Selfish Quotes

Real love is never a selfish emotion.
If you want something from someone -
especially if that something is sex -
what you are feeling is not true love.
True love is about wanting happiness for the person you love -
and not about seeking happiness for yourself.
Fortunately, in most cases our own loving presence
is the greatest gift we can give to a person we love.
Nonetheless, the litmus test of love is knowing
we would choose never to see that person again
if we believed that distance would bring them greater happiness.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure.
I make mistakes, I am out of control
and at times hard to handle.
But if you can't handle me at my worst,
then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best.
- Marilyn Monroe

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Thank you for joining me on this journey we call life,
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Take time to laugh.
It is the music of the soul.
Take time to think.
It is the source of power.
Take time to play.
It is the source of perpetual youth.
Take time to read.
It is the fountain of wisdom.
Take time to pray.
It is the greatest power on Earth.
Take time to love and be loved.
It is a God-given privilege.
Take time to be friendly.
It is the road to happiness.
Take time to give.
It is too short a day to be selfish.
Take time to work.
It is the price of success.
- Anonymous

"Mother Teresa Prayer"
People are often unreasonable, illogical, and self-centered;
... Forgive them anyway.
If you are kind, people may accuse you
of selfish, ulterior motives;
... Be kind anyway.
If you are successful, you will win some
false friends and some true enemies;
... Succeed anyway.
If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you;
... Be honest and frank anyway.
What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight;
... Build anyway.
If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous;
... Be happy anyway.
The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow;
... Do good anyway.
Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough;
... Give the world the best you've got anyway.
You see, in the final analysis, it is between you and God;
It was never between you and them anyway.
We can do no great things - only small things with great love.
- although commonly attributed to Mother Teresa,
who kept a copy of this prayer on
the wall of her Calcutta orphanage,
this prayer was actually written by Kent Keith.

Personal importance, or taking things personally,
is the maximum expression of selfishness
because we make the assumption that everything is about me.
- don Miguel Ruiz

Manifest plainness, embrace simplicity,
reduce selfishness, have few desires.
- Lao Tzu

Great achievement is usually born of great sacrifice,
and is never the result of selfishness.
- Napoleon Hill

Every man must decide whether he will
walk in the light of creative altruism
or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live,
it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.
- Oscar Wilde

As selfishness and complaint
pervert and cloud the mind,
so love with its joy
clears and sharpens the vision.
- Helen Keller

A man does what he must - in spite of personal consequences,
in spite of obstacles and dangers and pressures -
and that is the basis of all human morality.
- John F. Kennedy

About most subjects, there is not "The Truth;"
there is merely one's personal truth.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

I put aside personal preferences and step forward to be of service.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Whosoever is spared personal pain
must feel himself called
to help in diminishing the pain of others.
We must all carry our share of
the misery which lies upon the world.
- Albert Schweitzer

Everything we say, do, think, and feel
is a product of our personal history
and the collective history of humankind.
Our name for these histories is "prejudice."
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

When you pray for anyone, you tend to
modify your personal attitude toward them.
- Norman Vincent Peale

Property is intended to serve life,
and no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect,
it has no personal being.
It is part of the earth man walks on.
It is not man.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

We all have a social mask, right?
We put it on, we go out, put our
best foot forward, our best image.
But behind that social mask is a personal truth,
what we really, really believe
about who we are and what we're capable of.
- Phil McGraw

Having a personal opinion is great.
Believing that one's personal opinion is absolute truth
leads to most of the world's troubles.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

The less I take the difficulties of my life as personal affront,
and the more I use them as an opportunity to learn and grow...
the easier I sleep at night.
- Mary Anne Radmacher

Don't aim at success.
The more you aim at it and make it a target,
the more you are going to miss it.
For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued;
it must ensue, and it only does so as
the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication
to a cause greater than oneself.
- Viktor E. Frankl

I know, to banish anger altogether
from one's breast is a difficult task.
It cannot be achieved through pure personal effort.
It can be done only by God's grace.
- Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi

Belief transcends ritual, structure and societal expectation.
It is an enlivening, intensely personal
core to our being. Our way of being.
- Mary Anne Radmacher

Personal transformation can and does have global effects.
As we go, so goes the world, for the world is us.
The revolution that will save the world
is ultimately a personal one.
- Marianne Williamson

