22 Quotes Tagged: self-sacrifice

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?

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 wanted them to be happy yet they were sad and deprived and it was our fault.

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

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

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

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

The most sublime act is to set another before you.

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

The feelings of devotion, self-sacrifice for one's neighbor, the whole morality of self-denial must be questioned mercilessly and taken to court.... There is too much charm and sugar in these feelings of 'for others,' 'not for myself,' for us not to need to become doubly suspicious at this point and to ask: 'are these not perhaps-seductions?

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

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.

There is a man who would give his life to keep a life you love beside you.

... 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.

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

…he felt he could willingly give his life for them.