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Altruistic   /ˌɔltruˈɪstɪk/   Listen
Altruistic

adjective
1.
Showing unselfish concern for the welfare of others.  Synonym: selfless.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Altruistic" Quotes from Famous Books



... to grow apart in their sympathies; the one alert of mind, imaginative, open to every intellectual influence, also impetuous and hot-blooded; the other shy and intellectually stolid, but good to the very core, and moved by the strongest of altruistic impulses. In accordance with their respective characters, the first of these youths becomes a physician, and the other a clergyman. Then we have the sister of the physician, who becomes the wife of the clergyman, a noble, proud, self-centred nature, finely strung to the inmost fibre of her ...
— Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson • William Morton Payne

... never smile again," said Mr. Charteris. "And my wife—oh, it would upset Anne, quite frightfully! It is our altruistic, nay, our bounden duty to save them from ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell

... 'America's Leading Banjoists' charmed me next, for, after all, there is nothing like the banjo. If one does not one's self rejoice in its plunking, there are others who do, and that is enough for my altruistic spirit. Besides, it is America's leading instrument, and those who excel upon it appeal to the patriotism which is never really dormant in us. Its close association with color in our civilization seemed to render ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells

... of undisciplined compassion," observed the gold-spectacled gentleman, glowering at me. "The integrity and virtue of a whole family sacrificed to the gratification of thy altruistic emotions!" ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill

... gradually to inculcate the true social feeling which subordinates itself to the welfare of others. The application to sociological problems of the physical theory of organic evolution further developed the altruistic theory. According to Herbert Spencer, the life of the individual in the perfect society is identical with that of the state: in other words, the first object of him who would live well must be to take his part in promoting ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... It has been the fate of the Yugoslavs—Slovenes, Croats, Serbs and Bulgars—to live for centuries beside each other and be kept always, by foreign masters, isolated from each other. At rare intervals, as we shall see in following their history, a person has arisen who has tried, with altruistic or with selfish motives, to make some sort of union of the Yugoslavs. And now we will go back to the time when Slavs first ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein

... subordinate self displayed in this letter was very characteristic of its author. He was by nature altruistic, and this propensity was intensified by his career at Dulwich and his experience of athletics, both influences tending to merge the individual in the whole and to subordinate self to the side. Death he had never feared, and he dreaded it less than ever after ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones

... the club-house of the exclusive Circle of Friends of Humanity; but Lanyard's knock secured him prompt and unquestioned right of way. The unfortunate fact is, he was a member in the best of standing; for this society of pseudo-altruistic aims was nothing more nor less than one of those several private gambling clubs of Paris which the French Government tolerates more or less openly, despite adequate restrictive legislation; and gambling was Lanyard's ruling passion—a ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance

... taken by these altruistic reformers for the application of the doctrines they uphold. To the question how one kind of labor can be measured against another, how the labor of the artisan can be measured against the labor of ...
— The Altruist in Politics • Benjamin Cardozo

... time I know of only two companies that make top quality life extension vitamin supplement formulas. One is Prolongevity (Life Extension Foundation), the other, Vitamin Research Products. I prefer to support what I view as the altruistic motives behind Prolongevity and buy my products from them. Unfortunately, these vitamin compounders can not put every possibly beneficial substance in a single bottle of tablets. The main reason they do not is fear of the power-grabbing Food and Drug Administration. ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon

... with those of the evolutionists of to-day. Nothing strikes the reader so much as her firm belief in the theory of development, and her conclusion therefrom that progress in government consists in the gradual substitution of altruistic principles for the egotism which was the primal foundation of law and order. Profession of this creed is at once made in both the preface and first chapter of the "French Revolution." In ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell

... John Stuart Mill, perhaps it would have taken you some time, but suppose your nature was Quixotic, impulsive, altruistic, guileless; suppose you were a hungry man starving for something to love and lean upon, for one whose burdens you might bear, and who might help you to bear yours. Suppose you were down on your luck, still stunned by a horrible shock, and this bright vista of a happy future ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler

... up the broad steps at Thornwood, she congratulated herself upon a duty about to be accomplished. She had not foregone a bridge luncheon to make this tiresome trip to the country for purely altruistic reasons. She had come to prove to herself, and to her circle, the bond of friendship that existed between her and her distinguished cousin. Experience had taught her that an occasional reference to "my favorite cousin, John Jay Queerington, the ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice

... the proletary's case; and he knew that his opinion was shared with complete unanimity by all who had known Griswold in Printing House Square. To a man they agreed in calling him Utopian, altruistic, visionary. What milder epithets should be applied to one who, with sufficient literary talent—not to say genius—to make himself a working name in the ordinary way, must needs run amuck among the theories ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde

... gang, the Christian church, the political party, {47} the social set, the educational institution, and, indeed, the state itself; but wherever found it has its source in a very primitive group action. In the primitive struggle for existence man had little sympathy for his fellows, the altruistic sentiment being very feeble. But gradually through the influence of the family life sympathy widened and deepened in its onward flow until, joining with the group morality, it entered the larger world of ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar

... kept her much at home, and the dominant influence of her father had therefore every chance to make itself felt upon her character, and that influence was all in favor of a self-denying philanthropy. To the last her father was altruistic, finding nothing worth living for but the doing for others. Abiding secluded as Phillida had, the father's stamp remained uneffaced. She saw in all this magnificence a wanton waste of resources. She put it side by side with her sense of ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston

... and flourish in an agnostic climate is a highly dubious proposition. We can only say that available experience seems to be against it. The Christian morality implies the Christian religion which has created it; as for the {180} high-minded, altruistic individual agnostic, he must simply be pronounced a ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer

... leaders in the political and business worlds. He wrote me a very strong letter of protest against my attitude, expressed in dignified, friendly, and temperate language, but using one word in a curious way. This was the word "altruistic." He stated in his letter that he had not objected to my being independent in politics, because he had been sure that I had the good of the party at heart, and meant to act fairly and honorably; but that he had been warned, ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt

... of employment, is young, agile, a talker, a poser, sharp enough to be capable of anything in reason except honesty or altruistic considerations of any kind. The woman is a commonplace old bundle of poverty and hard-worn humanity. She looks sixty and probably is forty-five. If they were rich people, gloved and muffed and well wrapped up in furs and overcoats, they would be numbed and miserable; for it is a grindingly ...
— Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw

