Quotes About Selfishness

Selfishness so often is the basis of money problems, which are a very serious and real factor affecting the stability of family life. Selfishness is at the root of adultery, the breaking of solemn and sacred covenants to satisfy selfish lust. Selfishness is the antithesis of love. It is a cankering expression of greed. It destroys self-discipline. It obliterates loyalty. It tears up sacred covenants. It afflicts both men and women.

It was the mystical dogma of Bentham and Adam Smith and the rest, that some of the worst of human passions would turn out to be all for the best. It was the mysterious doctrine that selfishness would do the work of unselfishness.

The inescapable fact is that when we build a society based on greed, selfishness, and ruthless competition, the fruits we can expect to reap are economic insecurity at home and international discord abroad.

The vital Christian arouses opposition because he is a standing rebuke to the selfishness and sin of those around him.

There are so many ways a family can unravel. All it takes is a tiny slash of selfishness, a rip of greed, a puncture of bad luck. And yet, woven tightly, family can be the strongest bond imaginable.

Altruism is selfishness out with a pair of field glasses and imagination.

PERSONAL IMPORTANCE or taking things personally, is an expression of SELFISHNESS because we make the assumption that everything is about ME!! NOTHING PEOPLE DO IS BECAUSE OF YOU!! IT'S BECAUSE OF THEMSELVES!!

For what will it profit men that a more prudent distribution and use of riches make it possible for them to gain even the whole world, if thereby they suffer the loss of their own souls? What will it profit to teach them sound principles in economics, if they permit themselves to be so swept away by selfishness, by unbridled and sordid greed, that hearing the commandments of the Lord, they do all things contrary.

We're into an age of excessive individuals, all right. We're into the age were independence, autonomy, convenience, sometimes selfishness. The new trinity of me, myself and I, seems to dominate. We know that's contrary to the very nature of the human person. The very nature of the human person needs God and needs other people.

Good character consists of recognizing the selfishness that inheres in each of us and trying to balance it against the altruism to which we should all aspire. It is a difficult balance to strike, but no definition of goodness can be complete without it.

Next to selfishness the principal cause which makes life unsatisfactory is want of mental cultivation.

Selfishness is one of the qualities apt to inspire love.

By avarice and selfishness, and a groveling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber.

The greatest comforts and lasting peace are obtained, when one eradicates selfishness from within.

I have freedom. But freedom means total selfishness. It means nobody cares much what you do.

Posthumous charities are the very essence of selfishness when bequeathed by those who, even alive, would part with nothing.

How much that the world calls selfishness is only generosity with narrow walls,--a too exclusive solicitude to maintain a wife in luxury, or make one's children rich.

In short, selfishness is the opposite of love.

At the time of his death, Biko had a wife and three children for which he left a letter that stated in one part: “I've devoted my life to see equality for blacks, and at the same time, I've denied the needs of my family. Please understand that I take these actions, not out of selfishness or arrogance, but to preserve a South Africa worth living in for blacks and whites.

All sympathy not consistent with acknowledged virtue is but disguised selfishness.

The essence of Theosophy is the perfect harmonizing of the divine with the human in man, the adjustment of his god-like qualities and aspirations, and their sway over the terrestrial or animal passions in him. Kindness, absence of every ill feeling or selfishness, charity, goodwill to all beings, and perfect justice to others as to oneself, are its chief features. He who teaches Theosophy preaches the gospel of goodwill; and the converse of this is true also — he who preaches the gospel of goodwill, teaches Theosophy.

Kindness, love, patience, understanding, and unity will increase as we serve, while intolerance, jealousy, envy, greed, and selfishness decrease or disappear. The more we give of ourselves, the more our capacity to serve, understand, and love will grow.

A married person does not live in isolation. He or she has made a promise, a pledge, a vow, to another person. Until that vow is fulfilled and the promise is kept, the individual is in debt to his marriage partner. That is what he owes. 'You owe it to yourself' is not a valid excuse for breaking a marriage vow but a creed of selfishness.

There are points in your life, especially if you have creative ambitions, where selfishness is necessary.

