June 18, 2024, 4:46 a.m.
In a world often characterized by hustle and competition, the delicate balance between selflessness and selfishness can be challenging to navigate. Our relationships, ambitions, and well-being all hinge on how we navigate this complex interplay. Whether you're seeking insight, inspiration, or a moment of introspection, our curated collection of the top 100 selfishness quotes offers a rich tapestry of perspectives. Dive into these powerful reflections to better understand the multifaceted nature of selfishness and consider how it impacts your own life and choices.
1. “You have a good heart and you think the good thing is to be guilty and kind but it's not always kind to be gentle and soft, there's a genuine violence softness and kindness visit on people. Sometimes self-interested is the most generous thing you can be. ” - Tony Kushner
2. “Manifest plainness,Embrace simplicity,Reduce selfishness,Have few desires.” - Lao Tzu
3. “To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others.” - Albert Camus
4. “I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea.” - Fyodor Dostoevsky
5. “People pontificate, "Suicide is selfishness." Career churchmen like Pater go a step further and call in a cowardly assault on the living. Oafs argue this specious line for varying reason: to evade fingers of blame, to impress one's audience with one's mental fiber, to vent anger, or just because one lacks the necessary suffering to sympathize. Cowardice is nothing to do with it - suicide takes considerable courage. Japanese have the right idea. No, what's selfish is to demand another to endure an intolerable existence, just to spare families, friends, and enemies a bit of soul-searching.” - David Mitchell
6. “Nothing resembles selfishness more closely than self-respect” - George Sand
7. “The belief that unhappiness is selfless and happiness is selfish is misguided. It's more selfless to act happy. It takes energy, generosity, and discipline to be unfailingly lighthearted, yet everyone takes the happy person for granted. No one is careful of his feelings or tries to keep his spirits high. He seems self-sufficient; he becomes a cushion for others. And because happiness seems unforced, that person usually gets no credit.” - Gretchen Rubin
8. “Neither fear nor self-interest can convert the soul. They may change the appearance, perhaps even the conduct, but never the object of supreme desire... Fear is the motive which constrains the slave; greed binds the selfish man, by which he is tempted when he is drawn away by his own lust and enticed (James 1:14). But neither fear nor self-interest is undefiled, nor can they convert the soul. Only charity can convert the soul, freeing it from unworthy motives.” - St. Bernard of Clairvaux
9. “Your conscience is the measure of the honesty of your selfishness.Listen to it carefully.” - Richard Bach
10. “There will always be a part, and always a very large part of every community, that have no care but for themselves, and whose care for themselves reaches little further than impatience of immediate pain, and eagerness for the nearest good.” - Samuel Johnson
11. “It is an occult law moreover, that no man can rise superior to his individual failings without lifting, be it ever so little, the whole body of which he is an integral part. In the same way no one can sin, nor suffer the effects of sin, alone. In reality, there is no such thing as 'separateness' and the nearest approach to that selfish state which the laws of life permit is in the intent or motive.” - Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
12. “There seemed to be three choices: to give up trying to love anyone, to stop being selfish, or to learn to love a person while continuing to be selfish.” - Lydia Davis
13. “He could not believe that any of them might actually hit somebody. If one did, what a nowhere way to go: killed by accident; slain not as an individual but by sheer statistical probability, by the calculated chance of searching fire, even as he himself might be at any moment. Mathematics! Mathematics! Algebra! Geometry! When 1st and 3d Squads came diving and tumbling back over the tiny crest, Bell was content to throw himself prone, press his cheek to the earth, shut his eyes, and lie there. God, oh, God! Why am I here? Why am I here? After a moment's thought, he decided he better change it to: why are we here. That way, no agency of retribution could exact payment from him for being selfish.” - James Jones
14. “If there is one thing I dislike, it is the man who tries to air his grievances when I wish to air mine.” - P.G. Wodehouse
