Selfishness

“ Of the whole picture, selfishness is the prevailing feature;—selfishness admirably drawn, indeed; apologised for by every palliating circumstance of education and habit, and clothed in the brightest colours of which it is susceptible, from youth, talents, and placidity. ”

“ We intend, so far as possible without reference to others, to ask, and in our own way to develope, the question, What is selfishness, and what self-sacrifice? and to include in that the enquiry, What ground is there for the denial of unselfishness? ”

“ I do it out of that selfishness which inspires mankind to perform all their deeds of generosity and self-sacrifice, by making them recognize themselves in all who are unfortunate, by disposing them to commiserate their own calamities in the calamities of others and by inciting them to offer help to a mortal resembling themselves in nature and destiny, so that they think they are succouring themselves in succouring him. ”

“ The selfishness that makes dark deeds possible has revealed itself to me in all its hideous deformity since the light of your pure ideal fell upon it; and while naught on earth can restore me to happiness, or even to that equanimity of mind which my careless boyhood enjoyed, it would still afford me something like relief to know that you recognize the beginning of a new life in me, which, if not all you could desire, still has that gleam of light upon it which redeems it from being what it was before I knew you. ”

“ You show your selfishness by dwelling on what you have lost. You never think of what I have lost. I make no profession of unselfishness. I am suffering for my folly and egoism; and I deserve to suffer. ”

“ It is run through by many different laws; governed by many distinct forces, each of which strives to control it wholly—but never does. Selfishness blows on it like a parching sirocco, and all things seem to bow to the might of selfishness. ”

“ Evidently, then, it is your duty to efface yourself and to assert yourself; to humble yourself and to respect yourself; to sacrifice yourself and to preserve yourself. At any rate, it seems clear that self is of importance and that we cannot be complete persons without somehow regarding self.
For centuries philosophers have puzzled or disputed over the definition of selfishness. Where shall we draw the line between obligation to self and obligation to others? ”

“ It is another impulse that sways their existence. It is imagination; it is vanity; it is self, disguised with glittering qualities that dazzle our weak senses, but selfishness, the most entire, the most concentrated. ”

“ If our fellows in society can, for purposes of their own, throw a veil over their actions which we can seldom penetrate, surely vanity, passion, interest, and every other modification of selfishness, can, with art a thousand-fold more specious, still conceal from us the springs and motives of what is passing in our own bosom. ”

“ "You are the embodiment of selfishness," she said. ”

“ If it be the 'other-worldly' self which he seeks, and if he seeks it ascetically,—even though he would rather see all mankind damned eternally than lose his individual soul,—'saintliness' will probably be the name by which his selfishness will be called. ”

“ Thus the high-souled pride that in our better days sustains and keeps us far above the reach of sordid thoughts and unworthy actions, becomes, in the darker hour of our destiny, a misanthropic selfishness, in which we wrap ourselves as in a mantle. ”

“ Without passions or imagination himself, and steering his own course through life by the mere calculations of an enlightened selfishness, one half of the broad mass of Humanity was to him nothing better than a blank. ”

“ But there are those who could tell them such conduct is, in reality, the most consummate selfishness, because it inevitably produces the effect of making them the objects of much necessary attention, and of inflicting an endless catalogue of troubles and anxieties upon their friends. How soon does the stern discipline of life inflict its own punishment for this folly! ”

“ You will find as you grow older that the first thing needful to make the world a tolerable place to live in is to recognise the inevitable selfishness of humanity. You demand unselfishness from others, which is a preposterous claim that they should sacrifice their desires to yours. Why should they? When you are reconciled to the fact that each is for himself in the world you will ask less from your fellows. They will not disappoint you, and you will look upon them more charitably. Men seek but one thing in life—their pleasure." ”

“ That seems to me, Gloria, to be the crux of our endeavors. But when we speak of unselfishness, as we now have it in mind, we are entering a hitherto unknown realm. The definition of selfishness yesterday or to-day is quite another thing from the unselfishness that we have in view, and which we hope and expect will soon leaven society. ”

“ I believe the whole world, all that I know and love, to be my whole self, and I want to make that as good, as true, as harmonious as I can. What people usually call selfishness is only self-limitation, cutting yourself off. ”

“ Having risen above the lower region of strife and selfishness within himself, he can now look calmly down upon it in others and in the world, and analyse and comprehend it, and he will see how selfish striving is at the root of all the world’s suffering. ”

“ But what was to be expected from one whose impressions were equally quick and vivid, who felt so much for himself, and so much for others, that his life seemed a perpetual re-action between intense selfishness and morbid sensibility? ”

“ Such is the nature and ground of the illusion of selfishness.
If now our activity of realization were confined to the range of common-sense emotions, there would be no escape from all this. It is our critical reflection that appears on the scene, saying: “O common sense, what thou hast realized cannot be all. We must resolve to recognize more, else will our resolutions never lose their inconsistency and darkness. Be honest, O common sense. Is not thy neighbor after all just a dead fact of nature, an automaton with certain peculiar energies?” ”

“ We shall call out selfishness in others. Do we neglect our duty? Then others will neglect their duty to us. Do we indulge our passions? Then others, who depend on us, will indulge theirs, to our detriment and misery. ”

“ The selfishness of a mean and crafty man—the selfishness of an ambitious and silly woman——the selfishness of a spiteful and loveless child all tend one way, from bad to worse! And you, my darlings, must suffer it awhile, I fear. ”

