Selfishness Quotes - page 10

What will it take to rally all peoples and nations to unite in the name of humanity? An all-out alien invasion or imminent mass extinction? Perhaps a gentler proposal like a Human Heritage Month would help to raise awareness that we are all human beings living together on the same beautiful planet marred by undue human conflicts and selfishness. (Newton Lee)
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. View quote
James Fenimore Cooper
Charity is an attempt wherein I try to expand and bring into the ambit of my life, all others around me and grow to consider the other man's needs and requirements as important as my own personal needs. To live seeking an identity thus, with at least those who are immediately around me, is to live away from the suffocating selfishness and the throttling grip of my body-consciousness. View quote
Chinmayananda Saraswati
The poor child, as Charles Lamb so touchingly expresses it, is not brought, but "dragged out," and if the wits are sharpened, so, too, is the soft, round cheek. The crippled limb and broken constitution attest the effects of the over-early struggle with penury; but the child of rich parents suffers, though in another way; there is the heart that is crippled, by the selfishness of indulgence and the habit of relying upon others. It takes years of harsh contact with the realities of life to undo the enervating work of a spoilt and over aided childhood. We cannot too soon learn the strong and useful lessons of exertion and self-dependance. View quote
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Sympathy is the surest destruction of selfishness. Children, like the grown person, grow the better for participation in the sufferings where their own only share is pity. View quote
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Human nature is accused of much more selfishness than it really has; a thousand kindly emotions break in upon and redeem our daily and interested life. View quote
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Who shall say The love of genius is a common thing, Such as the many feel-half selfishness, Half vanity?-for genius is divine, And, like a god, doth turn its dwelling-place Into a temple; and the heart redeem'd By its fine influence is immortal shrine For love's divinity. View quote
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Selfishness is hypocritical by nature, and seizes on the first decent excuse as a cloak . View quote
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
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. View quote
W. H. Auden
Many and opposite are the lots in life, and unequal are the portions which they measure out to the children of earth. We cannot agree with those who contend that the difference after all is but in outward seeming. Such an assertion is often the result of thoughtlessness - sometimes the result of selfishness. It is one of the good points of human nature, that it revolts against human suffering. Few there are who can witness pain, whether of mind or of body, without pity, and the desire to alleviate ; but such is our infirmity of purpose, that a little suffices to turn us aside from assistance. Indolence, difficulties, and contrary interests come in the way of sympathy, and then we desire to excuse our apathy to ourselves. It is a comfortable doctrine to suppose that the evil is made up by some mysterious allotment of good ; it is an excuse for non-interference, and we let conscience sleep over our own enjoyments, taking it for granted others have them also - though how we know not. View quote
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
But thoughtless ingratitude is the armour of the young; without it, how would they ever get through life? The old wish the young well, but they wish them ill also: they would like to eat them up, and absorb their vitality, and remain immortal themselves. Without the protection of surliness and levity, all children would be crushed by the past - the past of others, loaded on their shoulders. Selfishness is their saving grace. (Margaret Atwood)
Maybe a new religion will rise now. Maybe without it, man will crumble in cynicism and selfishness because he really needs his gods. View quote
Anne Rice
What's not fair is that our society rewards selfishness. That's not fair. View quote
Max Barry
We are wont to condemn self-love but what we really mean to condemn is contrary to self-love. It is that mixture of selfishness and self-hate that permanently pursues us, that prevents us from loving others, and that prohibits us from losing ourselves. View quote
Paul Valéry
As a father now, I wouldn't do what my dad did, because it left me feeling emotionally unstable as a kid. But he didn't do the things he did out of selfishness or malice. View quote
Anthony Kiedis
Individual versus group selection results in a mix of altruism and selfishness, of virtue and sin, among the members of a society. View quote
E. O. Wilson
If people are innately saddled with certain sins and flaws, like selfishness, prejudice, sort-sightedness, and self-deception, then political reform would seem to be a waste of time. View quote
Steven Pinker
Good-breeding is opposed to selfishness, vanity, or pride. View quote
Stonewall Jackson
And when you sense a faint potentiality for happiness after such dark times you must grab onto the ankles of that happiness and not let go until it drags you face-first out of the dirt - this is not selfishness, but obligation. You were given life; it is your duty to find something beautiful within life no matter how slight. View quote
Elizabeth Gilbert
Childlessness doesn't make people selfish; selfishness makes people selfish. View quote
Elizabeth Gilbert
Happiness is not an end - it is only a means, and adjunct, a consequence. The Omnipotent Himself could never be supposed by any, save those who out of their own human selfishness construct the attributes of Divinity, to be absorbed throughout eternity in the contemplation of His own ineffable bliss, were it not identical with His ineffable goodness and love. (Dinah Craik)
The capacity to accept suffering for the sake of goodness, truth and justice is an essential criterion of humanity, because if my own well-being and safety are ultimately more important than truth and justice, then the power of the stronger prevails, then violence and untruth reign supreme. Truth and justice must stand above my comfort and physical well-being, or else my life itself becomes a lie. In the end, even the "yes” to love is a source of suffering, because love always requires expropriations of my "I”, in which I allow myself to be pruned and wounded. Love simply cannot exist without this painful renunciation of myself, for otherwise it becomes pure selfishness and thereby ceases to be love. View quote
Pope Benedict XVI
Satanism represents a form of controlled selfishness. View quote
Anton LaVey
My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness. Sometimes I seem to myself, in my feelings toward these tiny guiltless beings, a monster of selfishness and intolerance. View quote
Adrienne Rich
The sin which is indulged to the greatest extent, and which separates us from God and produces so many contagious spiritual disorders, is selfishness. View quote
Ellen G. White