Selfishness Quotes - Page 4

Love is always ready to deny itself, to give, sacrifice, just in the measure of its sincerity and intensity. Perfect love is perfect self-forgetfulness. Hence where there is love in a home, unselfishness is the law. Each forgets self and lives for others.But where there is selfishness it mars joy. One selfish soul will destroy the sweetness of life in any home. It is like an ugly bush in the midst of a garden of flowers. It was selfishness that destroyed the first home and blighted all the loveliness of Paradise; and it has been blighting lovely things in earth's home ever since. We need to guard against this spirit.

Teach the children compassion and empathy, for all creatures are born selfish.

Survival is a passive way of saying “my needs are greater than yours.

I have nothing to do with others, I am only concerned with myself. I take advantage of the fact that the majority of mankind are led by certain rewards to do things which directly or indirectly tend to my convenience.’‘It seems to me an awfully selfish way of looking at things,’ said Philip.‘But are you under the impression that men ever do anything except for selfish reasons?’‘Yes.’‘It is impossible that they should. You will find as you grow older that the first thing needful to make the world a tolerable place to live in is to recognise the inevitable selfishness of humanity. You demand unselfishness from others, which is a preposterous claim that they should sacrifice their desires to yours. Why should they? When you are reconciled to the fact that each is for himself in the world you will ask less from your fellows. They will not disappoint you, and you will look upon them more charitably. Men seek but one thing in life—their pleasure.

God creates us free, free to be selfish, but He adds a mechanism that will penetrate our selfishness and wake us up to the presence of others in this world, and that mechanism is called suffering.

We are some combination of strengths and weaknesses, virtues and less-than-virtuous inclinations. Greed, selfishness and pride are often co-conspirators planning their return just beyond the surface of our consciousness.

Even the early droplets of selfish decisions suggest a direction. Then the little inflecting rivulets come, merging into small brooks and soon into larger streams; finally one is swept along by a vast river which flows into the “gulf of misery and endless wo” (Hel. 5:12).

It is not really a small thing when in small things we resist self.

A prophet is always underestimated, and part of what makes one a prophet is that he doesn't really mind it.

Self care, self love.Self esteem, self confidence

A selfish life isn’t God’s purpose for you

Have we ever thought to consider that we create values that ‘feel’ right because they serve our current agendas, which is an infinitely different thing from values that ‘are’ right because they serve an eternal agenda?

Their arrogance protected them against any liking for their fellow-man, against the slightest interest in the strangers sitting all about them, amidst whom M. de Stermaria adopted the manner one has in the buffet-car of a train, grim, hurried, stand-offish, brusque, fastidious and spiteful, surrounded by other passengers whom one has never seen before, whom one will never see again and towards whom the only conceivable way of behaving is to make sure that they keep away from one's cold chicken and stay out of one's chosen corner-seat.

I suppose it is that sickness and weakness are selfish things and turn our inner eyes and sympathy on ourselves, whilst health and strength give love rein, and in thought and feeling he can wander where he wills.

It is the philosophers, theologians, and evangelists who are said to be filled with pride and bigotry due to the strong convictions that they represent. On the contrary, teachings can be either taken or dismissed; whereas voting is the only thing the average person can do to force everyone to live how they would prefer. A simple vote is among the largest yet most acceptable forms of bigotry, and that is because people play the card only when they feel that in doing so it conveniences themselves.

Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love but to use violence to get what they want.

Neither your position in society, nor power, nor dignity, nor selfishness, nor even personal promotion should enslave you

Women who say that they have met the most amazing guy in the world are only saying that because they haven’t lived with them yet.

What are you really living for? It's crucial to realize that you either glorify God, or you glorify something or someone else. You're always making something look big. If you don't glorify God when you're involved in a conflict, you inevitably show that someone or something else rules your heart.

...and as a result yet today we are unable to distinguish between sympathy and selfishness.

