Selfishness Quotes (324 Quotes)

When your own life is threatened, your sense of empathy is blunted by a terrible, selfish hunger for survival.

Where do you get the right to decide our lives? I'll tell you where. From that little hog's gut that hangs between your legs. Well, let me tell you something... you will need more than that. I don't know where you will get it or who will give it to you, but mark my words, you will need more than that.... You are a sad, pitiful, stupid, selfish, hateful man. I hope your little hog's gut stands you in good stead, and you take good care of it, because you don't have anything else.

And is it selfish of me to crave victory, or is it brave?

Everything - our houses, our clothes, our hairstyles - is meant to help us forget ourselves and to protect us from vanity, greed and envy, which are just forms of selfishness. If we have little, and want for little, and we are all equal, we envy no one.

Suicide to them is an act of selfishness. Someone who is truly selfless does not think of himself often enough to desire death.

Because I'm selfish. I'm a coward. I'm the kind of girl who, when she might actually be of use, would run to stay alive and leave those who couldn't follow to suffer and die.

It's something about the inevitability. How nothing can keep them apart--not her selfishness, or his evil, or even death, in the end...their love is their only redeeming quality.

She thought of the orchids spreading across the plains below, choking the life out of other plants, out of the soil itself, selfish and unstoppable. Tally Youngblood was a weed. And, unlike the orchids, she wasn't even a pretty one.

Your father always suspected that being pretty-minded is simply the natural state for most people. They want to be vapid and lazy and vain-Maddy glanced at Tally-and selfish. It only takes a twist to lock in that part of their personalities. He always thought that some people could think their way out of it.

He is altogether selfish, she thought in some surprise, the only man I have ever sat and talked to alone, and I am impatient; he is simply not very interesting.

I feel so selfish, because I want the best of both worlds. I want to keep the image I've worked so hard to create.

That moment. That instant when your fingers curl round the handles of a shiny, uncreased bagùand all the gorgeous new things inside it become yours. WhatÆs it like? ItÆs like going hungry for days, then cramming your mouth full of warm buttered toast. ItÆs like waking up and realizing itÆs the weekend. ItÆs like the better moments of sex. Everything else is blocked out of your mind. ItÆs pure, selfish pleasure.

She just happened to feel like it. Wasn't that after all, the only reason there was? Had she ever had a less selfish, more complicated reason for doing anything in her life?

I'd be a conservative if I'd never met any. They're selfish, mean-spirited, egocentric, reactionary, and boring.

Don't we forgive everything of a lover? We forgive selfishness, desire, guile. As long as we are the motive for it...There are some European words you can never translate properly into another language.

But thoughtless ingratitude is the armour of the young; without it, how would they ever get through life? The old wish the young well, but they wish them ill also: they would like to eat them up, and absorb their vitality, and remain immortal themselves. Without the protection of surliness and levity, all children would be crushed by the past - the past of others, loaded on their shoulders. Selfishness is their saving grace.

I love them, they are so nice and selfish. Dogs are TOO good and unselfish. They make me feel uncomfortable. But cats are gloriously human.

He was not an ill-disposed young man, unless to be rather cold hearted, and rather selfish, is to be ill-disposed....

The world had made him extravagant and vain - Extravagance and vanity had made him cold-hearted and selfish. Vanity, while seeking its own guilty triumph at the expense of another, had involved him in a real attachment, which extravagance, or at least its offspring, necessity, had required to be sacrificed. Each faulty propensity in leading him to evil, had led him likewise to punishment.

I'm an egotist, but I'm not selfish. There's a difference. I'm a neurotic, I guess. I can't stop thinking about myself. It isn't that I think myself so important... I simply can't think about anything else, that's all. If I could fall in love with a woman that might help some. But I can't find a woman who interests me.

Religion! Is what you hear at church religion? Is that which can bend and turn, and descend and ascend, to fit every crooked phase of selfish, worldly society, religion? Is that religion which is less scrupulous, less generous, less just, less considerate for man, than even my own ungodly, worldly, blinded nature? No! When I look for religion, I must look for something above me, and not something beneath.

Recently he has noticed idiocy creeping up on him. His resolve to keep his head on straight, his feet on the ground, is failing and he has observed, quite objectively, that he is becoming more thoughtless, selfish, making more and more stupid remarks. He has tried to do something about this but it almost feels out of his control now, like pattern baldness. Why not just give in and be an idiot? Stop caring.