15. “Many individuals are so constituted that their only thought is to obtain pleasure and shun responsibility. They would like, butterfly-like, to wing forever in a summer garden, flitting from flower to flower, and sipping honey for their sole delight. They have no feeling that any result which might flow from their action should concern them. They have no conception of the necessity of a well-organized society wherein all shall accept a certain quota of responsibility and all realize a reasonable amount of happiness. They think only of themselves because they have not yet been taught to think of society. For them pain and necessity are the great taskmasters. Laws are but the fences which circumscribe the sphere of their operations. When, after error, pain falls as a lash, they do not comprehend that their suffering is due to misbehavior. Many such an individual is so lashed by necessity and law that he falls fainting to the ground, dies hungry in the gutter or rotting in the jail and it never once flashes across his mind that he has been lashed only in so far as he has persisted in attempting to trespass the boundaries which necessity sets. A prisoner of fate, held enchained for his own delight, he does not know that the walls are tall, that the sentinels of life are forever pacing, musket in hand. He cannot perceive that all joy is within and not without. He must be for scaling the bounds of society, for overpowering the sentinel. When we hear the cries of the individual strung up by the thumbs, when we hear the ominous shot which marks the end of another victim who has thought to break loose, we may be sure that in another instance life has been misunderstood--we may be sure that society has been struggled against until death alone would stop the individual from contention and evil.” - Theodore Dreiser
16. “You will think me cruel, very selfish, but love is always selfish; the more ardent the more selfish. How jealous I am you cannot know. You must come with me, loving me, to death; or else hate me, and still come with me, and hating me through death and after. There is no such word as indifference in my apathetic nature.” - Sheridan Le Fanu
17. “Here I am going to say something which may come as a bit of a shock. God doesn't necessarily want us to be happy. He wants us to be lovable. Worthy of love. Able to be loved by Him. We don't start off being all that lovable, if we're honest. What makes people hard to love? Isn't it what is commonly called selfishness? Selfish people are hard to love because so little love comes out of them.” - William Nicholson
18. “God creates us free, free to be selfish, but He adds a mechanism that will penetrate our selfishness and wake us up to the presence of others in this world, and that mechanism is called suffering.” - William Nicholson
19. “Perhaps what I am about to say will appear strange to you gentlemen, socialists, progressives, humanitarians as you are, but I never worry about my neighbor, I never try to protect society which does not protect me -- indeed, I might add, which generally takes no heed of me except to do me harm -- and, since I hold them low in my esteem and remain neutral towards them, I believe that society and my neighbor are in my debt.” - Alexandre Dumas
20. “A selfless act out of even the purest desire to do for others, will be selfish in the satisfaction and happiness it brings to one doing it.” - Ashly Lorenzana
21. “Some people think that evolutionary psychology claims to have discovered that human nature is selfish and wicked. But they are flattering the researchers and anyone who would claim to have discovered the opposite. No one needs a scientist to measure whether humans are prone to knavery. The question has been answered in the history books, the newspapers, the ethnographic record, and the letters to Ann Landers. But people treat it like an open question, as if someday science might discover that it's all a bad dream and we will wake up to find that it is human nature to love one another.” - Steven Pinker
22. “It's a shame that we humans are never able to pull in the same direction . . . [n]ot even when confronted by infinity.” - Gentry Lee
23. “Just two choices on the shelf, pleasing God or pleasing self.” - Ken Collier
24. “Love is always ready to deny itself, to give, sacrifice, just in the measure of its sincerity and intensity. Perfect love is perfect self-forgetfulness. Hence where there is love in a home, unselfishness is the law. Each forgets self and lives for others.But where there is selfishness it mars joy. One selfish soul will destroy the sweetness of life in any home. It is like an ugly bush in the midst of a garden of flowers. It was selfishness that destroyed the first home and blighted all the loveliness of Paradise; and it has been blighting lovely things in earth's home ever since. We need to guard against this spirit.” - J.R. Miller
25. “Each one of us is selfish, including me.” - Santosh Kalwar
26. “[Dona Maria] saw that the people of this world moved about in an armor of egotism, drunk with self-gazing, athirst for compliments, hearing little of what was said to them, unmoved by the accidents that befell their closest friends, in dread of all appeals that might interrupt their long communion with their own desires.” - Thornton Wilder
27. “Almost every sinful action ever committed can be traced back to a selfish motive. It is a trait we hate in other people but justify in ourselves. ” - Stephen Kendrick
28. “Nobody knows you as well as our spouse. And that means no one will be quicker to recognize a change when you deliberately start sacrificing your wants and wishes to make sure his or her needs are met. ” - Stephen Kendrick