He wouldn't hear of anybody's paying taxes, though he was very patriotic.

In selfish men caution is as secure an armour for their foes as for themselves.

Paltry supply with capable means is one face of iniquity.

The shortest short-term investment is to serve ourselves.

I used to send my characters into a fire that necessarily consumed them, but I have learned, a little, how to send them through the fire to a new place. The characters who do not change — most notably Nakota in Cipher, Bibi in Skin, and Lena in Kink — are motivated by an essential selfishness or self-centeredness, an unwillingness to relinquish control to the process, a refusal to become.

Despite the voices of the culture that would scream otherwise, victory is irreparably tied to the surrender of self. And that explains why so few are truly victorious.

A selfless act out of even the purest desire to do for others, will be selfish in the satisfaction and happiness it brings to one doing it.

The sad reality of Mankind: Faith is the currency people trade in, through their ego and selfish ways.

When feels that someone puts you aside, sometimes thinks in an act of selfishnessbut always its really to have afraid of something worst.

Of course, if one does not fully trust the promise of God's Kingdom, he will have a hard time taking risks and making sacrifices in this life. A gospel centered around the temporal self - fleeting happiness, earthly success, vain prosperity, things such as these - is the primary ambition of the half-hearted Christian; the one who somewhat believes he is subject to an eternal death; the one who just might believe in men before God, who morbidly fears seeming less than anyone else. The man of this school feels deeply that he has but one life to live, that this must be his only chance, and therefore must have it all in his favor - from glory to comfort to riches - and have it right this instant. He is but hinting that he is overcome because he insists always that he must overcome, that his judgment comes now and by the persons around him. The point is, however, in this sense, that by grace the Christian is indeed free, but only for as long as he wants to be free - the practicality of true freedom: that of God which offers not so much freedom to be like the world as it does freedom from the pressures of having to be like the world. For Divine Law is based solely on love and freedom; whereas secular law, pressure and imitation.

If it has anything to do with me, it has nothing to do with sacrifice.

Not all generous hearts are gullible enough to be screwed by cold, calculating, business propaganda. A person who has an eye for what is right and the truth will immediately spot the cunning ways of a selfish "user and hungry grabber" who took initiative to grab the originality from other people they tried to profile, fake befriended and extracted favours." ~ Angelica Hopes, an excerpt from If I Could Tell You

Sacrifice of the self is sheer stupidity if sacrifice is not for the self.

That man who lives for self alone Lives for the meanest mortal known.

When you get born your father and mother lost something out of themselves, and they are going to bust a ham trying to get it back, and you are it. They know they can't get it all back but they will get as big a chunk out of you as they can.

Man is an extremely complex creature: he usually acts in an unselfish manner for selfish reasons.

But selfish isn't necessarily a bad thing. It only means you take care of yourself and you have to do that to be able to take care of others.

Charles Williams loved his son with reservations, complaining that "a child is a guest of a somewhat inconsistent temperament, rather difficult to get rid of, almost pushing; a poor relation rather than a pleasant kind.

The lovelorn, the cry-for-helpers, all mawkish tragedians who give suicide a bad name are the idiots who rush it, like amateur conductors. .A true suicide is a paced, disciplined certainty. People pontificate, 'Suicide is selfishness.' Career churchmen like Pater go a step further and call it a cowardly assault on the living. Oafs argue this specious line for varying reasons: to evade fingers of blame, to impress one’s audience with one’s mental fiber, to vent anger, or just because one lacks the necessary suffering to sympathize. Cowardice is nothing to do with it—suicide takes considerable courage. Japanese have the right idea. No, what’s selfish is to demand another to endure an intolerable existence, just to spare families, friends, and enemies a bit of soul-searching. The only selfishness lies in ruining strangers’ days by forcing ’em to witness a grotesqueness.

The bedrock of corruption is the attitude of selfishness. Nations are ruined when politicians think for themselves first before thinking about anyone else!

