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Selfishness is like a disease that suffocates our capacity to love. While love asks us to deny ourselves for the sake of another, selfishness demands we put ourselves first at their expense. When we choose to be self-centered, we become less kind and contentโmore needy, sensitive, and demanding. More unsatisfiable. Moodiness and impatience, laziness and irresponsibility, are only selfishness in disguise.
Stephen KendrickWe can leave a place behind, or we can stay in that place and leave our selfishness (often expressed in feeling sorry for ourselves) behind. If we leave a place and take our selfishness with us, the cycle of problems starts all over again no matter where we go. But if we leave our selfishness behind, no matter where we are, things start to improve.
John H. GrobergThe selfish man suffers more from his selfishness than he from whom that selfishness withholds some important benefit.
Ralph Waldo EmersonWhy fight the 'natural' (oh, weaselly word!) order of things? Why? Because of this--one fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself. In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.
David MitchellIn a world where God does not exist, any reasonable person must see that the propensity toward selfishness should be the most venerated of all human traits. From this it stands to reason that any man, knowing the total expanse of his existence to be finite, who does not devote every moment of his life to acts of pure selfishness, must be seen as nothing more than a fool.
Derek R. AudetteWe seldom stop to think how many people's lives are entwined with our own. It is a form of selfishness to imagine that every individual can operate on his own or can pull out of the general stream and not be missed.
Ivy Baker PriestPolitics is not an end, but a means. It is not a product, but a process. It is the art of government. Like other values it has its counterfeits. So much emphasis has been placed upon the false that the significance of the true has been obscured and politics has come to convey the meaning of crafty and cunning selfishness, instead of candid and sincere service.
Calvin CoolidgeI believe all suffering is caused by ignorance. People inflict pain on others in the selfish pursuit of their happiness or satisfaction. Yet true happiness comes from a sense of inner peace and contentment, which in turn must be achieved through the cultivation of altruism, of love and compassion and elimination of ignorance, selfishness and greed.
Dalai LamaSelfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary.
David Sloan WilsonComrades!' he cried. 'You do not imagine, I hope, that we pigs are doing this in a spirit of selfishness and privilege? Many of us actually dislike milk and apples. I dislike them myself. Our sole object in taking these things is to preserve our health. Milk and apples (this has been proved by Science, comrades) contain substances absolutely necessary to the well-being of a pig. We pigs are brainworkers. The whole management and organisation of this farm depend on us. Day and night we are watching over your welfare. It is for your sake that we drink the milk and eat those apples.
George OrwellHere is, in truth, the whole secret of Yoga, the science of the soul. The active turnings, the strident vibrations, of selfishness, lust and hate are to be stilled by meditation, by letting heart and mind dwell in spiritual life, by lifting up the heart to the strong, silent life above, which rests in the stillness of eternal love, and needs no harsh vibration to convince it of true being.
PatanjaliSomething terrible has happened to the soul of the Republican Party. We've gone from bad economic doctrine. We've even gone beyond selfishness and special interests. At this point we're talking about a state of mind that takes positive glee in inflicting further suffering upon the already miserable.
Paul KrugmanSelfishness is the greatest challenge for a coach. Most players are more concerned with making themselves better than the team.
John WoodenPosthumous charities are the very essence of selfishness when bequeathed by those who, even alive, would part with nothing.
Charles Caleb ColtonOthers had been a little wild, which was not to be wondered at, and not very blamable; but, he had made a lamentation and uproar which it was dangerous for the people to hear, as there is always contagion in weakness and selfishness.
Charles DickensHow 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.
Thomas Wentworth HigginsonWe 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.
Pope FrancisIf we do not cling to riches, selfishness or greed - then I believe we are getting closer to God.
Daniel OrtegaA 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.
R. C. SproulBegin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness โ all of them due to the offendersโ ignorance of what is good or evil.
Marcus AureliusThe mere absorption of facts and truths is so exclusively an individual affair that it tends very naturally to pass into selfishness. There is no obvious social motive for the acquirement of mere learning, there is no clear social gain in success thereat.
John DeweyNot 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.
Dinah Maria Murlock CraikFatherhood: How God blesses you out of your selfishness and floods your soul with love, all while reminding you how little you know.
Mark HartSelf-interest is not myopic selfishness. It is whatever it is that interests the participants, whatever they value, whatever goals they pursue. The scientist seeking to advance the frontiers of his discipline, the missionary seeking to convert infidels to the true faith, the philanthropist seeking to bring comfort to the needy - all are pursuing their interests, as they see them, as they judge them by their own values.
