A Quote by Dogen

IF YOU WOULD BE FREE OF GREED, FIRST YOU HAVE TO LEAVE EGOTISM BEHIND. THE BEST MENTAL EXERCISE FOR RELINQUISHING EGOTISM IS CONTEMPLATING IMPERMANENCE.

Dogen

Quote Topics

Behind Best Contemplating Egotism Exercise First Free Greed Impermanence Leave Mental Relinquishing Would Would Be

Quote Author

Dogen
Japanese - Leader
January 19, 1200 - September 22, 1253

Egotism erects its center in itself; love places it out of itself in the axis of the universal whole. Love aims at unity, egotism at solitude. Love is the citizen ruler of a flourishing republic, egotism is a despot in a devastated creation. Egotism sows for gratitude, love for the ungrateful. Love gives, egotism lends; and love does this before the throne of judicial truth, indifferent if for the enjoyment of the following moment, or with the view to a martyr's crown--indifferent whether the reward is in this life or in the next.

Friedrich Schiller

Laissez-faire, supply and demand-one begins to be weary of all that. Leave all to egotism, to ravenous greed of money, of pleasure, of applause-it is the gospel of despair.

Thomas Carlyle

All is egotism. The only people whose mainspring is not egotism are the dead and perhaps idiots.

Miles Franklin

If egotism means a terrific interest in one's self, egotism is absolutely essential to efficient living.

Arnold Bennett

Intolerance is a form of egotism, and to condemn egotism intolerantly is to share it.

George Santayana

If some really acute observer made as much of egotism as Freud has made of sex, people would forget a good deal about sex and find the explanation for everything in egotism.

Wallace Stevens

Hamlet is egotism as it appears to itself, and Don Quixote is egotism as it appears to the detached observer.

Hugh Kingsmill

To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.

Gore Vidal

If the egotist is weak, his egotism is worthless. If the egotist is strong, acute, full of distinctive character, his egotism is precious, and remains a possession of the race.

Alexander Smith

Bhakti is the one essential thing. To be sure, God exists in all beings. Who, then is a devotee? He whose mind dwells on God. But this is not possible as long as one has egotism and vanity. The water of God's grace cannot collect on the high mound of egotism. It runs down.

Ramakrishna

August Wilhelm von Schlegel

Communism is an aspiration, an aspiration is an ideal, a dream, a longing of something that would be perfect, but hard to build because it has to clash with human nature and against the egotism of humans and the egotism of the elites which usually try to guarantee their own interests above those of their nations and of their own people. But they are the ones that prevail because they have the economic power, the political power and the military power.

Alejandro Castro Espin

Opinions scattered indiscriminately about leave the mark of egotism.

William Strunk, Jr.

Take egotism out and you would castrate the benefactors.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

It has always seemed strange to me... the things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.