#selfishness

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

— A. G. Sertilanges

#inspirational

Self-absorption in all its forms kills empathy, let alone compassion. When we focus on ourselves, our world contracts as our problems and preoccupations loom large. But when we focus on others, our world expands. Our own problems drift to the periphery of the mind and so seem smaller, and we increase our capacity for connection - or compassionate action. ↗

— Daniel Goleman

#empathy #selfishness #social-intelligence #intelligence

Our enemies are our evil deeds and their memories, our pride, our selfishness, our malice, our passions, which by conscience or by habit pursue us with a relentlessness past the power of figure to express. ↗

— George A. Smith

#deeds #evil #express #figure #habit

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

...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

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

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

...I committed a sin the day I refused you - I discovered metal inside me where my heart should be - forgive me, Love, for acting on principles... ↗

— John Geddes

#love #refusal #repentance #selfishness #sin