Popular quotes about Selfishness! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 27
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. Thereโs a confusion in each of us, a sickness, really: selfishness. But thereโs 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.
George SaundersI don't think the revisionist historians are accurate. I think their agendas are clouded by selfishness and anger and rage.
Sherman AlexieFollowing Jesus means taking up one's own cross to accompany him on his path, an uncomfortable path that is not one of success or earthly glory, but which leads to true freedom, the freedom from selfishness and sin.
Pope FrancisThe greatest help to spiritual life is meditation. In meditation we divest ourselves of all material conditions and feel our divine nature. We do not depend upon any external help in meditation. The touch of the soul can paint the brightest color even in the dingiest places; it can cast a fragrance over the vilest thing; it can make the wicked divine-and all enmity, all selfishness is effaced.
Swami VivekanandaFor 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.
Pope Pius XIThat little hypocrites and half-crazed people dare to imagine that on their account the laws of nature are constantly broken; such an enhancement of every kind of selfishness to infinity, to impudence, cannot be branded with sufficient contempt. And yet Christianity owes its triumph to this pitiable flattery of personal vanity.
Friedrich NietzscheWe'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.
Timothy M. DolanWithout the protection of surliness and levity, all children would be crushed by the pastโthe past of others, loaded onto their shoulders. Selfishness is their saving grace.
Margaret AtwoodThe spirit of our American radicalism is destructive and aimless; it is not loving; it has no ulterior and divine ends; but is destructive only out of hatred and selfishness.
Ralph Waldo Emerson... we performers are monsters. We are a totally different, far-out race of people. I totally and completely admit, with no qualmsat all, my egomania, my selfishness, coupled with a really magnificent voice.
Leontyne PriceProfessional standards, the standards of ambition and selfishness, are always sliding downward toward expense, ostentation, and mediocrity. They tend always to narrow the ground of judgment. But amateur standards, the standards of love, are always straining upward toward the humble and the best. They enlarge the ground of judgment. The context of love is the world.
Wendell BerryWe are vulnerable if we can be taken by a wave of emotion, invaded by an invidious impulse, roughed up by resentment, or engulfed by a surge of selfishness.
Neal A. MaxwellLove created this world, & the lack of it can kill it. Selfishness, self-absorption , arrogance & indifference never built anything.
John Hope BryantWhat iโm saying is, my friends, one ought to be able to let go. If a path does not please us, instead of insisting on going that specific way, of making our selfishness the guide, we ought to forsake. The books we cannot write, the films we cannot shoot, the projects we cannot develop, the jobs we cannot pursue and the people who no longer love us. Being able to let go, at times, is the most beautiful of all!
Elif SafakThe impulse to perform a worthy action often springs from our best nature, but is afterwards tainted by the spur of selfishness or sinister interest.
Emile SouvestreI have freedom. But freedom means total selfishness. It means nobody cares much what you do.
Lynn BarberHaving kids is a full-time job. And I don't know any woman who isn't constantly fighting between the exquisite selfishness required to be an artist and this exquisite selflessness that's required to be a parent.
Liz W. GarciaIn order to swim one takes off all one's clothes--in order to aspire to the truth one must undress in a far more inward sense, divest oneself of all one's inward clothes, of thoughts, conceptions, selfishness etc., before one is sufficiently naked.
Soren KierkegaardIf you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears.
Cesare PaveseThere will be selfishness and greed and corruption and narrowness and intolerance in the world tomorrow and tomorrow's tomorrow. But pray God we may have the courage and the wisdom and the vision to raise a definite standard that will appeal to the best that is in man, and then strive mightily toward that goal.
Harold StassenA 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. SproulThere are points in your life, especially if you have creative ambitions, where selfishness is necessary.
Kris KristoffersonThere is more selfishness and less principle among members of Congress than I had any conception of, before I became President of the U.S.
James K. PolkMysticism has often been misunderstood as the attempt to escape this simple, phenomenal world to a more pure existence in heaven beyond. This is not mysticism, but Gnosticism. Biblical mysticism is the attempt to exit 'this world' to an alternative reality that pervades the old order. Its goal is to jettison the mind-set that says 'greed is good,' selfishness is normal,' and 'killing is necessary.' Mysticism in biblical terms is not escapism, as so many have caricatured it, but a fight for ethics and social change.
Walter WinkFatherhood: How God blesses you out of your selfishness and floods your soul with love, all while reminding you how little you know.
Mark HartMy hair would continue to gray, and then one day, it would fall out entirely, and then, on a day meaninglessly close to the present one, meaninglessly like the present one, I would disappear from the earth. And all these emotions, all these yearnings, all these data, if that helps to clinch the enormity of what I'm talking about, would be gone. And that's what immortality means. It means selfishness. My generations belief that each one of us matters more than you or anyone else would think.
Gary ShteyngartThese 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 NietzscheTake away someoneโs fear, or low intelligence, or dishonesty . . . and you take away their compassion. Take away someoneโs aggression and you take away their motivation, or their ability to assert themselves. Take away their selfishness and you take away their sense of self-preservation.
Veronica RothIf pity was always equally alive and acting in all individuals and in all circumstances, we could do away with moral. Unfortunately, it is not compassion, but rather it's contrary, selfishness, that act most strongly in us.
African SpirSelfishness is the making a man's self his own centre, the beginning and end of all he doeth.
John OwenSelfishness is weakness. But loving and caring for others is a position of power beyond anything we can possibly imagine.
Joel OsteenThe Reagan-Bush years have exalted private gain over public obligation, special interests over the common good, wealth and fame over work and family. The 1980s ushered in a Gilded Age of greed and selfishness, of irresponsibility and excess, and of neglect.
William J. ClintonAnyone who recognizes this regime [Israel] because of the pressure of the World oppressor, or because of naivetรฉ or selfishness, will be eternally disgraced and will burn in the fury of the Islamic nations.
Mahmoud AhmadinejadSelfishness is when we pursue gain at the expense of others. But God doesnโt have a limited number of treasures to distribute. When you store up treasures for yourself in heaven, it doesnโt reduce the treasures available to others. In fact, it is by serving God and others that we store up heavenly treasures. Everyone gains; no one loses.
Randy AlcornI will waste not even a precious second today in anger or hate or jealousy or selfishness. I know that the seeds I sow I will harvest, because every action, good or bad, is always followed by an equal reaction. I will plant only good seeds this day.
Og MandinoI 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.
Albert CamusSelfishness 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 BensonEducation has now become the chief problem of the world, its one holy cause. The nations that see this will survive, and those that fail to do so will slowly perish. . . . There must be re-education of the will and of the heart as well as of the intellect; and the ideals of service must supplant those of selfishness and greed.
G. Stanley HallThe simple recognition that everyone else wants to be happy and not to suffer, just as I do, serves as a constant reminder against selfishness and partiality. It reminds us there is little to be gained from being kind and generous while hoping to win something in return. Actions motivated by a desire to earn a good name for ourselves are still selfish, even if they appear to be acts of kindness.
Dalai LamaWe 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