Top 100 Quotes About Selfishness
#1. Neither your position in society, nor power, nor dignity, nor selfishness, nor even personal promotion should enslave you
Sunday Adelaja
#2. If this be an ordered selfishness, then we should pause before we condemn anyone for the vice of egoism, for there may be deeper roots for its causes than we have knowledge of.
Bram Stoker
#3. There is just too much cruelty, selfishness and corruption in the world not to want to crush the poisonous will of those who cause it by writing about it as powerfully as I can.
Carla H. Krueger
#4. Was it hardness, was it selfishness, that she should ask me to risk my life for her own glorification? Such thoughts may come to middle age; but never to ardent three-and-twenty in the fever of his first love.
Arthur Conan Doyle
#5. I will waste not even a precious second today in anger or hate or jealousy or selfishness. I know that the seeds I sow I will harvest, because every action, good or bad, is always followed by an equal reaction. I will plant only good seeds this day.
Og Mandino
#6. A liking for truth at any cost is a passion that spares nothing and that nothing resists. It's a vice, at times a comfort, or a selfishness.
Albert Camus
#7. There are points in your life, especially if you have creative ambitions, where selfishness is necessary.
Kris Kristofferson
#8. It seems to me that there are two great enemies of peace - fear and selfishness.
Katherine Paterson
#9. He knew that beauty faded quickly when embodied by selfishness,
Francine Rivers
#11. Amor deliria nervosa isn't a disease of love. It's a disease of selfishness.
Lauren Oliver
#12. We can also allow our Soulmate to pass us by,without accepting him or her,or even noticing. Then we will need another incarnation in order to find that Soulmate. And because of our selfishness, we will be condemned to the worst torture humankind ever invented for itself: loneliness.
Paulo Coelho
#13. Desire is the root of selfishness; clear your heart of desire and be selfless. Selflessness is the key to inner peace.
Christofer Drew
#14. Excellence in our work is actually a form of generosity and love, and poor quality is a form of stinginess and selfishness.
Matt Perman
#15. Selfishness is never so exquisitely selfish as when it is on its knees ... Self turns what would otherwise be a pure and powerful prayer into a weak and ineffective one.
Aiden Wilson Tozer
#16. Certain beliefs must accompany every action: One should act without selfishness, cultivate compassion for all living things, and develop respect for others.
Dalai Lama
#17. Whatever you had to do to survive, whatever you did from spite or rage or selfishness ... I don't give a damn. You're here - and you're perfect. You always were, and you always will be.
Sarah J. Maas
#18. Good character consists of recognizing the selfishness that inheres in each of us and trying to balance it against the altruism to which we should all aspire. It is a difficult balance to strike, but no definition of goodness can be complete without it.
Alan Dershowitz
#19. The fact is that sin is the most unmanly thing in God's world. You never were made for sin and selfishness. You were made for love and obedience.
J.G. Holland
#20. Every time we give in to selfishness and say "No" to God, we spoil his loving plan for us.
Pope Francis
#21. Are you willing to nourish your heart with love; then your selfishness will starve to death.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
#22. Atheism exists only in coldness, selfishness, and baseness.
Madame De Stael
#23. There is a passion and drive for cruel deeds which only the awe and fear of God can soothe; there is a suffocating selfishness in man which only holiness can ventilate.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#24. We seldom stop to think how many people's lives are entwined with our own. It is a form of selfishness to imagine that every individual can operate on his own or can pull out of the general stream and not be missed.
Ivy Baker Priest
#25. Many seniors understand that Social Security is social insurance as opposed to a program where we put money aside for our own retirement. But most elderly individuals think they're getting their money back. So it isn't selfishness as much as a misunderstanding.
Richard Lamm
#26. Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#27. Scientists have discovered that the small brave act of cooperating with another person, of choosing trust over cynicism, generosity over selfishness, makes the brain light up with quiet joy.
Natalie Angier
#29. A boy made of stardust and selfishness; a girl filled with fire and fury at the world. We are a tangle of emotional wreckage, two broken messes thrown together, trying to navigate something we can barely comprehend.
Julie Johnson
#30. We're all basically made of the same stuff: generosity and selfishness, goodness and greed.
Madeleine M. Kunin
#31. What causes you to be trapped is what we call personal importance. Personal importance, or taking things personally, is the maximum expression of selfishness because we make the assumption that everything is about me.
Miguel Ruiz
#32. This is the true selfishness: self-centeredness.
Henry Cloud
#33. One can become so sentimental about a person's absence, but it's impossible to be consistently sentimental in his presence - when you're confronted with the quotidian selfishness and silence that, I'm given to understand, comprise most of a life. But we were just so new.
Jennifer DuBois
#34. What is the authority in your life? Is it your selfishness? Your lust? Your greed? Or have you turned it all over to God and said, "Lord, You are going to be my authority"? When you are under authority, you are then able to assume authority.