29. “Even the early droplets of selfish decisions suggest a direction. Then the little inflecting rivulets come, merging into small brooks and soon into larger streams; finally one is swept along by a vast river which flows into the “gulf of misery and endless wo” (Hel. 5:12).” - Neal A. Maxwell
30. “Human beings appear to be sufficiently selfish and calculating to be capable of indefinitely greater harmony and social homeostasis. This statement is not self-contradictory. True selfishness, if obedient to the other constraints of mammalian biology, is the key to a more nearly perfect social contract.” - Edward O. Wilson
31. “My hair would continue to gray, and then one day, it would fall out entirely, and then, on a day meaninglessly close to the present one, meaninglessly like the present one, I would disappear from the earth. And all these emotions, all these yearnings, all these data, if that helps to clinch the enormity of what I'm talking about, would be gone. And that's what immortality means. It means selfishness. My generations belief that each one of us matters more than you or anyone else would think.” - Gary Shteyngart
32. “No man is more cheated than the selfish man.” - Henry Ward Beecher
33. “It is pleasure that lurks in the practice of every one of your virtues. Man performs actions because they are good for him, and when they are good for other people as well they are thought virtuous: if he finds pleasure in helping others he is benevolent; if he finds pleasure in working for society he is public-spirited; but it is for your private pleasure that you give twopence to a beggar as much as it is for my private pleasure that I drink another whiskey and soda. I, less of a humbug than you, neither applaud myself for my pleasure nor demand your admiration.” - W. Somerset Maugham
34. “People don't want other people to be people.” - Gene Wolfe
35. “Walter had never liked cats. They'd seemed to him the sociopaths of the pet world, a species domesticated as an evil necessary for the control of rodents and subsequently fetishized the way unhappy countries fetishize their militaries, saluting the uniforms of killers as cat owners stroke their animals' lovely fur and forgive their claws and fangs. He'd never seen anything in a cat's face but simpering incuriosity and self-interest; you only had to tease one with a mouse-toy to see where it's true heart lay...cats were all about using people” - Jonathan Franzen
36. “We all of us need to be toppled off the throne of self, my dear," he said. "Perched up there the tears of others are never upon our own cheek.” - Elizabeth Goudge
37. “People like us, we think differently, don't we? We are different. We do all the things that others do. But when it comes down to it, we don't need anyone else. We're happy doing what we do and having obligation interferes with that. And sometimes I think we don't even need ourselves. What's most important is to find out whether we're right or not.” - Simon Morden
38. “I content myself with the fact that the general system of our trade is a system of selfishness, is not dictated by the high sentiments of human nature much less by the sentiments of love and heroism but is a system of distrust not of giving, but of taking advantage.” - Joshua Ferris
39. “To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less...selfish.” - Alan Bennett
40. “God favors men and women who delight in being made worthy of happiness before the happiness itself.” - Criss Jami
41. “It is the philosophers, theologians, and evangelists who are said to be filled with pride and bigotry due to the strong convictions that they represent. On the contrary, teachings can be either taken or dismissed; whereas voting is the only thing the average person can do to force everyone to live how they would prefer. A simple vote is among the largest yet most acceptable forms of bigotry, and that is because people play the card only when they feel that in doing so it conveniences themselves.” - Criss Jami
42. “When you have wit of your own, it's a pleasure to credit other people for theirs.” - Criss Jami
43. “Being self-sufficient is not selfish; it is a need. Harming others or yourself is not selfish because it will never benefit the self; it is just stupid.” - Elizabeth Cartwright
44. “We all should rise, above the clouds of ignorance, narrowness, and selfishness.” - Booker T. Washington
45. “Each man is everything to himself, for with his death everything is dead for him. That is why each of us thinks he is everything to everyone. We must not judge nature by ourselves, but by its own standards.” - Blaise Pascal
46. “It all depends on what people you're talking about helping. That's the wonderful think about just about every religion on the planet - they're all so incredibly selfish.” - Derek Landy
47. “Let us admit, without bitterness, that the individual has his distinct interests and can, without felony, stipulate for those interests and defend them. The present has its pardonable amount of egotism; momentary life has its claims, and cannot be expected to sacrifice itself incessantly to the future. The generation which is in its turn passing over the earth is not forced to abridge its life for the sake of the generations, its equals after all, whose turn shall come later on.” - Victor Hugo