... of eloquence, of extravagant oratory, I longed for a sympathetic ear. An altruistic emotion pervaded me. Who would suspect, thought I, as I walked a little too circumspectly amid the throng, that my heart was aglow, that I was tensing my muscles in the pride of their fitness, that my brain was a bewildering kaleidoscope of thoughts ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service

... reverse side in pains, and to some pains the pleasures bear a small relation, being chiefly of the character of the pains being absent. As a social animal man is only imperfectly adapted to the state, there going on a constant warfare between his egoistic and altruistic impulses. In fact, it would certainly be an arguable proposition, if we allow intention in nature, to say that man was intended to remain at the animal level, and that, having so far defeated nature's intention, ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen

... descriptions of love cannot be denied. The subject, however, is too many-sided for me to attempt to describe it here. Suffice it to say that the men of the coming religion will be distinguished by an intelligent and yet intense altruistic affection—the ...
— The Reconciliation of Races and Religions • Thomas Kelly Cheyne

... then, is the regular rejoinder to the progressing people's protest against paternalism, and altruistic regard for their real welfare is still represented as the reason why special legislation should be provided when Filipinos prefer the same laws ...
— The Indolence of the Filipino • Jose Rizal

... the 12th of September. I hear that a doctor went into the Prince of Wales' Hotel to-day, and saw stuck up in the hall the words: "Das Seegefecht in der Nordsee" (in which of course we were victorious). He tore it down and stamped on it. An altruistic German waiter thinking to please the English guests had put the first sheet of the "Frankfurter Zeitung" in a prominent position to console them for the many defeats we are supposed to have had. ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson

... development of his sympathies. The savage may be defined as a man who cares only for his family and his tribe; the civilized man as one whose kindly interest extends to mankind and beyond to all sentient beings. In the development of this altruistic motive the care of the dependent species has evidently been most effective. We note that the peoples who have attained the first upward step in the association with domesticated animals are in their quality, so far as tested by literature and history, ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler

... trait they do show which is the first step toward knowledge—curiosity. Nearly all the animals show at times varying degrees of curiosity, but here again an instinctive feeling of possible danger probably lies back of it. They even seem to show at times a kind of altruistic feeling. A correspondent writes me that she possessed a canary which lived to so great an age that it finally became so feeble it could not crack the seeds she gave it, when the other birds, its own progeny, it is true, fed it; and Darwin cites cases of blind birds, in a state ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs

... companion, "we'll leave Weston out. I'm not sure about what he believes in, and it's probable that, he doesn't know himself, except that it's everything as it used to be. His wife was High Church, with altruistic notions, and it's no secret that she made things rather uncomfortable for her husband; but when she took the lad in hand she succeeded perhaps too well. You see, he wanted to apply her principles; and altruism leads to trouble when its possessor comes ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss

... jealousy but also of the Pope's. A few months before the death of Henry VII., these four combined in the League of Cambrai, for the dismemberment of Venice. The allies, however, were not guided in their actions by any altruistic motives—any excessive regard for the interests of their associates. The French King, Lewis XII., by prompt and skilful action, made himself master of the north of Italy before the rest were ready to move. ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes

... this complaint, The Curious Friends (ALLEN AND UNWIN), an unconventional and perhaps just a little silly tale about a secret association of children and grownups, pledged to mutual help and a variety of altruistic aims—a scheme, with all its faults, at least human and understandable. But Miss C.J. DELAGREVE has chosen to complicate it by (apparently) a dash of the supernatural, in the person of a character called Saint Ken, about whom we are told that he lived in a tunnel on the Underground and employed ...
— Punch, Volume 156, January 22, 1919. • Various

... have seen, frankly acknowledged that he sought his own advantage, and, when he possessed himself of Tunis, made no pretence of any altruistic motive. The Emperor, on the other hand, having come in the guise of a Christian reformer, simply stole the kingdom from Barbarossa and kept it for himself. Incidentally he released the captives, which enabled him ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey

... a generation ago would scarcely have recognized the England pictured by the amiable Bordeaux professor, and I am not sure that in this entirely altruistic big brother of little nations the English would have recognized themselves. But, at any rate, polite flutters of applause punctuated the talk, and at the end M. Cestre asked his audience to rise as he paid his final tribute to the people now fighting the common battle with France. They all stood ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl

... himself a slave to accumulation, absorbs an inordinate share of the trade or profession he is engaged in, makes life harder for all others engaged in it and excludes from it many who might otherwise gain competencies. Thus, besides the egoistic motive, there are two altruistic motives which should deter from this excess ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various

... contains twenty-six essays and letters (many published for the first time) belonging to the last fifteen years of Tolstoy's career, the period in which he has devoted himself exclusively to humanitarian labors. Therefore each has a definite altruistic purpose. In the letters in particular we have, in the words of the translator, "Tolstoy's opinions in application to certain definite conditions. They thus help to bridge the gulf ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy

... unsatisfying. Because, while I am trying not to see the wrong shape, I have only half my faculties to appreciate the exquisite colors, and so a third influence has to come in—the meaning of the artist who painted them and perhaps put into them his soul. But that is altruistic—I could as well admire something of very bad art for the same reason. For me a picture should satisfy each of these points of view to be perfect and lift me into heights. That is why perhaps I shall prefer sculpture on the whole, when I shall have ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn

... war which brought emancipation was not in itself a deliberately planned altruistic movement, but was precipitated upon the country, and waged primarily in the interest of the solidarity of the white ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs

... in seven merciless days—seven successive and terrible shocks of experience. The enormous world had not missed him; and his place therein was not void—society had simply forgotten him. So long as he had moved among them, all he knew for friends had performed their petty altruistic roles,—had discharged their small human obligations,—had kept turned toward him the least selfish side of their natures,—had made with him a tolerably equitable exchange of ideas and of favors; and after his disappearance from their midst, they had duly mourned for his loss—to ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn

... confidence into the bedroom. And simultaneously, to intensify his unease, the notion that profiteering was profiteering, whether in war or in peace, and the notion that F.F. was a man of lofty altruistic ideals, surged ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett

... this echoing patriotism—for want of a better gathering place. It is like an incident during an earthquake, when men who have abandoned a cleft fortress will shelter in a drinking bothy. But the very upheavals that have shattered the old fastnesses of altruistic men, will be found presently to be taking the shape of a new gathering place—and of this the New Republic presents an early guess and anticipation. I do not see how men, save in the most unexpected emergency, can be content to accept ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells

