Selfishness quotes
302 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside selfishness — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Money only appeals to selfishness and always tempts its owners irresistibly to abuse it. Can anyone imagine Moses, Jesus, or Gandhi armed with the money-bags of Carnegie?"
"There can be no Good Will. Will is always Evil; it is persecution to others or selfishness."
"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.'"
"By developing a sense of respect for others and a concern for their welfare, we reduce our own selfishness, which is the source of all problems, and enhance our sense of kindness, which is a natural source of goodness."
"Aggression is the first step on the slippery slope to selfishness and chaos."
"Service without humility is selfishness and egotism."
"There is a prodigious selfishness in dreams: they live perfectly deaf and invulnerable amid the cries of the real world."
"Certain beliefs must accompany every action: One should act without selfishness, cultivate compassion for all living things, and develop respect for others."
"Along with selfishness, anger is one of the most serious problems facing the world today"
"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."
"From the apparent usefulness of the social virtues, it has readily been inferred by sceptics, both ancient and modern, that all moral distinctions arise from education, and were, at first, invented, and afterwards encouraged ... in order to render men tractable, and subdue their natural ferocity and selfishness, which incapacitated them for society."
"Others had been a little wild, which was not to be wondered at, and not very blamable; but, he had made a lamentation and uproar which it was dangerous for the people to hear, as there is always contagion in weakness and selfishness."
"I don't think there's any need to have essays advocating selfishness among human beings; I don't know what your impression has been, but some things require no further reinforcement."
"I lived with the only continuity, day to day, of the me-me-me."
"The meaning ascribed in popular usage to the word 'selfishness' is not merely wrong: it represents a devastating intellectual 'package-deal,' which is responsible, more than any other single factor, for the arrested moral development of mankind."
"The attack on "selfishness" is an attack on man's self-esteem; to surrender one, is to surrender the other."
"If I had my mouth, I would bite; if I had my liberty, I would do my liking. In the meantime, let me be that I am, and seek not toalter me."
"I knew by the way he looked at her that he held her in a higher regard than he held even himself. No selfishness or insecurity kept him from seeing the full extent of her goodeness, as it so often does with the rest of us. That kind of love may only be possible in Abnegation. I do not know. My father: Erudite-born, Abnegation-grown. He often found it difficult to live up to the demands of his chosen faction, just as I did. But he tried, and he knew true selflessness when he saw it."
"No man at bottom means injustice; it is always for some obscure distorted image of a right that he contends: an obscure image diffracted, exaggerated, in the wonderfulest way by natural dimness and selfishness; getting tenfold more diffracted by exasperation of contest, till at length it become all but irrecognis-able."
"My view is my entire life has been shaped by giving when I didn't have it. Some idiot who's wealthy and doesn't give, they'll rot in their own selfishness. I'm not worried about them. What I'm really interested in is the day-to-day person, human beings who want to go to another level of their life."