“ In each nature selfishness crops out on one side rather than another, and it is this which has to be studied, that the forward may be repressed, the shy or indolent stimulated, the dreamy quickened into attention, and all the other defective sides recognized and taken, literally, in hand, to be modelled to a better form. ”

“ The more entirely we mingle our emotions with those of others, making our well or ill being depend on theirs, the more completely do we cast away selfishness, and approach the perfection of our nature. ”

“ The source of all our personal inclinations is the love for ourselves or self-love, a legitimate instinct when kept within bounds; but when carried to excess, when exclusive and predominant, it becomes the vice we call selfishness. ”

“ And by selfishness, I do not precisely understand a vulgar self-interest, or an ordinary ambition, but that absolute will or conduct which springs from some unalterable resolution, which, hurrying from one extreme to another, is sure to produce a perpetual alternation of extreme measures. ”

“ He replied that all around me lay misery, sin, and suffering, and that every person not absolutely blinded by selfishness must be aware of it and must realise the seriousness and tragedy of existence. ”

“ Ah, if I could but live my time over again, I'd pray night and day for selfishness. They teach us girls to pray for this and that virtue, which we have too much of already; and what we ought to pray for is selfishness. ”

“ Human nature is accused of much more selfishness than it really has; a thousand kindly emotions break in upon and redeem our daily and interested life. ”

“ But we must not wander from our depth, nor away from the subject. We have seen, I hope, in some imperfect fashion, what the bad self in general is, and with a fuller meaning we can repeat that selfishness is one form of the bad self. ”

“ Expand these ideas and you will see where we get that form of selfishness which we call natural selfishness, and how selfishness ceases to be a simple feeling and becomes pride in great minds, vanity in little ones, and in both feeds continually at our neighbour's cost. Passions of this kind, not having any germ in the child's heart, cannot spring up in it of themselves; it is we who sow the seeds, and they never take root unless by our fault. ”

“ But you, with your calm power of reasoning, can soon convince yourself that they require of you no less a sacrifice than your entire self, and that unbounded, although perhaps unconscious, selfishness is the mainspring of their proceedings, while I, as long as you have known me, have treated you with thorough disinterestedness. ”

“ Yet as a faithful presentation of human selfishness, and of you and me in so far as we happen to be mainly selfish, the odious mirror has its uses by showing us what manner of man we are or may become. ”

“ The selfishness, the utter extinction of all public spirit, the servility, which no longer as with an inward shame creeps into men’s acts, but utters itself boldly as the avowed law of their lives, the sense of the oppression of the strong, of the insecurity of the weak, and, generally, the whole character of life, alike outward and inward, as poor, mean, sordid, and ignoble, with only a few faintest glimpses of that romance which one usually attaches to the East ”

“ What is the cause of selfishness and indifference to the feelings of others? Simply this: the pride of man. He lifts himself up, and he claims the right to have his opinions and judgments as he pleases. ”

“ Our selfishness is so robust and many-clutching, that, well encouraged, it easily devours all sustenance away from our poor little scruples. ”

“ The question which I have proposed to examine is whether there is any general principle of selfishness in the human mind, or whether it is not naturally disinterested. Now the effects of appetite are so far from being any confirmation of the first supposition, that we are even oftener betrayed by them into actions contrary to our own well-known, clear, and lasting interest, than into those which are injurious to others. ”

“ The only thing worth while in life was success—which is selfishness. Selfishness sprawling stark-contoured and unashamed, sublimely unself-conscious, serenely brutal—a five-plied Nietzscheism on a modern business basis which acknowledges neither codified laws nor principles. ”

“ We must not always fly from temptation in every form, my boy, but we must arm ourselves against its attacks, otherwise our usefulness will be greatly lessened. If those who are endeavouring to make themselves better, do so by shunning society, they are rather examples of selfishness than benevolent goodness,—the selfishness is unconscious, and such a course may be followed from a sense of duty. ”

“ For selfishness in any and every form is dissipation, weakness, death; unselfishness in its spiritual aspect is conservation, power, life. As you grow in spiritual life, and become established upon principles, you will become as beautiful and as unchangeable as those principles, will taste of the sweetness of their immortal essence, and will realize the eternal and indestructible nature of the God within. ”

“ And if I believe this, which I think I do, how utterly inconsistent and detestable is the life I lead, which, so far from being a loving and cheerful surrender of itself once for all to God's service, is at best but a base compromise—a few moments or acts or thoughts consciously and with difficulty divested of actual selfishness. ”

“ And at all events, whatever sympathy leads to, it is not by itself the insight. And so, to sum up our present way of studying the illusions of selfishness, we find by these examples that by nature our neighbor’s conscious life is realized for us rather as an active agency that affects our fortunes, than as an inner experience, or as it is in itself, namely, as a Will; and hence it is that we are disposed to treat it with coldness, rather than to respect its true nature. Resistance, conquest, employment of this agency, seem to us axiomatic aims of prudence ”

“ If this be an ordered selfishness, then we should pause before we condemn any one for the vice of egoism, for there may be deeper roots for its causes than we have knowledge of. ”

“ Setting him up as the glass through which to view the groups around him, we are not the less moved to a hearty detestation of the social vices they exhibit, and pre-eminently of selfishness in all its forms, because we see more plainly than ever that there is but one vice which is quite irremediable. ”

“ Selfishness, to a large extent, rules in the world, and how can you promise yourself that you will escape its grasp? He certainly is rash who thinks he can, single-handed, contend against the world and its spirit. ”

“ "This selfishness is not only part of me. It is the most living part.
"It is by somehow transcending rather than by avoiding that selfishness that I can bring poise and balance into my life. ”