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Selflessness Quotes

Browse 571 quotes about Selflessness.

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Selflessness Quotes

“However, maitri is not just being kind and nice. It is the understanding that one has to become one with the situation. That does not particularly mean that one becomes entirely without personality and has to accept whatever the other person suggests. Rather, you have to overcome the barrier that you have formed between yourself and others. If you remove this barrier and open yourself, then automatically real understanding and clarity will develop in your mind.”

UnderstandingCompassionBuddhismEmpathyBuddhistSelflessnessLoving KindnessMettaMaitri
Book:Smile at Fear: Awakening the True Heart of Bravery
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“Our hero's journey combines two arcs: the inward arc involving leaving home, slaying the demon, and gaining insight into selflessness, and the outward arc involving finding the treasure of compassion and returning home with the elixir. (p. 205)”

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Book:Gradual Awakening: The Tibetan Buddhist Path of Becoming Fully Human
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“When we help someone with genuine concern for her well-being, levels of endorphins, which are associated with euphoric feeling, surge in the brain, a phenomenon referred to as the helper’s high. In studies in which participants were asked to consciously extend compassion to another person, the reward centers of the compassionate brain were activated – the same brain system that lights up when we think of chocolate or another treat...The fulfillment Mother Teresa derived from her selfless service was a by-product, not the goal. Her primary motive was to bring help and solace to the destitute. This is the catch – a happy catch – to compassion: The more we are in it for other people, the more we get out of it ourselves.”

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Book:A Fearless Heart: How the Courage to Be Compassionate Can Transform Our Lives
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“In subsequent studies, Warneken and Tomasello found that children were willing to help even when doing so involved hardship and interrupting their play. Interestingly, they also found that rewarding the children was counterproductive. The children who were rewarded for helping were later less likely to help than those who had never been rewarded. Studies also show that infants as young as six months demonstrate clear preference for toys that enact helping behavior rather than hindering.”

ChildrenScienceCompassionPsychologyResearchAltruismSelflessness
Book:A Fearless Heart: How the Courage to Be Compassionate Can Transform Our Lives
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“I enjoy experiencing a taste of the feeling that I am infinite. But you have to risk going into a sphere where you can‘t quite remember exactly who you are. You have to negate it anytime you feel the „I“ emerging as a fixed, independent, absolute thing, and then negate it again. It‘s not that nonexistence is your final goal, but that you want to rid yourself of your habitual sense that you exist in a static way. This practice has its thrilling moments of revelation, its unsettling moments of doubt, its quiet moments of mindfulness – all of which add up to a continuous, ever-deepening, evolving flow of liberation. Your infinite life thus becomes grounded in the greatest virtue of all – wisdom. Your wisdom deepens constantly as you gain a deeper and deeper understanding of your own selflessness and your resulting interconnectedness with all other beings. You engage other people with generosity, sensitive and empathic justice, and invincible tolerance, forbearance, and forgiveness. With practice, you gradually erase the division between meditation and action until you are filled with endless joy and bliss. Your newfound freedom energizes your actions in daily life, and you become an inexhaustible source of the infinite life force. Your embrace of beings who feel lost and frightened and abandoned does not ruffle the surface of the great ocean of your happy, loving presence, as you unleash waves of dynamic effort to help them. (p. 72)”

WisdomCompassionMeditationBuddhismEnlightenmentAwakeningSelflessness
Book:Infinite Life: Awakening to Bliss Within
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“Responsibility sounds pretty straightforward, but it’s more than keeping a schedule or running a company or expanding a vision into a global enterprise. It’s being able to attack a problem from any angle. It’s knowing where to push and when to pull. And when heroism meets responsibility, it’s sending the people you care about out to save the world, not knowing if they’ll return.”

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Book:What Makes a Hero
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“afflictions are classed as peripheral mental factors and are not themselves any of the six main minds [eye, ear, nose, tongue, body and mental consciousnesses]. however, when any of the afflicting mental factors becomes manifest, a main mind [a mental consciousness] comes under its influence, goes wherever the affliction leads it, and 'accumulates' a bad action. there are a great many different kinds of afflictions, but the chief of them are desire, hatred, pride, wrong view and so forth. of these, desire and hatred are chief. because of an initial attachment to oneself, hatred arises when something undesirable occurs. further, through being attached to oneself the pride that holds one to be superior arises, and similarly when one has no knowledge of something, a wrong view that holds the object of this knowledge to be non-existent arises. how do self-attachment and so forth arise in such great force? because of beginningless conditioning, the mind tightly holds to 'i, i' even in dreams, and through the power of this conception, self-attachment and so forth occur. this false conception of 'i' arises because of one's lack of knowledge concerning the mode of existence of things. the fact that all objects are empty of inherent existence is obscured and one conceives things to exist inherently; the strong conception of 'i' derives from this. therefore, the conception that phenomena inherently exist is the afflicting ignorance that is the ultimate root of all afflictions.”

