Quotes About Selfishness

No man has ever had a point of pride that was not injurious to him.

Man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.

Because men believe not in Providence, therefore they do so greedily scrape and hoard. They do not believe in any reward for charity, therefore they will part with nothing.

The Bible is very clear that in the last days men will be "lovers of themselves" (2 Tim. 3:2).

Selfishness is the making a man's self his own centre, the beginning and end of all he doeth.

No man sympathizes with the sorrows of vanity.

A man who overindulges lives in a dream. He becomes conceited. He thinks the whole world revolves around him; and it usually does.

Every man for himself.

All men are selfish, but the vain man is in love with himself. He admires, like the lover his adored one, everything which to others is indifferent.

Without the help of selfishness, the human animal would never have developed. Egoism is the vine by which man hoisted himself out of the swamp and escaped from the jungle.

One of the marks of a certain type of bad man is that he cannot give up a thing himself without wanting everyone else to give it up.

Man hoards himself when he has nothing to give away.

Charity feeds the poor, so does pride; charity builds an hospital, so does pride. In this they differ: charity gives her glory to God; pride takes her glory from man.

It is one of the worst effects of prosperity to make a man a vortex instead of a fountain; so that, instead of throwing out, he learns only to draw in.

Conceited men often seem a harmless kind of men, who, by an overweening self-respect, relieve others from the duty of respecting them at all.

she had felt weightless and carefree, as if she could go back to a bright, hard, selfish time when she had only herself to think about.

The whole of society pivots around that force which man has come to uphold as his principal deity - egotism. Under the influence of this jealous deity, man is forced to perceive the world around him only in terms of gross separativeness; his prevailing thoughts ever centred upon the theme of 'i here, and the world out there'.

They murder so that whatever to them seems living, shall resemble themselves.

comes as a genuine shock to parents of children to whom nothing has been denied that they should turn out selfish, demanding and intolerant of the slightest frustration.

The provision of charity as of right destroyed the motive for human solidarity in the face of hardship, and undermined both ties of personal affection and the sense of duty toward close relations. Intended as an expression of social responsibility, it liberated selfishness.

Many are secretly seeking their own ends in what they do, yet know it not.

No sooner is your ocean filled, than he grumbles that it might have been of better vintage. Try him with half of a Universe, of an Omnipotence, he sets to quarrelling with the proprietor of the other half, and declares himself the most maltreated of men.—Always there is a black spot in our sunshine: it is even, as I said, the Shadow of Ourselves.

In a controversy, the instant we feel anger we have already ceased striving for the truth, and have begun striving for ourselves.

Let me have my own way in exactly everything and a sunnier and pleasanter creature does not exist.