48. “Suppose you were the last one left? Suppose you did that to yourself?” - Cormac McCarthy
49. “Your corn is ripe today; mine will be so tomorrow. 'Tis profitable for us both, that I should labour with you today, and that you should aid me tomorrow. I have no kindness for you, and know you have as little for me. I will not, therefore, take any pains upon your account; and should I labour with you upon my own account, in expectation of a return, I know I should be disappointed, and that I should in vain depend upon your gratitude. Here then I leave you to labour alone; You treat me in the same manner. The seasons change; and both of us lose our harvests for want of mutual confidence and security.” - David Hume
50. “Love is the most selfish of all the passions.” - Alexandre Dumas
51. “Committing suicide essentially said to friends and loved ones and the world at large that you were the only thing that mattered, that your problems were hopeless that you deserved to escape from them and to hell with everyone else.Suicide was nothing more than a way to look in the eye of the people who loved you and say, "My pain is paramount and I want it to end. The pain you will feel when I am gone, and the guilt you will experience at not having been able to stop me, do not matter to me. I am willing for you to suffer for the rest of your life so that I can take the easy way out of mine.” - Christine Warren
52. “Unconditional love. That’s what he wants to give her and what he wants from her. People should give without wanting anything in return. All other giving is selfish. But he is being selfish a little, isn’t he, by wanting her to love him in return? He hopes that she loves him in return. Is it possible for a person to love without wanting love back? Is anything so pure? Or is love, by its nature, a reciprocity, like oceans and clouds, an evaporating of seawater and a replenishing of rain?” - Alan Lightman
53. “It was because all we wanted was each other's constant love and attention and for no one else to receive that love and attention, which is a selfish and difficult place to be in a relationship. We were emotionally retarded, and that was the best we could do at the time.” - Anthony Kiedis
54. “Wars come from egotism and selfishness. Every macrocosmic or world war has its origin in microcosmic wars going on inside millions and millions of individuals.” - Fulton J. Sheen
55. “Selfishness and greed, individual or national, cause most of our troubles.” - Harry S. Truman
56. “One of the greatest evils is the foolishness of a good man. For the giving man to withhold helping someone in order to first assure personal fortification is not selfish, but to elude needless self-destruction; martyrdom is only practical when the thought is to die, else a good man faces the consequence of digging a hole from which he cannot escape, and truly helps no one in the long run.” - Mike Norton
57. “Intensely selfish people are always very decided as to what they wish. They do not waste their energies in considering the good of others.” - Ouida
58. “What are you really living for? It's crucial to realize that you either glorify God, or you glorify something or someone else. You're always making something look big. If you don't glorify God when you're involved in a conflict, you inevitably show that someone or something else rules your heart.” - Ken Sande
59. “Most people are far too much occupied with themselves to be malicious.” - Friedrich Nietzsche
60. “Self-pity is egotism undiluted, after all—self-centeredness in its purest form.” - Rick Yancey
61. “I have always found it quaint and rather touching that there is a movement [Libertarians] in the US that thinks Americans are not yet selfish enough.” - Christopher Hitchens
62. “Selfishness Stops The Flow Of Blessings To You and Others” - Brenda Johnson Padgitt
63. “In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.” - David Mitchell
64. “How arrogant you areTo think your wretched Self so singular!The disappointments of this world will dieIn less time than the blinking of an eye,And as the earth must pass, pass by the earth Don't even glance at it, know what it's worth;What empty foolishness it is to careFor what must one day be dispersed to air!” - Farid ud-Din Attar
65. “God comes right out and tells us why he gives us more money than we need. It's not so we can find more ways to spend it. It's not so we can indulge ourselves and spoil our children. It's not so we can insulate ourselves from needing God's provision. It's so we can give and give generously (2 Corinthians 8:14; 9:11)” - Randy Alcorn
66. “What Douglas had once seen as the attractive over-confidence of youth, now looked more like unyielding selfishness.” - Len Deighton
67. “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
68. “Everyone wants a piece of you. The trick is what piece to give.” - Solange nicole
69. “The problem is hedonism. The problem is the preening vanity and selfishness of 'coming out,' of parading private inclinations, of a kind that repel normal people, as if those inclinations were, all by themselves, marks of authenticity and virtue, of suffering and oppression.” - John Derbyshire
