This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Posthumous charities are the very essence of selfishness when bequeathed by those who, even alive, would part with nothing." - Charles Caleb Colton
"Posthumous charities are the very essence of selfishness, when bequeathed by those who, when alive, would part with nothing." - Charles Caleb Colton
"Selfishness is the grand moving principle of nine-tenths of our actions." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"No indulgence of passion destroys the spiritual nature so much as respectable selfishness." - George MacDonald
"Nine times out of ten, optimism is a sly form of selfishness, a method of isolating oneself from the unhappiness of others." - Georges Bernanos
"If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears." - Glenn Clark
"Selfishness is that detestable vice which no one will forgive in others, and no one is without in himself." - Henry Ward Beecher
"Thorough selfishness destroys or paralyzes enjoyment. A heart made selfish by the contest for wealth is like a citadel stormed in war, utterly shattered." - Henry Ward Beecher
"Selfishness is that detestable vice which no one is without in himself." - Henry Ward Beecher
"Whenever education and refinement grow away from the common people, they are growing toward selfishness, which is the monster evil of the world. that is true cultivation which gives us sympathy with every form of human life, and enables us to work most successfully for its advancement. Refinement that carries us away from our fellow-men is not God's refinement." - Henry Ward Beecher
"Selfishness is the only real atheism; aspiration, unselfishness, the only real religion." - Israel Zangwill
"Selfishness is the only real atheism; unselfishness the only real religion." - Israel Zangwill
"Posthumous charities are the very essence of selfishness, when bequeathed by those who, when alive, would part with nothing." - James Bryant Conant
"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy that is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness." - John Kenneth Galbraith, aka "Ken"
"If you seek in the spirit of selfishness, to grasp all as your own, you shall lose all, and be driven out of the world, at last, naked and forlorn, to everlasting poverty and contempt." - Jonathan Edwards
"A person of character must look out for and overcome three very human tendencies that undermine good intentions: self-righteousness, self-delusion, and selfishness." - Michael S. Josephson
"Selfishness is one of the qualities apt to inspire love." - Nathaniel Hawthorne
"To talk about the need for perfection in man is to talk about the need for another species. The essence of man is imperfection. Imperfection and blazing contradictions - between mixed good and evil, altruism and selfishness, co-operativeness and combativeness, optimism and fatalism, affirmation and negation." - Norman Cousins
"Wars are brought about not by fateful divine action but by widespread material selfishness. Banish selfishness - individual, industrial, political, national - and you will have no more wars." - Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
"Our union with a Being whose activity is world-wide and who dwells in the heart of humanity cannot be a passive one. In order to be united with Him we must have to divest our work of selfishness and become Visvakarma, “the world-worker,” we must work for all. In order to be one with this Mahatma, “the Great Soul,” one must cultivate the greatness of soul which identifies itself with the soul of all peoples and not merely with that of one’s own." -
"The mean man suffers more from his selfishness than he form whom meanness withholds some important benefit." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"This span of life was lent for lofty duties; not for selfishness; not to be whiled away in aimless dreams, but to improve ourselves and serve mankind." - Aubrey de Vere, fully Aubrey Albericus de Vere NULL
"The human being who lives only for themselves finally reaps nothing but unhappiness. Selfishness corrodes. Unselfishness ennobles, satisfies. Don't put off the joy derivable from doing helpful, kindly things for others." - B. C. Forbes, fully Bertie Charles "B.C." Forbes
"Selfishness can be a virtue. Selfishness is essential to survival, and without survival we cannot protect those whom we love more than ourselves." - Duke Ellington, fully Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington
"The impulse to perform a worthy action often springs from our best nature, but is afterwards tainted by the spur of selfishness or sinister interest." - Émile Souvestre
"There are only two great economic systems in operation in the world today. If Capitalism in the spirit of Christian love can solve the problem of distribution and bring unemployment to an end, it will find itself spreading and recapturing the nations it has lost to its rival. But if Capitalism is permeated with selfishness it will gradually give way to Communism, Technocracy or some other form of Socialism." - Glenn Clark
"Education has now become the chief problem of the world, its one holy cause. The nations that see this will survive, and those that fail to do so will slowly perish. There must be re-education of the will and of the heart as well as of the intellect, and the ideals of service must supplant those of selfishness and greed." - Granville Stanley Hall
"The greatest comforts and lasting peace are obtained when one eradicates selfishness from within. " - Guru Gobind Singh
"There are no generalizations in American politics that vested selfishness cannot cut through. " - John Gunther
"Happiness begins where selfishness ends." - John Wooden, fully John Robert Wooden
"I believe that the rendering of useful service is the common duty of mankind and that only in the purifying fire of sacrifice is the dross of selfishness consumed and the greatness of the human soul set free. " - John D. Rockefeller, fully John Davidson Rockefeller I
