A Quote by Mason Cooley

The self-righteous feel no need to be charming, and thus double their offensiveness.

Mason Cooley

Quote Topics

Charming Double Feel Need Righteous Self Self-Righteous Thus

Quote Author

Mason Cooley
American - Writer
1927 - 2002

Self-righteousness is unavoidable. You can either be a self-righteous Pharisee where you think you are better than everyone else or you can be a self-righteous pagan who thinks you are better than the Pharisee. If you are a self-righteous person, I could become very self-righteous thinking that you're self-righteous and you think you're so good but I know you're bad. I know I'm bad so that makes me better than you.

Tullian Tchividjian

Once it has learned to dream the double, the self arrives at this weird crossroad and a moment comes when one realizes that it is the double who dreams the self.

Carlos Castaneda

I always have a feeling of awe and wonder at what God can do - using me as an instrument. I believe that anyone who is fully surrendered to God's will can be used gloriously - and will really know some things - and will probably be called self-righteous. You're called self-righteous if you are self-centered enough to think you know everything - but you may also be called self-righteous by the immature if you are God-centered enough to really know some things.

Peace Pilgrim

Like too much alcohol,self-consciousness makes us see ourselves double, and we make the double image for two selves - mental and material, controlling and controlled, reflective and spontaneous. Thus instead of suffering we suffer about suffering, and suffer about suffering about suffering.

Alan Watts

Am I self-righteous? Why not? It's not like I can count on you to be righteous for me.

Henry Rollins

most of us have to be self-righteous before we can be righteous.

Vera Brittain

We do not become righteous by doing righteous deed but, having been made righteous, we do righteous deeds.

Martin Luther

The idea that somehow "no self, no problem"- I don't exist because I don't have a self- would be a mistaken understanding. However, the selflessness teaching is not that hard to understand. What it means is a type of self that people feel they have, like a fixed, unchanging identity. Either they know they have it, or for some, they feel they need to seek it, and possibly have an experience where they feel like they found something. That type of fixed, unchanging, essential self, or absolute self doesn't exist. That's what "no self" means.

Robert Thurman

...Emma Morley wasn't such a paragon either: pretentious, petulant, lazy, speechifying, judgmental. Self-pitying, self righteous, self-important, all the selfs except self-confident, the quality that she had always needed the most.

David Nicholls

Those who condemn the self-righteous for the sake of self-discovery do so with ironic self-righteousness.

Timothy Keller

For us to feel peace within our hearts while we live here on earth we must be righteous. There is nothing that the world calls fun or pleasurable that can compare to the inner happiness and joy that comes from being righteous, nothing. That may be something you don't think much about, but if you will take time to identify how you feel when you make an unrighteous choice and compare that to how you feel when you make a difficult but righteous choice, you will know what I am talking about.

Patricia P. Pinegar

Whenever I allow anything but tenderness and compassion to dictate my response to life--be it self-righteous anger, moralizing, defensiveness, the pressing need to change others...I am alienated from my true self. My identity as Abba's child [a child of God] becomes ambiguous, tentative and confused

Brennan Manning

A belief in moral absolutes should always make us more, not less, critical of both sides in any conflict. This doesn't mean that both sides are equally wrong; it means that since we all fall short of moral perfection, even the side whose cause is truly righteous may commit terrible acts of violence in defense of that cause -- and, worse, may feel quite justified in committing them. That is the difference between being righteous and being self-righteous. Moral standards are absolute; but human fidelity to them is always relative.

Joseph Sobran

One should at least have some self-righteous ego. Not in the sense that you refuse to apologise even when judges reason with you to apologise. Self-righteous ego in the sense that nobody can force you to apologise if there is no reason to do so.

Prashant Bhushan

I feel myself trying to be charming, and then I realize I’m obviously trying to be charming, and then I try to be even more charming to make up for the fake charm, and then I’ve basically turned into Liza Minnelli: I’m dancing in tights and sequins, begging you to love me. There’s a bowler and jazz hands and lots of teeth.