... so was the 'Old Curiosity Shop.' No doubt a fancied affinity with Tom Pinch through their common love of music made him like that most sentimental and improbable personage, whom he would have disowned and laughed to scorn if he had met him in life; but it was a purely altruistic sympathy that he felt with Little Nell and her grandfather. He was fond of reading the pathetic passages from both books, and I can still hear his rich, vibrant voice as it lingered in tremulous emotion on the periods he ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... commercial instincts of the Jew, but with an errant philosophy which led him to believe first one thing and then another so long as neither interfered definitely with his business. He was an admirer of Henry George and of so altruistic a programme as that of Robert Owen, and, also, in his way, a social snob. And yet he had married Susetta Osborn, a Texas girl who was once his bookkeeper. Mrs. Platow was lithe, amiable, subtle, ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser

... with a persistent purpose to attain it in the end, this Society has never faltered in its effort to follow the path where he had blazed the way. It has never been seriously accused of acting from fear or favour or from other than altruistic motives, and by so doing it has gained and kept the confidence and respect of a great part of what is best in our community. It is far too late in the day for any newspaper or anay group of citizens, no matter how influential in the one case or highly respected in the other, ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell

... entitled to demand from Commerce that it should co-operate sincerely with the other elements in the State in pursuing the real objects of civilisation, inspired by an altruistic regard for the whole of which it is a part, that is by what is really "enlightened self-interest"; by what Plato has called Temperance[29] and Mr. H. G. Wells "a sense of the State."[30] We find instead that the trader has "day and night held ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato

... not even debated a refusal. The boy should be gratified. Nor did she try to convince herself that her motive was wholly altruistic. She had suddenly wished to mingle in what she was persuaded would be a scene of mad revelry. She had definitely abandoned the untrodden ways. She thought that reading about war might have unsettled her ideals. Anyway, they were unsettled. She was ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson

... I have ever encountered from a reviewer was the laconic and cynical remark (commenting upon my rather altruistic belief in the duty of giving one's best thought to the conversational circle), that "Nowadays, people don't talk: if they have any good ideas, they save them and write them out and sell them." The critic implied that, otherwise, in this age of universal scribbling, ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton

... other things that we have not. It has been observed, by all acute students of the novel, that the egotistic variety will not bear heavy crops of fruit by itself; and that it is incapable, or capable with very great difficulty, of letting the observed and so far altruistic kind grow from the same stool. Of what is sometimes called the dramatic faculty (though, in fact, it is only one side of that),—the faculty which in different guise and with different means the general novelist must also possess,—Rousseau ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury

... the maid who answered to his ringing. Therefore he went his way once more; and, feeling idle, unsettled, alternately depressed at the prospect of what he deemed his coming selfishness in seeking Olive again later on, and elated with a general zeal for altruistic effort by the success of his attempt to arouse Opdyke's dormant ambition: because of all these things, he suddenly decided that it would be the part of good fellowship to pay a visit to his former rector and ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray

... aristocratic-looking. He was really neither, but was well-built and well-dressed, and had good grayish-brown eyes, about the colour of his grayish-brown hair. Among these amiably worldly people, who were not in the least moved by an altruistic prompting, Emily's greatest capital consisted in the fact that she did not expect to be taken the least notice of. She was not aware that it was her capital, because the fact was so wholly a part of the simple contentedness of her nature that she had not thought about it ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... consequences upon the individual. His sensibility causes him through association to acquire the habits which generally bring praise and blame; and ultimately these qualities become attractive for their own sake. The difficulty is to see where the line is crossed which divides truly moral or altruistic conduct from mere prudence. Admitting that association may impel us to conduct which involves self-sacrifice, we may still ask whether such conduct is reasonable. Association produces belief in error as well as in truth. If I love a ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen

... next room came a quick change of accompaniment, and a voice was heard singing, as if to the singer's self, 'Il balen del suo sorris'. It is hard to tell how far such little incidents affected her in what she did that afternoon; but they had their influence. She said: "You are altruistic—or are you selfish, or both? . . . And should the woman —if it were a woman—yield, and spare the man, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... with her head on a strong man's shoulder, and a rough coat scrubbing her cheek, suddenly bethought her of the line—"Journeys end in lovers' meeting—" and was smitten with a secret wonder as to how much of her impulse to come north had been due to an altruistic concern for the Dunstable affairs, and how much to a firm determination to recapture Arthur from his Gloriana. But that doubt she would never reveal. It would be so bad ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward

... "No matter how altruistic you may be about it, you get man to the point that he doesn't depend on atmospheric oxygen here, and domes, pressurized houses and groundcars, oxygen equipment—a great many things are going to be unnecessary. ...
— Rebels of the Red Planet • Charles Louis Fontenay

... have chosen are: that between development of the aesthetic faculties and the development of the altruistic instincts; that between development of a sense of aesthetic harmony and a sense of the higher harmonies of universal life; and, before everything else, the coincidence between the preference for aesthetic pleasures and the ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee

... couldn't! But she cried, with great wet tears streaming down the smooth planes of her face. Didn't he love her? Wasn't this one little favor worth doing for the sake of her happiness? No one would be hurt by it. The motives were altruistic, after all. ...
— Heart • Henry Slesar

... missionary did in Uganda; only it seemed to him that of all lands Ireland needed most the service and the prayers of those of her children who had the capacity of self-forgetfulness. Afterwards, when he thought more deeply, he found a great hope in the very existence of all this altruistic enthusiasm. He had a vision of all that might be done for Ireland if only the splendid energy of her own children could be used in her service. He tried more than once to explain his point of view. Mr. Quinn met him ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham

... "believers" to abandon their relations with the Church. This, while on many accounts to be regretted, was nevertheless inevitable. The bare acceptance of the monotheistic idea does not secure that transformation of heart and produce that warmth of living faith which are essential elements in the altruistic ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick

... administer them purely on altruistic principles, for their own good and that of the world at large—like the oil-wells ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... which is the feline morn she would, if certain of a sufficient number of admiring spectators, condescend to amuse their dull human intelligence by exhibitions of her dexterity. But she was soon bored, and had no conception of altruistic effort. Abundantly cautious and prudent in all matters concerning her own safety and comfort, she had that feline celerity of vanishing like air or water before the foot, hand, or missile of irritated man; while on the other hand, when a sensitive specimen of the gentler sex (my ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various

