Famous Quotes & Sayings

Hippolyte Taine

Kindly politeness is the slow fruit of advanced reflection; it is a sort of humanity and kindliness applied to small acts and every day discourse: it bids man soften towards others, and forget himself for the sake of others: it constrains genuine nature, which is selfish and gross.

Henry Rollins

All of the things that the bible warns you of being: jealous, covetous, murderous, selfish, etc., that's kind of how humans are.

Henry Ward Beecher

Selfishness is that detestable vice which no one will forgive in others, and no one is without himself.

Henry Ward Beecher

Law represents the effort of man to organize society; governments, the efforts of selfishness to overthrow liberty.

Henry Ward Beecher

The grossest, the cruelest, the most selfish, the most easily pervertible and perverted thing in this world, is government.

Henry Ward Beecher

When leisure is a selfish luxury, its very activity, when it stirs, is apt to be only a kind of indolence taking exercise, that it may the better digest its selfishness.

Eric Ludy

And the flesh is that reprehensible preference for self that lurks within every one of our hearts. It is that base and selfish instinct to preserve our own interests at the expense of God's interests. It's devious, it's deceitful, it's self-indulgent. It's interested only in selfish comfort and will happily crucify Christ afresh to secure it. God also has another name for it- sin.

John Hodgman

From a very selfish point of view, I'm enchanted by the idea that a politician can come along and speak simply and clearly and truthfully to an electorate as though they are grown-ups and to feel the electorate respond to that.

Ayn Rand

It is one's own personal, selfish happiness that one seeks, earns, and derives from love.

Ayn Rand

If workers struggle for higher wages, this is hailed as "social gains", if businessmen struggle for higher profits, this is damned as "selfish greed".

Ayn Rand

Why is it immoral for you to desire, but moral for others to do so? Why is it immoral to produce a value and keep it, but moral to give it away? And if it is not moral for you to keep a value, why is it moral for others to accept it? If you are selfless and virtuous when you give it, are they not selfish and vicious when they take it?

Ayn Rand

Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive. Has any act of selfishness ever equalled the carnage perpetrated by disciples of altruism.

Ayn Rand

Love is an expression and assertion of self-esteem, a response to one's own values in the person of another. One gains a profoundly personal, selfish joy from the mere existence of the person one loves. It is one's own personal, selfish happiness that one seeks, earns, and derives from love....

You don't want to get too selfish over times. But we went out and got it done again.

Gertrude Stein

Men ... are so conservative, so selfish, so boresome, and ... they are so ugly, and ... they are gullible, anybody can convince them.

Gerard Way

People have evolved into something selfish, greedy and intolerant. People are unaccepting, because of religion, race, gender, sexual orientation... I've seen it in punk clubs, and I've seen it in the world.

Gretchen Rubin

If I give more to myself, I can ask more from myself. Self-regard isn't selfish.

Gretchen Rubin

Your unhappiness doesn't help anyone else - and in fact, as I mentioned in another answer, happy people are more altruistically inclined. So happiness is not a selfish goal.

Gordon B. Hinckley

It is selfishness which is the cause of most of our misery.

Gordon B. Hinckley

We are involved in an intense battle. It is a battle between right and wrong, between truth and error, between the design of the Almighty on the one hand and that of Lucifer on the other. For that reason, we desperately need moral men and women who stand on principle, to be involved in the political process. Otherwise, we abdicate power to those whose designs are almost entirely selfish.

Gordon B. Hinckley

It is imperative that good people, men and women of principle, be involved in the political process; otherwise we abdicate power to those whose designs are almost entirely selfish.

Gladys Taber

I resolve to be more patient, less selfish, cherish my friends, and in my small way help whoever needs help. I cannot conceivably influence the world's destiny, but I can make my own life more worthwhile. I can give some help to some people; that is not vital to all the world's problems and yet, I think if everyone did just that, we might see quite a world in our time!

Herbie Mann

Being selfish to me means that you have to look out for yourself and you don't have to sacrifice.

Herbie Mann

Being stubborn has helped, being selfish is not a bad thing.

Herbert Spencer

What a cage is to the wild beast, law is to the selfish man.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

In the North the first words are, Help me; in the South, Love me.

Jillian Michaels

Selfish isn't a dirty word. It means we take care of ourselves and are able to give back.

Esther Hicks

If you're not selfish enough to want to feel good, then you can't connect with the energy that is your Source which does always feel good.

Florence Nightingale

What the horrors of war are, no one can imagine. They are not wounds and blood and fever, spotted and low, or dysentery, chronic and acute, cold and heat and famine. They are intoxication, drunken brutality, demoralization and disorder on the part of the inferior... jealousies, meanness, indifference, selfish brutality on the part of the superior.

Florence Nightingale

The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.

Catharine Beecher

... so large a portion of those who hold much capital, instead of using their various advantages for the greatest good of those around them, employ the chief of them for mere selfish indulgences; thus inflicting as much mischief on themselves, as results to others from their culpable neglect. A great portion of the rich seem to be acting on the principle, that the more God bestows on them, the less are they under obligation to practise any self-denial, in fulfilling his benevolent plan of raising our race to intelligence and holiness.

Catharine Beecher

The ability to secure an independent livelihood and honorable employ suited to her education and capacities is the only true foundation of the social elevation of woman, even in the very highest classes of society. While she continues to be educated only to be somebody's wife, and is left without any aim in life till that somebody either in love, or in pity, or in selfish regard at last grants her the opportunity, she can never be truly independent.

George Eliot

A picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment.