Self Centered Quotes - Page 6

• Lord, help us to see in your crucifixion and resurrection an example of how to endure and seemingly to die in the agony and conflict of daily life, so that we may live more fully and creatively. You accepted patiently and humbly the rebuffs of human life, as well as the torture of the cross. Help us to accept the pains and conflicts that come to us each day as opportunity to grow as people and become more like you-make us realize that it is only by frequent deaths of ourselves, and our self-centered desires that we can come to live more fully, only by dying with you that we can rise with you.

  Mother Teresa

  Pain, Opportunity, Self

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• Now. Maybe you think it is arrogant or self centered, or ridiculous for me to believe that God bothered to wiggle a cheap bolt out of my new used car because he or she needed to keep me away for a few days until just the moment when my old friend most needed me to help her mother move into whatever comes next. Maybe nothing conscious helped to stall me so that I would be there when I could be most useful. Or maybe it did. I’ll never know for sure. And anyway, it doesn’t really matter.

  Anne Lamott

  Mother, Believe, Moving

  Anne Lamott (2000). “Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith”, p.102, Anchor

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• Caught in the self-centered dream, only suffering;
  holding to self-centered thoughts, exactly the dream;
  each moment, life as it is, the only teacher;
  being just this moment, compassion's way.

  Joko Beck

  Dream, Teacher, Compassion

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• If enlightenment comes first, before thinking, before practice, your thinking and your practice will not be self-centered. By enlightenment I mean believing in nothing, believing in something which has no form or no color, which is ready to take form or color. This enlightenment is the immutable truth. It is on this orginal truth that our activity, our thinking, and our practice should be based.

  Shunryu Suzuki

  Buddhist, Believe, Mean

  Shunryu Suzuki (2010). “Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind”, p.109, Shambhala Publications

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• Without a vision people and the church become self-centered. People start finding fault with one another and the church self-destructs.

  John C. Maxwell

  Self, People, Vision

  Source: enrichmentjournal.ag.org

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• I don't want to read more into it than there is. I try not to overanalyze anymore, as it tends to make me self-centered. If there is a deeper message in what happened in the last year and a half, I'm not going to look under every rock for it. Just let God be God.

  Wayne Watson

  Letting Go, Rocks, Self

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• Many people are unhappy and are not experiencing life to its fullest because they’ve closed their hearts to compassion, they are motivated by only what they want and what they think they need. They rarely do anything for anybody else unless they have an ulterior goal in mind. They are self-involved and self-centered.

  Joel Osteen

  Heart, Thinking, Compassion

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• It's hard to believe that these self-centered people have nuclear weapons that they can fire at any moment. Even modern wars are fought like revenge tales from some petty grievance. It was definitely tapping into the Dr. Strangelove vibe, which is one of my three top favorite films or all time.

  Jay Roach

  Revenge, War, Believe

  Source: www.hollywoodchicago.com

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• Sometimes I wonder if there is really goodwill in the world to worry about saving human beings, or whether we are just using that as camouflage for our own interests, the self-centered drive for more profits.

  Enele Sopoaga

  Self, Worry, World

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• Any school would gain, if the students began the day with meditation, cleared their heads and got themselves centered.

  Pico Iyer

  School, Meditation, Gains

  Source: layoga.com

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• If contemplation of other people's pain just increases distress, then I think we should see it in another way. If we don't center too much on ourselves, then [we] increase our courage and our determination to remedy the pain, not our distress. If we have unconditional compassion, then it increases our courage. So that's the difference, self-centered motivation versus altruistic motivation.

  Matthieu Ricard

  Determination, Pain, Motivation

  Source: www.takingcharge.csh.umn.edu

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• Progressive liberals seem incapable of stating the obvious truth: that we who are well off should be willing to share more of what we have with poor people not for the poor people's sake but for our own; i.e., we should share what we have in order to become less narrow and frightened and lonely and self-centered people.

  David Foster Wallace

  Lonely, Self, Order

  David Foster Wallace (2005). “Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays”, p.66, Hachette UK

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• sometimes i'd wake up at two or three in the morning and not be able to fall asleep again. i'd get out of bed, go to the kitchen, and pour myself a whiskey. glass in hand, i'd look down at the darkened cemetary across teh way and the headlights of the cars on the road. the moments of time linking night and dawn were long and dark. if i could cry, it might make things easier. but what would i cry over? i was too self centered to cry for other people, too old to cry for myself.