70. “When you get born your father and mother lost something out of themselves, and they are going to bust a ham trying to get it back, and you are it. They know they can't get it all back but they will get as big a chunk out of you as they can.” - Robert Penn Warren
71. “Obviously, the choice between human selfishness and divine Selfishness is not about leaving or not leaving a relationship. More important are the day-to-day opportunities in the course of relationship. It is really the choice of living from the heart or living from fear. And how do you live from fear? Saying "yes" when your heart wants to say "no." Saying "no" when your heart wants to say "yes." By not listening to your heart (i.e., what is best for your soul), you compromise your truth, and cause suffering in the relationship. You may be afraid of hurting your friend. You may be afraid of losing their love and friendship. Whatever it is you are afraid of, it is still fear that is ruling you, rather than love.” - Joyce Vissell
72. “Kujiua ni ubinafsi kwa sababu ya watu wanaokupenda.” - Enock Maregesi
73. “Up to the present man has hardly cultivated sympathy at all. He has merely sympathy with pain, and sympathy with pain is not the highest form of sympathy. All sympathy is fine, but sympathy with suffering is the least fine mode. It is tainted with egotism. It is apt to become morbid. There is in it a certain element of terror for our own safety. We become afraid that we ourselves might be as the leper or as the blind, and that no man would have care of us. It is curiously limiting, too. One should sympathise with the entirety of life, not with life's sores and maladies merely, but with life's joy and beauty and energy and health and freedom.” - Oscar Wilde
74. “Nafasi yako peponi itapotea iwapo utamruhusu Pluto (kiongozi wa ahera) akukaribishe bazarai (makao makuu ya ahera) kwa kuchukua maisha yako mwenyewe. Kujiua ni kujipenda zaidi kuliko unaowapenda. Anayejiua hujifikiria zaidi yeye kuliko wengine.” - Enock Maregesi
75. “I used to send my characters into a fire that necessarily consumed them, but I have learned, a little, how to send them through the fire to a new place. The characters who do not change — most notably Nakota in Cipher, Bibi in Skin, and Lena in Kink — are motivated by an essential selfishness or self-centeredness, an unwillingness to relinquish control to the process, a refusal to become.” - Kathe Koja
76. “The main condition for the achievement of love is the overcoming of one's narcissism. The narcissistic orientation is one in which one experiences as real only that which exists within oneself, while the phenomena in the outside world have no reality in themselves, but are experienced only from the viewpoint of their being useful or dangerous to one. The opposite pole to narcissism is objectivity; it is the faculty to see other people and things as they are, objectively, and to be able to separate this objective picture from a picture which is formed by one's desires and fears.” - Erich Fromm
77. “The faculty to think objectively is reason; the emotional attitude behind reason is that of humility. To be objective, to use one's reason, is possible only if one has achieved an attitude of humility, if one has emerged from the dreams of omniscience and omnipotence which one has as a child. Love, being dependent on the relative absence of narcissism, requires the developement of humility, objectivity and reason. I must try to see the difference between my picture of a person and his behavior, as it is narcissistically distorted, and the person's reality as it exists regardless of my interests, needs and fears.” - Erich Fromm
78. “You selfish bitch!"She had known for a long time that putting her needs above those of Adam's wife and children was indeed selfish. She had no real answer to the accusation thrown at her."I'm sorry" she said, with her head in her hands."you're sorry?" came her adversary's disbelieving reply."I am. I'm sorry he married you when he was in love with me. I'm sorry I couldn't have loved someone else. I'm sorry your marriage is a joke and I'm sorry that I'm alone. I'm sorry for a lot of things - for you, for your kids, for me and for him. I spend most of my time being sorry."For a moment there was silence at the end of the line."all you had to do was stay away""if only I could have." tears escaped and raced down her cheeks."I hate you!” - Anna McPartlin
79. “I thought he'd pick me, I know he has kids, but when it came down to it, I really thought he'd pick me."Tears rolled down her face and her nose ran. She sniffed."I know I'm selfish""You're human""I wanted him to abandon his children” - Anna McPartlin
80. “Indeed this gentleman's stoicism was of that not uncommon kind, which enables a man to bear with exemplary fortitude the afflictions of his friends, but renders him, by way of counterpoise, rather selfish and sensitive in respect of any that happen to befall himself.” - Charles Dickens
81. “Man is not, by nature, deserving of all that he wants. When we think that we are automatically entitled to something, that is when we start walking all over others to get it.” - Criss Jami
82. “...perhaps great sins start as simple weakness, and the consistent placing of self before others.” - Anne Perry