Milton FriedmanHe was a foe without hate; a friend without treachery; a soldier without cruelty; a victor without oppression, and a victim without murmuring. He was a public officer without vices; a private citizen without wrong; a neighbor without reproach; a Christian without hypocrisy, and a man without guile. He was a Caesar, without his ambition; Frederick, without his tyranny; Napoleon, without his selfishness, and Washington, without his reward.
Benjamin Harvey HillThese small things - nutrition, place, climate, recreation, the whole casuistry of selfishness - are inconceivably more important than everything one has taken to be important so far.
Friedrich NietzscheWould that our harsh judgments could be restrained, our impatience checked, our selfishness broken down, our passions controlled, our waste of time and life in worthless or unworthy objects corrected, by the thought that there is One in whose hands we are, who cares for us with a parent's love, who will judge us hereafter without the slightest tinge of human' infirmity, the All-Merciful and the All-Just.
Arthur Penrhyn StanleyA semi-civilized state of society, equally removed from the extremes of barbarity and of refinement, seems to be that particular meridian under which all the reciprocities and gratuities of hospitality do most readily flourish and abound. For it so happens that the ease, the luxury, and the abundance of the highest state of civilization, are as productive of selfishness, as the difficulties, the privations, and the sterilities of he lowest.
Charles Caleb ColtonBut the conceit of one's self and the conceit of one's hobby are hardly more prolific of eccentricity than the conceit of one's money. Avarice, the most hateful and wolfish of all the hard, cool, callous dispositions of selfishness, has its own peculiar caprices and crotchets. The ingenuities of its meanness defy all the calculations of reason, and reach the miraculous in subtlety.
Edwin Percy WhippleSelfishness is the only real atheism; aspiration, unselfishness, the only real religion.
Israel ZangwillI feel now, that Arabia could easily be evangelized within the next thirty years if it were not for the wicked selfishness of Christians.
Samuel Marinus ZwemerLove is the most ethically consistent experience, because selfishness and altruism no longer seem opposed or in conflict.
Peter BregginSelfishness is the making a man's self his own centre, the beginning and end of all he doeth.
John OwenPeople's lives are filled with vice and the trappings of it. Ambition, greed and selfishness all have to do with vice. Sooner or later, you have to see through it or you don't survive.
Bob DylanCamera but no selfies, which represent selfishness and egotism. Social media? Again: not really me.
Maurice LevyRomance is alive and well in America, but the 50 percent who can't make it work fail because of selfishness. It gets down to that. You can't oversimplify it because every situation is so complex.
Donny OsmondThus worshiping, serving, studying, praying, each in its own way squeezes selfishness out of us; pushes aside our preoccupations with the things of the world.
Neal A. MaxwellThe squirrel hoards nuts and the bee gathers honey, without knowing what they do, and they are thus provided for without selfishness or disgrace.
Ralph Waldo EmersonHuman love is mostly selfishness; all the time it thinks only of the little 'i'. That 'i' is the ego.
Sathya Sai BabaBroader and deeper we must write our annals, from an ethical reformation, from an influx of the ever new, ever sanative conscience, if we would trulier express our central and wide-related nature, instead of this old chronology of selfishness and pride to which we have too long lent our eyes. Already that day exists for us, shines in on us at unawares, but the path of science and of letters is not the way into nature. The idiot, the Indian, the child, and unschooled farmer's boy, stand nearer to the light by which nature is to be read, than the dissector or the antiquary.
Ralph Waldo EmersonSelfishness is one of the more common faces of pride. 'How everything affects me' is the center of all that matters-self-conceit, self-pity, worldly self-fulfillment, self-gratification, and self-seeking.
Ezra Taft BensonAnd because of our selfishness, we will be condemned to the worst torture humankind ever invented for itself: loneliness.
Paulo CoelhoIndividualism has come in for an enormous amount of criticism over the years. It still does. It is widely assumed to be synonymous with selfishness...But the main reason why so many people in power have always disliked individualism is because it is individualists who are ever keenest to prevent the abuse of authority.
Margaret ThatcherMaybe a new religion will rise now. Maybe without it, man will crumble in cynicism and selfishness because he really needs his gods.
Anne RiceWe hear in these days a great deal respecting rights--the rights of private judgment, the rights of labor, the rights of property, and the rights of man. Rights are grand things, divine things in this world of God's; but the way in which we expound these rights, alas! seems to me to be the very incarnation of selfishness. I can see nothing very noble in a man who is forever going about calling for his own rights. Alas! alas! for the man who feels nothing more grand in this wondrous, divine world than his own rights.
Frederick William Robertson