selfishness

What do you want to say to me?___othing__ust to talk about the profession I am entering. I am about to practice virtue in order to find a man who loves it only to destroy it' [replied Mademoiselle Vesian.]__hat is it exactly; and believe me, everything in this life is much the same. We refer everything to ourselves, and each of us is a tyrant. That is why the best of mortals is he who is tolerant.

Setting boundaries is a way of caring for myself. It doesn't make me mean, selfish, or uncaring because I don't do things your way. I care about me too.

Greed is a contagious mental illness without which civilization as we know it would not have been possible.

Some of us were brought into this troubled world primarily or only to increase our fathers_ chances of not being left by our mothers, or vice versa.

O young girl, throw yourself again into the water so that I might have a second time the chance to save the two of us!" A second time, eh, what imprudence! Suppose, dear sir, someone actually took our word for it? It would have to be fulfilled. Brr...! the water is so cold! But let's reassure ourselves. It's too late now, it will always be too late. Fortunately!

It's a shame that we humans are never able to pull in the same direction . . . [n]ot even when confronted by infinity.

Lovemaking takes time!It is a myth for lovemaking to be quick and smooth. To find pleasure in each other, both men and women need to take time to explore each other with their hands; their lips and they need to be open to each other in a mutual, consensual, and non-judgmental style.sure

More or less we are all Selfish. When it's come to Friendship, I do think that fish cant jump onto the ship!

You had once asked me if I was afraid of death. I said I was afraid of not living. I don__ want to eke out my life like a resource in short supply. The only selfish life is a timid one. To hold back, to withdraw, to keep the best in reserve, both overvalues the self, and undervalues what the self is.

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.

But then, I knew so little about my mother over the last decade of her life. I had been too wrapped up in my own drama.

Despair is a wholly selfish response to fortune__ slings and arrows.

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

When God interrupts your life, He is calling you to follow Him in a new way. By breaking into your settled pattern, He is moving you to a new place where you can make fresh discoveries of His grace. Embracing God__ call is never easy, but this is where the pursuit of a God-centered life begins, and where the shame of a self-centered life is exposed.

His Kingship, precisely because it is so broad, so total, is doomed to be rejected by anybody who is still into tribalism, or small belonging systems. We don't really like the big Kingdom if it gets in the way of our smaller kingdoms, and it always does.

When I am not king, then THE Kingdom has its best chance of breaking through.

Human beings are never to be treated as a means but always as ends.

A humanitarian seldom makes a good lover. For a lover__ world revolves around their lover, while a humanitarian__ world revolves around the world.