... it was its boast and merit to have supplanted. According to Geddes and Foster and others of their school, it is the species-subserving qualities that Nature selects; and these, in the higher grades of life, are equivalent to the altruistic, social, and ethical qualities. It is in virtue of the parental and maternal instincts of self-sacrifice, self-diffusion, self-forgetfulness in the interests of the offspring, that species are preserved ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell

... would pass, and the sane, ideal government of her dreams would follow—must follow, since among the people's elected representatives was a goodly number of unselfish, single-minded men of her father's class of life; men of breeding and education, impelled by a lofty altruistic patriotism; men who gradually came to form a party presently to be known as ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini

... tales of injustice and oppression till they had wrought his compassion to the pitch of that frenzy. But his father's friend, of course, dismissed him summarily as likely to ruin his business. After that altruistic exploit Stevie was put to help wash the dishes in the basement kitchen, and to black the boots of the gentlemen patronising the Belgravian mansion. There was obviously no future in such work. The gentlemen tipped him a shilling now and then. Mr Verloc showed himself ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad

... from the White Way of his native city. The years had taught her to look for selfish motives behind his every action; certainly, she told herself, he was not of the unselfish mold of his nephew, Harold Lounsbury, the sweetheart of her youth, but in this particular case the expedition seemed entirely altruistic. She wondered now whether, after all her dreams, she would be forced to turn back before her ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall

... progress along the Path which she pointed out to us, she told me of the possibility that other students might be accepted as apprentices by the great Masters, even as she herself had been accepted, and that the only way to gain such acceptance was to show oneself worthy of it by earnest and altruistic work. She told me that to reach that goal a man must be absolutely one-pointed in his determination; that no one who tried to serve both God and Mammon could ever hope to succeed. One of these Masters Himself had said: ...
— A Textbook of Theosophy • C.W. Leadbeater

... were probably not moved by any altruistic sentiments in the matter, and their sole reason for action may have been to see that German subjects should not be excluded from Moroccan markets. It may also be that Germany was resolved that if there was to be a seizure of Morocco she ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw

... Jews emerge into history, not a nation of keen spiritual aspirations and altruistic ethics, but that pagan people, worshipping rocks, sheep and cattle, and spirits of caves and wells, of whom the Old Testament, tending towards its higher ideal, gives fragmentary ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks

... included a very minute inspection of my eyes. Then he put me through a series of psychological test queries. When he had finished he sighed deeply and said: "I am sorry to find that you are suffering from a disturbed balance of the altruistic and the egotistic cortical impulses; it is doubtless due to the intensive demands made upon the creative potential before you were completely recovered from the sub-normal psychosis due to the gas ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings

... Dr. Andrew P. Peabody, when he said there was "probably no city in the world where there had been more ample provision for the poor than in Boston, whether by private alms-giving, benevolent organizations, or public institutions."[4] Nor was this altruistic spirit manifested alone in Boston, for Mr. Frothingham quotes the saying of a lady to Dr. E.E. Hale: "A Unitarian church to you merely means one more name on your calendar. To the people in this town it means better books, ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke

... passed through it. The share of Zoroastrianism must not be exaggerated. The metaphysical and ritualistic tendencies of Indian Buddhism are purely Hindu, and if its free use of images was due to any foreign stimulus, that stimulus was perhaps Hellenistic. But the altruistic morality of Mahayanism, though not borrowed from Zoroastrianism, marks a change and this change may well have occurred among races accustomed to the preaching of active charity and dissatisfied with the ideals of self-training and lonely perfection. And Zoroastrian ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot

... of the world's powerfully benignant great ladies; committees clustered round her; her words of assured wisdom sustained and guided ecclesiastical and political organisations; one must be benignant, in an altruistic modern world, if one wanted to rule. It was not a cynical nun who gazed; Lady Elliston was kind and Lady Elliston loved power; simply, without a sense of ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick

... drawing near when no altruistic idea should remain to redeem the race from the abyss of selfishness in which it was destined to be overwhelmed. The decay of the ethical idea was the necessary prelude to the perversion of the spiritual. The hand of every man fought for himself ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot

... altruistic in purpose and the soldier always exhibits unselfishness of high order, but, as a rule, conflicts ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... reflections are thus to be interpreted, it seems to me. She says, 'The vices of the world's nobler half in this day are feminine.' We have to guard against 'half-conceptions of wisdom, hysterical goodness, an impatient charity'—against the elementary state of the altruistic virtues, distinguishable as the sickness and writhings of our egoism to cast its first slough. Idea is there. The funny part of it is our finding it in books of fiction composed for payment. Manifestly ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... heaven there is no telling. It is safe to say that they were the usual human mixture of selfish and altruistic, wise and foolish, honorable and impudent, profitable and ruinous. She came by the dictagraphic idea very gradually. She had plentiful leisure since she had taken a distaste for good works. She had been so roughly handled by the world she was toiling for that she decided to let ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes

... person to "an intellectual calculating machine." The theory of evolution suggested to Herbert Spencer a new interpretation of human motives which reasserted their individualistic origin, but explained altruistic sentiments as the slowly accumulated products of evolution. Altruism to Spencer was the enlightened ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... I leave out altruistic considerations and include egoistic considerations only, I may still look back from these declining days of life with content. One drawback indeed there has been, and that a great one. All through those years ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various

... courts, told us that he was surprised that, in a land ostensibly of liberty, so few of the notorious newspaper-wooers and blacklegs upon the bench were assassinated. It is, in fact, rather curious. The thing happens very seldom, and then it is usually in the South, where the motive is not altruistic but political. That is to say, the assassin merely desires to remove one blackleg in order to make a place for some other blackleg. He has no objection to systematized injustice; all he desires is that it be dispensed in favour of his ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan

... so or not, we have in the person of John Gabriel Borkman a prominent example of the ninteenth century type of criminous speculator, in whom the vastness of view and the splendidly altruistic audacity present themselves as elements which render it exceedingly difficult to say how far the malefactor is morally responsible for his crime. He has imagined, and to a certain point has carried out, a monster metal "trust," for the success of which he lacks neither ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse

