Top 89 Most Selfish Quotes
#1. Pat has been instrumental in what we've done here so far and the most selfish thing for me is that I want to see what we've done placed in the hands of the most competent person, and that's Pat. No one would come close to being able to continue to build on what we've done here so far like he will.
Bobby Knight
#2. Humans, the most intelligent, gregarious(in biology), productive creatures on this planet but also the most selfish, destructive, heartless, insincere, insatiable creatures.
Myself
#4. Forgiveness, quite frankly, is the most selfish thing you can do. Because it is the greatest thing you can do for yourself.
Caroline Myss
#5. There is in even the most selfish passion a large element of self-abnegation. It is startling to realize that what we call extreme self-seeking is actually self-renunciation. The miser, health addict, glory chaser and their like are not far behind the selfless in the exercise of self-sacrifice.
Eric Hoffer
#6. The idea of Macbeth as a conscience-torm ented man is a platitude as false as Macbeth himself. Macbeth has no conscience. His main concern throughout the play is that most selfish of all concerns: to get a good night's sleep.
Mary McCarthy
#7. I think we are living in selfish times. I'm the first one to say that I'm the most selfish. We live in the so-called 'first world,' and we may be first in a lot of things like technology, but we are behind in empathy.
Javier Bardem
#8. I know that this time, the worst thing I can do is let go. And I won't be losing anything. Because it's the most selfish thing I could ever do - to allow myself to fall for someone worthwhile.
Kirsten Hubbard
#9. This game brings out the most selfish parts of many people, but it had the opposite effect on you. Watching you restored my belief that Caraval could be what I believe it used to be---and that my brother could be good once again.
Stephanie Garber
#10. The craziest, most selfish act is to commit suicide. When you kill yourself, you kill others.
Jenny Joseph
#12. I can't stand Tiger Woods. He is the most selfish man I've ever played golf with.
Stewart Rahr
#13. Blame is a human concept, one of its blackest and most selfish and self-binding.
Patrick Ness
#14. Everybody says, 'When you have kids, you really get away from yourself.' But really, it's the most selfish thing I've ever done. It's like, Okay, I'm going to create unconditional love for myself, and I'm going to need it and want it and ask for it every day, and I'm going to get it.
Brooke Shields
#15. Loyalty cannot be too liberally insisted upon. Altruism in nature remains an exception. It poses a puzzle, being in prima facie conflict with the survival of the fittest and most selfish.
Peter Birks
#16. I get out my hairbrush and wish for her - the real Lillian, and not the worst, most selfish parts of her. I wish for a warm, true best friend, one who didn't die.
Brenna Yovanoff
#17. Loving you," he says, "is the stupidest, most selfish thing I've ever done, but I can't stop. God knows, I've tried.
Leisa Rayven
#18. The grossest, the cruelest, the most selfish, the most easily pervertible and perverted thing in this world, is government.
Henry Ward Beecher
#19. The commonest weakness of our race is our ability to rationalize our most selfish purposes.
Robert A. Heinlein
#20. Because suicide is the most selfish thing a person can do.
Colleen Hoover
#21. Good nature, or what is often considered as such, is the most selfish of all virtues: it is nine times out of ten mere indolence of disposition. William Hazlitt, 'On the Knowledge of Character' (1822)
Alan Bennett
#22. It took so long to find you ... and now I don't want it to change. I want it all set in amber. I want us and nobody else in the most selfish way you can imagine. I can't help it
I'm old-fashioned. I believe marriage is between a man and a man.
Armistead Maupin
#23. And this is my most selfish thought, that if I lose the people I love what is left of my own life will consist only of grief.
Abigail Thomas
#25. Just as blueprints don't necessarily specify blue buildings, selfish genes don't necessarily specify selfish organisms. As we shall see, sometimes the most selfish thing a gene can do is build a selfless brain. Genes are a play within a play, not the interior monologue of the players.
Steven Pinker
#26. I am probably the most selfish man you will ever meet in your life. No one gets the satisfaction or the joy that I get out of seeing kids realize there is hope.
Jerry Lewis
#27. For so long Marianne and Albrecht and many of their friends had known Hitler was a lunatic, a leader whose lowbrow appeal to people's most selfish, self-pitying emotions and ignorance was an embarrassment for their country.
Jessica Shattuck
#28. You will have sacrificed the lives of the people for personal honor, an empty word," Luan said. "That seems to me a most selfish act.
Ken Liu
#29. Romantic love is the most selfish of all emotions.
Ellen Kenner
#30. It's not selfish to prioritize your life to fulfill Destiny. It's actually the most selfless thing you can do. God has an appointment for you to serve humanity in the greatest way possible for you.
T.D. Jakes
#31. Still what I miss most, simple and maybe selfish as it sounds, is the twinkle in Morrie's eyes when I came in the room. But When someone is happy-genuninely happy-to see you, it melts you from the start. It is like going home.
