Quotes about self-sacrifice

The problem of the hero is to pierce himself (and therewith his world) precisely through that point to shatter and annihilate that key knot of his limited existence.

Courtship is driven by hormones marriage is sustained by humility and self-sacrifice.

If you stay, I'll do whatever you want. I'll quit the band, go with you to New York. But if you need me to go away, I'll do that, too. I was talking to Liz and she said maybe coming back to your old life would be too painful, that maybe it'd be easier for you to erase us. And that would suck, but I'd do it. I can lose you like that if I don't lose you today. I'll let you go. If you stay.

How far should a person go in the name of true love?

I love you," he whispered, and that was the moment he knew what he was going to do. When you loved someone, you put their needs before your own. No matter how inconceivable those needs were; no matter how fucked up; no matter how much it made you feel like you were ripping yourself into pieces.

Don’t sacrifice yourself too much, because if you sacrifice too much there’s nothing else you can give and nobody will care for you.

Surely it was a good way to die, in the place of someone else, someone I loved.

I have been astonished that men could die martyrsfor their religion--I have shuddered at it,I shudder no more.I could be martyred for my religion.Love is my religionand I could die for that.I could die for you.My Creed is Love and you are its only tenet.

When you love you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve.

Some day you will find out that there is far more happiness in another's happiness than in your own.

My mother told me that life isn't always about pleasing yourself and that sometimes you have to do things for the sole benefit of another human being. I completely agreed with her, but reminded her that that was what blow jobs were for.

If we seek spiritual heroism ourselves, the old ego is just back in control under a new name. There would not really be any change at all, but only disguise, just bogus self-improvement on our own terms.

self-development is a higher duty than self-sacrifice.

Rise up oh heart, for there is another battle to win.

If I rise up again against the foe, dare I stand alone?

Sacrifice is a passion that unleashes everything away from us so that it can be drawn into everyone around us.

A lack of common sense usually ends in some heroic feat, much like the soldier who dives onto the grenade so that others may live.

They say the only way you can truly kill a Celestra is by fire. I would gladly lend myself to the flames to peer down eternally over this sinful disgrace of a planet that houses cowards such as these.

He was lost. He knew it. He had neither the size nor the strength to defeat her, and she had him cornered. But he would fight. He was a warrior, the prince-son of the unicorns, and he meant to go down fighting. There would be no songs to mark his death; and none of his people would even know. But he had saved Korr and the others of the band. It was noon — they were safe out of the hills by now, and none of the rest of it mattered.

We could see that our mothers blackmailed us with self-sacrifice, even if we did not know whether or not they might have been great opera stars or toasts of the town if they had not borne us. In our intractable moments we pointed out that we had not asked to be born, or even to go to an expensive school. We knew that they must have had motives of their own for what they did with us and to us. The notion of our parents' self-sacrifice filled us not with gratitude but with confusion and guilt. We

One little second of pleasure, a whole life of pain...my mother knew nothing of the pleasures of a good roll in the hay...she missed out on all that...like me, her son...a lifetime of sacrifice!...the woman who can grunt and rave in the throes of a deep fuck can die happy...

Despite the voices of the culture that would scream otherwise, victory is irreparably tied to the surrender of self. And that explains why so few are truly victorious.

Sadie," he said forlornly, "when you become a parent, you may understand this. One of my hardest jobs as a father, one of my greatest duties, was to realize that my own dreams, my own goals and wishes, are secondary to my children's.

Akin to the idea that time is money is the concept, less spoken but as commonly assumed, that we may be adequately represented by money. The giving of money has thus become our characteristic virtue. But to give is not to do. The money is given in lieu of action, thought, care, time.

If you are trading silence or compliance for love, you are being cheated. When acceptance or love is withheld if you reveal secrets, the value of the relationship is just an illusion. Love cannot be earned, bought or traded–only freely given. You are worthy of love that doesn’t require you to protect your abuser or sacrifice yourself.

Not knowing who you are is a certain kind of hell.

Ah! What pleasure it must be to a woman to suffer for the one she loves!

To die trying is the proudest humans thing.

For I was sure of one thing, it wasn't always the hero who saved the world. It was the person most willing to die first.

