Selfishness Quotes

“We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and along these sympathetic fibers, our actions run as causes and return to us as results.”
― Henry Melvill

“How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it; if you could really look at other men with common curiosity and pleasure; if you could see them walking as they are in their sunny sefishness and their virile indifference! You would begin to be interested in them, because they are not interested in you. You would break out of this tiny and tawdry theatre in which your own little plot is always played, and you would find yourself under a freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“What Melanie did was no more than all Southern girls were taught to do: to make those about them feel at ease and pleased with themselves. It was this happy feminine conspiracy which made Southern society so pleasant. Women knew that a land in which men were contented, uncontradicted, and safe in possession of unpunctured vanity was likely to be a very pleasant place for women to live. So from the cradle to the grave, women strove to make men pleased with themselves, and the satisfied men repaid lavishly with gallantry and adoration. In fact, men willingly gave the ladies everything in the world, except credit for having intelligence.

Scarlett exercised the same charms as Melanie but with a studied artistry and consummate skill. The difference between the two girls lay in the fact that Melanie spoke kind and flattering words from a desire to make people happy, if only temporarily, and Scarlett never did it except to further her own aims.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind

“The love of our neighbor is the only door out of the dungeon of self, where we mope and mow, striking sparks, and rubbing phosphorescences out of the walls, and blowing our own breath in our own nostrils, instead of issuing to the fair sunlight of God, the sweet winds of the universe.”
― George MacDonald

“In selfish men caution is as secure an armour for their foes as for themselves.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula

“Don't feel better than anybody, because you feel like something. Always have it at the back of your mind that you were nothing before you became something, and that thing you supposed to be is absolutely nothing.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“Strange that only a little problem of your own will take your mind far from a tragedy belonging to others.”
― Richard Llewellyn, How Green Was My Valley

“When God interrupts your life, He is calling you to follow Him in a new way. By breaking into your settled pattern, He is moving you to a new place where you can make fresh discoveries of His grace. Embracing God’s call is never easy, but this is where the pursuit of a God-centered life begins, and where the shame of a self-centered life is exposed.”
― Colin S. Smith, Jonah: Navigating a God-Centered Life

“Nor was her love for Udayan recognizable or intact. Anger was always mounted to it, zigzagging through her like some helplessly mating pair of insects. Anger at him for dying when he might have lived. For bringing her happiness, and then taking it away. For trusting her, only to betray her. For believing in sacrifice, only to be so selfish in the end.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland

“Confession is for the confessor. It makes you feel good; it ruins the lives of everyone else. It’s a selfish thing to do. Don’t confess.”
― Jake Adelstein, Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan

“Their arrogance protected them against any liking for their fellow-man, against the slightest interest in the strangers sitting all about them, amidst whom M. de Stermaria adopted the manner one has in the buffet-car of a train, grim, hurried, stand-offish, brusque, fastidious and spiteful, surrounded by other passengers whom one has never seen before, whom one will never see again and towards whom the only conceivable way of behaving is to make sure that they keep away from one's cold chicken and stay out of one's chosen corner-seat.”
― Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

“Every hour so many damn things in the sky! How in hell did those bombers get up there every single second of our lives! Why doesn't someone want to talk about it! We've started and won two atomic wars since 2022! Is it because we're having so much fun at home we've forgotten the world? Is it because we're so rich and the rest of the world's so poor and we just don't care if they are? I've heard rumors; the world is starving, but we're well fed. Is it true, the world works hard and we play? Is that why we're hated so much? I've heard the rumors about hate, too, once in a long while, over the years...Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damn insane mistakes!”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Everyone is out for himself. Not everyone will say so but everyone behaves so. And those that don't say so often behave in an even more grossly selfish way.”
― Adalbert Stifter, The Bachelors

“Parents are programmed to want the best for their kids, regardless of what they get in return. That's what love is supposed to be like, right? But in fact, if you think about it, that's kind of a strange belief. Given what we know about the way people really are. Selfish and shortsighted and egotistical and needy. Why should being a parent, in and of itself, somehow confer superior-personhood on everybody who tries it? Obviously it doesn't.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Freedom