Mitch Albom
#32. It's usually the selfish people who are loved the most. They do what you deny yourself, and you love them for it. You give them your heart.
Saul Bellow
#33. Off we skip like the most heartless things in the world, which is what children are, but so attractive; and we have an entirely selfish time, and then when we have need of special attention we nobly return for it, confident that we shall be rewarded instead of smacked.
J.M. Barrie
#34. Learning to not be selfish is what has changed in me the most since being married.
Blake Shelton
#35. I'm amazed, as quirky, individual and selfish as most of us are, that anyone stays married for long.
Mark McKinnon
#36. Being pretty-minded is simply the natural state for most people. They want to be vapid and lazy and vain ... and selfish. It only takes a twist to lock in that part of their personalities.
Scott Westerfeld
#37. Man is the most dangerous, destructive, selfish, and unethical animal on earth.
Michael Fox
#38. It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes ... we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions - especially selfish ones. - Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#39. We're all selfish. It's an age thing. We go spotty, disobedient and daft. But most of all, we go selfish
Ruth Hamilton
#40. The nicest people fall in love indiscriminately ... while under the influence of that pre-eminently selfish lunacy they may make the most outrageous demands upon their friends with no other excuse than their painful need.
Margery Allingham
#41. It wasn't as easy for others to accept the darker side of themselves. Most like to cling to the notion that hesitation still marked the presence of morality. Deep down we were all just selfish animals. We liked to take ... or be taken.
Teresa Mummert
#42. I think what's most fun is playing someone who's sort of selfish and in a lot of ways unlikeable, but there's this really big heart underneath it that you get little glimpses of.
David Walton
#43. The most DIFFICULT thing for individuals to do when they become part of a team is to sacrifice, it is much EASIER to be selfish.
Pat Riley
#44. Recognize at all times the paramount right of your Country to your most devoted services, whether she treat you ill or well, and never let selfish views or interests predominate over the duties of patriotism.
Henry Clay
#45. More often than not, the demons of our nature love a recluse; nobody is more vulnerable to himself than the solitary. To imagine that one can simply withdraw, and somehow achieve peace, or wisdom, or detachment, is a mistake. It is also, in most cases, inappropriate, selfish, and even cowardly.
John Burnside
#46. The sad thing is most people have to check with someone before they do the things that make them happy. We're all passing through; the least we can do is be happy, and the only way to do that is by being selfish.
Gene Simmons
#47. Charlotte Yates loved humanity with all her heart, but she really had to draw the line at individuals. For the most part they were incredibly stupid, clumsy, selfish, and criminally shortsighted. Look, for instance, at who they voted for.
Magnus Flyte
#48. The existing principle of selfish interest and competition has been carried to its extreme point; and, in its progress, has isolated the heart of man, blunted the edge of his finest sensibilities, and annihilated all his most generous impulses and sympathies.
Frances Wright
#51. I think being a mum gives you extra qualities. I'm more feisty, fiercely protective and less selfish. The main trait I want to instill in my kids is kindness. I think it's the most important thing. If you're kind, you'll go a long way.
Rebecca Ferguson
#52. It was a kindness that was hard to understand ... and the most selfishness she's ever shown.
Bisco Hatori
#53. I find that the crazy narcissists, the selfish loons are often the most fun to be around, weirdly.
Paul Giamatti
#54. Lepida, has anyone ever told you that you're a cruel spiteful selfish slut? ... You're vicious. You're unprincipled. You mistreat your slaves and abuse your daughter. And furthermore you're the worst, most neglectful, most criminal wife in Rome. I think we can go now.
Kate Quinn
#55. Do not give alms promiscuously. Select the unworthy poor and make them happy. To give to the deserving is a duty, but to help the improvident, drinking class is clear generosity, so that the donor has a right to be warmed by a selfish pride and count on a most flattering obituary.
George Ade
#56. A human being is happiest and most successful when dedicated to a cause outside his own individual, selfish satisfaction.
Benjamin Spock
#57. We're connected, as women. It's like a spiderweb. If one part of that web vibrates, if there's trouble, we all know it, but most of the time we're just too scared, or selfish, or insecure to help. But if we don't help each other, who will?
Sarah Addison Allen
#58. As utterly irrational as it might seem, the greed within me has the most limited vision I can possibly imagine as it has eyes only for the few things it doesn't have, and it is completely blind to all the many remarkable things that it does.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#59. We often become our kindest, most ethical selves only by seeing what it feels like to be selfish assholes first.
Cheryl Strayed
#60. It was selfish what I asked her to do, even if it wound up being the most unselfish thing I've ever done.
Gayle Forman
#61. She was the most precious thing in the world to him. So beautiful, so sweet, so giving and too damn good for him, but he was a selfish bastard and wouldn't let her go.
