Actions Quotes Logo

Selfishness Quotes

The instructive admonitions, “give an account of thy stewardship,“—“occupy till I come;” are forgott...

Show More
Picture of William Wilberforce
William WilberforceA Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians in the Higher and Middle Classes in This Country: Contrasted with Real Christianity

Selfishness is one of the principal fruits of the corruption of human nature; and it is obvious that...

Show More

Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor and could never h...

Show More

You know, Emily was a selfish old woman in her way. She was very generous, but she always wanted a r...

Show More

She's very selfish. Not exactly self-centered, but totally indifferent to everyone and everything. D...

Show More

To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit in...

Show More

Unconditional love. That’s what he wants to give her and what he wants from her. People should give ...

Show More

That she had loved Sylveste because he was such a self-important bastard and made something noble of...

Show More

To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others.

We do not have feelings which change us, but feelings that suggest to us the idea of change. Thus lo...

Show More

O young girl, throw yourself again into the water so that I might have a second time the chance to s...

Show More

Perhaps what I am about to say will appear strange to you gentlemen, socialists, progressives, human...

Show More

Oh, mankind, race of crocodiles! How well I recognize you down there, and how worthy you are of your...

Show More

Love is the most selfish of all the passions.

It is an infirmity of our nature to mingle our interests and prejudices with the operation of our re...

Show More

As a father now, I wouldn't do what my dad did, because it left me feeling emotionally unstable as a...

Show More

It was because all we wanted was each other's constant love and attention and for no one else to rec...

Show More

Look at the orators in our republics; as long as they are poor, both state and people can only prais...

Show More

[Y]ou possess all the attributes of a demagogue; a screeching, horrible voice, a perverse, crossgrai...

Show More

Of all the varieties of virtues, liberalism is the most beloved.

In a democracy the poor will have more power than the rich, because there are more of them, and the ...

Show More

Very often inertia, selfishness, and vanity play the greatest role in our trust in others; inertia w...

Show More

And isn’t that the root of every despicable action? Not selfishness, but precisely the absence of a ...

Show More

One gains a profoundly personal, selfish joy from the mere existence of the person one loves. It is ...

Show More
Picture of Ayn Rand
Ayn RandThe Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism

...only in relatively recent times have people decided that "because I want to" is sufficient reason...

Show More
Picture of Bill McKibben
Bill McKibbenWandering Home: A Long Walk Across America's Most Hopeful Landscape: Vermont's Champlain Valley and New York's Adirondacks

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

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

It is something like the way dame Nature gathers round a foreign body an envelope of some insensitiv...

Show More

I suppose it is that sickness and weakness are selfish things and turn our inner eyes and sympathy o...

Show More

While it lasts, the religion of worshiping oneself is the best.

Indeed this gentleman's stoicism was of that not uncommon kind, which enables a man to bear with exe...

Show More

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

I have always found it quaint and rather touching that there is a movement [Libertarians] in the US ...

Show More

We keep on being told that religion, whatever its imperfections, at least instills morality. On ever...

Show More

Suppose you were the last one left? Suppose you did that to yourself?

Self-absorption in all its forms kills empathy, let alone compassion. When we focus on ourselves, ou...

Show More
Picture of Daniel Goleman
Daniel GolemanSocial Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships

In 1948, psychologists asked more than 10,000 adolescents whether they considered themselves to be a...

Show More

Your corn is ripe today; mine will be so tomorrow. 'Tis profitable for us both, that I should labour...

Show More

The lovelorn, the cry-for-helpers, all mawkish tragedians who give suicide a bad name are the idiots...

Show More

People pontificate, "Suicide is selfishness." Career churchmen like Pater go a step further and call...

Show More

In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.

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

Show More

What is it about the American obsession with productivity and responsibility that makes it so diffic...

Show More

I believe I may assert that they were really in possession of deep and growing happiness. It ended. ...

Show More

This selfishness is not only part of me. It is the most living part.It is somehow transcending rathe...

Show More

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

If you do not worship God, you worship something, and nine times out of ten it will be yourself. You...

Show More

Wars come from egotism and selfishness. Every macrocosmic or world war has its origin in microcosmic...

Show More

I discovered that I am not disciplined out of virtue but as a reaction to my negligence, that I am g...

Show More
Picture of Gabriel García Márquez
Gabriel García MárquezMemories of My Melancholy Whores

People don't want other people to be people.