... punishments, becomes firmly established: Yama becomes an ethical judge. In the Brahmanas, Manu, and the Mahabharata, we find a sort of heaven for the virtuous and a hell for the vicious. While the academic thought of Brahmanism and the altruistic systems of Jainism and Buddhism looked to the absorption of the departed into the All, the popular Hindu faith held fast to the scheme of happiness and wretchedness in the future.[172] As in Dante's ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy

... his noble ambition has been satisfied: for through them he has, indeed, influenced the thought of his country, the thought of the whole world, which owes more than we even yet realise to their pure and altruistic teachings. However, leaving this most interesting question to be decided by our readers, each for himself, we shall now place the chief contents of these writings before them, using as far as possible ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens

... their interests? Stirner says nothing about it, and he can say nothing definite since from the abstract heights on which he stands, one cannot see clearly economic reality, the mother and nurse of all the "Egos," egoistic or altruistic. Nor is it surprising that he is not able to explain clearly even this idea of the class struggle, of which he nevertheless had a happy inkling. The "poor" must combat the "rich." And after, when they have conquered these? ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff

... could always be depended upon to lend a helping hand. On his part, Redell revered Cappy Ricks as only an idealistic and naturally lovable rascal of a boy can revere an idealistic and lovable old man. To J. Augustus Redell little, old, naive, whimsical, gentle, terrible, brilliant, cunning, generous, altruistic, prudent, youthful old Cappy Ricks was a joy forever. With the impishness of his tender years, Mr. Redell could conceive of no greater joy than picking on Cappy Ricks just to see the ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne

... lecture, if the lecture survives. I wish I could shake the hand of every person who has sat in my audiences. And I wish I could tell the lecture committees of America how I appreciate the vast amount of altruistic work they have done in bringing the audiences of America together. For lecture audiences are not drawn together, they ...
— The University of Hard Knocks • Ralph Parlette

... the Rancho Palomar," Miguel Farrel suggested, presently. "I dare say your purchase of this mortgage was not the mere outgrowth of an altruistic desire to relieve the First National Bank of El Toro of ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne

... that it is Satan who reigns exclusively upon earth, and that it is man's duty to help to free God from His powerful rival. They also preach the brotherhood of man and of nations, and it is probably this altruistic doctrine which has rendered them irresistible to many who are wearied and disheartened by the enmities and hatreds ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot

... discovered the Ghetto—you and the impertinent newspaper men. And like the reporters you come down to use us for 'copy.' You live here in comfort among us and then go away, write a book about our wretchedness and pose as altruistic heroes in your own silly set. How I loathe that word—altruism! As if the sacrifice of your personality does not always lead to self-deception, to hypocrisy! It is an excuse for the busybody-rich to advertise their charities. If they were as many ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker

... then all came easier. After critical articles on the trend of modern literature, he published "The Reprobate," a bold dithyrambic on ancient Greek philosophy. The poetry that followed was clearly Epicurean and in complete contradiction to the altruistic tendencies of the neo-Christian period, which found an arch enemy in Nietzsche, whose philosophy evidently influenced Merezhkovsky. However, this evolution did not have a very favorable effect on his poetry; it bordered on an art the clarity of which ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky

... arm, but she holds it in such a way that it gives promise of something better. The word reform never passed the Russians' lips. It is the insistent cry of Japan. The welfare of the Korean people never showed its head above the Russian horizon, but it fills the whole vision of Japan; not from altruistic motives mainly but because the prosperity of Korea and that of Japan rise and fall with the ...
— Korea's Fight for Freedom • F.A. McKenzie

... feeling, or perhaps it would be kinder to say a non-social feeling. Your home-loving person comes in the course of time to that state of mind where little else is of importance; the home becomes the only place where his sympathies and his altruistic purposes find any real outlet. The capitalist of the stage (and of real life too) is one so devoted to his home and family that he decorates one and the other with the trophies of other homes. There is none so devoted to his home as the peasant, and there is no one so individualistic, so intent ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson

... man held to no altruistic creed. His doctrines, had he expounded them quite coolly, would have claimed that self-preservation was the first law of Nature, and that Nature was the best guide. But now, with no time for reason, by the flashlight ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin

... Christ has a larger meaning than this. A presentation of the gospel which makes the welfare of the individual central does not grip the conscience and arouse the emotions as once it did. For the conception of human welfare as social rather than individual has become common; that "great fund of altruistic feeling," which, as Mr. Benjamin Kidd tells us, is the motive power of all our social reforms, is constantly stirring in human hearts; and although there are few whose lives are wholly ruled by this motive, there are fewer still who do not recognize ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden

... of mental and moral confusion is to mistake the egotistic shrinking from the sight of suffering with the altruistic shrinking from causing it ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various

... duty, both of which lie at the base of conscience; nor has he sufficient self-control to accommodate himself to the society in which he has to live, and so to promote his own selfish interests in the long-run. He cannot be preserved from criminal misadventure, either by altruistic sentiments or by ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton

... that his Paulina is coming to see him. With a kind of altruistic nobleness which seems contagious in this play, Polyeuctes resolves that Severus shall come too, and he will resign his wife, soon to be a widow, to the care of his own rival, her Roman lover. First, Polyeuctes and Paulina are alone together—Polyeuctes having, before she arrived, ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson

... hospitals, orphan asylums, institutions of learning and of art and many other altruistic enterprises depends largely upon the voluntary taxation, aggregating a great many millions annually, to which those men in America who have attained financial success have always willingly submitted themselves—more so, probably than in ...
— War Taxation - Some Comments and Letters • Otto H. Kahn

... Mr. Dunborough, Lord Almeric, and two other gentlemen; one of these, an elderly man, who wore black and hair-powder, and carried a gold-topped cane, had a smug and well-pleased expression, that indicated his stake in the meeting to be purely altruistic. The two companies ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman

... him it was used to designate the teachings not merely of Owen and his followers, but those of all social reformers and visionaries—Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, Louis Blanc, and others. By an easy transition, it soon came into general use as designating all altruistic visions, theories, and experiments, from the "Republic" of Plato ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo

... too altruistic ever to come in our lifetime; but, do you know, I am awfully optimistic about it. I really believe it will come so quickly, after it once gets a good start, that it will astound us. The proverbial snowball coming down the mountain side will be as nothing to it. Everyone will want to join the ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House

