Let grace our selfishness expel,
Our earthliness refine. [ Gurney ]

Men err from selfishness, women because they are weak. [ Mme. de Stael ]

The craven's fear is but selfishness, like his merriment. [ Whittier ]

Selfishness is the grand moving principle of nine-tenths of our actions. [ Rochefoucauld ]

The selfish, loving only themselves, are loved by no one: so, selfishness is moral suicide. [ De Gaston ]

While Selfishness joins hands with no one of the virtues. Benevolence is allied to them all. [ Oliver Goldsmith ]

The mean man suffers more from his selfishness than he from whom meanness withholds some important benefit. [ Emerson ]

Covetousness is a sort of mental gluttony, not confined to money, but craving honor, and feeding on selfishness. [ Cham fort ]

Commerce has set the mark of selfishness, the signet of all-enslaving power, upon a shining ore and called it gold. [ Shelley ]

He that is sensible of no evil but what he feels, has a hard heart; and he that can spare no kindness from himself, has a narrow soul. [ Collier ]

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. [ Emile Souvestre ]

This span of life was lent for lofty duties, not for selfishness; not to be wiled away for aimless dreams, but to improve ourselves, and serve mankind. [ Sir Aubrey de Vere ]

It is also important to guard against mistaking for good-nature what is properly good-humor, - a cheerful flow of spirits and easy temper not readily annoyed, which is compatible with great selfishness. [ Whately ]

Government began in tyranny and force, in the feudalism of the soldier and the bigotry of the priest; and the ideas of justice and humanity have been fighting their way like a thunderstorm against the organised selfishness of human nature. [ Wendell Phillips ]

Nowadays enthusiasm is accounted folly; truth, cynicism; dissimulation, self-control; stiffness of manners, dignity; deception, cleverness; hypocrisy, decency; selfishness, economy; freedom of thought, effrontery; and superstition, the prop of human morals. What progress in language!

Many a good intention dies from inattention. If, through carelessness or indolence, or selfishness, a good intention is not put into effect, we have lost an opportunity, demoralized ourselves, and stolen from the pile of possible good. To be born and not fed, is to perish. To launch a ship and neglect it is to lose it. To have a talent and bury it, is to be a wicked and slothful servant. For in the end we shall be judged, not alone by what we have done, but by what we could have done. [ Maltbie Babcock ]

Gratitude is a link between justice and love. It discharges by means of affections those debts which the affections only can discharge, and which are so much the more sacred for this reason. Gratitude never springs up in the soil of selfishness, for self-interest in its eagerness to appropriate is unable to understand the impulses of generosity or to measure the true value of the gift. And, when we do understand it, we must love much to be willing to accept, we refuse when we love but little. Gratitude is the justice of the heart. [ Degerando ]