Selfishness quotes
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Slavery is founded on the selfishness of man's nature - opposition to it on his love of justice. These principles are in eternal antagonism; and when brought into collision so fiercely as slavery extension brings them, shocks and throes and convulsions must ceaselessly follow.
-- Abraham Lincoln -
To feel much for others and little for ourselves; to restrain our selfishness and exercise our benevolent affections, constitute the perfection of human nature.
-- Adam Smith -
If 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 Spir -
Need drives men to envy as fullness drives them to selfishness.
-- Agnes Repplier -
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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.
-- Alan Dershowitz -
I lived with the only continuity, day to day, of the me-me-me.
-- Albert Camus -
It is very natural for a young friend and a young lover to think the persons they love have nothing to do but to please them.
-- Alexander Pope -
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.
-- Alice James -
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Selfish, adj. Devoid of consideration for the selfishness of others.
-- Ambrose Bierce -
We might not object to the statement that Lear deserved to suffer for his folly, selfishness and tyranny; but to assert that he deserved to suffer what he did suffer is to do violence not merely to language but to any healthy moral sense.
-- Andrew Coyle Bradley -
Maybe a new religion will rise now. Maybe without it, man will crumble in cynicism and selfishness because he really needs his gods.
-- Anne Rice -
Love is the selfishness of two persons.
-- Antoine de la Sale -
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Satanism represents a form of controlled selfishness.
-- Anton Szandor LaVey -
That which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it. Every one thinks chiefly of his own, hardly at all of the common interest; and only when he is himself concerned as an individual. For besides other considerations, everybody is more inclined to neglect the duty which he expects another to fulfill.
-- Aristotle -
Selfishness, when it is punished by the world, is mostly punished because it is connected with egotism.
-- Arthur Helps -
The attack on "selfishness" is an attack on man's self-esteem; to surrender one, is to surrender the other.
-- Ayn Rand -
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The Good Turn will educate the boy out of the groove of selfishness.
-- Baden Powell de Aquino -
In Scouting you are combating the brooding of selfishness.
-- Baden Powell de Aquino -
Let not a man's self be to him all in all.
-- Benjamin Whichcote -
Take the selfishness out of anger and you're left with determination.
-- Bernie Glassman -
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When Christ's love fills our hearts, it puts selfishness on the run.
-- Billy Graham -
Only God can give us a selfless love for others, as the Holy Spirit changes us from within. This is one reason we must receive Christ, for apart from His Spirit we can never be freed from the chains of selfishness, jealousy, and indifference. Will others see Christ's love in your life today?
-- Billy Graham -
Without the help of selfishness, the human animal would never have developed. Egoism is the vine by which man hoisted himself out of the swamp and escaped from the jungle.
-- Blaise Cendrars -
It is something like the way dame Nature gathers round a foreign body an envelope of some insensitive tissue which can protect from evil that which it would otherwise harm by contact. If this be an ordered selfishness, then we should pause before we condemn any one for the vice of egoism, for there may be deeper root for its causes than we have knowledge of.
-- Bram Stoker -
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Selfishness has never been admired.
-- C. S. Lewis -
No one has a right to hoard things which he cannot use.
-- Carrie Jacobs-Bond -
You have to be selfish to be an actor.
-- Charles Dance -
Others 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 Dickens -
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The Civilized… murder their children by producing too many of them without being able to provide for their well-being. Morality or theories of false virtue stimulate them to manufacture cannon fodder, anthills of conscripts who are forced to sell themselves out of poverty. This improvident paternity is a false virtue, the selfishness of pleasure.
-- Charles Fourier -
The man who lives by himself and for himself is likely to be corrupted by the company he keeps.
-- Charles Henry Parkhurst -
Selfishness of the stable or rigid sort is as a rule more bitterly resented than the more fickle variety, chiefly, no doubt, because, having more continuity and purpose, it is more formidable.
-- Charles Horton Cooley -
If we do not cling to riches, selfishness or greed-then I believe we are getting closer to God.
-- Daniel Ortega -
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In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.
