#selfishness

Everyone wants a piece of you. The trick is what piece to give. ↗

— Solange nicole

#humor #life #people #selfishness #society

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. ↗

— John Stuart Mill

#pacifism #sacrifice #selfishness #war #men

God favors men and women who delight in being made worthy of happiness before the happiness itself. ↗

— Criss Jami

#considerate #delight #favor #god #happiness

Inspiration is incompatible with selfish desire. Whoever wants something for himself sets truth aside. Such aims can only degrade work. ↗

— A. G. Sertilanges

#inspirational

What we do for ourselves dies with us. What we do for others and the world, is and remains imortal. ↗

— Albert Pine

#make-a-difference #selfishness #inspirational

The selfishness of an age that has devoted itself to the mere cult of pleasure has tainted the whole human race with an error that makes all our acts more or less lies against God. ↗

— Thomas Merton

#pleasure #selfishness #age

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

#inspire #love #qualities #selfishness

I want some day to be able to love with the same intensity and unselfishness that parents love their children with. ↗

— Shakira

#children #day #i #intensity #love

My hair would continue to gray, and then one day, it would fall out entirely, and then, on a day meaninglessly close to the present one, meaninglessly like the present one, I would disappear from the earth. And all these emotions, all these yearnings, all these data, if that helps to clinch the enormity of what I'm talking about, would be gone. And that's what immortality means. It means selfishness. My generations belief that each one of us matters more than you or anyone else would think. ↗

— Gary Shteyngart

#belief #generation #immortality #selfish #selfishness

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