Selfish Spendthrift Quotes

You may choose to live like a miser," Leo said, "but I'll be damned if I have to. You're incapable of enjoying the moment because you're always intent on tomorrow. Well, for some people, tomorrow never comes."
Her temper flared. "Someone has to think of tomorrow, you selfish spendthrift!"
"Coming from an overbearing shrew - "
Win stepped between them, resting a gentle hand on Amelia's shoulder. "Hush, both of you. It serves no purpose to make yourselves cross just before we are to leave." She gave Amelia a sweet quirk of a smile that no one on earth could have resisted. "Don't frown like that, dear. What if your face stayed that way?"
"With prolonged exposure to Leo," Amelia replied, "it undoubtedly would. ~ Lisa Kleypas

I wasn't good enough for abnegation," I say, "and I wanted to be free. So I chose Dauntless." "Why weren't you good enough?" "Because I was selfish." I say. "You were selfish? You aren't anymore?" "Of course I am. My mother said that everyone is selfish," I say, "but I became less selfish in Dauntless. I discovered there were people I would fight for. Die for, even. ~ Veronica Roth

The education system today makes and educated person selfish. It makes that person a slave to the senses and as a consequence the person forgets their own divine nature. ~ Sai Baba

Secondly, I've always harbored a deep fear of appearing to be selfish or self-centered. Finally, ~ Nate Terrell

Complex adaptations like "being a little selfish" and "not being willing to
work without reward" are human universals. The strength might vary a bit
from person to person, but everyone's got the same machinery under the
hood, we're just painted different colors. ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky

In retrospect, all these exercises in self-gratification seem pure fantasy, what Pascal called, licking the earth. ~ Malcolm Muggeridge

Patriotism is the opposite of selfish individualism. ~ David Ehrenfeld

There are no heroes, Tian Haoli. Grand Secretary Shi was both courageous and cowardly, capable and foolish. Wang Xiuchu was both an opportunistic survivor and a man of greatness of spirit. I'm mostly selfish and vain, but sometimes even I surprise myself. We're all just ordinary men - well, I'm an ordinary demon - faced with extraordinary choices. In those moments, sometimes heroic ideals demand that we become their avatars. ~ Ken Liu

When outsiders criticize Americans, they regularly note that we seem self-centered, which we are. But few contend we are selfish, and with good reason; we are not. ~ Harry Beckwith

But he was thankful for the offer and dimly he was beginning to formulate in his mind the feeling that the world is made up of good people and bad people, of selfish people and thoughtful people, of cruel people and kind people, and it was merely a case of luck as to which kind you met when you went on a great adventure. ~ Gene Stratton-Porter

3. Alone
The long march up the fulvous ridgebacks to
The marches, the frontiers of difference --
Where flesh marches with bone, day marches with
His wife the night, and country marches with
Another country -- is accomplished best,
By paradox, alone. A world of twos,
Of yangs and yins, of lives and objects, of
Sound grasses and deaf stones, is best essayed
By sole infiltrators who have cast off
Their ties to living moorings, and stand out
Into the roads of noon approaching night
Casting a single shadow, earnest of
Their honorable intention to lay down
Their lives for their old country, humankind,
In the same selfish spirit that inspired
Their lifelong journey, largely and at last
Alone, across the passes that divide
A life from every other, the sheer crags
Of overweening will, the deepening scarps
Like brain fissures that cunningly cut off
Each outcrop from the main and make it one
While its luck lasts, while its bravura holds
Against all odds, until the final climb
Across the mountains to the farther shore
Of sundown on the watersheds, where self,
Propelled by its last rays, sways in the sway
Of the last grasses and falls headlong in
The darkness of the dust it is part of
Upon the passes where we are no more:
Where the recirculating shaft goes home
Into the breast that armed it for the air,
And, as we must expect, the ~ L.E. Sissman

Sometimes, you can hurt another person by being true to yourself, but in the longterm you are doing both of you a favour. You can also hurt them by just being a selfish bitch and there is no excuse for that. Sometimes it is quite difficult to tell the two situations apart. ~ Kate Kerrigan

The Bible is not a witness to the best people making it up to God; it's a witness to God making it down to the worst people. Far from being a book full of moral heroes whom we are commanded to emulate, what we discover is that the so-called heroes in the Bible are not really heroes at all. They fall and fail; they make huge mistakes; they get afraid; they're selfish, deceptive, egotistical, and unreliable. The Bible is one long story of God meeting our rebellion with His rescue, our sin with His salvation, our guilt with His grace, our badness with His goodness. ~ Tullian Tchividjian