-- David Mitchell -
Romance 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 Osmond -
Selfishness can be a virtue. Selfishness is essential to survival, and without survival we cannot protect those whom we love more than ourselves.
-- Duke Ellington -
Competition, which is the instinct of selfishness, is another word for dissipation of energy, while combination is the secret of efficient production.
-- Edward Bellamy -
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Selfishness and separatation have led me to believe that the world is not my problem. I am the world.
-- Edward Kowalczyk -
Human nature must have come much nearer perfection than it is now, or will be in many generations, to exclude from such a control prejudice, selfishness, ambition, and injustice.
-- Elihu Root -
Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope; it is impossible.
-- Elizabeth Bowen -
There is only one force stronger than selfishness, and that is stupidity.
-- Ellen Glasgow -
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I'm just the mere shadow of my former selfishness. I crave the silhouette of your kiss.
-- Elvis Costello -
The 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 Souvestre -
Real love, no matter how unworthy the object, is a glorious adventure. It bursts the shackles of selfishness. One's world is bigger, broader; one's sympathies are amazingly more tender. No matter what the result, if you haven't really loved, you haven't really lived.
-- Emilie Loring -
Maternity is on the face of it an unsociable experience. The selfishness that a woman has learned to stifle or to dissemble where she alone is concerned, blooms freely and unashamed on behalf of her offspring.
-- Emily James Smith Putnam -
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You must pray for yourself constantly. How could it be otherwise? We worship God by believing in Him, trusting Him, and loving Him wholeheartedly - and we can attain to that only through prayer. The sole object of our being here is that we may grow like Him - and we can do that only through prayer. The more we pray for ourselves the more power will our prayers have for any other purpose whatever; so praying for ourselves is the reverse of selfishness - it is truly glorifying God.
-- Emmet Fox -
The hardest thing to cope with is not selfishness or vanity or deceitfulness, but sheer stupidity.
-- Eric Hoffer -
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.
-- Eric Ludy -
There is simply no dignified way for a woman to live alone. Oh, she can get along financially perhaps (though not nearly as well as a man), but emotionally she is never left in peace. Her friends, her family, her fellow workers never let her forget that her husbandlessness, her childlessness - her selfishness, in short - is a reproach to the American way of life.
-- Erica Jong -
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Asceticism is the trifling of an enthusiast with his power, a puerile coquetting with his selfishness or his vanity, in the absence of any sufficiently great object to employ the first or overcome the last.
-- Florence Nightingale -
He who does most to cure woman of her weakness, her frivolity, and her servility will likewise at the same stroke do most to cure man of his brutality, his selfishness and his sensuality.
-- Frances Power Cobbe -
Selfishness is the grand moving principle of nine-tenths of our actions.
-- Francois de La Rochefoucauld -
Being both more systematically brutal than chimps and more empathetic than bonobos, we are by far the most bipolar ape. Our societies are never completely peaceful, never completely competitive, never ruled by sheer selfishness, and never perfectly moral.
-- Frans de Waal -
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Legal plunder has two roots: One, as we have just seen, is in human selfishness; the other is in false philanthropy.
-- Frederic Bastiat -
These 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 Nietzsche -
Wars come from egotism and selfishness. Every macrocosmic or world war has its origin in microcosmic wars going on inside millions and millions of individuals.
-- Fulton J. Sheen -
Our selfishness is so robust and many-clutching that, well encouraged, it easily devours all sustenance away from our poor little scruples.
-- George Eliot -
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Selfish— a judgment readily passed by those who have never tested their own power of sacrifice.
-- George Eliot -
One thing is clear to me, that no indulgence of passion destroys the spiritual nature so much as respectable selfishness.
-- George MacDonald -
There is a prodigious selfishness in dreams: they live perfectly deaf and invulnerable amid the cries of the real world.
-- George Santayana -
We need leadership that can elevate religion and morality to their position of paramount importance and thus eliminate growing selfishness, immorality and materialism.
-- George W. Romney -
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Selfishness, if but reasonably tempered with wisdom, is not such an evil trait.
-- Giovanni Ruffini -
The greatest comforts and lasting peace are obtained, when one eradicates selfishness from within.
