Quotes About Selfishness

When I opt for a me-centered "more," what I actually get is always much, much less.

I propose that so much of what drives our responses to our kids is an unannounced set of laws that are more about what we want for ourselves and our lives than what God wants for and from our children. In our allegiance to our law, we end up breaking God's law in our interactions with our children. In this way we are just like our children: people who need to be rescued from ourselves.

The DNA of sin is selfishness (see 1 Cor. 5:15). Sin turns all of us in on ourselves. It reduces our circle of hopes and concerns to things that touch and involve us. It makes us all focused on and driven by our wants, needs, and feelings. Sin can so fill our eyes with our needs that we become functionally blind to the needs of others. We can be so focused on our interest that we have little interest in the interest of others.

Here it is. When the enemy somehow tricks you into squeezing the size of your life to the size of your personal dreams, wants, and needs, he has got you right where he wants you.

It really is true that when you're living for you, the call to love others is always a burden for you

There is no investment as poor as investment in the kingdom of self!

Avarice is fear sheathed in gold.

Selfishness causes friction. It makes harmful sparks fly because it rubs the wrong way against reality. For Buddhists selfishness is not so much sinful as it is stupid. (But like Christian sin, it causes suffering, for self and others.)

Radix omnium malorum est cupiditas.

little children never get frozen by their selfishness. Like the disciples, they come just as they are, totally self-absorbed. They seldom get it right. As parents or friends, we know all that. In fact, we are delighted (most of the time!) to find out what is on their little hearts. We don't scold them for being self-absorbed or fearful. That is just who they are.

She was doing what she was doing, not because her actions were helping her daughter—they weren't—but because she felt too uncomfortable doing nothing. Naomi accepted the fact that everything she did was based on selfish motives. She became willing to allow her daughter to take the consequences of her own behavior and thereby perhaps learn what she needed to learn.

Marriage is just an elaborate game that allows two selfish people to periodically feel that they're not.

Narcissists do not consider the pain they inflict on others; nor do they give any credence to others' perceptions. They simply do not care about thoughts and feelings that conflict with their own. Do not expect them to listen to, validate, understand, or support you. —Les Parker, PhD

For George, being in a band was a passion, one to be shared with his friends. Discovering that David had an entirely different agenda was a shock. Just as striking was how unapologetic George's bandmate was—indeed, there was a kind of purity about his attitude; David's selfishness was cheerful, instinctive, almost childlike in its lack of malevolence. George was one of the first, but not the last, to hear what would become a guiding philosophy: "Numero uno, mate!

Psychologisch beschouwd is het juister de verklaring voor het huidige profitariaat en individualisme te zoeken in een maatschappij die mensen opvoedt om steeds hun eigen voordeel na te streven, los van en desnoods ten koste van de ander. 'Je leeft maar één keer.

I had a harder time with this dishonesty, because it seemed to speak of something larger. The way he was always out for himself, whatever the cost.

I saved you for me.

There's two ways to be selfish. You can think too much about yourself, or you can think too little about others. You're selfish both ways.

Obedience indeed is only the pitiful and cowardly egotism of him who thinks that he can do something better than reason.

Twin-sister of Religion, Selfishness.

Commerce has set the mark of selfishness, the signet of its all-enslaving power, upon a shining ore, and called it gold: before whose image bow the vulgar great, the vainly rich, the miserable proud, the mob of peasants, nobles, priests, and kings, and with blind feelings reverence the power that grinds them to the dust of misery.

The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired than at periods when, from an excess of the selfish and calculating principle, the accumulation of the materials of external life exceed the quantity of the power of assimilating them to the internal laws of human nature. The

No woman, believe me, will want to rub elbows with the dead woman you keep in your heart." (CG 254/P 9:1127) Félix, she understands, cannot detach himself from the dead Henriette. And also from himself: she accuses him of an incurable egotism. If he continues to unburden himself to other women as he has to her, they will perceive "the aridity of your heart, and you will always be unhappy

I have written a memoir here and there, and that takes its own form of selfishness and courage. However, generally speaking, I have no interest in writing about my own life or intruding in the privacy of those around me.