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

"I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (Notes from Underground)

"Your conscience is the measure of the honesty of your selfishness.
Listen to it carefully."
— Richard Bach (Illusions)

"Manifest plainness,
Embrace simplicity,
Reduce selfishness,
Have few desires."
— Laozi

"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 (Angels in America, Part Two: Perestroika)

"Selfish- a judgment readily passed by those who have never tested their own power of sacrifice. "
— George Eliot (Silas Marner)

"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 (Love Among the Chickens)

"Just two choices on the shelf, pleasing God or pleasing self."
— Ken Collier

"Whatever joy there is in the world
Arises from wishing for others' happiness.
Whatever suffering there is in the world
Arises from wishing for your own happiness."
— -Shantideva

"Nothing resembles selfishness more closely than self-respect"
— George Sand (Indiana)

"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

"I tried to manipulate and control people, and I harbored resentment. I wanted to be forgiven, but I wouldn't forgive others."
— Lauryn Hill

"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. "
— The Love Dare

""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 (Carmilla)

"[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 (The Bridge of San Luis Rey)

"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 (The Count of Monte Cristo)

"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 (Sister Carrie)

"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. "
— The Love Dare