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Author:Dalai Lama XIV
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“It seems to Marithe that her life has undergone two changes: one, when her father left. And two, about a year ago, when she turned thirteen, when her life and the way she felt about it and the way she viewed it suddenly tilted; like the deck of a ship in a storm. At first it seemed to her that her house, her family, her dogs, her accordion, her books, her room with its geology samples, its display of feathers, its pictures of foxes and wolves, all took on an unreal aspect. Everything felt like a stage set: she kept viewing herself as if from the outside. Instead of just acting, just doing, just running or speaking or playing or collecting, she would feel this sense of externalisation: and so, a voice inside her head would comment, you are running. Do you need to run? Where are you going? You're picking up that rock but do you want it, do you really need it, are you going to carry it home? [...] And her body! Some mornings she woke and it was as if lead weights had been attached to her limbs by some ill-meaning fairy. Even if she had the urge to walk across the paddock to feed the neighbours' horses -- which she hardly ever did any more, she didn't know why -- she wouldn't have the energy, the sap in her to do it. She wanted it returned to her, Marithe did, that sense of security in her life, of certainty, of knowing who she was and what she was about. Would it ever come back?”

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Book:This Must Be the Place
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“Every single good person is a good person for their own sake, not for the sake of humanity, not even for the sake of another human being.”

PhilosophyHumorHumanityCompassionHumourEmpathyMercyCharityPhilosopherGoodSelfishnessSatireSympathyGenesAltruismSelflessnessUnselfishnessTeresaNelson MandelaGenieSocial CriticismMandelaGeneMother TeresaGhandiMahatma Ghandi
Book:The Selfish Genie: A Satirical Essay on Altruism
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“To label someone as selfless is symptomatic of having bought the preposterous claim that a human being can have great concern for other human beings and little concern for themselves, or that, when taken to extremes, a human being can have great concern for other human beings and absolutely no concern for themselves.”

PhilosophyHumorHumanityCompassionHumourEmpathyConcernMercyCharityPhilosopherSelfishnessSatireSympathyGenesAltruismSelflessnessSymptomsSatiristUnselfishnessTeresaNelson MandelaGenieSocial CriticismMandelaGeneMother TeresaLabelGhandiMahatma Ghandi
Book:The Selfish Genie: A Satirical Essay on Altruism
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“It is humanly impossible to be selfless. As a matter of fact, human beings are inherently selfish.”

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Book:The Selfish Genie: A Satirical Essay on Altruism
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“You see, it’s about empathy. It’s not about you. It’s about empathy. It’s not even about caring or being kind. It’s about empathy. Do you think that all people who can empathize with other people (and rocks and trees), are desirous of being kind, at all times? Of course not! Empathy often hurts, and is often difficult. But we experience this difficulty, because we are human beings, because human beings are designed to connect with other living and non-living things!”

Wisdom QuotesEmpathyAltruismSelflessnessWhat Is EmpathyThe Nature Of EmpathyTrue EmpathyUnderstandign Empathy
Author:C. JoyBell C.
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“Purpose, meaning, and hope are the edge of a coin; on one side is imprinted the image of God; and on the other is self … As complicated as life seems at times, the mystery of fulfillment and the paradox of contentment are as simple as that. What makes life complicated, I suspect, isn’t the choice between these two value systems and the paths they define, sin and holiness, so much as it is our unwillingness to make the choice between the two.”

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Author:James Castleton, MD, Mending of a Broken Heart
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“Being in love with someone is wanting his or her happiness. It is not wanting to possess him or her for our happiness. That’s possessiveness and desire for control. But when we’re really in love with others, we want only their happiness. We forget about our happiness, and then, therefore, ironically, we get very happy, because we temporarily stop worrying about how happy we are. When we forget about how happy we are, we become happy. That’s why people like to be in love, because when they’re in love, they focus only on the beauty and the happiness of the beloved other. (p. 127)”

LoveHappinessBuddhismEnlightenmentTrue LoveAwakeningSelflessnessSelf TranscendenceThe Path Of The Bodhisattva
Book:The Jewel Tree of Tibet: The Enlightenment Engine of Tibetan Buddhism
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