#selfish

Selfishness is one of the qualities apt to inspire love. ↗

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

#inspire #love #qualities #selfishness

The selfish thing about an athlete is you always look at the side of things where you say I could've done that better. ↗

— Andy Roddick

#always #athlete #better #could #done

...alone in this city, alone on this sea. The days were strewn about him, he was a drunkard of days. He had achieved nothing. He had his life--it was not worth much--not like a life that, though ended, had truly been something. If I had had courage,he thought, if I had had faith. We preserve ourselves as if that were important, and always at the expense of others. We hoard ourselves. We succeed if they fail, we are wise if they are foolish, and we go onward, clutching, until there is no one--we are left with no companion save God. In whom we do not believe. Who we know does not exist. ↗

— James Salter

#faith #loneliness #regret #selfishness #age

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. ↗

— Simone de Beauvoir

#books #friends #greedy #life #loneliness

Declare your jihad on thirteen enemies you cannot see -egoism, arrogance, conceit, selfishness, greed, lust, intolerance, anger, lying, cheating, gossiping and slandering. If you can master and destroy them, then you will be read to fight the enemy you can see. ↗

— Al-Ghazali

#arrogance #cheating #conceit #egoism #gossiping

The faculty to think objectively is reason; the emotional attitude behind reason is that of humility. To be objective, to use one's reason, is possible only if one has achieved an attitude of humility, if one has emerged from the dreams of omniscience and omnipotence which one has as a child. Love, being dependent on the relative absence of narcissism, requires the developement of humility, objectivity and reason. I must try to see the difference between my picture of a person and his behavior, as it is narcissistically distorted, and the person's reality as it exists regardless of my interests, needs and fears. ↗

— Erich Fromm

#conflict #empathy #erich-fromm #humility #love

We usually live our lives with the belief that "I sacrifice myself for everyone else," rather than thinking that "everyone else helps me. ↗

— Jae Woong Kim

#life #philosophy #selfishness #attitude

Galinda didn't see the verdant world through the glass of the carriage; she saw her own reflection instead. She had the nearsightedness of youth. She reasoned that because she was beautiful she was significant, though what she signified, and to whom, was not clear yet...She was, after all, on her way to Shiz because she was smart. But there was more than one way to be smart. ↗

— Gregory Maguire

#fiction #maguire #selfishness #smart #wicked

Let us admit, without bitterness, that the individual has his distinct interests and can, without felony, stipulate for those interests and defend them. The present has its pardonable amount of egotism; momentary life has its claims, and cannot be expected to sacrifice itself incessantly to the future. The generation which is in its turn passing over the earth is not forced to abridge its life for the sake of the generations, its equals after all, whose turn shall come later on. ↗

— Victor Hugo

#sacrifice #selfishness #equality

...if I try to make only enough money for my family' immediate needs, it may violate Scripture. ...Even though earning just enough to meet the needs of my family may seem nonmaterialistic, it's actually selfish when I could earn enough to care for others as well. ↗

— Randy Alcorn

#earning #enough #family #materialism #money