Billy Graham
#35. Don't shave my head to make your wig of selfishness. Shave it because you care.
Jarod Kintz
#36. Empty me of the selfishness inside, every vain ambition and the poison of my pride, and any foolish thing my heart holds to, Lord empty me of me so I can be filled with you.
Chris Sligh
#37. You see, passion alone is a blind power. It's fire without light. It just ignites whatever it touches, good or evil, truth or lies, unselfishness or selfishness, love or lust.
Peter Kreeft
#39. Understand the suffering of worldly existence.
Abandon its causes of ignorance and selfishness.
Practice the path of meditation and compassion.
Awaken from suffering within Great Peace.
Gautama Buddha
#40. My best quality is that I'm a big hearted person. I'm resilient, too. My worst quality is selfishness, although everyone is guilty of that to an extent. Everyone should be, I think - you need to respect yourself.
Matthew McConaughey
#41. We look for love, we open our heart and we become vulnerable, just to find selfishness.
Miguel Ruiz
#42. A trustworthy marriage has weathered temptation and anger and jealousy, resentment, self-righteousness and a little bit of selfishness. When you get over and get through that, then maybe you can see the light to love.
Ruby Dee
#43. Very unfairly, there's a negative image of the kid, which really stems from the greed and selfishness of the NBA and NCAA. They're forcing these kids to go to school.
Sonny Vaccaro
#44. Even through you and I are in different boats, you in your boat and we our canoe, we share the same river of life. What befalls me befalls you. And downstream, downstream in this river of life, our children will pay for our selfishness, for our greed, and for our lack of vision.
Oren Lyons
#45. For Silicon Valley and its idols, innovation is the new selfishness.
Evgeny Morozov
#46. The reason authors almost always put a dedication on a book is, because their selfishness even horrifies themselves in the end.
Stephen King
#47. Thus suicidal selfishness, that blights The fairest feelings of the opening heart, Is destined to decay, whilst from the soil Shall spring all virtue, all delight, all love, And judgment cease to wage unnatural war With passion's unsubduable array.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#48. What a strange sort of love, to be entirely free from that quality of selfishness which is frequently the chief constituent of the passion, and sometimes it's only one!
Thomas Hardy
#49. There is more selfishness and less principle among members of Congress than I had any conception of, before I became President of the U.S.
James K. Polk
#50. There's no room for selfishness when you have a defenseless human being depending on you.
Mia Asher
#51. The heart of our problem is the selfishness in our heart.
The human spirit soars with hope when lifted by an encouraging word.
The important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle.
Pierre De Coubertin
#52. Individual versus group selection results in a mix of altruism and selfishness, of virtue and sin, among the members of a society.
E. O. Wilson
#53. I was young and filled with a degree of self-interest that could rightly be called selfishness. Nothing was more important than the stories we wrote,
Ann Patchett
#54. Thus worshiping, serving, studying, praying, each in its own way squeezes selfishness out of us; pushes aside our preoccupations with the things of the world.
Neal A. Maxwell
#55. In any relationship, do what is right; not what you want to do. Eliminate selfishness. Eliminate neglect.
Bridget Earl Pehrson
#56. Selfishness and fear are at the root of (pro-abortion) legislation ... We in the Church have a great struggle to defend life ... life is a gift not a threat.
Pope Benedict XVI
#57. Pulling weeds and planting seeds. That's the story of life. We are individual lots on which either weeds of selfishness or fruit of the Holy Spirit grows and flourishes.
Dennis Rainey
#58. The common trait of all evil is nothing other than egoism ... Basically all human evil comes from what we call the selfishness.
Rudolf Steiner
#59. The sin which is indulged to the greatest extent, which separates us from God and produces so many spiritual disorders, and which are contagious, is selfishness.
Ellen G. White
#60. Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either extreme egotism, selfishness, evil
or else an absolute ignorance.
Graham Greene
#61. Fond of bewailing the decadence of the modern world, of denouncing the younger generation for its lack of idealism and public spirit, he is blind to the fact of his own enormous selfishness. He is one of those invalids who make use of their real or imagined sufferings to get their own way.
Christopher Isherwood
#62. Well," said I, "you call that love, Mr. Carruthers, but I should call it selfishness." "Maybe the two things go together.
Arthur Conan Doyle
#63. Any opposition not based on rationalism or science or experience will one day or other, reveal the fraud, selfishness, lies and conspiracies.
Periyar E.V. Ramasamy
#64. All the words we use are stripped bare, so that no one ever knows what anyone else is saying, so that all kindness is cruelty, all selfishness generous, all care callous.
David Levithan
#65. ... his light to my dark. His truth to my lies. His sacrifices to my selfishness.
Jessica Shirvington
#66. The first thing any coaching staff must do is weed out selfishness. No program can be successful with players who put themselves ahead of the team.