"Civilized man has been more ruthlessly wasteful and grasping in his attitude toward the natural world than has served even his most material best interests. Possibly - as some hope - a mere enlightened selfishness will save it in time. Even if we should learn just in the nick of time not to destroy what is necessary for our own preservation, the mere determination to survive is not sufficient to save very much of the variety and beauty of the natural world. They can e preserved only if man feels the necessity of sharing the earth with at least some of his fellow creatures to be a privilege rather han an irritation. And he is not likely to feel that without something more than intellectual curiosity - that something more you may call love, fellow-feeling, or reverence for life. Without reverence or love the increasing awareness of what the science of ecology teaches us can come to be no more than a shrewder exploitation of what it would be better to admire, to enjoy, and to share in." - Joseph Wood Krutch
"Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness – all of them due to the offenders’ ignorance of what is good or evil." - Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus
"We can surely no longer pretend that our children are growing up into a peaceful, secure, and civilized world. We've come to the point where it's irresponsible to try to protect them from the irrational world they will have to live in when they grow up. The children themselves haven't yet isolated themselves by selfishness and indifference; they do not fall easily into the error of despair; they are considerably braver than most grownups. Our responsibility to them is not to pretend that if we don't look, evil will go away, but to give them weapons against it." - Madeleine L’Engle
"Those who cleanse their hearts of the embittering poison of selfishness, hate and greed shall find God as their own true Self. When you find and realize God, the problem of selfishness and its numerous expressions melts away like mist before the sun. In God and as God, all life reveals itself as being really one and indivisible, and all separateness created by identification with human or sub-human forms is seen to be illusory." - Meher Baba, born Merwan Sheriar Irani
"Through the higher love the whole life of man is to be elevated from temporal selfishness to the spring of all love, to God: man will again be master over nature by abiding in God and lifting her up to God." - Meister Eckhart, formally Meister von Hochheim
"Man, by nature, is a selfish creature. Even in his relationships with others he tends to focus primarily on himself or, at most, on his self-colored perception of his fellow. "Love" is the endeavor to transcend this intrinsic selfishness and truly relate to one's fellow, to be sensitive to and devoted to his/her needs as an individual distinct of oneself and one's own stake in the relationship." - Menachem Mendel Schneerson, known as the Lubavitcher Rebbe
"A self that is only differentiated - not integrated - may attain great individual accomplishments, but risks being mired in self-centered egotism. By the same token, a person who self is based exclusively on integration will be well connected and secure, but lack autonomous individuality. Only when a person invests equal amounts of psychic energy in these two processes and avoids both selfishness and conformity is the self likely to relect complexity." - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály
"It is to the credit of human nature, that, except where its selfishness is brought into play, it loves more readily than it hates. Hatred, by a gradual and quiet process, will even be transformed to love, unless the change be impeded by a continually new irritation of the original feeling of hostility." - Nathaniel Hawthorne
"Before man can be free, and equal, and truly wise, he must cast aside the chains of habit and superstition; he must strip sensuality of its pomp, and selfishness of its excuses, and contemplate actions and objects as they really are. He will discover the wisdom of universal love; he will feel the meanness and the injustice of sacrificing the reason and the liberty of his fellow-men to the indulgence of his physical appetites, and becoming a party to their degradation by the consummation of his own." - Percy Bysshe Shelley
"In proportion as mankind becomes wise — yes, in exact proportion to that wisdom — should be the extinction of the unequal system under which they now subsist. Government is, in fact, the mere badge of their depravity. They are so little aware of the inestimable benefits of mutual love as to indulge, without thought, and almost without motive, in the worst excesses of selfishness and malice. Hence, without graduating human society into a scale of empire and subjection, its very existence has become impossible. It is necessary that universal benevolence should supersede the regulations of precedent and prescription, before these regulations can safely be abolished. Meanwhile, their very subsistence depends on the system of injustice and violence, which they have been devised to palliate." - Percy Bysshe Shelley
"In the world today many people think that one can do without religion, and that they themselves have outgrown religion by reason of their evolution. Many have no religious belief, and therefore the world has never been in a more chaotic condition. No doubt one finds in tradition and in history that in the name of religion the selfishness and ignorance of mankind have been given free reign. This is the reason why man, revolting against this state of things, has forsaken religion and forgotten that spirit which, in the name of religion, has also played its part in the world." - Inayat Khan, aka Hazrat Inayat Khan, fully Pir-O-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan
"There is a selfishness even in gratitude, when it is too profuse; to be over-thankful for one favor is in effect to lay out for another." - Richard Cumberland, Bishop of Peterborough
"But is the selfishness of children so very different from our own?" - Raymond Radiguet
"The position I have always adopted is that much of animal nature is indeed altruistic, cooperative and even attended by benevolent subjective emotions, but that this follows from, rather than contradicts, selfishness at the genetic level." - Richard Dawkins
"There is no pride on earth like the pride of intellect and science." - Roswell Dwight Hitchcock
"There is hardly a more common error than that of taking the man who has one talent, for a genius." - Arthur Helps, fully Sir Arthur Helps