PERSONAL IMPORTANCE or taking things personally, is an expression of SELFISHNESS because we make the assumption that everything is about ME!! NOTHING PEOPLE DO IS BECAUSE OF YOU!! IT'S BECAUSE OF THEMSELVES!!
Many a good intention dies from inattention. If, through carelessness or indolence, or selfishness, a good intention is not put into effect, we have lost an opportunity, demoralized ourselves, and stolen from the pile of possible good. To be born and not fed, is to perish. To launch a ship and neglect it is to lose it. To have a talent and bury it, is to be a "wicked and slothful servant. " For in the end we shall be judged, not alone by what we have done, but by what we could have done.
Let us reject violence and selfishness which could destroy our country's unity.
The greatest slave is not he who is ruled by a despot, great though that evil be, but he who is in the thrall of his own moral ignorance, selfishness, and vice.
He who lives only to benefit himself confers on the world a benefit when he dies.
The fawning courtier and the surly squire often mean the same thing,--each his own interest.
We can neither change nor overpower God's eternal suffrage against selfishness and meanness.
Selfishness corrodes. Unselfishness ennobles, satisfies. Don't put off the joy derivable from doing helpful, kindly things for others.
The State must act as the guardian of a millennial future in the face of which the wishes and the selfishness of the individual must appear as nothing and submit.
What's wrong with selfishness and egotism? We live to die smiling, don't we?
There are no generalizations in American politics that vested selfishness cannot cut through.
The force of selfishness is as inevitable and as calculable as the force of gravitation.
O my God, how true it is that we may have of Thy gifts and yet may be full of ourselves!
No man at bottom means injustice; it is always for some obscure distorted image of a right that he contends: an obscure image diffracted, exaggerated, in the wonderfulest way by natural dimness and selfishness; getting tenfold more diffracted by exasperation of contest, till at length it become all but irrecognis-able.
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.
Jeffersonian isolationism expressed an essentially cosmopolitan spirit. The Jeffersonian was determined - even at the expense of separating himself from the rest of the globe, and even though he be charged with provincial selfishness - to preserve America as an uncontaminated laboratory.
Every single one of the major world faiths, whether we're talking about Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Darwinism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, have all come to the conclusion that what holds us back from our better self is ego, selfishness, greed, unkindness, hatred. And it all springs from a sense of thwarted ego.
We live in a world of transgressions and selfishness, and no pictures that represent us otherwise can be true; though happily for human nature, gleamings of that pure spirit in whose likeness man has been fashioned, are to be seen, relieving its deformities, and mitigating, if not excusing its crimes.
Selfishness is never so exquisitely selfish as when it is on its knees. . . . Self turns what would otherwise be a pure and powerful prayer into a weak and ineffective one.
The soul, like the body, acquires vigor by the exercise of all its faculties. In the midst of the world, in overcoming difficulties, in conquering selfishness, indolence, and fear--in all the occasions of duty, it employs, and reveals by employing, energies that render it efficient and robust--that broaden its scope, adjust its powers, and mature it with a rich experience.