  Haruki Murakami

  Morning, Fall, Dark

  FaceBook post by Haruki Murakami from Feb 13, 2012

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• What we do is inherently self-centered and sort of narcissistic. It's hard to really be thinking about myself all of the time when I have a dog who needs me to be caring for him twenty-four seven.

  Bitsie Tulloch

  Dog, Caring, Thinking

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• The flesh, or human nature, is generally lazy and self-centered.

  Joyce Meyer

  Self, Lazy, Flesh

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• That’s what it was like to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those...of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another. Now you know- that’s the happy existence you wanted to go back to. Ignorance and blindness. -Simon Stimson, OUR TOWN

  Thornton Wilder

  Time, Moving, Passion

  Thornton Wilder (1966). “Three Plays: Our Town, The Skin of Our Teeth, The Matchmaker”

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• It is in a way a mystery that, instead of demanding that their governments give primary attention to their own needs and aspirations, most of the citizens of big counties-those, that is, that have the status of being "powers" in the world-far from being self-centered or materialistic as they are commonly credited with being, the ordinary citizen and his elected representative all too often turn out to be romantics, ready and eager to sacrifice programs of health, education and welfare for the power and pride of the nation.

  J. William Fulbright

  Educational, Pride, Sacrifice

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• In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities; in the expert's mind there are few.... In the beginner's mind there is no thought, 'I have attained something.' All self-centered thoughts limit our vast mind. When we have no thought of achievement, no thought of self, we are true beginners. We can really learn something.

  Shunryu Suzuki

  Self, Meditation, Achievement

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• If you are honest, people may cheat you. Be honest anyway.

  Paulo Coelho

  People, May, Honest

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• Every person in the world, including yourself, will encounter various trials throughout life. Satan seeks to defeat you by tempting you to trust your own wisdom, to live according to your self-centered feelings, and to gratify the desires of your flesh. In contrast, God's will is for you to be an overwhelming conqueror in all of these tests for His honor and glory.

  John C. Broger

  Self, Feelings, Honor

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• If we don't have a clear sense of our identity and purpose, we are much more vulnerable to Lucifer. He of course knows this and accordingly attempts to blur our vision. He lies. He shades and obliterates truth. He makes evil look good and good look unenlightened and unsophisticated. Make no mistake about it: Lucifer will do anything to derail, disappoint, dishearten, discourage, and deceive us—and particularly those who have made and are seeking to keep sacred covenants. His motives are entirely self-centered, selfish, destructive, and evil.

  Sheri L. Dew

  Mistake, Lying, Selfish

  Sheri L. Dew (2001). “No Doubt about it”

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• The whole Universe is on your side. Life is forever biased on the side of healing, on the side of overcoming, on the side of success. When you get yourself centered in the Universal flow you become synchronized with this divine bias for good.

  Eric Butterworth

  Healing, Your Side, Forever

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• Selfishness is like a disease that suffocates our capacity to love. While love asks us to deny ourselves for the sake of another, selfishness demands we put ourselves first at their expense. When we choose to be self-centered, we become less kind and content—more needy, sensitive, and demanding. More unsatisfiable. Moodiness and impatience, laziness and irresponsibility, are only selfishness in disguise.

  Stephen Kendrick

  Self, Capacity To Love, Demand

  Stephen Kendrick, Alex Kendrick (2013). “The Love Dare for Parents”, p.26, B&H Publishing Group

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• The idea that an individual can find God is terribly self-centered. It is like a wave thinking it can find the sea.

  John Templeton

  Optimistic, Thinking, Self

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• So, to meditate is to purge the mind of its self-centered activity. And if you have come this far in meditation, you will find there is silence, a total emptiness. The mind is uncontaminated by society; it is no longer subject to any influence, to the pressure of any desire. It is completely alone, and being alone, untouched it is innocent. Therefore there is a possibility for that which is timeless, eternal, to come into being. This whole process is meditation.

  Jiddu Krishnamurti

  Self, Silence, Meditation

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