Was it hardness, was it selfishness, that she should ask me to risk my life for her own glorification? Such thoughts may come to middle age; but never to ardent three-and-twenty in the fever of his first love.
Maternity is on the face of it an unsociable experience. The selfishness that a woman has learned to stifle or to dissemble where she alone is concerned, blooms freely and unashamed on behalf of her offspring.
Anyone who recognizes this regime [Israel] because of the pressure of the World oppressor, or because of naiveté or selfishness, will be eternally disgraced and will burn in the fury of the Islamic nations.
No one has a right to hoard things which he cannot use.
There is little hope of the repentance and redemption of certain some until they have committed one or another of the many wrong things of which they are daily, through a course of unrestrained selfishness, becoming more and more capable.
The hardest work you and I will ever do is to put off our selfishness. It is heavy lifting!
Professional standards, the standards of ambition and selfishness, are always sliding downward toward expense, ostentation, and mediocrity. They tend always to narrow the ground of judgment. But amateur standards, the standards of love, are always straining upward toward the humble and the best. They enlarge the ground of judgment. The context of love is the world.
Aggression is the first step on the slippery slope to selfishness and chaos.
Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope; it is impossible.
In short, selfishness is the opposite of love.
Individual versus group selection results in a mix of altruism and selfishness, of virtue and sin, among the members of a society.
Selfishness is the making a man's self his own centre, the beginning and end of all he doeth.
Not forgiving prolongs hurt and anger and leads to smoldering resentment, which will make us miserable until it kills us. Resentment destroys the perception of reality. As we try to bend the world to accommodate our resentment, fear, and selfishness, we become less accurate in understanding the world. This eventually destroys our ability to cope successfully with life.
Selfishness is unnecessary. War is obsolete.
There is a prodigious selfishness in dreams: they live perfectly deaf and invulnerable amid the cries of the real world.
Indeed, beauty is one of mankind's greatest needs; it is the root from which the branches of our peace and the fruits of our hope come forth. Beauty also reveals God because, like him, a work of beauty is pure gratuity; it calls us to freedom and draws us away from selfishness.
Our enemies are our evil deeds and their memories, our pride, our selfishness, our malice, our passions, which by conscience or by habit pursue us with a relentlessness past the power of figure to express.
To feel much for others and little for ourselves; to restrain our selfishness and exercise our benevolent affections, constitute the perfection of human nature.
We can leave a place behind, or we can stay in that place and leave our selfishness (often expressed in feeling sorry for ourselves) behind. If we leave a place and take our selfishness with us, the cycle of problems starts all over again no matter where we go. But if we leave our selfishness behind, no matter where we are, things start to improve.
It is also important to guard against mistaking for good-nature what is properly good-humor,--a cheerful flow of spirits and easy temper not readily annoyed, which is compatible with great selfishness.