Courage, Lucy Snowe! With self-denial and economy now, and steady exertion by-and-by, an object in life need not fail you. Venture not to complain that such an object is too selfish, too limited, and lacks interest; be content to labour for independence until you have proved, by winning that prize, your right to look higher.

I have little left in myself -- I must have you. The world may laugh -- may call me absurd, selfish -- but it does not signify. My very soul demands you: it will be satisfied, or it will take deadly vengeance on its frame.

A woman means by Unselfishness chiefly taking trouble for others; a man means not giving trouble to others...thus, while the woman thinks of doing good offices and the man of respecting other people's rights, each sex, without any obvious unreason, can and does regard the other as radically selfish.

Heaven would be Hell in no time if every cruel, selfish, vicious soul went to Heaven.

Not selfishness, but precisely the absence of a self. Look at them. The man who cheats and lies, but preserves a respectable front. He knows himself to be dishonest, but others think he's honest and he derives his self-respect from that, second-hand. The man who takes credit for an achievement which is not his own. He knows himself to be mediocre, but he's great in the eyes of others.

Everyone thinks I'm showing off when I talk, ridiculous when I'm silent, insolent when I answer, cunning when I have a good idea, lazy when I'm tired, selfish when I eat one bite more than I should.

If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears.

The one thing that stood out to me was he Popovich said for once in your basketball career, be selfish,

National progress is the sum of individual industry, energy, and uprightness, as national decay is of individual idleness, selfishness, and vice.

Selfishness must always be forgiven you know, because there is no hope of a cure.

We just played unselfishly. At times this year, we've played selfish, but today we passed the ball. ... We were just very supportive of each other.

Manifest plainness, embrace simplicity, reduce selfishness, have few desires.

It is easier to do one's duty to others than to one's self. If you do your duty to others, you are considered reliable. If you do your duty to yourself, you are considered selfish.

I don't have a selfish bone in my body. I understand that moving on is part of the nature of this business. My assignment was up in Philadelphia. I did exactly what I was supposed to do there. It's not bittersweet at all. I feel exactly the same way I have for my 13 years in the NFL. You don't like watching two other teams going to the Super Bowl. But I'm overjoyed for them.

California is a queer place in a way, it has turned its back on the world, and looks into the void Pacific. It is absolutely selfish, very empty, but not false, and at least, not full of false effort.

How small an selfish is sorrow. But it bangs one about until one is senseless. (letter to Edith Sitwell, shortly after the death of George VI)

And, one thing I definitely enjoyed personally, from a selfish point of view, was exploration and going to places that I had never been to before and learning, you know, meeting the people and getting to know, new sights and sounds, etc.

They smell, they snarl and they scratch they have a singular aptitude for shredding rugs, drapes and upholstery they're sneaky, selfish and not at all smart they are disloyal, condescending and totally useless in any rodent free environment.

To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.

Those who serve the True Guru are very beautiful they cast off the filth of selfishness and conceit.

Oh, I guess it's selfishness. I can make a movie when I want to. I don't need to work as a hired actor. I produce, I write, I direct. I guess I like it.

Pay attention to the voice within.... Sometimes the voice of your conscience gets drowned out by crowd noise or by the pep rally of temptations. And your mind may put some selfish spin on the ball, rationalizing that it's okay to veer away from the ethical route. When we run into conflicts between ethical 'shoulds' and our selfish 'wants,' we all argure out ways to con our conscience. But take pains to listen, because it has your best interests at heart.

Caution is the confidential agent of selfishness.

No man is more cheated than the selfish man.

Things like this just wear you out. It's frustrating because every two months we seem to have a scandal around here, and then the people involved decide they won't talk to the media. That leaves the rest of us, who aren't involved, to have to answer for them publicly, and it's not a whole lot of fun. But, hey, some guys are just selfish. They don't think about anybody else.

I believe all suffering is caused by ignorance. People inflict pain on others in the selfish pursuit of their happiness or satisfaction. Yet true happiness comes from a sense of brotherhood and sisterhood. We need to cultivate a universal responsibility for one another and the planet we share.

And books that were published in much larger numbers than Selfish, Little are hard to find. And publishers who wanted to publish my last few works have them stuck in limbo while new distribution ideas and legal issues and fears are blown away.

We absolutely do not see this in ideological terms, nor are we aligning ourselves with any particular individual person, nor are we taking the stance because of some selfish interest of our own.