This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Love is the sunshine of the soul. Without it we get hard and sour and we never grow into what we could be. Love sweetens the bitterness of experience and softens the core of selfishness that is inherent in human nature.
Bitterness | Experience | Human nature | Love | Nature | Selfishness | Soul |
Posthumous charities are the very essence of selfishness when bequeathed by those who, even alive, would part with nothing.
Nothing | Selfishness |
If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears.
Light | Selfishness |
Thorough selfishness destroys or paralyzes enjoyment. A heart made selfish by the contest for wealth is like a citadel stormed in war, utterly shattered.
Enjoyment | Heart | Selfishness | War | Wealth |
Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
Wars are brought about not by fateful divine action but by widespread material selfishness. Banish selfishness - individual, industrial, political, national - and you will have no more wars.
Action | Individual | Selfishness | Will |
The mean man suffers more from his selfishness than he form whom meanness withholds some important benefit.
Important | Man | Meanness | Selfishness |
B. C. Forbes, fully Bertie Charles "B.C." Forbes
The human being who lives only for themselves finally reaps nothing but unhappiness. Selfishness corrodes. Unselfishness ennobles, satisfies. Don't put off the joy derivable from doing helpful, kindly things for others.
Joy | Nothing | Selfishness | Unhappiness |
Duke Ellington, fully Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington
Selfishness can be a virtue. Selfishness is essential to survival, and without survival we cannot protect those whom we love more than ourselves.
Love | Selfishness | Survival | Virtue | Virtue |
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.
Action | Impulse | Selfishness |
There are only two great economic systems in operation in the world today. If Capitalism in the spirit of Christian love can solve the problem of distribution and bring unemployment to an end, it will find itself spreading and recapturing the nations it has lost to its rival. But if Capitalism is permeated with selfishness it will gradually give way to Communism, Technocracy or some other form of Socialism.
Capitalism | Love | Nations | Selfishness | Spirit | Will | World |
The greatest comforts and lasting peace are obtained when one eradicates selfishness from within.
Peace | Selfishness |
Education has now become the chief problem of the world, its one holy cause. The nations that see this will survive, and those that fail to do so will slowly perish. There must be re-education of the will and of the heart as well as of the intellect, and the ideals of service must supplant those of selfishness and greed.
There are no generalizations in American politics that vested selfishness cannot cut through.
Politics | Selfishness |
The only way to be loved is to be and to appear lovely; to possess and display kindness, benevolence, tenderness; to be free from selfishness and to be alive to the welfare of others.
Display | Selfishness |
John D. Rockefeller, fully John Davidson Rockefeller I
I believe that the rendering of useful service is the common duty of mankind and that only in the purifying fire of sacrifice is the dross of selfishness consumed and the greatness of the human soul set free.
Duty | Greatness | Mankind | Sacrifice | Selfishness | Service | Soul |
Civilized man has been more ruthlessly wasteful and grasping in his attitude toward the natural world than has served even his most material best interests. Possibly - as some hope - a mere enlightened selfishness will save it in time. Even if we should learn just in the nick of time not to destroy what is necessary for our own preservation, the mere determination to survive is not sufficient to save very much of the variety and beauty of the natural world. They can e preserved only if man feels the necessity of sharing the earth with at least some of his fellow creatures to be a privilege rather han an irritation. And he is not likely to feel that without something more than intellectual curiosity - that something more you may call love, fellow-feeling, or reverence for life. Without reverence or love the increasing awareness of what the science of ecology teaches us can come to be no more than a shrewder exploitation of what it would be better to admire, to enjoy, and to share in.
Awareness | Beauty | Better | Curiosity | Destroy | Determination | Earth | Hope | Love | Man | Necessity | Reverence | Science | Selfishness | Time | Will | World | Beauty | Awareness | Learn | Privilege |
Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus
Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness – all of them due to the offenders’ ignorance of what is good or evil.
Day | Good | Ignorance | Selfishness |