Quotes About Selfishness

You will speed up your growth by being selfish. So imagine that the people you're looking at can actually take care of themselves. And if you ask for what you want and trust that the other person will say yes or no powerfully, it will make things very interesting.

When you're dealing with people who have no moral center, no loyalty to anyone but themselves, you don't always get the logical results you expect, or the truth that you paid for.

As to how a Prince is to know his Minister, this unerring rule may be laid down. When you see a Minister thinking more of himself than of you, and in all his actions seeking his own ends, that man can never be a good Minister or one that you can trust.

Die Menschen sind undankbar, unbeständig, heuchlerisch, furchtsam und eigennützig.

he'd once believed that the answer lay somehow in the music he created, he suspected now that He'd been mistaken. The more he thought about it, the more he'd come to realize that for him, music had always been a movement away from reality rather than a means of living in it more deeply. .. he now knew that burying himself in music had less to do with God than a selfish desire to escape.

I have never given adoration to any body except myself.

Falling in love is a narcissistic endeavor. You play the role of lover, and you find someone to act it out on.

I look back on my life and have to face the fact that I have been narcissistic and selfish.

We have a system that is deeply narcissistic - the consumer sort of capitalist culture. It's all about me and now and what do I need that just makes you feel a bit better with all the stress. But in other healthy cultures, they have a real sense of ancestor and a sense of the next seven generations.

Nothing in these woods could be more dreadful, more terrifying, than the selfish cruelty of ordinary people.

There is a special place in hell for people who bring children into this world solely for the sake of seeming better than they are.

He loved his wife and his kids right up to the moment it threatened his ability to have a good time, to be adored.

I have always found it quaint and rather touching that there is a movement [Libertarians] in the US that thinks Americans are not yet selfish enough.

Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the 'transcendent' and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Don't be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will provide plenty of time for silence.

It is a terrible thing to feel sorry for one's mother or indeed father. And it's an additionally awful thing to feel this and to know the impotence of the adolescent to do anything at all about it. Worse still, perhaps, is the selfish consolation that it isn't really one's job to rear one's parents.

All of these things cater to our inborn stupidity, and our willingness to be persuaded against all the evidence that we are indeed the center of the universe and that everything is arranged with us in mind.

theory of natural selection itself seems calculated to foster selfishness at the expense of public good, violence, callous indifference to suffering, short term greed at the expense of long term foresight. If scientific theories could vote, evolution would surely vote Republican.

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.

To live for the moment is the prevailing passion—to live for yourself, not for your predecessors or posterity. We are fast losing the sense of historical continuity, the sense of belonging to a succession of generations originating in the past and stretching into the future.

Eragon's plan to let his family see Saphira was dispelled by Roran's announcement and Saphira's own cautionary words. She was reluctant to be seen, and he, partly out of selfishness, agreed. The moment her existence was divulged, he knew that shouts, accusations, and fear would be directed at him Ã¢â'¬Â¦ so he procrastinated. He told himself to wait for a sign that it was the right time.

The Europeans wanted gold and slaves, like everybody else; but at the same time they wanted statues put up to themselves as people who had done good things for the slaves.

Although narcissists can appear charismatic, that charm is always and only exercised in the service of their own greater glory. They disregard the feelings and the interests of others and are often skilled at manipulating them into providing what the narcissist wants right here, right now. From Reading Crimes by DR TONY HILL

Un giorno che Å trum le aveva detto qualcosa a proposito dell'eterna giovinezza d'animo di Aleksandra Vladimirovna, Ljudmila era sbottata: «È vecchia ed egoista, altro che giovane». «Non è egoismo, il suo. La nonna è una populista» aveva detto Nadja, aggiungendo: «E i populisti sono brava gente, ma con poco cervello».

We are so ignorant of our true condition that we know little more of ourselves than our name and address and how much we have; of our selfishness, our envy, our detraction, our sin, we know absolutely nothing. In fact, in order that we may never know ourselves, we hate silence and solitariness.