83. “...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
84. “You know, Emily was a selfish old woman in her way. She was very generous, but she always wanted a return. She never let people forget what she had done for them - and, that way she missed love.” - Agatha Christie
85. “...only in relatively recent times have people decided that "because I want to" is sufficient reason for annoying others.” - Bill McKibben
86. “Why are...poor people more ready to share their goods than rich people? The answer is easy: The poor have little to lose; the rich have more to lose and they are more attached to their possessions. Poverty provides a deeper motivation for understanding your neighbors, welcoming others and attending to those who are suffering. I would go so far as to say that poverty helps you understand what happiness is, what serenity is in life.” - Piero Gheddo
87. “Human beings are never to be treated as a means but always as ends.” - Immanuel Kant
88. “Some take pains to be biblical, but many [Christian financial teachers, writers, investment counselors, and seminar leaders] simply parrot their secular colleagues. Other than beginning and ending with prayer, mentioning Christ, and sprinkling in some Bible verses, there's no fundamental difference. They reinforce people's materialist attitudes and lifestyles. They suggest a variety of profitable plans in which people can spend or stockpile the bulk of their resources. In short, to borrow a term from Jesus, some Christian financial experts are helping people to be the most successful 'rich fools' they can be.” - Randy Alcorn
89. “Selfishness is one of the principal fruits of the corruption of human nature; and it is obvious that selfishness disposes us to over-rate our good qualities, and to overlook or extenuate our defects.” - William Wilberforce
90. “I don't want you to leaveWhich is exactly why I should. But don't worry. I'm essentially a selfish creature. I crave your company too much to do what I should.” - Stephenie Meyer
91. “All love may begin by being passionate, especially for younger people. But in the process of living together, they have to learn and practice love, so that selfishness--the tendency to possess--will diminsh, and the elemetns of understanding and gratitude will settle in, little by little, until their love becomes nourishing, protecting, and reassuring," (41).” - Thich Nhat Hanh
92. “To Love oneself is Ok but,to love only oneself isn't!” - Krishna Kumar Kanagal
93. “I wish I could break this window. Step through it. But I can't break this window. I can't even find some less dramatic way to die inside of this school, like hanging myself or slitting my wrists, because what would they do with my body? It might put everyone at risk. I won't let myself do that.I'm not selfish like Lily.I hate her. I hate her so much my heart tries to crawl out of my throat but it gets stuck there and beats crazily in the too narrow space. I bring my hands to my neck and try to massage it back down. I pres so heard against the skin, my eyes sting, and then I'm hurrying back down the stairs, back to the first floor. I think of Trace running laps, something he can control.” - Courtney Summers
94. “The trouble with Clare was, not only that she wanted to have her cake and eat it too, but that she wanted to nibble at the cakes of other folk as well.” - Nella Larsen
95. “The world is not fair, and often fools, cowards, liars and the selfish hide in high places. (p 57)” - Bryant McGill
96. “It is not really a small thing when in small things we resist self.” - Thomas A. Kempis
97. “It is possible that our present-day discussion about needs might be framed more by secular psychological theories than by Scripture. If this is so, we should be careful about saying, "Jesus meets all our needs." At first, this has a plausible biblical ring to it. Christ _is_a friend; God _is_ a loving Father; Christians _do_ experience a sense of meaningfulness and confidence in knowing God's love. It makes Christ the answer to our problems. Yet if our use of the term "needs" is ambiguous, and its range of meaning extends all the way to selfish desires, then there will be some situations where we should say that Jesus does not intend to meet our needs, but that he intends to change our needs.” - Edward T. Welch
98. “When we don’t put the brakes on our self-absorption, we have nothing stopping us from total self-destruction. We become the fruits of our actions.” - Zeena Schreck
99. “It's way too easy to see the real face of a person. They're amiable and full of pretense when they want something from you, but the minute you don't give in, back away or put yourself first (like they do) is the minute they show you who they really are.” - Donna Lynn Hope
100. “Deceit for personal gain is one of history's most recurring crimes. Man's first step towards change would be thinking, counter-arguing, re-thinking, twisting, straightening, perfecting, then believing every original idea he intends to make public before making it public. There is always an angle from which an absolute truth may appear askew just as there is always a personal emotion, or a personal agenda, which alienates the ultimate good of mankind.” - Criss Jami