Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Selfishness.
The ruin of the human heart is self-interest, which the American merchant calls self-service. We have become a self-service populace, and all our specious comforts --the automatic elevator, the escalator, the cafeteria --are depriving us of volition and moral and physical energy.
Edward Dahlberg
Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.
Oscar Wilde
Despite those titles, power, and pelf, The wretch, concentred all in self, Living, shall forfeit fair renown, And, doubly dying, shall go down To the vile dust, from whence he sprung, Unwept, unhonor'd, and unsung.
Sir Walter Scott, The Lay of the
The greatest productive force is human selfishness.
Robert A. Heinlein
Selfishness is that detestable vice which no one will forgive in others, and no one is without in himself.
Henry Ward Beecher
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.
Sir Walter Scott
I've given up reading books. I find it takes my mind off myself.
Oscar Levant
Being sorry is the highest act of selfishness, seeing value only after discarding it.
Doug Horton
Selfishness is one of the qualities apt to inspire love.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Selfish- a judgment readily passed by those who have never tested their own power of sacrifice.
George Eliot
He who takes but never gives, may last for years but never lives.
Source Unknown
He who is wrapped up in himself makes a mighty small package.
I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice, though not in principle.
Jane Austen
We keep on being told that religion, whatever its imperfections, at least instills morality. On every side, there is conclusive evidence that the contrary is the case and that faith causes people to be more mean, more selfish, and perhaps above all, more stupid.
Christopher Hitchens
How a sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man's self to himself! He is his own exclusive object. Supreme selfishness is inculcated in him as his only duty,
Charles Lamb
Don't worry about the war. It's all over but the shooting.
Samuel Goldwyn
What we call personality (...) has become the most impersonal thing in the world. Its pale and featureless face appears like a ghost at every corner and in every crowd. ... Individualism kills individuality, precisely because individualism has to be an 'ism' quite as much as Communism or Calvinism. The economic and ethical school which calls itself individualist ended by threatening the world with the flattest and dullest spread of the commonplace. Men, instead of being themselves, set out to find a self to be: a sort of abstract economic self identified with self-interest. But while the self was that of a man, the self-interest was generally that of a class or a trade or even an empire. So far from really remaining a separate self, the man became part of a communal mass of selfishness.
G. K. Chesterton, February 25, 1
Indeed this gentleman's stoicism was of that not uncommon kind, which enables a man to bear with exemplary fortitude the afflictions of his friends, but renders him, by way of counterpoise, rather selfish and sensitive in respect of any that happen to befall himself.
Charles Dickens
As selfishness and complaint pervert and cloud the mind, so love with its joy clears and sharpens the vision.
Helen Keller
The argument of this book is that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes. Like successful Chicago gangsters, our genes have survived, in some cases for millions of years, in a highly competitive world. This entitles us to expect certain qualities in our genes. I shall argue that a predominant quality to be expected in a successful gene is ruthless selfishness. This gene selfishness will usually give rise to selfishness in individual behavior. However, as we shall see, there are special circumstances in which a gene can achieve its own selfish goals best by fostering a limited form of altruism at the level of individual animals. 'Special' and 'limited' are important words in the last sentence. Much as we might wish to believe otherwise, universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts that simply do not make evolutionary sense.
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gen