Authentic greatness involves doing great things and then saying that I had nothing to do with it because God had everything to do with it. Anything else is my ego on a bender. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

No clouds gathered in the skies and the polluted streams became clear, whilst celestial music rang through the air and the angels rejoiced with gladness. With no selfish or partial joy but for the sake of the law they rejoiced, for creation engulfed in the ocean of pain was now to obtain release. ~ Gautama Buddha

But God was never about power over us. It was about the power we possessed to either be good in His graces, or be selfish and wretched in His shadow. So to speak. Hell is being in that shadow. It's not in the next world, but this one, right now, anytime you choose not to do the right thing. As long as we're still here, not merely surviving but trying to do right by one another, then I believe that the heritage of God's light is still in us. ~ Chuck Wendig

What is charm then? The free giving of a grace, the spending of something given by nature in her role of spendthrift ... something extra, superfluous, unnecessary, essentially a power thrown away. ~ Doris Lessing

Taylor Swift on why girls look up to her:
It's the message. I try to have a normal life and look at things in a normal way, under very abnormal circumstances. That's always going to be my main goal, that's always what I'm going to strive for, to be a normal human being. It's interesting because you're put in really abnormal situations. You have an abnormal-size microscope covering your life and everything you do. You look at the idea of being 22, that's when you're supposed to be out there living and being selfish and making mistakes and messing up. If I mess up once, it's a headline everywhere. ~ Taylor Swift

But if you knew that, why on earth did you marry her?" Rosemary asked.

"Why?" Rhett's mouth twisted in a smile.
"Because she was so full of fire and so recklessly, stubbornly brave.Because she was such a child beneath all her pretenses.Because she was unlike any woman I had ever known. She fascinated
me,infuriated me, drove me mad. I loved her as consumingly as she loved him. From the day I first laid eyes on her. It was a kind of disease."
There was a weight of sorrow in his voice. He bowed his head into his two hands and laughed shakily. His voice was muffled and blurred by his fingers. "What a grotesque practical joke life is. Now Ashley Wilkes is a free man and would marry Scarlett on a moment's notice, and I want to be rid of her. Naturally that makes her determined to have me. She wants only what she cannot have."
Rhett raised his head. "I'm afraid," he said quietly, "afraid that it will all begin again. I know that she's heartless and completely selfish, that she's like a child who cries for a toy and then breaks it once she has it. But there are moments when she tilts her head at a certain angle, or she smiles that gleeful smile, or she suddenly looks lost-and I come close to forgetting what I know. ~ Alexandra Ripley

Of all the things I have learned since becoming a parent(and sometimes, it feels as if this might be everything I've learned), perhaps the hardest to accept is that it is selfish and possibly even dangerous to desire particular outcomes for our children. ~ Ben Hewitt

I can't love him. I don't. This feeling is not the selfish, grasping need that I've seen tear apart my family, writhing through heir hearts like worms through rotten apples. ~ Rosamund Hodge

Suppose it was even as you think," he went on, even more gently. "Suppose that all you say was a fact, and that our Elders were but greedy tyrants, ourselves abandoned here by their selfish will and set to fulfill a false and prideful purpose. No." Jamethon's voice rose. "Let me attest as if it were only for myself. Suppose that you could give me proof that all our Elders lied, that our very Covenant was false. Suppose that you could prove to me" - his face lifted to mine and his voice drove at me - "that all was perversion and falsehood, and nowhere among the Chosen, not even in the house of my father, was there faith or hope! If you could prove to me that no miracle could save me, that no soul stood with me, and that opposed were all the legions of the universe, still I, I alone, Mr. Olyn, would go forward as I have been commanded, to the end of the universe, to the culmination of eternity. For without my faith I am but common earth. But with my faith, there is no power can stay me! ~ Gordon R. Dickson

I love you," he said, and I wondered which one of us he was trying to convince. "You're like a secret nobody else has heard yet, and the selfish part of me is glad that other people don't know you the way I do, because if they saw how perfect you are, every one of them would try to steal you away from me. ~ Lisa Henry

Some selfish people rise because some kind people haven't learned the art of saying no to them. ~ Sanhita Baruah

Can you not see it? Can you not feel how badly I want you? I'm a selfish bastard, I'm worse then you'll ever know, but I'll answer to God or anyone else who tries to stand in our way so long as I know you're safe. ~ Alexandra Bracken

