Sacrifice Quotes - Page 3

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.

Your father... doesn't work late for you to pinch his dinner.

Overoptimism Is More Dangerous Than Overpessimism

Nothing shows our hearts like sacrifice. When we are willing not only to give from our excess, but to embrace some personal loss or disadvantage for the sake of showing generosity toward others, we say loudly and clearly…that we have a greater love than ourselves and our comforts.

Love is about giving, about caring for the other person's welfare. Love is treating someone, in the Kantian sense, never as a means but as an end in themselves. Love is sacrifice, love is something you work at, something you build like a house or tend like a plant, brick by brick, drop by drop, day by day. Nonsense. Old wives' tales, old husbands' tales. That is affection they are talking about, that is companionship, that is charity, that is tickets for the Cancer Research Ball. You must ask the young if you want to know what love is. Only they are deep enough in it to describe. We older ones have clues and simulacra, we base our judgement, like pathologists do, on the dents and scars and sediments of hearts long kept in formaldehyde. It is the pulsing heart you want to probe: the pulsing, beating, leaping, dipping, fluttering heart of a seventeen-year-old.

If you pay the price for success, you win. If you avoid payment, you lose. It’s really that simple.

Hong Kong became so materialistic that it must be one of the rarest places in the world where family members need to make an appointment to have dinner together, and people speculate upon their own home where their own children are growing up.

She resembled the swallow in the fable who once every thousand years transferred a grain of wheat, in the hope of rearing a mountain to reach the moon. Such persons are raised up in every age; they obstinately insist on transporting their grains of wheat and they derive a certain exhilaration from the sneers of the bystanders. “How queerly they dress!” we cry. “How queerly they dress!

A god of the ‘possible’ is no God.

The pursuit of any worthwhile goal requires that you give up something that feels comfortable, secure, and safe in the moment to get you closer to your future dreams.

...the true value of an offering isn't measured by how much we give. It's measured by how much we keep...By definition, a sacrifice must involve sacrifice...

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.

You always hear all these statements like "Freedom isn't free." You hear the President talking about all these people making sacrifices. But you never really know until you carry one of them in a casket. When you feel their bodyweight. When you feel them. That's when you know. That's when you understand.

If the baser instinct of rampant self-preservation adamantly refuses to surrender itself to the infinitely greater call of self-sacrifice, in attempting to save our lives we will have in reality completely destroyed our lives.

Life’s just a sacrifice, a ransomWe pay to Death for Love to save,Which turns to be as great as handsomeTo get a blessing from the grave.

Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists.

And at once he sacrificed everything to it, if it can be said we ever sacrifice anything save what we know we can never attain, or what some secret wisdom tells us it would be uncomfortable or saddening to possess.

You know how the story ends. He escaped and went on to become the greatest chief Suntown ever had. He never built a shrine or a temple or even a shack in the name of Tia. In the Great Book, her name is never mentioned again. He never mused about her or even asked where she was buried. Tia was a virgin. She was beautiful. She was poor. And she was a girl. It was her duty to sacrifice her life for his.

Do not cry for me, Azrael. Do not waste your tears. You made your decision. And this is mine. Sacrifice seems to be my destiny. A funny thing for a selfish man, isn't it? They always called me weak back then...

This is the one who will find us. He's the one who will lead them all back to me someday. He's the explorer. El curioso.

I dun knw things get trappedIn my mindThen itss smethin That I wanna find I dun get the answer Is there anyone listenin to me No one there to seeTo see the pain and the agony Inside ur beautiful heartTo see that u kissed the painAnd kicked everythin apart

In order for you to receive, someone else has to give. That’s called sacrifice.

Dare to be different.

Our gifts are very pleasant to Him. He loves to see us lay our time, our talents, our substance on the altar not for the value of what we give, but for the sake of the motive from which the gift springs.

And so life went on, as it always will.It had taken an awful lot to get there, for no victory comes without hardship and sacrifice.But then, those whom we hold so dear, that we fight so hard to protect, and suffer so greatly for, are always worth it in the end.

Jesus says, "Deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me." He says, "The first shall be last and the last shall be first," and infuriating things like "if you seek to find your life you will lose it but those who lose their life will find it." And every single time I die to something—my notions of my own specialness, my plans and desires for something to be a very particular way—every single time I fight it and yet every single time I discover more life and more freedom than if I had gotten what I wanted.

