Self Centeredness Quotes

“There is a huge amount of freedom that comes to you when you take nothing personally.”
― Don Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom

“The only person that deserves a special place in your life is someone that never made you feel like you were an option in theirs.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“These illustrations suggest four general maxims[...].
The first is: remember that your motives are not always as altruistic as they seem to yourself.
The second is: don't over-estimate your own merits.
The third is: don't expect others to take as much interest in you as you do yourself.
And the fourth is: don't imagine that most people give enough thought to you to have any special desire to persecute you.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness

“The Anatomy of Conflict:

If there is no communication then there is no respect. If there is no respect then there is no caring. If there is no caring then there is no understanding. If there is no understanding then there is no compassion. If there is no compassion then there is no empathy. If there is no empathy then there is no forgiveness. If there is no forgiveness then there is no kindness. If there is no kindness then there is no honesty. If there is no honesty then there is no love. If there is no love then God doesn't reside there. If God doesn't reside there then there is no peace. If there is no peace then there is no happiness. If there is no happiness ----then there IS CONFLICT BECAUSE THERE IS NO COMMUNICATION!”
― Shannon L. Alder

“There is nothing more irreligious than self-absorbed religion.”
― J.I. Packer, Knowing God

“Noi fummo i Gattopardi, i Leoni; quelli che ci sostituiranno saranno gli sciacalletti, le iene; e tutti quanti gattopardi, sciacalli e pecore, continueremo a crederci il sale della terra."

("We were the Leopards, the Lions; those who'll take our place will be little jackals, hyenas; and the whole lot of us, Leopards, jackals, and sheep, we'll all go on thinking ourselves the salt of the earth.")”
― Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard

“To focus on how I'm doing more than what Christ has done is Christian narcissism”
― Tullian Tchividjian, Jesus + Nothing = Everything

“The pain of the narcissist is that, to him, everything is really a threat. What doesn't surrender in reverence is blasphemous to a high opinion of oneself - the burden of self-importance. The narcissist reconstructs his own law of gravity which states that all things and all creatures must adhere to his personal satisfaction, but when they do not, the pain is far more intense than it is for one who is free from the clamors of 'I'.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“When we fear what other people think about us, we are frequently more focused on 'being interesting' and less focused on 'taking an interest.' That's why many people talk a great deal when they are anxious and why many people never feel heard. If both people and conversation are trying to be interesting, there is no one left to genuinely listen.”
― John Yokoyama, When Fish Fly: Lessons for Creating a Vital and Energized Workplace from the World Famous Pike Place Fish Market

“...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, Blindness

“There are ultimately only two possible adjustments to life; one is to suit our lives to principles; the other is to suit principles to our lives. If we do not live as we think, we soon begin to think as we live. The method of adjusting moral principles to the way men live is just a perversion of the order of things.”
― Fulton J. Sheen

“...some people coddle their own afflictions the way others spoil small pedigreed dogs with cans of pate.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“She would be one of those who kneel to their own shadows till feet grow on their knees; then go down on their hands till their hands grow into feet; then lay their faces on the ground till they grow into snouts; when at last they are a hideous sort of lizards, each of which believes himself the best, wisest, and loveliest being in the world, yea, the very centre of the universe. And so they run about for ever looking for their own shadows that they may worship them, and miserable because they cannot find them, being themselves too near the ground to have any shadows; and what becomes of them at last, there is but one who knows.”
― George MacDonald, The Wise Woman and Other Stories

“How can one ever do anything nobly Christian, living among people with such petty thoughts?”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“How hungrily we read about ourselves!”
― Gore Vidal, Julian

“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 Solovyov, The Meaning of Love

“The motivation of transparency is important. The culture teaches people to be candid and blunt, but this usually revolves around self-centeredness – you have a right to express your true feelings and your rage. This is an entitlement. Instead, the Christian way to approach transparency is to realize out candidness should be motivated by a desire to have a pure heart before God and others.”
― David Kinnaman, unChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity... and Why It Matters

“A faithful servant may be wiser than the master, and yet retain the true spirit and posture of the servant. The humble man looks upon every, the feeblest and unworthiest, child of God, and honors him and prefers him in honor as the son of a King.”
― Andrew Murray, Humility: The Journey Toward Holiness

“Each man is everything to himself, for with his death everything is dead for him. That is why each of us thinks he is everything to everyone. We must not judge nature by ourselves, but by its own standards.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“لكي تصبح سعيدا، عليك ألا تعبأ كثيرا بالآخرين”
― Albert Camus

“The shape of evil is much more superficiality and blindness than the usual list of hot sins. God hides, and is found, precisely in the depths of everything.”
― Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

“He’s interested in Willie. Quite simply and directly. And when anybody is interested in himself quite simply and directly the way Willie is interested in Willie you call it genius. It’s only the half-baked people like Mr. Patton who are interested in money. Even the big boys who make a real lot of money aren’t interested in money. Henry Ford isn’t interested in money. He is interested in Henry Ford and therefore he is a genius.”
― Robert Penn Warren

“Alex Rodriguez seemed not to fit in with the rest of his Yankee teammates. For instance, he wanted a clubhouse attendant personally assigned to him, when there were four or five for the whole team. Seeing the rift between him and the rest of the team and how Rodriguez's major focus on how HE was perceived, Joe Torre suggested in the individual meeting that Rodriguez at least get his own coffee rather than send someone to get it for him. Later that day, Alex Rodriguez made a point of telling the manager that he got his own coffee – drawing attention to himself, even in what was meant to be just an example of how he could fit in with normal behavior.”
― Tom Verducci, The Yankee Years

“megan once told me that happiness is getting exactly what you want, but she thinks it's only what she wants that counts.”
― Louise O'Neill

“Was there any more repellent sight, Harriet wondered, than a silly, self-centred, greedy woman clad in the skin of a beast so much more splendid than herself?”
― Olivia Manning, The Spoilt City

“Would you rather a god who listens or a god who speaks?”

Be careful with the answer.

It’s as important as every word from Scheherazade’s mouth that saved her life.

And everybody’s got an answer.

A god who listens is like your best friend, who lets you tell him about all the people you don’t like.

A god who speaks is like your best teacher, who tells Brandon Goff he has to leave the room if he’s going to call people falafel monkeys.

A god who listens is your mom who lets you sit in a kitchen and tell her stories about castles in the mountains.

A god who speaks is your dad who calls on the phone with advice for your life in America.

There are gods all over the world who just want you to express yourself. Look inside and find whatever you think you are and that’s all it takes to be good. And there are gods who are so alien to us, with minds so clear, the only thing to do would be to sit at their feet and wait for them to speak, to tell us what is good.

A god who listens is love.

A god who speaks is law.

At their worst, the people who want a god who listens are self-centered. They just want to live in the land of do-as-you-please. And the ones who want a god who speaks are cruel. They just want laws and justice to crush everything.

I don’t have an answer for you. This is the kind of thing you live your whole life thinking about probably.

Love is empty without justice.

Justice is cruel without love.

Oh, and in case it wasn't obvious, the answer is both.

God should be both.

If a god isn't, that is no God.”
― Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue

“I am never repelled or chilled, as many people are, by the cheerless self-centeredness of the nervous or the unhappy.”
― John Collier, Fancies and Goodnights

“Power-drunk men heed not where the empty bottles fall; they care little for the blood of those who tread on shattered glass”
― Lynn Ujiagbe

“People are like that.

They're immune to the sadness of others.”
― Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue

“So, you think I'm only concerned with myself."

"I didn't say that either. But, basically, that's true of all of us.”
― Percival Everett, Erasure