Egoism Quotes

One altar forever is preserved, that whereon we burn incense to the supreme idol,--ourselves, our god is great, and money is his Prophet! We devastate nature in order to make sacrifice to him; we boast that we have conquered Matter and forget that it is matter that has forever enslaved us.

Kakuzō Okakura

We have only minimal control over the rewards for our work and effort - other people’s validation, recognition, rewards. It’s far better when doing the work itself is sufficient. When fulfilling our own internal standards is what fills us with pride and self-respect. The less attached we are to the outcomes, the better. Our ego wants recognition & compensation. We have expectations. Let the effort, not the results be enough. Maybe your parents/kids/partner/etc won’t be impressed. We can’t let THAT be what motivates us. We can change the definition of success to: ‘peace of mind, which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to do your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming.’ With this definition we decide not to let externals determine if something is worth doing. It’s on us.

Ryan Holiday

The meaning and worth of love, as a feeling, is that it really forces us, with all our being, to acknowledge for ANOTHER the same absolute central significance which, because of the power of our egoism, we are conscious of only in our own selves. Love is important not as one of our feelings, but as the transfer of all our interest in life from ourselves to another, as the shifting of the very centre of our personal life. This is characteristic of every kind of love, but predominantly of sexual love; it is distinguished from other kinds of love by greater intensity, by a more engrossing character, and by the possibility of a more complete overall reciprocity. Only this love can lead to the real and indissoluble union of two lives into one; only of it do the words of Holy Writ say: 'They shall be one flesh,' i.e., shall become one real being.

Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov

Politicians look for interests not people

Bangambiki Habyarimana

The social system of capital separates most people from the conditions of existence. This compels the vast majority to accept the mediations of work and commodity consumption in order to maintain a minimal existence at the expense of their lives, desires and dreams, of their individuality. The artificial economic scarcity imposed by capital leads to a competition that is often promoted in the United States as the basis of "individualism" in spite of the fact that it creates nearly identical mediocre existences in which life is subsumed in survival... If all individuals are indeed to be free to create their lives and relations as they desire, it is necessary to create a world in which equality of access to the means and conditions of existence is reality. This requires the total destruction of economy—the end of property, commodity exchange and work. Thus we see that the generalized realization of individual freedom goes hand-in-hands with the best aspects of the anarcho-communist ideal and can only be achieved through a revolutionary transformation.

Wolfi Landstreicher Individualism and Communism

I don't want to write a mass before being in a state to do it well, that is a Christian. I have therefore taken a singular course to reconcile my ideas with the exigencies of Academy rules. They ask me for something religious: very well, I shall do something religious, but of the pagan religion. . . . I have always read the ancient pagans with infinite pleasure, while in Christian writers I find only system, egoism, intolerance, and a complete lack of artistic taste.

Georges Bizet

Stay away from lazy parasites, who perch on you just to satisfy their needs, they do not come to alleviate your burdens, hence, their mission is to distract, detract and extract, and make you live in abject poverty.

Michael Bassey Johnson

…In the very simplicity of her desire to punish herself appeared egoism in its purest form. Never before had this woman who seemed to think only of herself experienced an egoism so immaculate.

Yukio Mishima

You have no understanding of the warrior code at all. What you've done here proves it. You've risked the lives of young kits... by leaving them alone here. Anything could have happened to them. They could have been lost. They could have died. My kits could have died. But you didn't just betray me. You betrayed the entire Clan. You did all this... and you never considered how it would make any of us feel. The Clan is a family, Sol. A community. And you're incapable of thinking about anyone but yourself.

Erin Hunter

Yuvraj Singh is one of the best batsmen to watch in world cricket when he's in form. He is ego personified. Yuvraj doesn’t just hit the ball, he lets it rebound off his aura.

Jarrod Kimber

An eminent philosopher among my friends, who can dignify even your ugly furniture by lifting it into the serene light of science, has shown me this pregnant little fact. Your pierglass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially, and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable. The scratches are events, the candle is the egoism of any party now absent.

George Eliot

A politician is a man in his natural state

Bangambiki Habyarimana

Most of the people don't see a big success in life, because small successes ignites ego issues in them.

Amit Kalantri

Ego very much wants to make you think that your self worth is all about what you possess, what you've accomplished, and who you know.