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.

I've had people tell me to get over it. I politely tell them, 'How about if I chop off your finger and see if it grows back?

There isn’t a single definition of happiness to suit everyone’s requirements, but you know it when you feel it

That is why your sacrifice was all the more difficult. You chose to be a hero not through enchantment but through your own manhood.

In November, when our nation remembers her fallen soldiers and honours the lost youth of my generation, the Prime Minister, government leaders and the hollow men of business affix paper poppies to their lapels and afford the dead of war two minutes' silence. Afterwards, they speak golden platitudes about the struggle and the heroism of that time. Yet the words they speak are meaningless because they have surrendered the values my generation built after the horrors of the Second World War.

So, apart from casting runes, what other hobbies do you have? Forbidden rituals, human sacrifices, torturing? –

The child you hold in your arms is your gift to a future that you will not see. Therefore, we must turn a blind eye to ourselves and selflessly pour the best of ourselves into our children while rigorously sifting out the worst of ourselves. And once we are utterly spent by such daring gestures, we will shockingly discover the resulting emptiness as astonishingly filled.

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.

I rouse Emily to our guests, as she finishes off our fifteenth snowman by setting the head atop its torso. She stands limp at my direction, pointing out the coming shadows and I cannot help but hear a muffled sigh as she decapitates her latest creation with a single push of her hand.

If it has anything to do with me, it has nothing to do with sacrifice.

The difference between the old Testament and the new testament is that God doesn’t want sacrifices anymore

Failure is a pitfall of working without a plan.

I was raised to believe that God speaks in the language of sacrifice," he told me, "You are expected to sacrifice because it is the measure of the depth of your belief...

Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you're not really losing it. You're just passing it on to someone else.

She was smiling as she imagined herself as one more star in the sea of millions, and her body decided it had had enough, and she felt the exact moment when her power source gave up and the hum of electricity extinguished.But she was already vast and bright and endless.

The one who truly sacrifices the most is usually the one who talks about it the least

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?

It’s like this. Terror might make someone kill, but love will make someone die. People die for love. They would give up anything for love, even their life. And don’t you see, that’s a denial of the most basic of all human instincts: survival.

The satyagrahi enters the jail cell as the bridegroom enters the bridal chamber

Circumstances, events or situations do not have inherent meanings except what you give them

The men stop coming after Hunt goes missing. We learned from the last brave soul to visit that they whispered all sorts of stories to answer his disappearance. My favorite is that we ate him. We cooked him up with our whore-earned corn, a dozen rats’ eyes, and a bat wing. Even I couldn’t have thought of anything more perfect.

Sometimes events that lead us bereft of anything but grief just happen for no reason other than happenstance--a car turns left instead of right, a train is missed, a call comes too late--and the real test of our humanness is whether, in light of that knowledge, we are ever able to recover. When we again find our way despite the inability to manufacture a deeper meaning in our suffering, that I think is when God smiles upon us, proud of the strength of his creation.

Can any man sacrifice is life for his fellow man?

Being a ruler is, contrary to popular notions, a calling of self-sacrifice. That is, if one wants to be a good ruler.

Listen ... The universe is full of creatures that can get inside your soul. Things that try to take away the very things that make you who you are, who try to reshape you for their own ends, who want to eat you like a piece of fruit and spit out the seeds. It's Turtles all the way down. Are you listening? ... Listen, Chris. The Turtles don't deserve your life. You mustn't let them have you. I know them too well, Chris. They've touched me, infected me, possessed me. I've felt their contamination. I've been on their altars. Listen to me, Chris. They don't have the right ... Not even if they love you ... Not even if they're a god.

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.

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.

I don’t hate you,” I said, and I almost believed it.

[Connor, prepared to sacrifice himself to save Sarah]God, I pray, give me the strength to live the next hour well.

The best use of life is love. The best expression of love is time. The best time to love is now.

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.

I gave him everything from my lunches I hate, which is called Charity.

Civilians enjoy their time because soldiers sacrifice their time.

Good tells us that our agenda is the agenda of the person next to us.