Quotes About Selfishness

The selfish man suffers more from his selfishness than he from whom that selfishness withholds some important benefit.

Since, according to me, your life is going to be a gradual process of becoming kinder and more loving: Hurry up. Speed it along. Start right now. There’s a confusion in each of us, a sickness, really: selfishness. But there’s also a cure. So be a good and proactive and even somewhat desperate patient on your own behalf - seek out the most efficacious anti-selfishness medicines, energetically, for the rest of your life.

The more our hearts and minds are turned to assisting others less fortunate than we, the more we will avoid the spiritually cankering effects that result from greed, selfishness and overindulgence.

How often, in this cold and bitter world, is the warm heart thrown back upon itself! Cold, careless, are we of another's grief; we wrap ourselves in sullen selfishness.

Gratitude free of compassion is selfishness. It is nothing more than being happy for what has been done to benefit you.

By obliging men to turn their attention to other affairs than their own, it rubs off that private selfishness which is the rust of society.

Faith, I am no such fool; everyone for himself in this desert of selfishness which is called life.

What you learn about yourself is that you continue to see that you're selfish. It's so easy, in our Laodicean culture with all the different things that grab our minds that aren't of eternal value, to let those tentacles wrap themselves around your heart. That's one of the reasons why we love going overseas. It helps us to break free of those things. We've been on all of these trips, but it's easy to slide back into the selfishness of life. That's what we find out about ourselves.

Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary.

I don't think there's any need to have essays advocating selfishness among human beings; I don't know what your impression has been, but some things require no further reinforcement.

I'm really disturbed by the degree to which I don't hear people saying, "Are we leaving the world better than we found it?" I think we are a generation that perhaps could not answer in the affirmative, and it is the evasion of the larger responsibility of being only one generation in what one hopes will be an infinite series of fruitful generations. There is a selfishness in refusing to understand that we are passing through; others will come, and they deserve certain courtesies and certain considerations from us.

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

Selfishness draws men into a spiritual vacuum where, absorbed in self service, they shut out all others.

... the hey-day of a woman's life is on the shady side of fifty, when the vital forces heretofore expended in other ways are garnered in the brain, when their thoughts and sentiments flow out in broader channels, when philanthropy takes the place of family selfishness, and when from the depths of poverty and suffering the wail of humanity grows as pathetic to their ears as once was the cry of their own children.

Satanism represents a form of controlled selfishness.

Selfishness is one of the qualities apt to inspire love.

Selfishness in art, as in other things, is sensibility kept at home.

To feel oppressed by obligation is only to prove that we are incapable of a proper sentiment of gratitude. To receive favors from the unworthy is simply to admit that our selfishness is superior to our pride. Most men remember obligations, but not often to be grateful for them. The proud are made sour by the remembrance and the vain silent.

We have observed that, in society and the world in which we live, selfishness has increased more than love for others, and that men of good will must work, each with his own strengths and expertise, to ensure that love for others increases until it is equal and possibly exceeds love for oneself.

The act of love . . . is a confession. Selfishness screams aloud, vanity shows off, or else true generosity reveals itself.

We are too much haunted by ourselves, projecting the central shadow of self on everything around us. And then comes the Gospel to rescue us from this selfishness. Redemption is this, to forget self in God.

Selfishness at the core is to think you have a special problem- a problem that God cannot deal with, that God didn’t deal with at the cross. You do not have anything special that has been dealt out to you.

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

Along with selfishness, anger is one of the most serious problems facing the world today

And sometimes it's the very otherness of a stranger, someone who doesn't belong to our ethnic or ideological or religious group, an otherness that can repel us initially, but which can jerk us out of our habitual selfishness, and give us intonations of that sacred otherness, which is God.

We live in a world of transgressions and selfishness, and no pictures that represent us otherwise can be true; though happily for human nature, gleamings of that pure spirit in whose likeness man has been fashioned, are to be seen, relieving its deformities, and mitigating, if not excusing its crimes.

Generosity is the only legitimate selfishness.

Failing to hold someone accountable is ultimately an act of selfishness.

The fun, joy, and humor dry up in a relationship when one of the partners is swimming in gin. To my way of thinking, it is selfishness personified to see life through the bottom of a liquor bottle.

The only struggle which religions can justify, the only struggle worthy of humans, is the moral struggle against humanity's own disordered passions, against every kind of selfishness, against attempts to oppress others, against every type of hatred and violence.

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

Abortion and racism are both symptoms of a fundamental human error. The error is thinking that when someone stands in the way of our wants, we can justify getting that person out of our lives. Abortion and racism stem from the same poisonous root, selfishness.

Suicide to them is an act of selfishness. Someone who is truly selfless does not think of himself often enough to desire death.

Selfishness is unnecessary. War is obsolete.

If you seek in the spirit of selfishness, to grasp all as your own, you shall lose all, and be driven out of the world, at last, naked and forlorn, to everlasting poverty and contempt.

Lust is raw selfishness. It's all about my wants, my needs, my pleasure. Most love songs are actually lust songs.

Most human beings know only the language of exploitation. Due to their selfishness, they are unable to consider others.

How sick one gets of being "good," how much I should respect myself if I could burst out and make everyone wretched for twenty-four hours; embody selfishness.

Real leaders are people who “help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.

Every single one of the major world faiths, whether we're talking about Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Darwinism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, have all come to the conclusion that what holds us back from our better self is ego, selfishness, greed, unkindness, hatred. And it all springs from a sense of thwarted ego.

Anyone who recognizes this regime [Israel] because of the pressure of the World oppressor, or because of naiveté or selfishness, will be eternally disgraced and will burn in the fury of the Islamic nations.

WHAT IF we all treat other people as we wish to be treated? MORE happiness. LESS selfishness, crime, fraud, hatred, terrorism, wars.

The attack on "selfishness" is an attack on man's self-esteem; to surrender one, is to surrender the other.

Aggression is the first step on the slippery slope to selfishness and chaos.

Thus worshiping, serving, studying, praying, each in its own way squeezes selfishness out of us; pushes aside our preoccupations with the things of the world.

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

I believe we are most likely to succeed when ambition is focused on noble and worthy purposes and outcomes rather than on goals set out of selfishness.

Unless we realize our sins enough to call them by name, it is hardly worth while to say anything about them at all. When we pray for forgiveness, let us say, "my temper," or "untruthfulness," or "pride," "my selfishness, my cowardice, indolence, jealousy, revenge, impurity." To recognize our sins, we must look them in the face and call them by their right names, however hard. Honesty in confession calls for definiteness in confession.