... advance justice and liberty. Thus do men love their neighbors as themselves, and move forward to fraternity and equality in kingdoms and commonwealths. The special province of moral reformers, like Garrison and the Abolitionists, seems to be to set these egoistic and altruistic elements of human society at war, the one against the other, thereby compelling its members and classes, willy nilly, to choose between the belligerents. Some will enlist on one side, some on the other, but in the furnace ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke

... thing for a government to declare its altruistic intentions, but often quite another to carry them ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86

... Beautiful upon a mountain. El Kudz means The City, and in a certain sense it is that, to unnumbered millions of people. Ludicrous, uproarious, dignified, pious, sinful, naively confidential, secretive, altruistic, realistic. Hoary-ancient and ultra-modern. Very, very proud of its name Jerusalem, which means City of Peace. Full to the brim with the malice of certainly fifty religions, fifty races, and five hundred thousand curious political chicaneries disguised as plans to save our souls ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy

... the Rebellion,—we are to be forced into the chicken business for the good of Bart's health and pocket, and my mental discipline, and also that a thrifty Pennsylvania air may be thrown about our altogether too delightful and altruistic summer arrangements! It's t-o-o bad!" ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright

... states and nations could be quickly depopulated. The Prussian conspiracy would not have been possible if the international affairs of the earth had been assigned to a League of Nations. The play may seem to be altruistic, if not fantastic, but the skeptic is moved by the idea that nations cannot forget selfishness. If that be true, then the world lacks the fundamental fibers of character ...
— The Progressive Democracy of James M. Cox • Charles E. Morris

... familiar subject we have never studied, but also the inevitable influence of sexual bias. Of such bias there is more than one kind. There is the egoistic bias by which we are led to regard our own sex as naturally better than any other could be, and there is the altruistic bias by which we are led to find a charming and mysterious superiority in the opposite sex. These different kinds of sexual bias act with varying force in particular cases; it is usually necessary to ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis

... and resolved to trust him. "Let me explain," he said. "You and I agree in thinking that Miss Wynton is an uncommonly nice girl. I am not on her visiting list at present, so my judgment is altruistic. Suppose she was your daughter or niece, would you care to see her ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy

... of that enthronement of character in the supreme place which is the prominent feature of highly organized industry. In building a hut to shelter his family, a savage puts into his work conscience and affection as well as muscular effort; and when the mother of the family does this work, the altruistic element in it is still more conspicuous. As society becomes highly organized the importance of the moral element in all labor increases till the further progress, or even the existence, of the social order may be said to depend on it. In the world of business there is now distrust and ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark

... new idea—the ecclesiastical and altruistic life as distinct from the intellectual and emulative life. A man could preach and do good to his fellow-creatures without taking double-firsts in the schools of Christminster, or having anything but ordinary knowledge. The old fancy which had led on to the culminating ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy

... being carefully veiled. It appears again in the utterly irrational conversion and purification of these characters, and we may further face it in the profound cynicism, all the more terrible because apparently unconscious, with which the author is content to dismiss Thenot, cured of his altruistic devotion by the shattering at one blow of all that he held most sacred ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg

... favorable to a realization of the dream of empire giving to Japan an importance amounting almost to sovereignty over a vast section of the Far East. The new treaty with Great Britain, which Germans claimed to be anything but altruistic, is having a steadying influence on the policy of the ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield

... This attitude has weakened the usefulness of many bodies organized to promote industrial hygiene. Although the term "industrial hygiene" is broad enough to include all sanitary and hygienic conditions that surround the worker while at work, it is restricted by some to the efforts made by altruistic or farsighted employers in the interest of employees; others think of prohibitions and mandates, in the name of the state, that either prevent certain evils or compel certain benefits; for too few it refers to what the ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen

... money—for her—but nothing like what she might very easily have made. And she knew it, young as she was. For it does not take very long to learn about such things when a girl is attempting to earn her living in this altruistic world. ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers

... Undoubtedly he was right so far as this, that gratitude answering to a spirit of exaction in a benefactor is no merit; a service done in expectation of gratitude is from that fact stripped of the quality which makes gratitude due, and is a mere piece of egoism in altruistic disguise. Kindness in its genuine forms is a testimony of good feeling, and conventional speech is perhaps a little too hard, as well as too shallow and unreal, in calling the recipient evil names because ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley

... change comes that great rhythm by which life and death succeed each other, and death is the cost of life, and to bring life into the world means sacrifice; and—as we rise higher still—to sustain life means prolonged and altruistic love. This is the history of sex and of procreation, a history associated with the rising of humanity in the scale of being, a history not so much of his physical as ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden

... side to all this: the more highly developed nations do owe leadership and service in helping those below to climb the path of civilization; but let one answer fairly how much of empire building has been due to this altruistic spirit, and how much to selfishness and the lust ...
— The Soul of Democracy - The Philosophy Of The World War In Relation To Human Liberty • Edward Howard Griggs

... busy and tremendous months of war Germany has not only been denuding Turkey of her food supplies, for the sake of the Pan-Turkish ideal; in the same altruistic spirit she has been vastly increasing the productiveness of her new and most important colony. The great irrigation works at Konia, begun several years ago, are in operation, and the revenues of the irrigated villages have been doubled. ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson

... with some resentment by Mexican historians. But it is to be recollected that the United States itself was weak, and could not be expected to antagonise Europe too deeply. As it was, Mexico entered into the concert of nations without a friend in the world, save as the not necessarily disinterested or altruistic declaration of Britain and the United States might be construed as friendship. But the recognition of Mexico's independence by Britain in 1825 and treaty of friendship brought the first foreign capital to the land's resources, whilst the war between ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock

... more I try to talk Of you the more my tongue grows egotistic To prattle of myself! I'll try to balk Its waywardness and be more altruistic. So let us speak of others—how they sin, And what a devil of a ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce

... organized world in which moral principle can operate. The world, we might say, is still infantile or immature. The world is still unmoral. We cannot say that nationalism as the principle of the conduct of nations is a wholly selfish principle as contrasted with a moral or altruistic motive, since such an analogy with individual morality fails to take into account the complex nature of nationalism, and overlooks the social qualities ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge

... in the matter of suicides, as in that of remorse, we were too "spectacular and altruistic"; that we lived in a rather unwholesome atmosphere of self-created and foolish ideas concerning honour and duty; that the Mektoub practice of the Arabs pointed to an underlying primitive sanity which we would do well to foster ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas

