Quotes About Sacrifice
1. If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery–isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you’ll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is.
2. Dreams do come true, if only we wish hard enough. You can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it.
3. I guess that’s just part of loving people: You have to give things up. Sometimes you even have to give them up.
4. Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you’re not really losing it. You’re just passing it on to someone else.
5. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.
6. She taught me all about real sacrifice. That it should be done from love… That it should be done from necessity, not without exhausting all other options. That it should be done for people who need your strength because they don’t have enough of their own.
7. There are memories that time does not erase… Forever does not make loss forgettable, only bearable.
8. Sacrifice is a part of life. It’s supposed to be. It’s not something to regret. It’s something to aspire to.
9. As my sufferings mounted I soon realized that there were two ways in which I could respond to my situation — either to react with bitterness or seek to transform the suffering into a creative force. I decided to follow the latter course.
10. Life is funny. Things change, people change, but you will always be you, so stay true to yourself and never sacrifice who you are for anyone.
11. Sometimes the prize is not worth the costs. The means by which we achieve victory are as important as the victory itself.
12. Real magic can never be made by offering someone else’s liver. You must tear out your own, and not expect to get it back.
13. It’s not hard to decide what you want your life to be about. What’s hard, she said, is figuring out what you’re willing to give up in order to do the things you really care about.
14. Sometimes talking to you is like talking to myself: pretty damned annoying.
15. It was remembered afterwards that when he bent down and touched her face with his lips, he murmured some words. The child, who was nearest to him, told them afterwards, and told her grandchildren when she was a handsome old lady, that she heard him say, “A life you love.
16. The best use of life is love. The best expression of love is time. The best time to love is now.
17. For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life.
18. Love without sacrifice is like theft
19. There is no progress or accomplishment without sacrifice.
20. Only yesterday I was no different than them, yet I was saved. I am explaining to you the way of life of a people who say every sort of wicked thing about me because I sacrificed their friendship to gain my own soul. I left the dark paths of their duplicity and turned my eyes toward the light where there is salvation, truth, and justice. They have exiled me now from their society, yet I am content. Mankind only exiles the one whose large spirit rebels against injustice and tyranny. He who does not prefer exile to servility is not free in the true and necessary sense of freedom.
21. Self-sacrifice? But it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed.
22. Тhere isnʹt much I wouldnʹt do for you. Тhe stupider, the better.
23. Anything that you cannot sacrifice pins you. Makes you predictable, makes you weak.
24. The ultimate test of man’s conscience may be his willingness to sacrifice something today for future generations whose words of thanks will not be heard.
25. The first question which the priest and the Levite asked was: ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’ But…the good Samaritan reversed the question: ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?
26. Find a purpose to serve, not a lifestyle to live.
27. Without pain, without sacrifice we would have nothing. Like the first monkey shot into space.
28. Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable… Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.
29. It is often argued that religion is valuable because it makes men good, but even if this were true it would not be a proof that religion is true. That would be an extension of pragmatism beyond endurance. Santa Claus makes children good in precisely the same way, and yet no one would argue seriously that the fact proves his existence. The defense of religion is full of such logical imbecilities. The theologians, taking one with another, are adept logicians, but every now and then they have to resort to sophistries so obvious that their whole case takes on an air of the ridiculous. Even the most logical religion starts out with patently false assumptions. It is often argued in support of this or that one that men are so devoted to it that they are willing to die for it. That, of course, is as silly as the Santa Claus proof. Other men are just as devoted to manifestly false religions, and just as willing to die for them. Every theologian spends a large part of his time and energy trying to prove that religions for which multitudes of honest men have fought and died are false, wicked, and against God.
30. To me it seems that too many young women of this time share the same creed. ‘Live, laugh, love, be nothing but happy, experience everything, et cetera et cetera.’ How monotonous, how useless this becomes. What about the honors of Joan of Arc, Beauvoir, Stowe, Xena, Princess Leia, or women that would truly fight for something other than just their own emotions?
31. I have so many dreams of my own, and I remember things from my childhood, from when I was a girl and a young woman, and I haven’t forgotten a thing. So why did we think of Mom as a mom from the very beginning? She didn’t have the opportunity to pursue her dreams, and all by herself, faced everything the era dealt her, poverty and sadness, and she couldn’t do anything about her very bad lot in life other than suffer through it and get beyond it and live her life to the very best of her ability, giving her body and her heart to it completely. Why did I never give a thought to Mom’s dreams?
