#selfish

Next to the young, I suppose the very old are the most selfish. ↗

— William Makepeace Thackeray

#most #next #old #selfish #suppose

There is more selfishness and less principle among members of Congress than I had any conception of, before I became President of the U.S. ↗

— James K. Polk

#any #became #before #conception #congress

I've come to the point in my life where I encourage young Native Americans to become much more selfish about their personal needs and wants. ↗

— Sherman Alexie

#become #come #encourage #i #life

Ego got you thinkin' you're workin' somebody to your advantage; you're just playin' yourself. ↗

— T.F. Hodge

#egotism #quotes-to-live-by #selfish #death

Your corn is ripe today; mine will be so tomorrow. 'Tis profitable for us both, that I should labour with you today, and that you should aid me tomorrow. I have no kindness for you, and know you have as little for me. I will not, therefore, take any pains upon your account; and should I labour with you upon my own account, in expectation of a return, I know I should be disappointed, and that I should in vain depend upon your gratitude. Here then I leave you to labour alone; You treat me in the same manner. The seasons change; and both of us lose our harvests for want of mutual confidence and security. ↗

— David Hume

#farming #individualism #selfishness #change

I'm not a person or a selfish player, but we have to move the ball more, and we have to look further the team game, because we have enough talent to use different players. ↗

— Pau Gasol

#because #different #different players #enough #further

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

— Herbert Spencer

#cage #fish man #law #man #selfish

Up to the present man has hardly cultivated sympathy at all. He has merely sympathy with pain, and sympathy with pain is not the highest form of sympathy. All sympathy is fine, but sympathy with suffering is the least fine mode. It is tainted with egotism. It is apt to become morbid. There is in it a certain element of terror for our own safety. We become afraid that we ourselves might be as the leper or as the blind, and that no man would have care of us. It is curiously limiting, too. One should sympathise with the entirety of life, not with life's sores and maladies merely, but with life's joy and beauty and energy and health and freedom. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#sympathy #beauty

Don’t try to hog loneliness and keep it all to yourself. Share it with a special someone.
 ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#alone #bizarre #funny #hog #humor

Some people think that evolutionary psychology claims to have discovered that human nature is selfish and wicked. But they are flattering the researchers and anyone who would claim to have discovered the opposite. No one needs a scientist to measure whether humans are prone to knavery. The question has been answered in the history books, the newspapers, the ethnographic record, and the letters to Ann Landers. But people treat it like an open question, as if someday science might discover that it's all a bad dream and we will wake up to find that it is human nature to love one another. ↗

— Steven Pinker

#human-nature #selfishness #dreams