R.L. Mathewson
#62. But the reality is we often become our kindest, most ethical selves only by seeing what it feels like to be a selfish jackass first.
Cheryl Strayed
#63. My mum was critical in getting me to recognise very early on that although what I was doing was pretty serious, quite selfish, and probably to most people pretty obsessive, there actually was more to life than running quickly twice round a track.
Sebastian Coe
#64. Christ can take the most sin-laden, selfish, evil person and bring forgiveness and new life.
Billy Graham
#65. I was a normal child. Which is to say, I was selfish and I was not entirely convinced of the existence of things that were not me, and I was certain, rock-solid, unshakeably certain, that I was the most important thing in creation. There was nothing that was more important to me than I was.
Neil Gaiman
#66. I'm still struggling with the fact that due to my own (selfish) desire to be a writer, my children probably won't have the same opportunities I had growning up. For most students, however, I genuinely think it's about the money. It's a factor, sure. But it just feels like a factor.
Marina Keegan
#67. They were unfailing in their love for me, and most of the time they had gotten nothing in return. Maybe that last part was the proof that my mother was right. They only gave, and I only took.
Amanda Hocking
#68. Of all forms of government and society, those of free men and women are in many respects the most brittle. They give the fullest freedom for activities of private persons and groups who often identify their own interests, essentially selfish, with the general welfare.
Dorothy Thompson
#69. My son's the most precious thing to me; he's changed me from being selfish to selfless.
Ricardo Antonio Chavira
#70. Switzerland is a curst, selfish, swinish country of brutes, placed in the most romantic region of the world.
Lord Byron
#71. Inflammatory passion and selfish interest characterizes most men, whereas ambition characterizes men who pursue and hold national office. Such men rise from the people through a process of self-selection, since politics is a dirty business that discourages all but the most ambitious.
Tom Cotton
#73. I would have been a terrible mother because I'm basically a very selfish human being. Not that that has stopped most people going off and having children.
Katharine Hepburn
#74. Paradox is beloved of novelists. The despised savior, the humane whore, the selfish man suddenly munificent, the wise fool, and the cowardly hero. Most writers spend their lives writing about unexpected malice in the supposedly virtuous, and unexpected virtue in the supposedly sinful.
Thomas Keneally
#75. Most of the time, the things that really change the world exist for something fundamentally selfish and then the world-changing ends up being a side-effect of that.
Andrew Mason
#76. One of the most important lessons I've recently learned? I have to move forward without that apology. Waiting on it has bound me to an anchor that is pulling me under. What would make the other person apologize for hurting me when they're far too selfish to notice they have?
Paula Heller Garland
#77. I've learnt an enormous amount from my children. Mostly that my agenda isn't the most important thing in the world. For a while, I was trying to squeeze them into my life. And it was such torment! It makes you realise how selfish you are.
Toby Stephens
#78. What do violent individuals fear most? Violence? I should say not! By what do the cruel and selfish feel most threatened? All of them fear nothing as much as they fear love.
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#79. I am speaking now of the highest duty we owe our friends, the noblest, the most sacred
that of keeping their own nobleness, goodness, pure and incorrupt ... If we let our friend become cold and selfish and exacting without remonstrance, we are no true lover, no true friend.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
#80. Everyone is good at heart. We all do things with the greatest of intentions and most of the time we do it for selfish reasons. Myself included.
Celia Mcmahon
#81. In matters editorial, I am a believer in totalitarian despotism. Most writers are lazy, difficult, selfish, thoughtless, and unreliable.
John Derbyshire
#82. My work requires acting at its most committed - it demands actors of enormous resilience, but also intelligence and wit. It doesn't work for narcissistic or selfish actors.
Mike Leigh
#83. Love wasn't a selfish thing. It was the kindest, most generous impulse a man could have.
Susan Wiggs
#84. In much of today's popular culture, the virtues of forgiveness and kindness are belittled, while ridicule, anger, and harsh criticism are encouraged. Let us not hurt the ones we love the most by selfish criticism!
David E. Sorensen
#85. The sacrifice 'of' self for the greater good is the greatest calling imaginable, and it is the bedrock of the greatest nations. The sacrifice 'for' self is the most pathetic calling imaginable, and it is the quicksand within which nations perish.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#86. I think I'm hornier than most dudes. I'm not a selfish lover - but the bottom line is ... I guess I am horny. I'm insatiable. I can never get enough.
Rude Jude
#87. Having been created in the image and likeness of God, unlike trees or flowers or fire or the moon, we are most fully human when we love, forgive and work toward peace. To be violent, vengeful or selfish is to be un-human!
Daniel Horan
#88. The man who is most aggressive in teaching tolerance is the most intolerant of all: he wants a world full of people too timid and ashamed to really disagree with anything.
Criss Jami
#89. When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. It was true too ... she was as tyrannical and selfish a little pig as ever lived.
Frances Hodgson Burnett
