Quotes Tagged "selfish"

I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.

I am simple, complex, generous, selfish, unattractive, beautiful, lazy, and driven.

Don’t sacrifice yourself too much, because if you sacrifice too much there’s nothing else you can give and nobody will care for you.

At first I did not love you, Jude; that I own. When I first knew you I merely wanted you to love me. I did not exactly flirt with you; but that inborn craving which undermines some women's morals almost more than unbridled passion--the craving to attract and captivate, regardless of the injury it may do the man--was in me; and when I found I had caught you, I was frightened. And then--I don't know how it was-- I couldn't bear to let you go--possibly to Arabella again--and so I got to love you, Jude. But you see, however fondly it ended, it began in the selfish and cruel wish to make your heart ache for me without letting mine ache for you.

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth a war, is much worse. When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice, — is often the means of their regeneration. A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever-renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other.

Here I am going to say something which may come as a bit of a shock. God doesn't necessarily want us to be happy. He wants us to be lovable. Worthy of love. Able to be loved by Him. We don't start off being all that lovable, if we're honest. What makes people hard to love? Isn't it what is commonly called selfishness? Selfish people are hard to love because so little love comes out of them.

Selflessness. Humility. Truthfulness. These are the three marks of an honorable man.

A PRIME TRUTH - MAN IS SELFISH (Name of chapter)

People love answers, but only as long as they are the ones who came up with them.

If I am unwilling to step up and look beyond the stunted reach of my own agendas, if I am unwilling embrace the truth even though it may run frustratingly contrary to my most innate desires, if I am unwilling to respect my fellowman even though our disagreements may be irritatingly vast...if I am so lifelessly entrenched in the bane of my own immaturity that I am ignorantly unwilling to do these things and rather choose to play the fool dressed in the garb of wisdom and other such assorted notions, 'common sense' will always be a phrase but never a standard.

You love yourself.. Selfish!” “Selfishness protects you from pity, is it a sin to love oneself and enjoy life away from ungrateful people?” said Norina.

Maturity means being able to accept the fact that sometimes the things that we wish for will create the histories that we don’t wish for.

The subsistence mentality of a person is a prison in which his personal joy is detained. If you want to live in joy, you don't live for yourself alone. Live for others too!

A common mistake we make is that we look for God in places where we ourselves wish to find him, yet even in the physical reality this is a complete failure. For example, if you lost your car keys, you would not search where you want to search, you would search where you must in order to find them.

If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn't help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we've got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don't want to do it.

Without exaggerating the point, the difference between ‘what I should do’ verses ‘what I want to do’ is quite frankly the difference between success and failure.

The greatest ‘victory’ in any victory is that I didn’t make it about myself.

Your best friends are in trouble and you say 'of course' and forget them instantly.

The belief that someone loves us, or should or can love us, as much as we love ourselves is one of the most common signs of intellectual immaturity.

A selfish life isn’t God’s purpose for you