Taite Adams

If you are worrying about reputation, you are taking time away from doing the things that really matter.

Taite Adams

When relying solely on ego, we are given many messages that are contrary to the achievement of that happy and fulfilling life that most of us actually desire.

Taite Adams

The ego is never satisfied. So, if you're not satisfied with what you have right now, consider what is driving you.

Taite Adams

Ego sends a lot of messages through the sub-conscious that do not serve our true nature, even a little bit.

Taite Adams

If you're brighter than a lightning bug, don't show your ass

Stanley Victor Paskavich

God cares only for what is his, busies himself with only himself, thinks only of himself, and has only himself before his eyes...He serves no higher person, and satisfies only himself. His cause is--A purely egoistic cause.

Max Stirner

Our ego occupies so much space, there is little room for anything else.

Nilesh Rathod

...the human being to lack that second skin we call egoism has not yet been born, it lasts much longer than the other one, that bleeds so readily.

José Saramago

She liked the idea of a place belonging to the cows, no ownership of human ego.

Aporva Kala

There isn’t a parallel of latitude but thinks it would have been the equator if it had had its rights.

Mark Twain

The men of the future will yet fight their way to many a liberty that we do not even miss.

Max Stirner

There is only one power which can from within undermine egoism at the root, and really does undermine it, namely love, and chiefly sexual love. The falsehood and evil of egoism consists in the exclusive acknowledgement of absolute significance for oneself and in the denial of it for others. Reason shows us that this is unfounded and unjust, but simply by the facts love directly abrogates such an unjust relation, compelling us not by abstract consciousness, but by an internal emotion and the will of life to recognize for ourselves the absolute significance of another. Recognizing in love the truth of another, not abstractly, but essentially, transferring in deed the centre of our life beyond the limits of our empirical personality, we by so doing reveal and realize our own real truth, our own absolute significance, which consists just in our capacity to transcend the borders of our factual phenomenal being, in our capacity to live not only in ourselves, but also in another.

Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov

Self Importance is the worst sin a person can get into

Rajesh Nanoo

The point that I think myself to be so terribly clever is the precise point at which I am beginning to think myself to be god-like, which causes me to become God-less.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

But self-abasement is just inverted egoism. Anyone who acts with genuine humility will be as far from humiliation as from arrogance.

Stephen Mitchell

People who are depressed at the thought that all our motives are selfish are [confused]. They have mixed up ultimate causation (why something evolved by natural selection) with proximate causation (how the entity works here and now). [A] good way to understand the logic of natural selection is to imagine that genes are agents with selfish motives. [T]he genes have metaphorical motives — making copies of themselves — and the organisms they design have real motives. But they are not the same motives. Sometimes the most selfish thing a gene can do is wire unselfish motives into a human brain — heartfelt, unstinting, deep-in-the-marrow unselfishness. The love of children (who carry one's genes into posterity), a faithful spouse (whose genetic fate is identical to one's own), and friends and allies (who trust you if you're trustworthy) can be bottomless and unimpeachable as far as we humans are concerned (proximate level), even if it is metaphorically self-serving as far as the genes are concerned (ultimate level). Combine this with the common misconception that the genes are a kind of essence or core of the person, and you get a mongrel of Dawkins and Freud: the idea that the metaphorical motives of the genes are the deep, unconscious, ulterior motives of the person. That is an error.

Steven Pinker

It is something like the way dame Nature gathers round a foreign body an envelope of some insensitive tissue which can protect from evil that which it would otherwise harm by contact. 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 root for its causes than we have knowledge of.

Bram Stoker

If I assume the ‘truth’ to be negotiable based on whether or not it serves my agenda, then my agenda has become my ‘truth.’ And the ‘truth’ of the matter is, when I do this I’ve chosen to take a treacherous path through some very deep woods where neither path nor woods exist.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

Accept the ego of extraordinary people as they have achieved something but don't accept the ego of ordinary people.

Amit Kalantri

Egoism holds, therefore, is that each man's happiness is the sole good--that a number of different things are each of them the only good thing there is--an absolute contradiction! No more complete and thorough refutation of any theory could be desired.

G.E. Moore

It is only man's egoism that wants to keep woman like some buried treasure.

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

Nobody wants to know how you feel, yet, they want you to do what they feel.

