Men think that self-sacrifice is the most charming of all the cardinal virtues for women, and in order to keep it in healthy working order, they make opportunities for its illustration as often as possible.

Self-sacrifice is the leit-motif of most of the marital
games played by women, from the crudest (‘I’ve given you the
best years of my life’) to the most sophisticated (‘I only went to bed
with him so’s he’d promote you’). For so much sacrificed self the
expected reward is security, and seeing that a reward is expected it
cannot properly speaking be called self-sacrifice at all. It is in fact a
kind of commerce, and onein which the female must always be the creditor. Of course, it is also
practised by men who explain their failure to do exciting jobs or risk
insecurity because of their obligations to wife and/or children, but
it is not invariable, whereas it is hard to think of a male/female relationship
in which the element of female self-sacrifice was absent. So
long as women must live vicariously, through men, they must labour
at making themselves indispensable and this is the full-time job that
is generally wrongly called altruism. Properly speaking, altruism is
an absurdity. Women are self-sacrificing in direct proportion to their
incapacity to offer anything but this sacrifice. They sacrifice what
they never had: a self.

Put it down in capital letters: SELF-DEVELOPMENT IS A HIGHER DUTY THAN SELF-SACRIFICE. The thing that most retards and militates against women’s self development is self-sacrifice.

... self-sacrifice is a passion so overwhelming that beside it even lust and hunger are trifling. It whirls its victim to destruction in the highest affirmation of his personality. The object doesn't matter; it may be worthwhile or it may be worthless. No wine is so intoxicating, no love so shattering, no vice so compelling. When he sacrifices himself man for a moment is greater than God, for how can God, infinite and omnipotent, sacrifice himself? At best he can only sacrifice his only begotten son.

But people will say to me, "why ask selflessness and sacrifice only from the woman? What about the man?" To this, I answer, does not the man, the husband, who toils and moils to support his family, and especially if he is a gentleman, who has to do his duty not only to his family, but to his King and country, and, in doing that has, some time even to give his life: does he not also make sacrifice?

One of the rules that emerges from a consideration of the factors that promote self-sacrifice is that we are less ready to die for what we have or are than for what we wish to have and to be. It is a perplexing and unpleasant truth that when men already have “something worth fighting for,” they do not feel like fighting. People who live full, worthwhile lives are not usually ready to die for their own interests nor for their country nor for a holy cause.

What a man sacrifices in struggling for his Volk, a woman sacrifices in struggling to preserve this Volk in individual cases. What a man gives in heroic courage on the battlefield, woman gives in eternally patient devotion, in eternally patient suffering and endurance. Every child to which she gives birth is a battle which she wages in her Volk's fateful question of to be or not to be.

Masculine purity loves to regard women as chaste in mind as well as in body, to surround her with conceptions of purity and impregnable virtue; but the conclusion is irresistible that those who can gloat over others’ lapses from virtue, and find delight in such questionable entertainments as the most recent case of seduction, or the newest scandal, have need to purify their hearts and re-enforce their waning chastity.

...there is power in self-sacrifice.

How much easier is self-sacrifice than self-realization?

Men are virtuous because the women are; women are virtuous from necessity.

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

Men flatter the vanity of those women who seek praise, who always want to be complimented and enthroned because they know their weak side, but the woman who is pure, with her own chastity she is protected, because men, no matter how uneducated they are, always respect the woman who shows herself to be worthy of respect. The woman should always try to acquire useful and beneficial knowledge, because in these modern times she has wide horizons; the sciences, industries, workshops, and even her very home demand her better abilities, her perseverance and consistency in her work, and her influence and aid for everything that is progress and advancement for humanity.

The quality you most admire in a man? Courage moral and physical: 'anima' — the ability to think like a woman. Also a sense of the absurd.

The quality you most admire in a woman? Courage moral and physical: “anima” — the ability to visualize the mind and need of a man. Also a sense of the absurd.