The personal life deeply lived
always expands into truths beyond itself.
- Anais Nin

Get up-close-and-personal:
Life looks different when you really get involved.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

I left the "eye for an eye" God
when I walked out of Bible school,
but God Within is a daily part of my personal experience.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Man must cease attributing his problems to his environment,
and learn again to exercise his will - his personal responsibility
in the realm of faith and morals.
- Albert Schweitzer

Sometimes I lie awake at night and ask "Why me?"
Then a voice answers "Nothing personal,
your name just happened to come up. -
- Charlie Brown, in Charles M. Schulz' cartoon Peanuts

Buddhism has the characteristics of what would be expected
in a cosmic religion for the future:
It transcends a personal God, avoids dogmas and theology;
it covers both the natural and the spiritual,
and it is based on a religious sense
aspiring from the experience of all things,
natural and spiritual, as a meaningful unity.
- Albert Einstein

My biggest dream is that my words will inspire heart,
hope and personal responsibility in people around the globe
long after my feet in these shoes aren't walking the planet.
- Mary Anne Radmacher

I am the owner of my choices.
I am the source for the perspectives I choose to hold...
regardless of how aware I am of why or how I come to possess
that particular perspective.
It takes courage to look into the mirror of our souls, absent excuses.
I will look into that mirror little bits at a time.
SEE and ACT. SEE what I can bear to see and ACT upon what I am able.
This is the heart of a gentle invitation to personal responsibility.
- Mary Anne Radmacher

Pity may represent little more
than the impersonal concern
which prompts the mailing of a check,
but true sympathy is the personal concern
which demands the giving of one's soul.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Purity of personal life is the one indispensable condition
for building up a sound education.
- Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi

Nearly all men can stand adversity,
but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.
- Abraham Lincoln

No man stands so tall as when he stoops to help a child.
- Anonymous (often attributed to Abraham Lincoln)

Talent is God-given; be humble.
Fame is man-given; be thankful.
Conceit is self-given; be careful.
- John Wooden

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person.
Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
- Oscar Wilde

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men
who walked through the huts comforting others,
giving away their last piece of bread...
They offer sufficient proof that everything
can be taken from a man but one thing:
to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances,
to choose one's own way.
- Viktor E. Frankl

If a man is called to be a street sweeper,
he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted,
or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry.
He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts
of heaven and earth will pause to say,
here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Every child comes with the message
that God is not yet discouraged of man.
- Rabindranath Tagore

Two things a man should never be angry at:
what he can help,
and what he cannot help.
- Thomas Fuller

A man is a success if he gets up in
the morning and gets to bed at night,
and in between he does what he wants to do.
- Bob Dylan

All things share the same breath -
the beast, the tree, the man...
the air shares its spirit with all the life it supports.
- Chief Seattle (attributed)

I cannot trust a man to control others
who cannot control himself.
- Robert E. Lee

A wise man can learn more from a foolish question
than a fool can learn from a wise answer.
- Bruce Lee

When I am getting ready to reason with a man,
I spend one-third of my time thinking about myself
and what I am going to say
and two-thirds about him and what he is going to say.
- Abraham Lincoln

Non-violence means avoiding not only external physical violence
but also internal violence of spirit.
You not only refuse to shoot a man,
but you refuse to hate him.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

If a man loses his reverence for any part of life,
he will lose his reverence for all of life.
- Albert Schweitzer

If a man does not keep pace with his companions,
perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.
- Henry David Thoreau

A great secret of success is to go through life
as a man who never gets used up.
- Albert Schweitzer

One man with courage makes a majority.
- old saying probably repeated by Andrew Jackson
(falsely attributed to Jefferson)

Man lives freely only by his readiness to die, if need be,
at the hands of his brother, never by killing him.
- Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi

There is nothing with which every man is so afraid
as getting to know how enormously much
he is capable of doing and becoming.
- Soren Kierkegaard

If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right.
Men will believe what they see.
- Henry David Thoreau

Many a man curses the rain that falls upon his head,
and knows not that it brings abundance
to drive away the hunger.
- Saint Basil

It is what a man thinks of himself
that really determines his fate.
- Henry David Thoreau

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May the world be kind to you, and may your own thoughts be gentle upon yourself.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Jonathan Huie jlh(at)jlhuie(dot)com - About & Disclosure

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Selfish Quotes

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