Self-Interest

(271 votes)   Remember how often you have postponed minding your interest, and let slip those opportunities the gods have given you. It is now high time to consider what sort of world you are part of, and from what kind of governor of it you are descended; that you have a set period assigned you to act in, and unless you improve it to brighten and compose your thoughts, it will quickly run off with you, and be lost beyond recovery.

Marcus Aurelius
121-80 AD, Roman Emperor, Philosopher

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(232 votes)   The ruin of the human heart is self-interest, which the American merchant calls self-service. We have become a self-service populace, and all our specious comforts --the automatic elevator, the escalator, the cafeteria --are depriving us of volition and moral and physical energy.

Edward Dahlberg
1900-1977, American Author, Critic

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(195 votes)   The virtues and vices are all put in motion by interest.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld
1613-1680, French Classical Writer

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(125 votes)   It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our necessities but of their advantages.

Adam Smith
1723-1790, Scottish Economist

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(108 votes)   I don't believe in principle, but I do in interest.

James Russell Lowell
1819-1891, American Poet, Critic, Editor

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(103 votes)   Self-interest is but the survival of the animal in us. Humanity only begins for man with self-surrender.

Henri Frederic Amiel
1821-1881, Swiss Philosopher, Poet, Critic

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(100 votes)   The punters know that the horse named Morality rarely gets past the post, whereas the nag named Self-interest always runs a good race.

Gough Whitlam
1916-, Australian Labor Politician, Prime Minister

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(96 votes)   Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live; it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. And unselfishness is letting other people's lives alone, not interfering with them. Selfishness always aims at uniformity of type. Unselfishness recognizes infinite variety of type as a delightful thing, accepts it, acquiesces in it, enjoys it.

Oscar Wilde
1856-1900, British Author, Wit

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(88 votes)   Long before Einstein told us that matter is energy, Machiavelli and Hobbes and other modern political philosophers defined man as a lump of matter whose most politically relevant attribute is a form of energy called ''self-interestedness.'' This was not a

George F. Will
1941-, American Political Columnist

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(81 votes)   A man's interest in the world is only an overflow from his interest in himself.

George Bernard Shaw
1856-1950, Irish-born British Dramatist

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(81 votes)   Only free peoples can hold their purpose and their honor steady to a common end and prefer the interest of mankind to any narrow interest of their own.

Woodrow T. Wilson
1856-1924, Twenty-eighth President of the USA

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(69 votes)   There are no uninteresting things, there are only uninterested people.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
1874-1936, British Author

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