Selfishness Quotes

Selfishness comes from too little self-love, not too much, as we compensate for our lack. There's no such thing as caring for the self too much, just as there's no such thing as too much genuine affection for others. Our world suffers from too little self-love and too much judgment, insecurity, fear, and mistrust. If we all cared about ourselves more, most of these ills would disappear.

~ Anita Moorjani

Above all, avoid lying, especially lying to yourself. Keep watching out for your lies, watch for them every hour, every minute. Also avoid disgust, both for others and yourself: whatever strikes you as disgusting within yourself is cleansed by the mere fact that you notice it.Avoid fear, too, although fear is really only a consequence of lies. Never be afraid of your petty selfishness when you try to achieve love and don’t be too alarmed if you act badly on occasion.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

And when the earth began to rumble and quake, as fear and frantic set in, he ran back inside the house past his wife and children, gathering all the valuables and things he thought of importance, and ran back to his car packing away. After making two trips in and out, he waited in the car for his family to come out, in fear they darted through the darkness and pelting cold rain. When everything calmed down, and the house was intact and safe, he returned putting everything back in its place, had the kids go to bed, told his wife he loves her and turned off the light.

~ Anthony Liccione

The assumption is that if I expend myself for myself in the end all I’ll be left with is myself, and that alone is frightening. But what I’ve failed to consider is that I have to expend so much of myself living for myself that in the end I’m really left with very little of myself, and that is unimaginably frightening.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

God’s eyes readily see beyond our actions, for our actions are simply fear and selfishness pretending to be us.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

If you wait for the mango fruits to fall, you'd be wasting your time while others are learning how to climb the tree

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

Most people are far too much occupied with themselves to be malicious.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

People don't want other people to be people.

~ Gene Wolfe

It's way too easy to see the real face of a person. They're amiable and full of pretense when they want something from you, but the minute you don't give in, back away or put yourself first (like they do) is the minute they show you who they really are.

~ Donna Lynn Hope

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

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.

~ Vince Antonucci

The birthplace of anarchy is the cemetery of freedom.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

The assumption of ‘rights’ is the cancer of privilege.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

The way of the consumerist culture is to spend so much energy chasing happiness that it has none left to be happy.

~ Criss Jami

Independence that has declared its ‘independence’ from the sure and certain compass of sound morals is nothing more than rogue greed having scantily dressed itself in the garb of independence while running off the cliff of anarchy.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

To embrace the message of Christmas is to throw off my hedonistic rebellion and bow before the chafing reality that I can't save myself, and in that very act to be suddenly taken aback in that I've stumbled upon the very freedom I've longed for in the very place I'd least expected it.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

When national ideals are confined to insignificant issues reflective primarily of a personal choice, there lies a problem of distorted priorities.

~ Moutasem Algharati

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.

~ Criss Jami

I am thankful that there are those among us who have sacrificed dearly on behalf of us. And I ardently pray to God that I might be less like myself and more like them.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

I marvel at the placidity of the Utopian who imagines that man is perfectible. There is no denying that the human creature is born selfish, abusive, vile. Just look around you and see. Society cynical and ferocious, the humble heckled and pillaged by the rich traffickers in necessities. Everywhere the triumph of the mediocre and unscrupulous, everywhere the apotheosis of crooked politics and finance. And you think you can make any progress against a stream like that? No, man has never changed. His soul was corrupt in the days of Genesis and is not less rotten at present. Only the form of his sins varies. Progress is the hypocrisy which refines the vices.

~ Joris-Karl Huysmans

We do not have feelings which change us, but feelings that suggest to us the idea of change. Thus love does not purge us of selfishness, but makes us aware of it and gives us the idea of a distant country where this selfishness will disappear.

~ Albert Camus

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

~ Indonesia123

Sweet wine makes drunk, sour wine (insult) is tetelestai. Life is not about what we have done and become, but how God to be fully glorified.

~ Indonesia123

Whatever we have in the glory of man is away. Those are just not enough before we go home to the glory of God.

~ Indonesia123

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

~ Indonesia123

If we glorify God (not self) in everything we do then everything on earth will glorify God.

~ Indonesia123

He knew that beauty faded quickly when embodied by selfishness...

~ Francine Rivers

The best I can do is to ‘pretend’ that I’m my own god. But in the pretending I have to pretend that I’m not pretending, and somehow that doesn’t sound very god-like to me.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Our prayers are something akin to delivering a list, verses surrendering a life. The former will always leave me creating the next list, while the latter will leave me creating a new life.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

The desire to experience new kinds of community led a number of thoughtful and idealistic people to reject the patterns of vocation, family life and religion with which they had grown up. Their attempt to establish new patterns of social bonding in uncontaminated rural retreats can be seen as a secular monasticism, but they often discovered that to abolish the boundaries of authority, family and property created a whole series of problems which they did not have the spiritual and personal resources to solve.At their best, such groups have opened up new horizons of discipleship, but they have often learned some hard lessons about the intractable sinfulness and selfishness of partly-redeemed human nature.

~ Ian Breward

Feelings trap us in the self, Tony dear. Doing a thing because you feel wonderful about it—even a work of charity—is in the end a selfish act. We perform the work not to feel wonderful but to know and love the other. It's the same with your romance. You may not feel your love, but God is still your loved one, your other.

~ Tony Hendra

One’s Use of Life’, if turns into worldly selfishness is called adharma (irreligion), and if it turns into spiritual selfishness (towards true self) is called dharma (religion).

~ Dada Bhagwan

I am thankful that I can be thankful, for if thankfulness did not exist my heart would be irretrievably imprisoned by the crazed twins of acquisition and possession, and my soul would exist as a forever slave to greed.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Too often there is this sinister greed that pulls at my coattails, subtly whispering in the ear of my soul that it is within my rights to tuck away a few dark trinkets to toy with when the tedium of righteous living gets a bit boring. But God would suggest that I empty my pockets.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Once Trump got his hands around this promising idea, he basically strangled it.

~ Joe Nocera

To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less...selfish.

~ Alan Bennett

In the act of selfishness, you bind demerit karma and in the act of sacrificing your own self-interest for the sake of others [selflessness], you bind merit karma. Nevertheless, they are both karma, aren’t they? The fruit of merit karma is shackles of gold and fruit of demerit karma is shackles of iron but they are both indeed shackles, aren’t they?

~ Dada Bhagwan

If there is true ‘Selfishness,’ then there is ‘liberation of the Self’, and that indeed is one’s own form (the Self).

~ Dada Bhagwan

Your brother is a sensitive person. Aesthetically, ethically, and intellectually he is in fact hypersensitive. As a result, it would seem that he was born only to torture himself. He has none of that saving dullness of intelligence which sees little difference between A and B. To him it must be either A or B. And if it is to be A, its shape, degree, and shade of color must precisely match his own conception of it; otherwise he will not accept it. Your brother, being sensitive, is all his life walking on a line he has chosen—a line as precarious as a tight rope. At the same time he impatiently demands that others also tread an equally precarious rope, without missing their footing. It would be a mistake, though, to think that this stems from selfishness. Imagine a world which could react exactly the way your brother expects; that world would undoubtedly be far more advanced than the world as it is now. Consequently, he detests the world which is—aesthetically, intellectually, and ethically—not as advanced as he is himself. That's why it's different from mere selfishness, I think.

~ Sōseki Natsume

One might almost define intelligence as the level at which an aware organism demands, 'What's in it for me?

~ Robert A. Heinlein