... one slowly. "It sounds great, but it's pretty altruistic. And while I don't want to impugn anybody's motives, it ...
— Pagan Passions • Gordon Randall Garrett

... advertisement. We may correct any such impression, by changing our point of view. When we consider the difficulties and the hindrances in the way of laying up these savings, while the moral effect of the self-sacrifice hitherto involved is enhanced, the question comes up whether this altruistic exertion can be maintained in the future. How many of the ten millions of depositors in the savings banks have considered that their rulers at Washington give away every year in military pensions a sum equal ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various

... I went out among them consuming with fine altruistic zeal. A woman with a starving child in her arms begged of me in the plaza. Instantly my purse was out, and instantly I was mobbed by the howling, filthy crowd. My purse was almost torn out of my hand, ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee

... more and more presenting the broader aspects of the subjects taught. Even the altruistic and extremely technical aspects of the subject are found profitable. The narrower and apparently the more practical course does not result so successfully as the broader and ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott

... man. And during the interval that separated boy from man had come up in him his strong love of humanity, his passion for the development of the good that lies everywhere, like the ore in gold-bearing earth. That love had perhaps been given to him to combine the two loves, the altruistic love, and the love for a woman bringing its ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens

... have far too much to do; but in this juncture I should count it worth your while to pay him some attention. I want him to get the President's ideas about Mexico, good and firm and hard. They are so far from altruistic in their politics here that it would be a good piece of work to get our ideas and aims into this man's head. His going gives you and the President and everybody a capital chance to help me keep ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick

... is most uncivilized in many respects, will be admitted by all whose range of consciousness has touched in any degree, the infinite areas of wisdom expressed in altruistic action. ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad

... a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. And the altruistic virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim. Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state ...
— The Soul of Man • Oscar Wilde

... the most timid of metals. It has a great disinclination to be alone. It is also one of the most altruistic of the elements. It likes almost every other element better than itself. It has an especial affection for oxygen, and, since this is in both air and water, and these are everywhere, iron is not long without a mate. The result of this ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson

... little thought to the child whose ideals are for service to others or to the community. It is very often the same child that at one time glories in successful emulation under the encouragement of our approval, and that later fails to develop the germs of altruistic ideals because we fail to recognize, or at least to encourage, them. We cannot expect from the schools an early change of emphasis from the competitive type of ambition to the ideal of cooperation or service, ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg

... diabolically ingenious wording—a secret message to his own spies in Washington. Commands for them to obey. A dozen of his spies were in the Earth government's most trusted, highest service—and some of them were there in Washington, close around Georg and Maida as they made their altruistic plan. ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings

... Auberon. "Will wonders never cease? Have the two greatest marvels been achieved? Have you turned altruistic, and has Wayne turned selfish? Are you the patriot, and ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton

... laughed at him for deliberately choosing to leap into the political mire, he told them that the governing class ought to govern, and that not they themselves but the bosses and "heelers" were the real governors of New York City. Not the altruistic desire to reform, but the perfectly practical resolve to enjoy the political rights to which he had a claim was his leading motive. It is important to understand this because it will explain much of his action as a statesman. Roosevelt ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer

... duty. By what tortuous processes of thought I had arrived at the conclusion I do not know, but I considered myself responsible to Audrey for the safeguarding of the Little Nugget, and no altered relations between us could affect my position. Perhaps mixed up with this attitude of mind, was the less altruistic wish to foil Smooth Sam. His continued presence at the school was ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse

... schooled in love's game: to lure, to please, to exploit, to defend, evade, deny; in each postulant seeking, testing, trying for the right man to whom should be made love's final surrender. But Creed, always absorbed in vague altruistic dreams, had no boyish sweethearting behind him to have taught him the ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan

... picture," complained the skipper ironically. "First you say we have to fight him and his kind, and then you imply that he was highly altruistic. What ...
— The Invaders • William Fitzgerald Jenkins

... change in the management of either would be unfortunate. Hampton is a magnificent illustration of Anglo-Saxon ideas in modern education. Tuskegee, on the other hand, is the best demonstration of Negro achievement along distinctly altruistic lines. In its successful work for the elevation and civilization of the children of the freedmen, it is also the most convincing evidence of the Negroes' ability to work together with mutual regard and mutual helpfulness. When Tuskegee was started there was a serious question as to whether ...
— Tuskegee & Its People: Their Ideals and Achievements • Various

... be a mistake, however, to assume that Russia's motives had been entirely or even largely altruistic. The powers had expressed the fear that a greater Bulgaria would gradually become part of the Russian Empire. There can be no doubt that Russia thought so too. All her later actions point to that fact. The only mistake, and this was shared by all who participated ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various

... the child and her thoughts are turned to it instinctively. About this time many of the discomforts of pregnancy disappear and there ensues a period of unusually good health. Perhaps it would be going too far to give this more wholesome altruistic mental attitude the entire credit for the relatively better health of the second half of pregnancy, but without doubt it is a most ...
— The Prospective Mother - A Handbook for Women During Pregnancy • J. Morris Slemons

... things coming to us as God's gift of providence. (3) Make a list of prudential maxims or rules which teach how to live rightly and to lift us above the tribulations and defeat of life. (4) Does the author think seeking pleasure is the real business of life? (5) Does he deny the value of altruistic service? (6) Does he believe in the future life ...
— The Bible Book by Book - A Manual for the Outline Study of the Bible by Books • Josiah Blake Tidwell

... superstition converted into gods. But with the decay of the old faiths the only possible fruitful ideal left is the ideal upheld by Socialism, the ideal of the Co-operative Commonwealth in which the economic conditions will give birth to the highest, purest, most altruistic ethics the world has yet seen. It is true the co-operative commonwealth is far more than a Utopian ideal, it is a scientific prediction, but at this point I wish to emphasize its ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte

... Newyorcon could be complete without a deep bow of appreciation to the altruistic trio of committeemen (including one comely woman) who all but destroyed themselves engineering the Convention: David A. Kyle, ...
— Out of This World Convention • Forrest James Ackerman

... don't know," remarked Betty, in an altruistic effort to pour oil upon the troubled waters, "that I would particularly mind marrying a scientific farmer if they all have houses like this and acres of ground with orchards and ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Bluff Point - Or a Wreck and a Rescue • Laura Lee Hope