Johnny Majors
#67. Selfishness comes from poverty in the heart, from the belief that love is not abundant.
Miguel Angel Ruiz
#68. The Fourth Truth, brothers, is that selfishness can be extinguished by following an eightfold path: right understanding, right purpose, right speech, right conduct, right occupation, right effort, right attention, and right meditation.
Anonymous
#69. If you must hate, if hatred is the leaven of your life, which alone can give flavor, then hate what should be hated: falsehood, violence, selfishness.
Ludwig Borne
#70. I am not a foreigner, because we are all traveling, we are all full of the same questions, the same tiredness, the same fears, the same selfishness and the same generosity.
I am not a foreigner, because when I asked, I received.
When I knocked, the door opened.
When I looked, I found.
Paulo Coelho
#71. No more selfishness. Just a balanced, contented, and richly meaningful life.
Fennel Hudson
#72. Carley saw two forces in life--the destructive and constructive. On the one side greed, selfishness, materialism: on the other generosity, sacrifice, and idealism.
Zane Grey
#73. It's about time we stop mistaking self-knowledge for self-absorption - and realize that nobody has a monopoly on selfishness.
Meghan Daum
#74. Emerson, do you mean it?' 'It is only your due, my dear Peabody. Spite and selfishness alone kept me from beginning on them long ago. You deserve pyramids, and pyramids you will have!
Elizabeth Peters
#75. We might not object to the statement that Lear deserved to suffer for his folly, selfishness and tyranny; but to assert that he deserved to suffer what he did suffer is to do violence not merely to language but to any healthy moral sense.
Andrew Coyle Bradley
#76. We are wont to condemn self-love; but what we really mean to condemn is contrary to self-love. It is that mixture of selfishness and self-hate that permanently pursues us, that prevents us from loving others, and that prohibits us from losing ourselves.
Paul Valery
#77. Those who do not hate their own selfishness and regard themselves as more important than the rest of the world are blind because the truth lies elsewhere
Blaise Pascal
#78. What the writers do, and we hopefully can bring to life, is that they present characters who, on the surface, aren't always heroic and their acts aren't always devoid of selfishness.
Charlie Cox
#80. Getting enough of what you want without depriving anyone else is the ultimate act of selfishness and sanity.
Joy Browne
#81. Nothing resembles selfishness more closely than self-respect
George Sand
#82. 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
#83. Aggression is the first step on the slippery slope to selfishness and chaos.
Anne Campbell
#84. Thorough selfishness destroys or paralyzes enjoyment. A heart made selfish by the contest for wealth is like a citadel stormed in war, utterly shattered.
Henry Ward Beecher
#85. There can be no Good Will. Will is always Evil; it is persecution to others or selfishness.
William Blake
#86. Altruism is selfishness out with a pair of field glasses and imagination.
Christina Stead
#87. Next to the ministry I know of no more noble profession than the law. The object aimed at is justice, equal and exact, and if it does not reach that end at once it is because the stream is diverted by selfishness or checked by ignorance. Its principles ennoble and its practice elevates.
William Jennings Bryan
#89. If love isn't embedded withing giving, then it would be best to never give at all, for love and giving is inseparable; they are one. Selfishness and self-gratification is not of love.
Aloy Ricketts
#90. Lord, help me to be a good wife. I fully realize that I don't have what it takes to be one without Your help. Take my selfishness, impatience, and irritability and turn them into kindness,
Stormie O'martian
#91. To humanity, which sometimes seems to be lost and dominated by the power of evil, selfishness and fear, the risen Lord gives the gift of His love which forgives, reconciles and reopens the soul to hope.
Pope John Paul II
#92. Selfishness is easy to find. Selflessness is a much rarer beast.
Stewart Stafford
#93. He who does most to cure woman of her weakness, her frivolity, and her servility will likewise at the same stroke do most to cure man of his brutality, his selfishness and his sensuality.
Frances Power Cobbe
#94. Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.
Oscar Wilde
#95. Becoming a linchpin is not an act of selfishness. I see it as an act of generosity,
Seth Godin
#96. The act of love ... is a confession. Selfishness screams aloud, vanity shows off, or else true generosity reveals itself.
Albert Camus
#97. Chastity by no means signifies rejection of human sexuality or lack of esteem for it: rather it signifies spiritual energy capable of defending love from the perils of selfishness and aggressiveness, and able to advance it towards its full realization.
Pope John Paul II
#98. Pray and ask God to show you a specific area where you need to let go of selfishness. Once He shows you, don't get discouraged or be afraid - trust God to change you!
Joyce Meyer
#99. Men have committed murder for jealousy's sake, and anger's sake, and hatred's sake, and selfishness' sake, and spiritual pride's sake; but no man that ever I heard of, ever committed a diabolical murder for sweet charity's sake.
Herman Melville
#100. You are the embodiment of selfishness.
Kate Chopin