National progress is the sum of individual industry, energy, and uprightness, as national decay is of individual idleness, selfishness, and vice.

There is more selfishness and less principle among members of Congress than I had any conception of, before I became President of the U.S.

Like nature itself, modern economic life is driven by relentless competition and unbridled selfishness. Or is it?

One of the unseen benefits of having children is that they deliver you from your own selfishness. There's no going back.

It's usually the stupid people that develop long illnesses. You need more than indolence and selfishness, you need endurance to make a good patient.

This hour in history needs a dedicated circle of transformed nonconformists. Our planet teeters on the brink of annihilation; dangerous passions of pride, hatred, and selfishness are enthroned in our lives; and men do reverence before false gods of nationalism and materialism. The saving of our world from pending doom will come, not through the complacent adjustment of the conforming majority, but through the creative maladjustment of a nonconforming minority.

Not perhaps until later life, until the follies, passions, and selfishness of youth have died out, do we . . . recognize the the inestimable blessing, the responsibility awful as sweet, of possessing or of being a friend.

Happiness begins where selfishness ends.

There is no place for selfishness-and no place for fear! Do not be afraid, then, when love makes demands. Do not be afraid when love requires sacrifice

There is a need for everyone's brain to be imprinted with more self-enhancing impulses: the impulse to peace over violence, love over fear, compassion over selfishness.

True patriots believe that freedom from responsibility is selfishness, freedom from sacrifice is cowardice, freedom from tolerance is prejudice, freedom from stewardship is exploitation, and freedom from compassion is cruelty.

I catch myself thinking 'Thank God For This' out of habit, and then I understand what he's so concerned about. What if my parents' God, their whole belief system, is just something concocted by a bunch of scientists to keep us under control? And not just their beliefs about God and whatever else is out there, about right and wrong, about selfishness?

Thorough selfishness destroys or paralyzes enjoyment. A heart made selfish by the contest for wealth is like a citadel stormed in war, utterly shattered.

One thing is clear to me, that no indulgence of passion destroys the spiritual nature so much as respectable selfishness.

Individual versus group selection results in a mix of altruism and selfishness, of virtue and sin, among the members of a society. If one colony member devotes its life to service over marriage, the individual is of benefit to the society, even though it does not have personal offspring. A soldier going into battle will benefit his country, but he runs a higher risk of death than one who does not. An altruist benefits the group, but a layabout or coward who saves his own energy and reduces his bodily risk passes the resulting social cost to others.

God creates us free, free to be selfish, but He adds a mechanism that will penetrate our selfishness and wake us up to the presence of others in this world, and that mechanism is called suffering.

Scientists have discovered that the small, brave act of cooperating with another person, of choosing trust over cynicism, generosity over selfishness, makes the brain light up with quiet joy.

The squirrel hoards nuts and the bee gathers honey, without knowing what they do, and they are thus provided for without selfishness or disgrace.

To the end, I will remain a child of Europe, of worry and of shame. I have no message of hope to deliver. For the West, I do not feel hatred. At most I feel a great contempt. I know only that every single one of us reeks of selfishness, masochism and death. We have created a system in which it has simply become impossible to live, and what's more, we continue to export it.

As frost to the bud, and blight to the blossom, even such is self-interest to friendship; for confidence cannot dwell where selfishness is porter at the gate.

I enjoyed my own nature to the fullest, and we all know there lies happiness, although, to soothe one another mutually, we occasionally pretend to condemn such joys as selfishness.

Collectivists would have you believe that individualism is merely another word for selfishness, because individualists oppose welfare and other forms of coercive redistribution of wealth, but just the opposite is true. Individualists advocate true charity, which is the voluntary giving of their own money, while collectivists advocate the coercive giving of other people's money; which, of course, is why it is so popular.

The reason why wicked men and devils hate God is, because they see Him in relation to themselves. Their hearts rise up in rebellion, because they see Him opposed to their selfishness.

Selfishness is never so exquisitely selfish as when it is on its knees. ... Self turns what would otherwise be a pure and powerful prayer into a weak and ineffective one.