Michael Bassey Johnson

She was a wicked thing sometimes. All full of want. As if the shape of the world depended on her mood. As if she were important.

Patrick Rothfuss

Failure to recognize one's own absolute significance is equivalent to a denial of human worth; this is a basic error and the origin of all unbelief. If one is so faint-hearted that he is powerless even to believe in himself, how can he believe in anything else? The basic falsehood and evil of egoism lie not in this absolute self-consciousness and self-evaluation of the subject, but in the fact that, ascribing to himself in all justice an absolute significance, he unjustly refuses to others this same significance. Recognizing himself as a centre of life (which as a matter of fact he is), he relegates others to the circumference of his own being and leaves them only an external and relative value.

Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov

She enjoyed her own pain by this egoism of suffering, if I may so express it. This aggravation of suffering and this rebelling in it I could understand; it is the enjoyment of man, of the insulted and injured, oppressed by destiny, and smarting under the sense of its injustice.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

You'll make bundle of blunders if you consider yourself too clever to look at anothers work.

Michael Bassey Johnson

It is through the filter of our ego that we give meaning to everything we see, touch, hear, taste and feel.

Gyalwa Dokhampa

Someone who is said to have a big ego is thought to be full of themselves, to lack the ability to listen, to always rush to be at the top of the tree and to think their own ideas are the best.

Gyalwa Dokhampa

We who are born into this age of freedom and independence and the self must undergo this loneliness. It is the price we pay for these times of ours.

Sōseki Natsume

Ego doesn't want us to be loving, forgiving and kind to each other or even to ourselves.

Taite Adams

Worry is the greatest seed [cause] for the worldly life because worrying is the greatest egoism. If the egoism leaves, then worries will go away.

Dada Bhagwan

Worrying is the greatest egoism!

Dada Bhagwan

Spontaneous and natural (sahajik) speech means there is not an iota of ego in it.

Dada Bhagwan

Egoism devours all the energy, and in addition it makes one suffer.

Dada Bhagwan

One’ is not a doer in this world. Where he believes that he is the doer, there is ‘charging’ (of karma). When one tastes egoistic pride of, “I did this samayik, I did these activities”, he will ‘charge’ (karma). The taste of egoistic pride is very sweet.

Dada Bhagwan

To run the worldly life, Egoism is not required. To bind [karma] for the next life, Egoism is required. If one doesn’t want the bondage for the next life, then also it is possible to conduct the worldly life without egoism. Entire worldly life is in the ‘discharge’ form. So it will continue to ‘discharge’ by itself.

Dada Bhagwan

This is not suitable for me”- to say this is indeed madness, it is nothing but egoism. To say ‘will not suit’ is an offense.

Dada Bhagwan

To say that, “I will not agree (will not accept)” is great egoism!

Dada Bhagwan

The true instrument is that, with the help of which, the egoism and my-ness goes away.

Dada Bhagwan

Ego will always conduct itself to make sure that it does not appear bad.

Dada Bhagwan

If one has egoism without my-ness, he will go to moksha; all this entrapment is there because of egoism with my-ness!

Dada Bhagwan

Gnani Purush’ (the enlightened one) is considered to be the owner of the whole universe. And yet, there is not the slightest egoism in Him. Where there is no authority, there is egoism and where there is authority, there is no egoism. This is the wonder of ‘Gnani Purush!’ ‘Gnani Purush’ is the manifest light.

Dada Bhagwan

Your level of ignorance is based on what you believe you know and your ego.

Kemi Sogunle

ego promenades, flounces, pushes in unwanted places, trips, stands on others, whereas a sense of destiny grounds - you just do what you do

Jay Woodman

Where the world comes in my way - and it comes in my way everywhere - I consume it to quiet the hunger of my egoism. For me you are nothing but - my food, even as I too am fed upon and turned to use by you. We have only one relation to each other, that of usableness, of utility, of use. We owe each other nothing, for what I seem to owe you I owe at most to myself. If I show you a cheery air in order to cheer you likewise, then your cheeriness is of consequence to me, and my air serves my wish; to a thousand others, whom I do not aim to cheer, I do not show it.

Max Stirner

Shyness is just egoism out of its depth.

Penelope Keith

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Egoism Quotes

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