What is "selfishness"

Usage examples of "selfishness".

When the herd draws itself together in arms against the stranger it is a fall for those rare free spirits who love the whole world, but it raises the many who weakly vegetate in anarchistic egotism, and lifts them to that higher stage of organised selfishness.

Insecurity teamed up with conceit, braggadocio with cowardice, selfishness with a need to be admired.

With their disintegration, cutthroat capitalism, petty-stateism, senseless competition, and canonized selfishness, they have created want and insecurity, hunger, malnutrition, unemployment, despair and suicide.

I was also shocked by their selfishness, for while they fought pettily amongst themselves over how they would change their lands for the better, a seemingly important question about past and future, they completely ignored the sufferings of other humanoids, to whom their way of living no doubt seemed like a paradise.

Everybody pitied me, or pretended to do so, for selfishness is the predominant passion of gamesters.

In the absence of human playfellows, they did much to keep me from selfishness.

Practically, then, it is a fantastic impossibility that any reversionary service to our British expedition, which is held out in prophetic vision as consecrating our French and American friends from all taint of mercenary selfishness, ever can be realised.

Such are the functions of Acquisitiveness, Secretiveness, Selfishness, and Combativeness, as well as the Generative powers.

Develop secretiveness and selfishness, and they become cunning and profligacy, desperation and crime.

My good genius stayed my arm, and I uttered not a word in reproach of his base selfishness.

There was at any rate nothing scant either in her admissions or her perversions, the mixture of her fear of what Maisie might undiscoverably think and of the support she at the same time gathered from a necessity of selfishness and a habit of brutality.

And that made it just about as opposite as it could get from the traditional values of his people, which made wealth a symbol for selfishness, and had caused a friend of his to deliberately stop winning rodeo competitions because he was getting unhealthily famous and therefore out of harmony.

He did it from pure selfishness, and because he was determined to possess the most illusive, tantalizing, elegant, and utterly unmoral little creature that the sun shone upon.

So rich, and prodigal, and glorious, in its gifts, is faithful and true-hearted love,--when it knows the sacrifices which it must make to merit them, and consents willingly to forego vanity, selfishness, and the exactions of self-will, in unlimited and unregretted exchange.

Then the vast sweetness of that violet night entered into his blood,--filled him with that awful joy, so near akin to sadness, which the sense of the Infinite brings,--when one feels the poetry of the Most Ancient and Most Excellent of Poets, and then is smitten at once with the contrast-thought of the sickliness and selfishness of Man,--of the blindness and brutality of cities, whereinto the divine blue light never purely comes, and the sanctification of the Silences never descends .