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/ˈigoʊˌɪzəm/ Listen

noun

Egoism n.

(Philos.) The doctrine of certain extreme adherents or disciples of Descartes and Johann Gottlieb Fichte, which finds all the elements of knowledge in the ego and the relations which it implies or provides for.

Excessive love and thought of self; the habit of regarding one's self as the center of every interest; selfishness; opposed to altruism.

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Etymology of 'Egoism'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Egoism" Quotes from Famous Books

... Ireland. He certainly had the makings of a chivalrous figure, and perhaps even a great man. One thinks that he began his descent unconsciously, and that carelessness rather than any inherent badness led gradually to an egoism which has proved fatal to his powers and to ...

— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie

... attempted. There are only two poets in English literature who thus stand out of the tradition, who are without ancestors, Donne and Browning. Each seems to have certain qualities almost greater than the qualities of the greatest; and yet in each some precipitation of arrogant egoism remains in the crucible, in which the draught has ...

— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons

... boys at my school besides myself who took a private pleasure in poetry; but red-hot iron would not have induced most of us to admit this to the masters, or to repeat poetry with the faintest inflection of rhythm or intelligence. That would have been anti-social egoism; we called it "showing off." I myself remember running to school (an extraordinary thing to do) with mere internal ecstasy in repeating lines of Walter Scott about the taunts of Marmion or the boasts of Roderick ...

— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton

... but this was because, moreover, the men distrusted Greek culture. When literature, science, and Hellenic philosophy were admitted into the great Roman families as desired and welcome guests, neither the authority, nor the egoism, nor yet the prejudices of the men, sought to deprive women of the joy, the comfort, the light, that might come to them from these new studies. We know that many ladies in the last two centuries of the republic ...

— The Women of the Caesars • Guglielmo Ferrero

... Comte as to the expediency of relieving the philosopher from the necessity of being in plain and business-like relations with indifferent persons for a certain number of hours in the week. Such relations do as much as a doctrine to keep egoism within decent bounds, and they must be not only a relief, but a wholesome corrective to the tendencies of concentrated thinking ...

— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 10: Auguste Comte • John Morley

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