A man's interest in the world is only the overflow from his interest in himself.

Selfish— a judgment readily passed by those who have never tested their own power of sacrifice.

The love of our neighbor is the only door out of the dungeon of self, where we mope and mow, strikin...

Show More

I am a beast until I love as God doth love.

Picture of George MacDonald
George MacDonaldThe Diary of an Old Soul

And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to mak...

Show More

It is warm, I am alive, I am calm and sad, I hardly know why. In this existence so even, so tranquil...

Show More

Nothing resembles selfishness more closely than self-respect

My problem was not only drinking; it was selfishness. The booze was leading me to put myself ahead o...

Show More

What do you want to say to me?’‘Nothing—just to talk about the profession I am entering. I am about ...

Show More

If we are to build that Zion of which the prophets have spoken and of which the Lord has given might...

Show More

It is a great mistake to suppose that a woman with no heart will be an easy creditor in the exchange...

Show More

We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and alo...

Show More

No man is more cheated than the selfish man.

The word 'love,' used in connection with the reproduction of our species, is the most odious blasphe...

Show More

Let's be clear: unless I have profoundly misunderstood its position, I pretty much despise American ...

Show More

...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.

To behold virtue in her proper form is nothing else but to contemplate morality stripped of all admi...

Show More
Picture of Immanuel Kant
Immanuel KantFundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals

Selfishness is the only real atheism aspiration unselfishness the only real religion.

...alone in this city, alone on this sea. The days were strewn about him, he was a drunkard of days....

Show More

The first sentiment of man was that of his existence, his first care that of preserving it.

Picture of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques RousseauDiscourse on the Origin of Inequality

You had once asked me if I was afraid of death. I said I was afraid of not living. I don’t want to e...

Show More

Ah, those foolish days, those foolish days when we were unselfish and pure-minded; those foolish day...

Show More

Nor was her love for Udayan recognizable or intact. Anger was always mounted to it, zigzagging throu...

Show More

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

When the same qualities which we admire in ourselves are seen in others, even though they be superio...

Show More
Picture of John Calvin
John CalvinInstitutes of the Christian Religion

The problem is hedonism. The problem is the preening vanity and selfishness of 'coming out,' of para...

Show More
Picture of John Derbyshire
John DerbyshireWe Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism

I must fight with my weapons. Not his. Not selfishness and brutality and shame and resentment.

What you love is your own love. It's not love, it's selfishness. It's not me you think of, but what ...

Show More

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, th...

Show More

By nature, we get more pleasure from God's gifts then from Himself.

J
John Piper (artist)When I Don't Desire God: How to Fight for Joy

By nature, we get more pleasure from God's gifts then from Himself.

J
John Piper (artist)When I Don't Desire God: How to Fight for Joy

By nature, we get more pleasure from God's gifts then from Himself.

J
John Piper (theologian)When I Don't Desire God: How to Fight for Joy

By nature, we get more pleasure from God's gifts then from Himself.

J
John Piper (theologian)When I Don't Desire God: How to Fight for Joy

Do you know, I am putting off ending this letter as though the end would be the end of something I w...

Show More

Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives... I never meant ...

Show More

Parents are programmed to want the best for their kids, regardless of what they get in return. That'...

Show More

Walter had never liked cats. They'd seemed to him the sociopaths of the pet world, a species domesti...

Show More

Our minds, unedited by guilt or shame, are not for public consumption, because they would either be ...

Show More

In his 1907 retirement address, Joseph Pulitzer urged his successors to always oppose privileged cla...

Show More

Take taking from those that give & nobody anywhere will need any more such gifts.

Manifest plainness,Embrace simplicity,Reduce selfishness,Have few desires.

My illness helped me to see that what was missing in society is what was missing in me: a little hea...

Show More

The same people who can deny others everything are famous for refusing themselves nothing.

What Douglas had once seen as the attractive over-confidence of youth, now looked more like unyieldi...

Show More

A liberal is a man or a woman or a child who looks forward to a better day, a more tranquil night, a...

Show More

Their arrogance protected them against any liking for their fellow-man, against the slightest intere...

Show More
Picture of Marcel Proust
Marcel ProustIn the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

Service is the rent we pay for the life we have been given.

Self-interest lies behind all that men do, forming the important motive for all their actions; this ...

Show More