Egoism Quotes

“Declare your jihad on thirteen enemies you cannot see -egoism, arrogance, conceit, selfishness, greed, lust, intolerance, anger, lying, cheating, gossiping and slandering. If you can master and destroy them, then you will be read to fight the enemy you can see.”
― Al-Ghazzali

“In this story
I am the poet
You're the poetry.”
― Arzum Uzun

“Stay away from lazy parasites, who perch on you just to satisfy their needs, they do not come to alleviate your burdens, hence, their mission is to distract, detract and extract, and make you live in abject poverty.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“The weak are dominated by their ego, the wise dominate their ego, and the intelligent are in a constant struggle against their ego.”
― Hamza Yusuf

“COMING FORTH INTO THE LIGHT

I was born the day
I thought:
What is?
What was?
And
What if?

I was transformed the day
My ego shattered,
And all the superficial, material
Things that mattered
To me before,
Suddenly ceased
To matter.

I really came into being
The day I no longer cared about
What the world thought of me,
Only on my thoughts for
Changing the world.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“Shine your soul with the same
egoless humility as the rainbow
and no matter where you go
in this world or the next,
love will find you, attend you, and bless you.”
― Aberjhani, Journey through the Power of the Rainbow: Quotations from a Life Made Out of Poetry

“She was a wicked thing sometimes. All full of want. As if the shape of the world depended on her mood. As if she were important.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Slow Regard of Silent Things

“Where the world comes in my way—and it comes in my way everywhere—I consume it to quiet the hunger of my egoism. For me you are nothing but—my food, even as I too am fed upon and turned to use by you. We have only one relation to each other, that of usableness, of utility, of use. We owe each other nothing, for what I seem to owe you I owe at most to myself. If I show you a cheery air in order to cheer you likewise, then your cheeriness is of consequence to me, and my air serves my wish; to a thousand others, whom I do not aim to cheer, I do not show it.”
― Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own

“Perhaps what I am about to say will appear strange to you gentlemen, socialists, progressives, humanitarians as you are, but I never worry about my neighbor, I never try to protect society which does not protect me -- indeed, I might add, which generally takes no heed of me except to do me harm -- and, since I hold them low in my esteem and remain neutral towards them, I believe that society and my neighbor are in my debt.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“Don't feed your ego with my soul.”
― Arzum Uzun

“Each man for himself in that desert of egoism which is called life.”
― Stendhal, The Red and the Black

“...the human being to lack that second skin we call egoism has not yet been born, it lasts much longer than the other one, that bleeds so readily.”
― José Saramago, Blindness

“To seek truth requires one to ask the right questions. Those void of truth never ask about anything because their ego and arrogance prevent them from doing so. Therefore, they will always remain ignorant. Those on the right path to Truth are extremely heart-driven and childlike in their quest, always asking questions, always wanting to understand and know everything — and are not afraid to admit they don't know something. However, every truth seeker does need to breakdown their ego first to see Truth. If the mind is in the way, the heart won't see anything.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“She enjoyed her own pain by this egoism of suffering, if I may so express it. This aggravation of suffering and this rebelling in it I could understand; it is the enjoyment of man, of the insulted and injured, oppressed by destiny, and smarting under the sense of its injustice.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Insulted and Humiliated

“Shyness is just egoism out of its depth.”
― Penelope Keith

“Don't show a friend your gift, or your bag of money if you still want to maintain your relationship, but if nay, go on, and all you'll see is hate and jealousy, and you'll fight with him in the street like a dog and all you'll feel is regret.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“Failure to recognize one's own absolute significance is equivalent to a denial of human worth; this is a basic error and the origin of all unbelief. If one is so faint-hearted that he is powerless even to believe in himself, how can he believe in anything else? The basic falsehood and evil of egoism lie not in this absolute self-consciousness and self-evaluation of the subject, but in the fact that, ascribing to himself in all justice an absolute significance, he unjustly refuses to others this same significance. Recognizing himself as a centre of life (which as a matter of fact he is), he relegates others to the circumference of his own being and leaves them only an external and relative value.”
― Vladimir Solovyov, The Meaning of Love

“The meaning and worth of love, as a feeling, is that it really forces us, with all our being, to acknowledge for ANOTHER the same absolute central significance which, because of the power of our egoism, we are conscious of only in our own selves. Love is important not as one of our feelings, but as the transfer of all our interest in life from ourselves to another, as the shifting of the very centre of our personal life. This is characteristic of every kind of love, but predominantly of sexual love; it is distinguished from other kinds of love by greater intensity, by a more engrossing character, and by the possibility of a more complete overall reciprocity. Only this love can lead to the real and indissoluble union of two lives into one; only of it do the words of Holy Writ say: 'They shall be one flesh,' i.e., shall become one real being.”
― Vladimir Solovyov, The Meaning of Love

“But self-abasement is just inverted egoism. Anyone who acts with genuine humility will be as far from humiliation as from arrogance.”
― Stephen Mitchell, The Book of Job

“The enemy stays in the hearts of friends. Watch what your friends know about you and watch what you tell your friends, remember, egoism breeds jealousy and ends a relationship in discord.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“I was transformed the day
My ego shattered,
And all the superficial, material
Things that mattered
To me before,
Suddenly ceased
To matter.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“No egoism is so insufferable as the Christian with regard to his soul.”
― W. Somerset Maugham

“…In the very simplicity of her desire to punish herself appeared egoism in its purest form. Never before had this woman who seemed to think only of herself experienced an egoism so immaculate.”
― Yukio Mishima, Thirst for Love

“There isn’t a parallel of latitude but thinks it would have been the equator if it had had its rights.”
― Mark Twain

“Mourning. At the death of the loved being, acute phase of narcissism: one emerges from sickness, from servitude. Then, gradually, freedom takes on a leaden hue, desolation settles in, narcissism gives way to a sad egoism, an absence of generosity.”
― Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary: October 26, 1977–September 15, 1979

“God cares only for what is his, busies himself with only himself, thinks only of himself, and has only himself before his eyes...He serves no higher person, and satisfies only himself. His cause is--A purely egoistic cause.”
― Max Stirner

“Yuvraj Singh is one of the best batsmen to watch in world cricket when he's in form. He is ego personified. Yuvraj doesn’t just hit the ball, he lets it rebound off his aura.”
― Jarrod Kimber

“Some people think that if they don’t know their faults, they don’t have any.”
― Frank Sonnenberg, Listen to Your Conscience: That's Why You Have One

“There is only one power which can from within undermine egoism at the root, and really does undermine it, namely love, and chiefly sexual love. The falsehood and evil of egoism consists in the exclusive acknowledgement of absolute significance for oneself and in the denial of it for others. Reason shows us that this is unfounded and unjust, but simply by the facts love directly abrogates such an unjust relation, compelling us not by abstract consciousness, but by an internal emotion and the will of life to recognize for ourselves the absolute significance of another. Recognizing in love the truth of another, not abstractly, but essentially, transferring in deed the centre of our life beyond the limits of our empirical personality, we by so doing reveal and realize our own real truth, our own absolute significance, which consists just in our capacity to transcend the borders of our factual phenomenal being, in our capacity to live not only in ourselves, but also in another.”
― Vladimir Solovyov, The Meaning of Love

“We deny the fact that people get into or remain in our lives mainly for selfish reasons mainly for a selfish reason, namely, to protect our cherished belief that we are special.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana