Did you know you can turn any of the short quotes on our site into an e-card?
Simply locate the quote you'd like to send, and if it fits on our card, you'll see an option for Send as greeting on the left side of the quote.
Or, if you'd like a more classic Greeting card, you can visit our Gaia Greeting Gallery.
Every act of commerce is an act of mutual service. Even though it can be motivated by self-interest, the market system channels that selfish energy towards helping others.
When we analyze or diagnose or psychoanalyze people's motives (e.g. in politics or in reading a mystery novel or decoding some everyday remark), we are trying to puzzle out not just the tangle of emotions or interests that lie all on the same plane, but also the priority or hierarchy of different species of motive and interest: cui bono? i.e. what element or organismic subsystem in his psyche ultimately benefited from his behavior or his ploy? Differently put, the contents of experience and self-expression "differ" from one another not just qualitatively but also ordinally, in terms of their ranking or determinative power over one another.
...Whenever there is a conflict between universl principles and sel-interest, sel-interest is likely to prevail...
It is a feeble compassion that pulls up short where self-interest begins
It is a feeble compassion that pulls up short where self-interest begins
Level 5 leaders channel their ego needs away from themselves and into the larger goal of building a great company. It's not that Level 5 leaders have no ego or self-interest. Indeed, they are incredibly ambitious--but their ambition is first and foremost for the institution, not themselves.
Where self-interest is suppressed, it is replaced by a burdensome system of bureaucratic control that dries up the wellspring of initiative and creativity.
If your imagination leads you to understand how quickly people grant your requests when those requests appeal to their self-interest, you can have practically anything you go after.
Never appeal to a man's 'better nature,' he may not have one. Invoking his self-interest gives you more leverage.
Some of us have turned our freedom into exploitation, our land into a dust bowl. We can't make a nation strong when it is held together by the rotten rope of self-interest. Too often we think of democracy only in terms of getting our rights.
Friendship without self-interest is one of the rare and beautiful things of life.
To be beneficent when we can is a duty; and besides this, there are many minds so sympathetically constituted that, without any other motive of vanity or self-interest, they find a pleasure in spreading joy around them, and can take delight in the satisfaction of others so far as it is their own work. But I maintain that in such a case an action of this kind, however proper, however amiable it may be, has nevertheless no true moral worth, but is on a level with other inclinations. . . . For the maxim lacks the moral import, namely, that such actions be done from duty, not from inclination.
Self-interest is but the survival of the animal in us. Humanity only begins for man with self-surrender.
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.
More things are left undone through neglect of duty than through neglect of self-interest.
Help
Sign In
