Selfishness Quotes

The trouble with Clare was, not only that she wanted to have her cake and eat it too, but that she wanted to nibble at the cakes of other folk as well.

~ Nella Larsen

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

~ Thomas À Kempis

Boredom is for the selfish.

~ Patti Digh

To be wrecked begins with an experience that pulls you out of your comfort zone and self-centeredness, whether you want it or not.

~ Jeff Goins

I believe I may assert that they were really in possession of deep and growing happiness. It ended. Well, we must be for ourselves in the long run; the mild and generous are only more justly selfish than the domineering- and it ended when circumstances caused each to feel that the one's interest was not in the chief consideration in the other's thoughts.

~ Emily Brontë

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

~ M.h. Rakib

Some of us - She paused as she sought the words. - don't die unless we want to. The selfish ones never do.

~ Alex Bledsoe

You know, Emily was a selfish old woman in her way. She was very generous, but she always wanted a return. She never let people forget what she had done for them - and, that way she missed love.

~ Agatha Christie

I don't want you to leaveWhich is exactly why I should. But don't worry. I'm essentially a selfish creature. I crave your company too much to do what I should.

~ Stephenie Meyer

The problem is hedonism. The problem is the preening vanity and selfishness of 'coming out,' of parading private inclinations, of a kind that repel normal people, as if those inclinations were, all by themselves, marks of authenticity and virtue, of suffering and oppression.

~ John Derbyshire

Up to the present man has hardly cultivated sympathy at all. He has merely sympathy with pain, and sympathy with pain is not the highest form of sympathy. All sympathy is fine, but sympathy with suffering is the least fine mode. It is tainted with egotism. It is apt to become morbid. There is in it a certain element of terror for our own safety. We become afraid that we ourselves might be as the leper or as the blind, and that no man would have care of us. It is curiously limiting, too. One should sympathise with the entirety of life, not with life's sores and maladies merely, but with life's joy and beauty and energy and health and freedom.

~ Oscar Wilde

Indeed this gentleman's stoicism was of that not uncommon kind, which enables a man to bear with exemplary fortitude the afflictions of his friends, but renders him, by way of counterpoise, rather selfish and sensitive in respect of any that happen to befall himself.

~ Charles Dickens

There is the expression of selfishness and there is the expression of selflessness - but economists or theoreticians never touched that part. They said: 'Go and become a philanthropist.' I said, 'No, I can do that in the business world, create a different kind of business - a business based on selflessness.'

~ Muhammad Yunus

Selfishness is one of the qualities apt to inspire love.

~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

All sympathy not consistent with acknowledged virtue is but disguised selfishness.

~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

There are no generalizations in American politics that vested selfishness cannot cut through.

~ John Gunther

It may be a cold, clammy thing to say, but those that treat friendship the same as any other selfishness seem to get the most out of it.

~ E. W. Howe

Individual versus group selection results in a mix of altruism and selfishness, of virtue and sin, among the members of a society.

~ E. O. Wilson

I have freedom. But freedom means total selfishness. It means nobody cares much what you do.

~ Lynn Barber

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.

~ Anthony Kiedis