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. I would fain teach women that self-development is a higher duty than self-sacrifice.

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.

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.

... 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.

The bravest thing that men do is love women.

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?

...there is power in self-sacrifice.

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.

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

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.

Q: What is the best thing men do? A: To be kind, to be proud, to be fearless.

Mothers with marriageable daughters ought to look out for men of this stamp, men with brains to act as protecting divinity, with worldly wisdom to diagnose like a surgeon, and with experience to take a mother’s place in warding off evil. These are the three cardinal virtues in matrimony.

Men dissimulate their dearest, most constant, and most virtuous inclination from weakness and a fear of being condemned.

An appeal to men's self-sacrificing disposition and self-renouncing love ought at least to have lost its seductive plausibility when, after an activity of thousands of years, it has left nothing behind but the – misery of today. Why then still fruitlessly expect self-sacrifice to bring us better times? Why not rather hope for them from usurpation? Salvation comes no longer from the giver, the bestower, the loving one, but from the taker, the appropriator (usurper), the owner. Communism, and, consciously, egoism-reviling humanism, still count on love.