Famous Quotes & Sayings

Miles Franklin

Only a very small percentage can regard conditions from any but a selfish point of view or conceive of any but their own shoe-pinch.

Mike Leigh

My work requires acting at its most committed - it demands actors of enormous resilience, but also intelligence and wit. It doesn't work for narcissistic or selfish actors.

Laura Lippman

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

Lisa Kleypas

Only you could love such a vile, selfish peacock, Evie.

John Updike

I never made a decision in my life that wasn't one hundred per cent selfish.

John Updike

In fact we do not try to picture the afterlife, nor is it our selves in our nervous tics and optical flecks that we wish to perpetuate; it is the self as the window on the world that we can't bear to thinkof shutting. My mind when I was a boy of ten or eleven sent up its silent scream at the thought of future aeons -- at the thought of the cosmic party going on without me. The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise of the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.

John Updike

The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise for the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.

John Stuart Mill

It would be a great misunderstanding of this doctrine to suppose that it is one of selfish indifference about the well-being of others'.

John Stuart Mill

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

John Stuart Mill

Few human creatures would consent to be changed into any of the lower animals for a promise of the fullest allowance of a beast's pleasures; no intelligent human being would consent to be a fool, no instructed person would be an ignoramus, no person of feeling and conscience would be selfish and base, even though they should be persuaded that the fool, the dunce, or the rascal is better satisfied with his lot than they are with theirs.

James Scott

Secrets are inherently selfish. The longer you keep them, the harder it is to put yourself in other people's shoes about them and the more irrational your thinking surrounding it becomes.

Laurence Sterne

There are some tempers--how shall I describe them--formed either of such impenetrable matter, or wrought up by habitual selfishness to such an utter insensibility of what becomes of the fortunes of their fellow-creatures, as if they were not partakers of the same nature, or had no lot or connection at all with the species.

Henry Rollins

I used to love you I still do So Selfish I love the old you The you that didnt shoot drugs ...The you that didnt get beat on by men You laugh in my face and call me a fool But its true I still love you Sometimes,I can see the old you When your eyes flash When you almost look alive

Henry Rollins

You don't make me feel like you used to. That's why I'm leaving That's why people leave each other They come to their senses and get selfish again.

Helen Hunt

Marriage takes your whole heart; selfish people can't pull it off.

Henry Hazlitt

Economics is haunted by more fallacies than any other study known to man. This is no accident. The inherent difficulties of the subject would be great enough in any case, but they are multiplied a thousandfold by a factor that is insignificant in, say, physics, mathematics or medicine - the special pleading of selfish interests.

Mallory Ortberg

I do not think it is selfish to want to donate a kidney "only" to family members.

Malcolm Muggeridge

In retrospect, all these exercises in self-gratification seem pure fantasy, what Pascal called, licking the earth.

Mahatma Gandhi

Journalism should never be prostituted for selfish ends or for the sake of merely earning a livelihood or, worse still, for amassing money.

Mahatma Gandhi

A selfish basis would not serve the purpose of taking a man higher and higher along the paths of evolution.

John C. Maxwell

If the church is going to make a difference, it will need to go through the "big give-up" stage. Churches will need to quit being selfish and become relevant.

Eric Hoffer

There is in even the most selfish passion a large element of self-abnegation. It is startling to realize that what we call extreme self-seeking is actually self-renunciation. The miser, health addict, glory chaser and their like are not far behind the selfless in the exercise of self-sacrifice.

Eric Hoffer

It needs some intelligence to be truly selfish. The unintelligent can only be self-righteous.

James Anthony Froude

Where all are selfish, the sage is no better than the fool, and only rather more dangerous.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

A point has been reached where the peoples of the Americas must take cognizance of growing ill-will, of marked trends toward aggression, of increasing armaments, of shortening tempers--a situation which has in it many of the elements that lead to the tragedy of general war.... Peace is threatened by those who seek selfish power.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

We know that there are chiselers. At the bottom of every case of criticism and obstruction we have found some selfish interest, some private axe to grind.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

We must especially beware of that small group of selfish men who would clip the wings of the American Eagle in order to feather their own nests.

Lord Byron

We are all selfish and I no more trust myself than others with a good motive.

Lupe Fiasco

I do this for the sake of myself. It's a selfish process. I don't really have any expectations from anyone for your comments or your reviews or your previews.

Ellen Page

I just love it so much [acting]. When I get passionate, I’ll give you everything until I collapse. That’s not in any ’Look at me, I’m a saint’ kind of way. It’s very selfish in a way. I’m doing this really awesome exploration, and it’s like a drug, because I completely disappear.

Randy Alcorn

If I try to make only enough money for my family' immediate needs, it may violate Scripture. ...Even though earning just enough to meet the needs of my family may seem non materialistic, it's actually selfish when I could earn enough to care for others as well.

Thomas Jefferson

How soon the labor of men would make a paradise of the earth were it not for misgovernment and a diversion of his energies to selfish interests.

Rick Riordan

Gods tend to be selfish. Even when they're helpful, they always have their own motives. That's why you have to be careful about trusting them.