It's a shame that we humans are never able to pull in the same direction . . . [n]ot even when confronted by infinity.

At its core, sinfulness is selfishness. It's enthroning yourself - your desires, your needs, your plans - above all else. You may still seek God, but you don't seek Him first. You seek Him second or third or seventh. You may sing "Jesus at the center of it all," but what you really want is for people to bow down to you as you bow down to Christ. It's a subtle form of selfishness that masquerades as spirituality, but it's not Christ-centric. It's me-centric. It's less about us serving His purposes and more about Him serving our purposes.

Yesterday I was clever, so I took the glory for me. Today He makes me wise, so I give the glory to Thee

We all should rise, above the clouds of ignorance, narrowness, and selfishness.

Loneliness had made the Queen bitter, bitterness had made her selfish, and selfishness had made her suspicious. --The Changeling

I cannot calculate nor attempt to manage sacrifice, for to do so is to attempt to sacrifice comfortably. And it is in the attempt to sacrifice comfortably that I begin to realize that the desire for comfort is in reality the demand that I put myself first, and there is nothing of sacrifice in that.

One of the greatest evils is the foolishness of a good man. For the giving man to withhold helping someone in order to first assure personal fortification is not selfish, but to elude needless self-destruction; martyrdom is only practical when the thought is to die, else a good man faces the consequence of digging a hole from which he cannot escape, and truly helps no one in the long run.

In choosing to exchange precious principles for worthless impulses, I have far too often bankrupted my soul in order to bankroll my ego.

Maybe you've gotten through something and when you did you thought, I am leaving that behind and will never return. And that's a great way of thinking...for selfish jerks.If we actually care about people other than ourselves, we can't leave our problems behind and never return. If we don't take the freedom we've experienced and try to bring it to others, we are not becoming people worth becoming.

Yesterday i was clever so i took the glory for me. Today HE makes me wise so i give the glory to HIM.

...children are at heart selfish, and reasonably so, for they are programmed for survival.

Human beings are never to be treated as a means but always as ends.

Never stand in the way of letting God use people’s actions, in order to solve a greater issue in the world.

As utterly irrational as it might seem, the greed within me has the most limited vision I can possibly imagine as it has eyes only for the few things it doesn’t have, and it is completely blind to all the many remarkable things that it does.

Your corn is ripe today; mine will be so tomorrow. 'Tis profitable for us both, that I should labour with you today, and that you should aid me tomorrow. I have no kindness for you, and know you have as little for me. I will not, therefore, take any pains upon your account; and should I labour with you upon my own account, in expectation of a return, I know I should be disappointed, and that I should in vain depend upon your gratitude. Here then I leave you to labour alone; You treat me in the same manner. The seasons change; and both of us lose our harvests for want of mutual confidence and security.

It's easy to make a mess when you're not the one who has to clean it up.

A humanitarian seldom makes a good lover. For a lover’s world revolves around their lover, while a humanitarian’s world revolves around the world.

[Y]ou possess all the attributes of a demagogue; a screeching, horrible voice, a perverse, crossgrained nature and the language of the market-place. In you all is united which is needful for governing.

Society. I felt as though even I were beginning at last to acquire some vague notion of what it meant. It is a struggle between one individual to another, a then-and-there struggle, in which the immediate triumph is everything. ‘Human beings never submit to human beings.’ Even slaves practice their mean retaliations. Human beings cannot conceive of any means of survival except of a single then-and-there contest. They speak of duty to one’s country and such like things, but the object of their effort is invariably the individual, and, even once the individual’s needs have been met, again the individual comes in. The incomprehensibility of society is the incomprehensibility of the individual. The ocean is not society; it is individuals.

It is a great mistake to suppose that a woman with no heart will be an easy creditor in the exchange of affection. There is not on earth a more merciless extractor of love from others than a thoroughly selfish woman; and the more unlovely she grows, the more jealously and scrupulously she extracts love, to the uttermost farthing.