Best 557 quotes in «selfishness quotes» category

Many a good intention dies from inattention. If, through carelessness or indolence, or selfishness, a good intention is not put into effect, we have lost an opportunity, demoralized ourselves, and stolen from the pile of possible good. To be born and not fed, is to perish. To launch a ship and neglect it is to lose it. To have a talent and bury it, is to be a "wicked and slothful servant." For in the end we shall be judged, not alone by what we have done, but by what we could have done.

My desire for the part of Mammy was not dominated by selfishness for Hollywood has been good to me and I am grateful

Mundus vult decipi'—the world wants to be deceived. To live without deception presupposes standards beyond the reach of most people whose existence is largely shaped by compromise, evasion and mutual accommodation. Could they face their weakness, their vanity and selfishness, without a mask?

Next to selfishness the principal cause which makes life unsatisfactory is want of mental cultivation.

Next to the very young, I suppose the very old are the most selfish.

My view is my entire life has been shaped by giving when I didn't have it. Some idiot who's wealthy and doesn't give, they'll rot in their own selfishness. I'm not worried about them. What I'm really interested in is the day-to-day person, human beings who want to go to another level of their life.

One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves.

Nothing is more condemnable than selfishness. A man who thinks of himself alone is the most unlucky person of all.

No universal selfishness can bring social good to all.

One of the unseen benefits of having children is that they deliver you from your own selfishness. There's no going back.

Our actual enemy is not any force exterior to ourselves, but our own crying weaknesses, our cowardice, our selfishness, our hypocrisy, our purblind sentimentalism.

Only God can give us a selfless love for others, as the Holy Spirit changes us from within. This is one reason we must receive Christ, for apart from His Spirit we can never be freed from the chains of selfishness, jealousy, and indifference. Will others see Christ's love in your life today?

Others had been a little wild, which was not to be wondered at, and not very blamable; but, he had made a lamentation and uproar which it was dangerous for the people to hear, as there is always contagion in weakness and selfishness.

Selfishness in art, as in other things, is sensibility kept at home.

Real love, no matter how unworthy the object, is a glorious adventure. It bursts the shackles of selfishness. One's world is bigger, broader; one's sympathies are amazingly more tender. No matter what the result, if you haven't really loved, you haven't really lived.

Selfishness can be a virtue. Selfishness is essential to survival, and without survival we cannot protect those whom we love more than ourselves.

Selfishness, if but reasonably tempered with wisdom, is not such an evil trait.

Pulling weeds and planting seeds. That's the story of life. We are individual lots on which either weeds of selfishness or fruit of the Holy Spirit grows and flourishes.

Selfishness and self-absorption are deadly charm-exterminators.

Selfishness is unnecessary. War is obsolete.

Selfishness, when it is punished by the world, is mostly punished because it is connected with egotism.

Sordid selfishness doth contract and narrow our benevolence, and cause us, like serpents, to infold ourselves within ourselves, and to turn out our stings to the entire world besides.

Since, according to me, your life is going to be a gradual process of becoming kinder and more loving: Hurry up. Speed it along. Start right now. There’s a confusion in each of us, a sickness, really: selfishness. But there’s also a cure. So be a good and proactive and even somewhat desperate patient on your own behalf - seek out the most efficacious anti-selfishness medicines, energetically, for the rest of your life.

Slavery is founded in the selfishness of man's nature - opposition to it is his love of justice. These principles are an eternal antagonism; and when brought into collision so fiercely, as slavery extension brings them, shocks and throes and convulsions must ceaselessly follow.

Socialism proposes no adequate substitute for the motive of enlightened selfishness that today is at the basis of all human labor and effort, enterprise and new activity.

So it is the fear, weakness, selfishness, and cowardice of onlookers that permit evil behavior to persist.

stinginess seemed instinctive to him. Darwinian even. He hadn't gotten to his current size by sharing.

The basis of all sin is selfishness.

The abortionist I worked for, he's a very greedy man, a selfish man.

The fact is that sin is the most unmanly thing in God's world. You never were made for sin and selfishness. You were made for love and obedience.

The planet should not be used as a warehouse of resources to serve humanity's selfishness

The gospel of licentiousness, of selfishness, of blaming all the difficulties of life on external factors - these are the things that are killing people today in ways that the slave whips and the overseers couldn't.

The greatest slave is not he who is ruled by a despot, great though that evil be, but he who is in the thrall of his own moral ignorance, selfishness, and vice.

The hardest thing to cope with is not selfishness or vanity or deceitfulness, but sheer stupidity.

The organization and constant onward sweep of this movement exemplifies the resentment of the many toward the selfishness, greed and the neglect of the few.

The fawning courtier and the surly squire often mean the same thing,--each his own interest.

The greatest meliorator of the world is selfish, huckstering Trade.

The human being who lives only for himself finally reaps nothing but unhappiness. Selfishness corrodes. Unselfishness ennobles, satisfies.

The impulse to perform a worthy action often springs from our best nature, but is afterwards tainted by the spur of selfishness or sinister interest.

The meaning ascribed in popular usage to the word 'selfishness' is not merely wrong: it represents a devastating intellectual 'package-deal,' which is responsible, more than any other single factor, for the arrested moral development of mankind.

There are so many ways a family can unravel. All it takes is a tiny slash of selfishness, a rip of greed, a puncture of bad luck. And yet, woven tightly, family can be the strongest bond imaginable.

There is an ill-breeding to which, whatever our rank and nature, we are almost equally sensitive, the ill-breeding that comes from want of consideration for others.

There is a big, beautiful world that could be destroyed by selfishness and foolishness. We musicians have it without power to save it. In a small way, every single one of us counts.

The truth is that cupidity, selfishness, envy, malice, lust, vindictiveness, are constant vices of human nature.

There is no structural organization of society which can bring about the coming of the Kingdom of God on earth since all systems can be perverted by the selfishness of man. The Malvern Manifesto: Drawn up by a Conference of the Province of York, January 10, 1941; signed for the Conference by Temple, then Archbishop of York .

There is simply no dignified way for a woman to live alone. Oh, she can get along financially perhaps (though not nearly as well as a man), but emotionally she is never left in peace. Her friends, her family, her fellow workers never let her forget that her husbandlessness, her childlessness - her selfishness, in short - is a reproach to the American way of life.

There was no such thing as luck.  Luck was a word idiots used to explain the consequences of their own rashness, and selfishness, and stupidity.  More often than not bad luck meant bad plans.

There is more selfishness and less principle among members of Congress than I had any conception of, before I became President of the U.S.

There is only one force stronger than selfishness, and that is stupidity.

there were people who occupied telephone booths as though they had rented them for the day.