He could see now that asking the dead about his father was nearly useless, so burdened were they with their own losses and regrets and distractions. He had no right to press them. It was not enough merely to let them speak. If anything, he should try to bring them comfort, to shorten their suffering. Anything else was selfish, thoughtless, at best redundant. He was also finding it too easy to take on their pain, perhaps because he was more like them than he wanted to admit. Or rather, he had let himself become like them, a wanderer, someone lost in a world he had hewn from his own pain. ~ Ari Berk

You've always brought out the softer side in my master. But he hasn't changed. He's as changeless as he is ageless. He'll always be selfish, manipulative, untamable. He knows no other way to be, for he is all things Wonderland. ~ A.G. Howard

The smear artist reveals himself by his disparate treatment of people and situations. He drapes himself in a superhero cape, claiming to defend the aggrieved. He pretends to right societal wrongs. In fact, though, he's motivated primarily by paid interests and his own selfish agendas. By definition, the job requires that morality and conscience be cast aside ~ Sharyl Attkisson

Lord, with love and mercy you protect us from the dangers of the world. When I spend too much time looking into my smartphone, paying little attention to the beautiful faces of the people around me, I know I am in danger of forgetting who I am. When I text and tweet all sorts of messages to people I hardly know, making no time to have a meaningful conversation with a stranger or even a loved one, I know I am in danger of losing sight of God in others. When I indulge myself by buying things instantly and mindlessly, I am in danger of becoming indifferent to the needs of others. Lord, save me from my selfish ways and addictive attachment to the things of this world. Fill me with love, mercy and inner peace, that I may long to truly be present to those who cry for help. Amen. Read ~ Fr. Warren J. Savage

Man liveth from hour to hour, and knoweth not what may happen; Influences circle him on all sides, and yet must he answer for his actions: For the being that is master of himself, bendeth events to his will, But a slave to selfish passions is the wavering creature of circumstance. ~ Martin Farquhar Tupper

Meme A term introduced by the biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. Dawkins defined memes as small cultural units of transmission, analogous to genes, which are spread from person to person by copying or imitation. Examples of memes in his pioneering essay include cultural artifacts such as melodies, catchphrases, and clothing fashions, as well as abstract beliefs. Like genes, memes are defined as replicators that undergo variation, competition, selection, and retention. At any given moment, many memes are competing for the attention of hosts; however, only memes suited to their sociocultural environment spread successfully, while others become extinct. ~ Limor Shifman

Higgins: I find that the moment I let a woman make friends with me, she becomes jealous, exacting, suspicious, and a damned nuisance. I find that the moment I let myself make friends with a woman, I become selfish and tyrannical. Women upset everything. When you let them into your life, you find that the woman is driving at one thing and youre driving at another.
Pickering: At what, for example?
Higgins: Oh, Lord knows! I suppose the woman wants to live her own life; and the man wants to live his; and each tries to drag the other on to the wrong track. One wants to go north and the other south; and the result is that both have to go east, though they both hate the east wind. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Being "ordinary" means that we reject the idolatry of pursuing excellence for selfish reasons. We aren't digging wells in Africa to prove our worth or value. We aren't serving in the soup kitchen or engaging in spiritual disciplines because we long to be unique, radical, and different. When we do these things for selfish reasons, God becomes a tool for winning our lifetime achievement award. Our neighbors become instruments in the crafting of our sense of meaning, impact, and identity. What we do for God is really for ourselves. ~ Michael S. Horton

If you can't be happy, then be something else. Be useful, that would be good. Decorative, if you like. Selfish, if you must. But don't whine about it. ~ K.J. Charles

I have two choices in life: I either try to do the right thing and get accused of being selfish, or I just do what is right for me and get called selfish anyway. This time, it's all about me. ~ Dawn O'Porter

What was said of an earlier tribune was more true of Antony: "He was a spendthrift of money and chastity - his own and other people's." The brilliant cavalry officer had all of Caesar's charm and none of his self-control. In 44 the conspirators had deemed him too inconsistent to be dangerous. After the Ides Mark Antony was in his glory, entirely the man of the hour - at least until Octavian arrived. Cleopatra ~ Stacy Schiff

Baby, I'm so sorry. You know I wouldn't feel right, if I ran away from my responsibilities. I'd have to live with that decision for the rest of my life. My being in the war could save lives. My running away will only save mine. It's a selfish decision to make. I'll come back to you. I promise. ~ Jason Medina