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Self-interest is but the survival of the animal in us. Humanity only begins for man with self-surrender.
-Henri Frederic Amiel
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That which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it. Every one thinks chiefly of his own, hardly at all of the common interest; and only when he is himself concerned as an individual. For besides other considerations, everybody is more inclined to neglect the duty which he expects another to fulfill.
-Aristotle
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Remember how often you have postponed minding your interest, and let slip those opportunities the gods have given you. It is now high time to consider what sort of world you are part of, and from what kind of governor of it you are descended; that you have a set period assigned you to act in, and unless you improve it to brighten and compose your thoughts, it will quickly run off with you, and be lost beyond recovery.
-Marcus Aurelius
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I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice, though not in principle.
-Jane Austen
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Selfishness is that detestable vice which no one will forgive in others, and no one is without in himself.
-Henry Ward Beecher
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We are all selfish and I no more trust myself than others with a good motive.
-Lord (George Gordon) Byron
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We are not built for the mountains and the dawns and aesthetic affinities, those are for moments of inspiration, that is all. We are built for the valley, for the ordinary stuff we are in, and that is where we have to prove our mettle. Spiritual selfishness always wants repeated moments on the mount. We feel we could talk like angels and live like angels, if only we could stay on the mount. The times of exaltation are exceptional, they have their meaning in our life with God, but we must beware lest our spiritual selfishness wants to make them the only time.
-Oswald Chambers
My Utmost for His Highest
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What we call personality (...) has become the most impersonal thing in the world. Its pale and featureless face appears like a ghost at every corner and in every crowd. ... Individualism kills individuality, precisely because individualism has to be an 'ism' quite as much as Communism or Calvinism. The economic and ethical school which calls itself individualist ended by threatening the world with the flattest and dullest spread of the commonplace. Men, instead of being themselves, set out to find a self to be: a sort of abstract economic self identified with self-interest. But while the self was that of a man, the self-interest was generally that of a class or a trade or even an empire. So far from really remaining a separate self, the man became part of a communal mass of selfishness.
-G. K. Chesterton, February 25, 1928
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Human history is the sad result of each one looking out for himself.
-Julio Cortazar
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The ruin of the human heart is self-interest, which the American merchant calls self-service. We have become a self-service populace, and all our specious comforts --the automatic elevator, the escalator, the cafeteria --are depriving us of volition and moral and physical energy.
-Edward Dahlberg
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If you think only of yourself, if you forget the rights and well-being of others, or, worse still, if you exploit others, ultimately you will lose. You will have no friends who will show concern for your well-being. Moreover, if a tragedy befalls you, instead of feeling concerned, others might even secretly rejoice. By contrast, if an individual is compassionate and altruistic, and has the interests of others in mind, then irrespective of whether that person knows a lot of people, wherever that person moves, he or she will immediately make friends. And when that person faces a tragedy, there will be plenty of people who will come to help.
-Dalai Lama
from The Dalai Lama's Book of Wisdom
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The argument of this book is that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes. Like successful Chicago gangsters, our genes have survived, in some cases for millions of years, in a highly competitive world. This entitles us to expect certain qualities in our genes. I shall argue that a predominant quality to be expected in a successful gene is ruthless selfishness. This gene selfishness will usually give rise to selfishness in individual behavior. However, as we shall see, there are special circumstances in which a gene can achieve its own selfish goals best by fostering a limited form of altruism at the level of individual animals. 'Special' and 'limited' are important words in the last sentence. Much as we might wish to believe otherwise, universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts that simply do not make evolutionary sense.
-Richard Dawkins
The Selfish Gene, 1976
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It’s Not All About You…Stay in the Game. Taking myself lightly means trading my self-absorption for connecting with others…it is really not all about you! One of our workshop participants relates to this principle in this way: Don’t make yourself more important than the situation.
-Suzanne Mayo Frindt
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The force of selfishness is as inevitable and as calculable as the force of gravitation.
-Hailliard
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Selfishness is one of the qualities apt to inspire love.
-Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The greatest productive force is human selfishness.
-Robert A. Heinlein
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Being sorry is the highest act of selfishness, seeing value only after discarding it.
-Doug Horton
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As selfishness and complaint pervert and cloud the mind, so love with its joy clears and sharpens the vision.
-Helen Keller
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How a sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man's self to himself! He is his own exclusive object. Supreme selfishness is inculcated in him as his only duty,
-Charles Lamb
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I've given up reading books. I find it takes my mind off myself.
-Oscar Levant
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I did not have three thousand pairs of shoes. I had one thousand and sixty.
-Imelda Marcos
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In retrospect, all these exercises in self-gratification seem pure fantasy, what Pascal called, licking the earth.
-Malcolm Muggeridge
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Lovers never get tired of each other because they are forever talking about themselves.
-Francois de la Rochefoucauld
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Selfishness, not love, is the actuating motive of the gallant.
-Mme. Roland
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If we were not all so excessively interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it.
-Arthur Schopenhauer
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Books about Selfishness