“Choose altruism, because selfishism is a lonely, cold, dark hole.”
― Richelle E. Goodrich, Making Wishes: Quotes, Thoughts, & a Little Poetry for Every Day of the Year

“But then, I knew so little about my mother over the last decade of her life. I had been too wrapped up in my own drama.”
― Mitch Albom, For One More Day

“I always knew he was selfish and self-indulgent and kind of lazy; those are practically prerequisites for playing lead guitar.”
― Rainbow Rowell, Attachments

“Don't ever feel sad about who you are. Don't wish to be a daughter or son to a wealthy home, just because you think you're poor. Look! Everybody's poor, i discovered it when i realized that its not everything that President Barrack Obama has.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“Arrogance and selfishness are not the only reasons behind our loneliness, but most often we used to be alone because of them.”
― M.F. Moonzajer

“pretending to be good might be the same with pretending to be right, its just you are selfish on your own because you think only for yourself..”
― Jinnul Jr.

“The truth is that, when it comes to sex, selfishness is pretty typical with guys."

"Great. How infinitely comforting."

"I don't mean they're all jerks. I just mean it's more common for them to go about sex focusing on what they want rather than ensuring that you get what you want. Sabrina shook her head and clicked her tongue. "It's a sad fact of the world.”
― Claire Kent, Escorted

“Selfishness creates greed and greed destroys the soul.”
― Zarina Bibi

“Selfishness leads to nothingness. Generosity and benevolence leads to great reward,” he explained.”
― J. W. Lord

“I don't want revenge, Mandalay, I want Dwayne to be stopped. If he's not, somebody else will suffer like I am, like my parents and little brother are. And . . . "
"And what?"
"I think I'm the one who's supposed to stop him. It has to be me because I've killed people before. It won't change my song like it would my daddy's, or Aiden's, or Terry Joe's."
"So you remembered what happened to you, then?"
"No. I know what happened, and that's enough. If I remembered what happened, then the next time I tried to do it, it'd get all tangled up with those memories." She recalled the cliff-top conversation with Bliss. "The night wind's been preparing me for this, Mandalay. There's a need out there, and I can fill it. But it'll be on my terms."
"And what're those?"
Bronwyn smiled coldly. "Whatever I say they are."
"And how's that different from how you used to be? The Bronwynator, doing whatever she wants?"
"Maybe the 'how' ain't any different. But the 'why' is. You and the First Daughters wanted me back, didn't you? Now you've got me. And if it means you got the hum you wanted but the shiver's different, well, that's tough.”
― Alex Bledsoe, The Hum and the Shiver

“More or less we are all Selfish. When it's come to Friendship, I do think that fish cant jump onto the ship!”
― Shah Moazzem

“We are not only contingent beings, dependent on the love and will of a Creator whom we cannot know experientially except in so far as he reveals to us our personal relationship with him as his sons - we are also sinners who have FREELY REPUDIATED this relationship. We have rebelled against him. The spirit of rebellious refusal persists in our heart even when we try to return to him. Much could be said, at this point, about all the subtlety and ingenuity of religious egoism which is one of the worst and most ineradicable forms of self-deception. Sometimes one feels that a well-intentioned and inculpable atheist is in many ways better off - and gives more glory to God - than some people whose bigoted complacency and inhumanity to others are signs of the most obvious selfishness! Hence we not only need to recover an awareness of our creaturehood; we also must repair the injury done to truth and to love by this repudiation, this infidelity. But how? Humanly speaking, there is no way in which we can do this.”
― Thomas Merton, Contemplative Prayer

“Lust, anger, attachment, greed, over pride be,
Jealousy, selfishness, injustice, cruelty, ego truly;
- 153 -”
― Munindra Misra, Devi Mahatmayam in English Rhyme

“Emotion it self is blindfold. So one second of your life control by emotion it's the definition of selfishness.”
― Abraham Ruiz

“Selfishness squelches love.”
― Todd Stocker, Refined: Turning Pain into Purpose

“Are you willing to nourish your heart with love; then your selfishness will starve to death.”
― Sir Kristian Goldmund Aumann, Love Poems: Love Conquers All