Sometimes love is not enough.

She put others before herself and yet you hate her. What did she do to you?

The sin of quick anger is an idol of the heart that is not dying to our own rights.

One of the highest marks of citizenship is fighting for the common defense.

Yet, there is a sense of some deep sort that runs entirely contrary to human nature; that in putting ourselves first, we must by necessity put others first.

What's a man worth without love ? $.89 worth of chemicals." Hawkeye Pierce

It takes practice to stand with others facing pain of death, and it helps if you don't have to do it all alone. We should practice on the small stuff so that we will be better able to stand together for what we believe and for what we love, who may someday need our support.

True love is generative. It is the only kind that makes more of itself as it goes along.

The generation of American men who fought the Second World War were too struck by the scale of the effort – and the stakes of the effort – to see the war as a stage for their own personal heroism. Most men seem to have taken the lesson that there's enough honor in doing a hard job when you have to.

A great imperative imparts a wonderful impulse to the spirit.

You could run from someone you feared, you could try to fight someone you hated. All my reactions were geared toward those kinds of killers – the monsters, the enemies. When you loved the one who was killing you, it left you no options. How could you run, how could you fight, when doing so would hurt that beloved one? If your life was all you had to give your beloved, how could you not give it? If it was someone you truly loved?

Someone has to be stoic, for the sake of, in spite of, and in the face of all those who are, not. Someone, has to be serious. Someone has to choose to forgo choice, so that there is an option left for others to consider. Everyone can't be, someone.

Amin, you’re not making sense to me. Things have always been this way, since the beginning of time. Some die so others can be saved. You don’t believe in the salvation of others?

You can sacrifice and not love. But you cannot love and not sacrifice.

Oftentimes winning can become an addiction, whether good or bad, to the point where you would rather lose it all before you lose at all.

The only honorable, desirable kind of fear that shouldn't be feared is the fear of harm on a loved one. It's the kind of fear that leads to self-sacrifice and the kind of fear where you would truly jump in front of a bus to save another.

I brought you here to tell you this: sometimes what we are searching for does not exist. We may sacrifice for it, even bleed for it, but it was never meant to be ours.

The goddess smiled. "You are a good hero, Percy Jackson. Not too proud. I like that. But you have much to learn. When Dionysus was made a god, I gave up my throne for him. It was the only way to avoid a civil war among the gods.""It unbalanced the Council," I remembered. "Suddenly there were seven guys and five girls."Hestia shrugged. "It was the best solution, not a perfect one. Now I tend the fire. I fade slowly into the background. No one will ever write epic poems about the deeds of Hestia.

What looked safe was not safe. What looked hard and unsafe was probably safer. Anyway, safe was somewhere else in the world.

Giving yourself is the ultimate revolution.

Charity is to be measured, not by what one has given away, but by what one has left.

Civilians who volunteer generally wish to escape, not to share, privatizations worse than their own.

- in the end she felt pity for me, for the lost man. And when a girl's heart is moved to pity, that is, of course, most dangerous for her. She's sure to want to "save" him then, to bring him to reason, to resurrect him, to call him to nobler aims, to regenerate him into a new life and new activity. Well, everyone knows what can be dreamt up in that vein. I saw at once that the bird was flying into my net on its own.

At certain moments, the foot slips ; at others, the ground gives way. How many times had that conscience, furious for the right, grasped and overwhelmed him! How many times had truth, inexorable, planted her knee upon his breast! How many times, thrown to the ground by the light, had he cried to it for mercy!

As empaths, one of the quickest ways to completely losing our grounding in reality is by deferring our needs and wants in relationships.

Doing the right thing for someone else occasionally means doing something that feels wrong to you.

If the Emperor had not delivered his [15 August 1945] address urging the Japanese people to lay down their swords—if that speech had been a call instead for the Honorable Death of the Hundred Million—those people on that street in Sōshigaya probably would have done what they were told and died. And probably I would have done likewise. The Japanese see self-assertion as immoral and self-sacrifice as the sensible course to take in life. We were accustomed to this teaching and had never thought to

Whatever the item is that I have chosen to give you, it is nothing more than the receptacle within which I have placed the whole of myself. If it is empty, it is not a gift.