... on one side of Eudoxia Pence—Eudoxia gorgeous, affluent, worldly. Never had she disclosed herself at a further remove from all that was earnest, thoughtful, philanthropic, altruistic. ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller

... long sigh. "Dear me, you ought to have been an evangelist. I can't understand why you suddenly become punctilious and altruistic. For years you never did anything but try to make money and wonder if I would marry you—you never cared who was dead or what happened as ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley

... sanction. He feels dimly that he has justification, just as the home-defending Boer felt, though more sharply, with each bullet he fired at the invading English. Behind every brick thrown by a striker is the selfish will "to live" of himself, and the slightly altruistic will "to live" of his family. The family group came into the world before the State group, and society, being still on the primitive basis of tooth and nail, the will "to live" of the State is not so compelling to the striker as is the ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London

... out one of her miracles over fields of grain, over prairie flowers, over umbrageous trees and all things borne upon the bosom of Mother Earth, checking the succulence of precocious overgrowths, hardening fibre, turning plant energy away from selfish exuberance in mere stalk building into the altruistic sacrament of ripening fruit and hardening grain. A wise old alchemist is Mother Earth, working in time but ever ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor

... the shrewdest delegates in Paris, a man who allowed himself to be breathed upon freely by the old spirit of nationalism, but was capable withal of appreciating the passionate enthusiasm of others for a more altruistic dispensation, addressed me one evening as follows: "Say what you will, the Secret Council is a Council of Two, and the Covenant a charter conferred upon the English-speaking peoples for the government of the world. The design—if it be a design—may be excellent, ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon

... Love, mark you. It is always interesting to see that flower bud twice from the same stalk. However, one naturally defers to a lady, especially when one is very much in her way. Place aux dames, eh? Exit poor Farquharson! You must admit that his was an altruistic soul. Well, she has her freedom—if only to barter it for a new bondage. Shall we drink to the happy ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various

... special culture as means for advancing the culture of all. It is said to be human nature when special privileges or special gifts are used only for egoistic ends; but the complete development of the human being demands that altruistic ideas should also be cultivated. We see that in China an aristocracy of letters—for it is through passing difficult examinations in old literature that the ruling classes are appointed—is no protection to the poor and ignorant from oppression or degradation. ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence

... about 'reactionable endowment', 'surrender-value', and 'interest accumulating on the tontine policy', and tried, as I did so, to analyse the loathing I felt for him. I came to the conclusion that it was partly due to his pose of doing the whole thing from purely altruistic motives, entirely for my good, and partly because he forced me to face the fact that I was not always going to be young. In an abstract fashion I had already realized that I should in time cease to be thirty, but ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse

... Vernon, putting down his cup, "you shall not renounce the altruistic pleasure which you promise to yourself in yielding this professorship to me. I ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit

... from a false altruistic standpoint, insist that the insane criminal requires no different treatment from that which the ordinary insane patient does. This is very true in the case of prisoners who develop mental disorders which have no relation to crime ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck

... sort of girl who would be dependent in any case. She holds rather altruistic ideas in fact," remarked Harwood. "I mean," he added, seeing that Bassett waited for him to explain himself, "that Miss Garrison feels that she starts life in debt to the world—by reason of her own opportunities and so on; she expects to make ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson

... pitied me, young and vigorous and strong, but she had no pity for the two old men who stood by my side! She was a young woman, and I was a young man, and what vague sex promptings impelled her to pity me put her sentiment on the lowest plane. Pity for old men is an altruistic feeling, and besides, the workhouse door is the accustomed place for old men. So she showed no pity for them, only for me, who deserved it least or not at all. Not in honour do grey hairs go down to the grave in ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London

... moment, and then he answered: "No, I should not say it was. From what we know historically of those conditions in our country, it appears that the great mass of women were not directly affected by them. They constituted an altruistic dominion of the egoistic empire, and, except as they were tainted by social or worldly ambitions, it was possible for every woman to be a lady, even in competitive conditions. Her instincts were unselfish, and her first thoughts were ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells

... politician dare cry, hist! So we get the paradox: the only perfect freedom is to be found in a monarchy. "A Republic," says Schopenhauer, "is a land that is ruled by the many—that is to say, by the incompetent." But Schopenhauer, of course, knew nothing of the American primary, devised by altruistic Hibernians for the purpose of thwarting the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard

... selfish and altruistic: as a national movement its aim is "Ireland first and Ireland alone and Ireland always"; as an individual movement it inculcates that "no personal sacrifice is too great for one's country," and it ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard

... legislative output has been strictly protective of union interests. Labor, like all other interests that aim to use the power of government, has not been wholly altruistic, in its motives, especially since in recent years it has found itself matched against such powerful organizations of employers as the Manufacturers' Association, the National Erectors' Association, and ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth

... temptation to lay his own on his heart in a burlesque of it. At the door he remembered something, and turned. He stood looking back precisely where Laura Filbert had stood, but the sun was gone. "You might tell me more about your friend of the altruistic army," he said. ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)

... levels of government that look after the citizens' desires and wellbeing. It depends on laws to back it up, and on institutions and programs established by law. These are the only machinery by which it can be adequately stimulated, unless we assume that all waste producers are altruistic to a point of self-sacrifice, an assumption which history does ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior

... the aim of art he is too apt to mean self-expression only—utterance of individual emotion. Utterance of individual emotion is very closely neighboured by, is almost identical with, self-enhancement. What should be a generous, and in part altruistic, exaltation becomes mere megalomania. This egotism is, of course, a danger inherent in all art. The suspension of motor-reactions to the practical world isolates the artist, cuts him off from his fellow-men, ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison

... the war was no concern of America; he had given over completely the tradition that if we keep our own hands clean we fulfill our duty. He had begun to elaborate an idealistic policy of service to the world, not unreminiscent of the altruistic schemes of Clay and Webster for assisting oppressed republicans in Europe during the first third of the nineteenth century. Wilson, like those statesmen, had always felt that the position of the United States in the world was of a special sort, quite different from that ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour

... debonair club man returned to Shirley's face, as he twitted back: "Purely an altruistic inquiry, Dick. I feared that you might be risking your own heart and the modicum of freedom which you still possess. But I'll wager a supper-party for four that I'll find out who she is, without either ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball



Words linked to "Altruistic" :   unselfish, altruist, egoistic



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