-- Guru Gobind Singh -
Our infinite obligations to God do not fill our hearts half as much as a petty uneasiness of our own; nor His infinite perfections as much as our smallest wants.
-- Hannah More -
It never enters the lady's head that the wet-nurse's baby probably dies.
-- Harriet Martineau -
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Selfishness and greed, individual or national, cause most of our troubles.
-- Harry S. Truman -
My desire for the part of Mammy was not dominated by selfishness for Hollywood has been good to me and I am grateful
-- Hattie McDaniel -
Selfishness keeps man blind through life.
-- Hazrat Inayat Khan -
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.
-- Henry David Thoreau -
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A gamester, as such, is the cool, calculating, essential spirit of concentrated, avaricious selfishness.
-- Henry Ward Beecher -
Being stubborn has helped, being selfish is not a bad thing.
-- Herbie Mann -
Less, less of self each day, And more, my God, of Thee!
-- Horatius Bonar -
I didn't have any concept of Trainspotting being published. It was a selfish act. I did it for myself.
-- Irvine Welsh -
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A person who can really be called an unselfish person, has no place in life.
-- Ivy Compton-Burnett -
Go to the cross of Christ, all you that want to be delivered from the power of selfishness.
-- J. C. Ryle -
Love is the doorway through which the human soul passes from selfishness to service.
-- Jack Hyles -
How easy it is for generous sentiments, high courtesy, and chivalrous courage to lose their influence beneath the chilling blight of selfishness, and to exhibit to the world a man who was great in all the minor attributes of character, but who was found wanting when it became necessary to prove how much principle is superior to policy.
-- James F. Cooper -
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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.
-- James K. Polk -
We can neither change nor overpower God's eternal suffrage against selfishness and meanness.
-- James Martineau -
I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice, though not in principle.
-- Jane Austen -
In the North the first words are, Help me; in the South, Love me.
-- Jean-Jacques Rousseau -
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This idea of selfishness as a virtue, as opposed to generosity: That, to me, is unnatural.
-- Jessica Lange -
As you can see marriage is about putting away selfishness and taking on the concept of teamwork.
-- Jim George -
That man who lives for self alone, Lives for the meanest mortal known.
-- Joaquin Miller -
There was no such thing as luck. Luck was a word idiots used to explain the consequences of their own rashness, and selfishness, and stupidity. More often than not bad luck meant bad plans.
-- Joe Abercrombie -
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Selfishness is weakness. But loving and caring for others is a position of power beyond anything we can possibly imagine.
-- Joel Osteen -
The 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 Dewey -
I must fight with my weapons. Not his. Not selfishness and brutality and shame and resentment.
-- John Fowles -
There are no generalizations in American politics that vested selfishness cannot cut through.
-- John Gunther -
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We can leave a place behind, or we can stay in that place and leave our selfishness behind.
-- John H. Groberg -
We 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. Groberg -
The vital Christian arouses opposition because he is a standing rebuke to the selfishness and sin of those around him.
-- John Hagee -
The only care That I shall share Shall be the care of others, And on the road I'll halve the load Of overburdened brothers. I rather guess It's selfishness That drives me to such actions, For in this plan I find I can Forget my own distractions.
-- John Kendrick Bangs -
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The organization and constant onward sweep of this movement exemplifies the resentment of the many toward the selfishness, greed and the neglect of the few.
-- John L. Lewis -
Happiness begins when selfishness ends.
-- John Wooden -
Cowardice rightly understood begins with selfishness and ends with shame.
-- Jose Rizal -
What can one possibly introduce into a mind that is already full, and full of itself?
-- Joseph Joubert -
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Take the selfishness out of this world and there would be more happiness than we should know what to do with.
-- Josh Billings -
Getting enough of what you want without depriving anyone else is the ultimate act of selfishness and sanity.
-- Joy Browne -
If selfishness is the key to being miserable, then selflessness must be the key to being happy!
-- Joyce Meyer -
Be, as many now are, luxurious to yourself, parsimonious to your friends. [Lat., Esto, ut nunc multi, dives tibi pauper amicis.]
-- Juvenal -
