Selfishness Quotes - Page 29

• One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves.

  Susan Sontag

  Want, Messages, Consumerism

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• Kindness, love, patience, understanding, and unity will increase as we serve, while intolerance, jealousy, envy, greed, and selfishness decrease or disappear. The more we give of ourselves, the more our capacity to serve, understand, and love will grow.

  Carlos H. Amado

  Kindness, Giving, Envy

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• When the perfect order prevails, the world is like a home shared by all. Leaders are capable and virtuous. Everyone loves and respects their own parents and children as well as the parents and children of others. The old are cared for, adults have jobs, children are nourished and educated. There is a means of support for all those who are disabled or find themselves alone in the world. Everyone has an appropriate role to play in the family and society. Devotion to public duty leaves no place for idleness. Scheming for ill gain is unknown. Sharing displaces selfishness and materialism.

  Confucius

  Inspirational, Motivational, Jobs

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• Selfishness is blind.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Blind

  Mahatma Gandhi (2008). “My Experiments With Truth: An Autobiography”, p.113, Jaico Publishing House

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• Selfishness is the grand moving principle of nine-tenths of our actions.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Moving, Principles, Our Actions

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• But the conceit of one's self and the conceit of one's hobby are hardly more prolific of eccentricity than the conceit of one's money. Avarice, the most hateful and wolfish of all the hard, cool, callous dispositions of selfishness, has its own peculiar caprices and crotchets. The ingenuities of its meanness defy all the calculations of reason, and reach the miraculous in subtlety.

  Edwin Percy Whipple

  Self, Hobbies, Peculiar

  Edwin Percy Whipple (1866). “Character and Characteristic Men”, p.47

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• A semi-civilized state of society, equally removed from the extremes of barbarity and of refinement, seems to be that particular meridian under which all the reciprocities and gratuities of hospitality do most readily flourish and abound. For it so happens that the ease, the luxury, and the abundance of the highest state of civilization, are as productive of selfishness, as the difficulties, the privations, and the sterilities of he lowest.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Civilization, Luxury, Ease

  Charles Caleb Colton (1821). “Lacon: or, Many things in few words”, p.227

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• A gamester, as such, is the cool, calculating, essential spirit of concentrated, avaricious selfishness.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Gambling, Essentials, Spirit

  Henry Ward Beecher (1871). “Lectures to young men, on various important subjects”, p.160

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• 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.

  James F. Cooper

  Character, Men, Principles

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• I can only say that I have acted upon my best convictions, without selfishness or malice, and that by the help of God I shall continue to do so.

  Abraham Lincoln

  God, Helping, Sincerity

  Abraham Lincoln (2012). “The Complete Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln (Biographically Annotated Edition)”, p.1041, Jazzybee Verlag

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• Be, as many now are, luxurious to yourself, parsimonious to your friends.
  [Lat., Esto, ut nunc multi, dives tibi pauper amicis.]

  Juvenal

  Luxurious

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• Given a man full of faith, you will have a man tenacious in purpose, absorbed in one grand object, simple in his motives, in whom selfishness has been driven out by the power of a mightier love, and indolence stirred into unwearied energy.

  Alexander MacLaren

  Faith, Simple, Men

  Alexander Maclaren (1902). “The Secret of Power: And Other Sermons”

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• The country is suffering from musical-chairs syndrome. We all dance around for a bit and then when we try to sit down again, somebody doesn't have a chair. We're running scared; we want ours.

  Cynthia Heimel

  Running, Country, Musical

  Cynthia Heimel (1988). “But Enough about You”, Fireside

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• Selfishness is the root and source of all natural and moral evils.

  Nathanael Emmons

  Roots, Evil, Moral

  Nathanael Emmons (1860). “The Works of Nathanael Emmons, D.D., Third Pastor of the Church in Franklin, Mass: With a Memoir of His Life”, p.195

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• We must learn that to enjoy happiness we must conscientiously and continuously seek to spread happiness. Selfishness is suicidal to happiness.

  B. C. Forbes

  Happiness, Suicidal, Enjoy

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• Satan had two conditions [to his plan]: the first was the denial of agency, and the second, that he would have the honor. In other words, something had to be in it for him. And thus he became the father of lies and selfishness. Taking up one's cross and following the Savior means overcoming selfishness; it is a commitment to serve others. Selfishness is one of the baser human traits, which must be subdued and overcome. We torture our souls when we focus on getting rather than giving.

  James E. Faust

  Selfish, Lying, Father

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• Possessive parents rarely live long enough to see the fruits of their selfishness.

  Alan Garner

  Family, Long, Parent

  Alan Garner (2013). “The Owl Service”, p.6, HarperCollins UK

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• People's lives are filled with vice and the trappings of it. Ambition, greed and selfishness all have to do with vice. Sooner or later, you have to see through it or you don't survive.

  Bob Dylan

  Ambition, People, Greed

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• I like to think that my arrogance, impetuosity, impatience, selfishness and greed are the qualities that make me the lovable chap I am.

  Richard Hammond

  Thinking, Greed, Arrogance

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• I heard of somebody once who said he was interested in doing the greatest amount of good for the greatest number, and that the greatest number was number one. That was himself. That may sound like a little bit of selfishness, but if that is selfishness, at least it is a very intelligent selfishness. Everyone has a right to be interested in himself, and I am confident that God wants us to be interested in ourselves first; that is, the first soul that anyone should bring to God should be his own soul.

  Sterling W Sill

  Selfish, Intelligent, Numbers

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• When you go out there and do the things you're supposed to do, people view you as selfish.

  Wilt Chamberlain

  Basketball, Selfish, Views

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• One of the unseen benefits of having children is that they deliver you from your own selfishness. There's no going back.

  Martin Amis

  Children, Father, Unseen

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• By avarice and selfishness, and a groveling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Mean, Landscape, Soil

  Henry David Thoreau, Michael McCurdy, Terry Tempest Williams (2010). “Walden”, p.88, Shambhala Publications

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• And sometimes it's the very otherness of a stranger, someone who doesn't belong to our ethnic or ideological or religious group, an otherness that can repel us initially, but which can jerk us out of our habitual selfishness, and give us intonations of that sacred otherness, which is God.

  Karen Armstrong

  Religious, Giving, Groups

  "Now" with Bill Moyers, www.pbs.org.

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• Declare your jihad on thirteen enemies you cannot see - Egoism, Arrogance, Conceit, Selfishness, Greed, Lust, Intolerance, Anger, Lying, Cheating, Gossiping and Slandering. If you can master and destroy them, then will be ready to fight the enemy you can see.

  Al-Ghazali

  Cheating, Lying, Islamic

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