well-constituted, the superior in spirit and body, the beautiful and the happy," wisdom replies with a shrill of its shoulders. And when such egoism preaches altruism—then! ”

“ But let me say again—for I can scarcely say it too often—that the growth which emancipates from self is many-sided growth, the growth, not of any one faculty, or group of faculties, but of the soul as such. Were it not so, the life of self-realisation might easily become a life of glorified and therefore intensified selfishness. It is quite possible, as we know from experience, for a high degree of "culture" to co-exist with a high degree of egoism. ”

“ The great egoism of our dominating will insists on our completely shutting our eyes to ourselves, and on our appearing "impersonal," "disinterested"!—Oh to what a ridiculous degree we are the reverse of this! ”

“ And if I persist in speaking of ourselves and our suffering, it is not for personal egoism, nor even class egoism, but the pardonable egoism of a nation, which has been too long playing a miserable part on Europe's stage and in its own conscience, and which now repudiates the suffering of yesterday and, at the dawn of new life, seeks the possibility—oh, only the possibility!—of respecting itself. ”

“ Such egoism leads humanity downwards: it practically says: "I, the bungled and the botched, I the poor in spirit and body, I the mean, despicable and ugly, want my kind to be all-important, paramount and on the top—I the least desirable wish to prevail." ”

“ How can people, all whose faculties are trained to work in upon themselves—how can they have charm? An egotist, one who talks only of himself, may have charm because he gives you the impression that he is trying to please you, that he thinks you so important that he wishes you to be sensible of his importance. But the egotist who, whatever he talks, thinks only of himself—he is not only dull and bored but also a diffuser of dullness and boredom. ”

“ And when the jaded soul revolts in supreme defiance, declaring its right to its own life, its own duties, its own friendships, and its own loves, there is much expressed disgust, much misfortune predicted, and, saddest of all, much wounded vanity.
The dominant egotism forbids that anything shall be better than itself. No success is comparable to one's own, no life so wisely ordered, and there is nothing so sad as the fame attained by those who do not follow our advice. ”

“ Perhaps you would rather call them--as indeed they are--the seven common forms of egotism. They represent the natural reactions to life of the self-centred human consciousness, enslaved by the "world of multiplicity"; and constitute absolute barriers to its attainment of Reality. So long as these dispositions govern character we can never see or feel things as they are ”

“ Or rather to admire One's Self as he was, without consciousness of the mean vice of egotism, because of the pity almost bordering on contempt with which One regards One's Self as he is, shrivelled up into a sort of shrimp of a man—or blown out into a flounder. ”

“ I frankly confess that in my robust and equable moments I do recognise the broken edge of my life, and what a very poor thing I have made of it—but, for all that, it is my honest belief that we most of us have in our hearts that inmost shrine of egotism, where the fire burns clear and fragrant before an idealised image of self ”

“ The third fact:—There will be a gradual bringing back to their normal condition of those facilities which have been dwarfed, or warped, or abnormally developed through sin and selfishness. Sometimes these moral twists and quirks in our mental faculties are an inheritance through one or more generations. The man with excessive egotism often carries the evidence of it in the very shape of his head. But as he yields to the new Spirit dominant within, a spirit of humility, of modesty will gradually displace so much of the other as is abnormal. ”

“ His seething ambition, his easy-going temper, his constitutional dislike of running in grooves, and his recent despondency, all rose and confronted him in the guise of a colossal Egoism, a selfishness which desired exemption from the common lot of mankind, a lot of hopeless futureless toil ”

“ However when the distinction between individuals makes itself felt, due to the rise of comparative reflection, self-assertion (amour de soi) , in itself free and noble, becomes egoism (amour propre) . Dependence, discontent, vanity, envy and lust for power manifest themselves. And to this must be added the division of labor which social life evolves. ”

“ From the body springs egotism of all kinds, for this is born with the limited personality, and must die with it. Conscience, as a restrainer of this personality, and law and all that belongs to the Fall,—which was a fall from the eternal into the temporal state,—die with the phase of life with which they deal. ”

“ Egoism, in the new psychological sense of the word, may be regarded as the deliberate attempt in an individual's life to throw the chief interest and emphasis of his days upon the inward, personal, subjective impressions produced by the world, rather than upon outward action or social progress. Egoism does not necessarily imply the invidious stigma of selfishness. Goethe, the greatest of all egoists, was notoriously free from such a vice. ”

“ In the egotist we trace prejudices, the cloudiness of a caste education, appetite growing with intoxication, and prosperity that stuns, a fear of suffering which in some goes so far as an aversion from the sufferers, an implacable satisfaction, and the feeling of self so swollen that it closes the soul. In the wretched we find covetousness, envy, the hatred of seeing others successful, the great bounds of the human beast toward gorging, hearts full of mist, sorrow, want, fatality, and foul and common ignorance. ”