Hoyt & Roberts, comps. Hoyt’s New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations. 1922.
Selfishness
Chacun chez soi, chacun pour soi.
Every one for his home, every one for himself.
M. Dupin.
Where all are selfish, the sage is no better than the fool, and only rather more dangerous.
Froude—Short Studies on Great Subjects. Party Politics.
Esto, ut nunc multi, dives tibi pauper amicis.
Be, as many now are, luxurious to yourself, parsimonious to your friends.
Juvenal—Satires. V. 113.
As for the largest-hearted of us, what is the word we write most often in our cheque-books?—“Self.”
Eden Phillpotts—A Shadow Passes.
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonour’d and unsung.
Scott—Lay of the Last Minstrel. Canto VI. St. 1.
What need we any spur but our own cause,
To prick us to redress?
Julius Cæsar. Act II. Sc. 1. L. 123.
Love took up the harp of Life, and smote on all the chords with might;
Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, pass’d in music out of sight.
Tennyson—Locksley Hall. L. 33.
Selfishness is the only real atheism; aspiration, unselfishness, the only real religion.
Zangwill—Children of the Ghetto. Bk. II. Ch. 16.