to oneself

comparative more to oneself · superlative most to oneself · alternative to-oneself

1. informalTending not to interact with others; introverted; reserved.

   John was very shy and to himself when he went to school that day.

   1 more example

   At the centre of Stalin’s superiority over his competitors was certainly his intense will, just as Napoleon ranked what he called ‘moral fortitude’ higher in a general than genius or experience. When Milovan Djilas said to Stalin during the Yugoslav-Soviet discussions in Moscow during the war that the Serbian politician Gavrilović was ‘a shrewd man’, Stalin commented, as though to himself: ‘Yes, there are politicians who think shrewdness is the main thing in politics. . . .’⁴⁴ His was a will-power taken to a logical extreme. There is something non-human about his almost total lack of normal restraints upon it.

   1968, Robert Conquest, “The Purge Begins”, in The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties, Macmillan Company, →LCCN, →OCLC, →OL, page 75