The greatest joys and the greatest sorrows we experience are in family relationships. The joys come from putting the welfare of others above our own. That is what love is. And the sorrow comes primarily from selfishness, which is the absence of love. The ideal God holds for us is to form families in the way most likely to lead to happiness and away from sorrow.
Without the help of selfishness, the human animal would never have developed. Egoism is the vine by which man hoisted himself out of the swamp and escaped from the jungle.
One of the worst things sin did for man was to make him selfish, for selfishness cannot love.
Asceticism is the trifling of an enthusiast with his power, a puerile coquetting with his selfishness or his vanity, in the absence of any sufficiently great object to employ the first or overcome the last.
People's lives are filled with vice and the trappings of it. Ambition, greed and selfishness all have to do with vice. Sooner or later, you have to see through it or you don't survive.
We make allowance for a certain degree of selfishness in men; because we know it to be inseparable from human nature, and inherent in our frame and constitution. By this reflexion we correct those sentiments of blame, which so naturally arise upon any opposition.
Nothing resembles selfishness more closely than self-respect
I have learned, by some experience, that virtue and patriotism, vice and selfishness, are found in all parties, and that they differ less in their motives than in the policies they pursue.
Our infinite obligations to God do not fill our hearts half as much as a petty uneasiness of our own; nor His infinite perfections as much as our smallest wants.
Selfishness doesn't consist in a love to yourself, but in a big degree of such love.
Love is the most ethically consistent experience, because selfishness and altruism no longer seem opposed or in conflict.
Selfishness is the making a man's self his own centre, the beginning and end of all he doeth.
A semi-civilized state of society, equally removed from the extremes of barbarity and of refinement, seems to be that particular meridian under which all the reciprocities and gratuities of hospitality do most readily flourish and abound. For it so happens that the ease, the luxury, and the abundance of the highest state of civilization, are as productive of selfishness, as the difficulties, the privations, and the sterilities of he lowest.
My self-absorption warms me; yours boils me.
To feel much for others and little for ourselves; to restrain our selfishness and exercise our benevolent affections, constitute the perfection of human nature.
The fawning courtier and the surly squire often mean the same thing,--each his own interest.
I can only say that I have acted upon my best convictions, without selfishness or malice, and that by the help of God I shall continue to do so.
The force of selfishness is as inevitable and as calculable as the force of gravitation.
I am always nearest to myself," says the Latin proverb.
Courtesy is only a thin veneer on the general selfishness.