32. God knows we’re all drawn toward what’s beautiful and broken; I have been, but some people cannot be fixed. Or if they can be, it’s only by love and sacrifice so great it destroys the giver.
33. They never fail who die in a great cause.
34. So the question becomes, Daughter of the Dragon, what will you sacrifice? What will you let be taken away so that you, too, can have power?
35. It’s easier to bleed than sweat, Mr. Motes.
36. But once in a while . . . I don’t know. I feel so close, Rose. So close to the edge. Like if I allow myself one small misstep, I’ll plunge away and never come back. It’s like I’ll lose myself.
37. One of the greatest evils is the foolishness of a good man. For the giving man to withhold helping someone in order to first assure personal fortification is not selfish, but to elude needless self-destruction; martyrdom is only practical when the thought is to die, else a good man faces the consequence of digging a hole from which he cannot escape, and truly helps no one in the long run.
38. When you go in search of honey, you must expect to be stung by bees.
39. Love doesn’t please itself by seeking revenge. Love sacrifices itself for the good of others.
40. When you know who matters most to you, giving things up, even yourself, doesn’t really feel like a sacrifice.
41. I see enormous loves growing immense and finally crushing me.
42. I remembered suddenly that Aspen had always been this way. He sacrificed sleep for me, he risked getting caught out after curfew for me, he scrounged together pennies for me. Aspen’s generosity was harder to see because it wasn’t as grand as Maxon’s, but the heart behind what he gave was so much bigger.
43. When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process.
44. My father told me once that the most important thing every man should know is what he would die for.
45. Without sacrifice, true love is incomprehensible.
46. I’d rather spend the rest of my life without ever seeing you again,” he says, “than watch them destroy you because of me.
47. She was a ray of sunshine, a warm summer rain, a bright fire on a cold winter’s day, and now she could be dead because she had tried to save the man she loved.
48. I have come to see clearly that life is more than self. It is more than doing what I want, striving for what will benefit me, dreaming of all I can be. Life is all about my relationship with God. There is no higher calling, no loftier dream, and no greater goal than to live, breathe, and be poured out for Jesus Christ.”
–Jamie in Brother Andrew’s “The Calling
49. WL’s [White Liberals] think all the world’s problems can be fixed without any cost to themselves. We don’t believe that. There’s a lot to be said for sacrifice, remorse, even pity. It’s what separates us from roaches
50. If she loved him the way she said she did, she wanted him whole. Maybe this was what love meant after all: sacrifice and selflessness. It did not mean hearts and flowers and a happy ending, but the knowledge that another’s well-being is more important than one’s own.
51. You don’t get it, Clary. You don’t understand what it’s like to live always at war, to grow up with battle and sacrifice. I guess it’s not your fault. It’s just how you were brought up-
52. Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience.
53. Nobody knows you as well as our spouse. And that means no one will be quicker to recognize a change when you deliberately start sacrificing your wants and wishes to make sure his or her needs are met.
54. We set out to save the Shire, Sam and it has been saved – but not for me.
55. For what is love itself, for the one we love best? – an enfolding of immeasurable cares which yet are better than any joys outside our love.
56. I’m willing to walk in darkness if it keeps humans in the light.
57. I was aware that we were both silently making those inevitable comparisons, putting our relationship in context. She is more this and less that. He is better or worse in these ways. It is human nature to do this–unless its your first relationship, which might be the very reason that your first relationship feels special and remains forever sacred. But the older you get, the more cynical you become, and the more complicated and convoluted the exercise is. You begin to realize that nothing is perfect, that there are trade-offs and sacrifices. The worst is when someone in your past trumps the person in the present, and you think to yourself: if I’d known this, then maybe I wouldn’t have let him go.
58. Also … the plan sounded exactly like the sneaky, twisted, ridiculously annoying and noble sort of thing Leo Valdez would do.
59. It wasn’t necessary to win for the story to be great, it was only necessary to sacrifice everything.
60. Regardless of the advertising campaigns may tell us, we can’t have it all. Sacrifice is not an option, or an anachronism; it’s a fact of life. We all cut off our own limbs to burn on some altar. The crucial thing is to choose an altar that’s worth it and a limb you can accept losing. To go consenting to the sacrifice.
