If you stay, I'll do whatever you want. I'll quit the band, go with you to New York. But if you need me to go away, I'll do that, too. I was talking to Liz and she said maybe coming back to your old life would be too painful, that maybe it'd be easier for you to erase us. And that would suck, but I'd do it. I can lose you like that if I don't lose you today. I'll let you go. If you stay.

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

I love you," he whispered, and that was the moment he knew what he was going to do. When you loved someone, you put their needs before your own. No matter how inconceivable those needs were; no matter how fucked up; no matter how much it made you feel like you were ripping yourself into pieces.

Don’t sacrifice yourself too much, because if you sacrifice too much there’s nothing else you can give and nobody will care for you.

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

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

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

My mother told me that life isn't always about pleasing yourself and that sometimes you have to do things for the sole benefit of another human being. I completely agreed with her, but reminded her that that was what blow jobs were for.

Those who live as though God sets the rules are not going by their own rules. That is the self-sacrifice, or selflessness, that peace more often than not requires. Those who insist on going by their own rules cannot make that sacrifice. They are the steady adherents of (global) conflict because they are forever fighting both themselves and others to do whatever they think that they want to do.

Every plant, tree, and animal is a blessing and every person has a purpose for living. Courage, curiosity, and generosity produce noble spirits. Enduring life honorably results in wisdom. Knowledge passed down from one generation to the next along with humankind's tradition of performing charitable and self-sacrificing deeds creates principled legacies for future generations to emulate.

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

Oh I know it's cliché but yeah they say that great men make it in-To places few others who even do take the risk've ever been

Despite the voices of the culture that would scream otherwise, victory is irreparably tied to the surrender of self. And that explains why so few are truly victorious.

Authentic love is deciding to live on a one-way street where all the arrows point down the street and not a single one of them point back up to where I’m standing.

Not knowing who you are is a certain kind of hell.

Ah! What pleasure it must be to a woman to suffer for the one she loves!

If I can somehow focus on the pain of not focusing on my pain, I will soon find that pain healed simply because I forced myself to do the exact opposite of what my core humanity demanded I do…I sought to heal the pain of someone else instead.

Everybody knows basically what is right and what is wrong. Everybody knows better than to hate others. In fact, most people teach against it, and yet we still see it on the daily. But why do you think that is? It is because the problem was never really humans not loving humans enough; the problem was humans not loving righteousness enough. We must empty our own love for the world so that it can be replaced by the love of Christ; only then will we begin to love people as Christ loves people, as He always intended.

But I can tell you this: that I am deeply proud of Rebecca. That she made a split-second decision to save the life of her son, turning the wheel of her vehicle so that her side of it would be impacted by an oncoming car instead of his. She gave her life in the exercise of the greatest gift that God grants us—the ability to change the trajectory of history.

Speaking a painful truth should be done only in love - like wielding a sword with no hilt - it should pain oneself in direct proportion to the amount of force exerted.

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.

Sadie," he said forlornly, "when you become a parent, you may understand this. One of my hardest jobs as a father, one of my greatest duties, was to realize that my own dreams, my own goals and wishes, are secondary to my children's.

The more you offer yourself to make life better for someone, the more you empty yourself of the load of destiny you carry into the world. Serve till you empty all.

A lack of common sense usually ends in some heroic feat, much like the soldier who dives onto the grenade so that others may live.

They say the only way you can truly kill a Celestra is by fire. I would gladly lend myself to the flames to peer down eternally over this sinful disgrace of a planet that houses cowards such as these.

Grace represents the sublime glamour of human souls, the ability of physically courageous and emotionally brave people to give part of them in order to protect other people regardless of adverse consequence that they might personally endure.

Rise up oh heart, for there is another battle to win.

If I rise up again against the foe, dare I stand alone?

Growing up, I always had a soldier mentality. As a kid I wanted to be a soldier, a fighter pilot, a covert agent, professions that require a great deal of bravery and risk and putting oneself in grave danger in order to complete the mission. Even though I did not become all those things, and unless my predisposition, in its youngest years, already had me leaning towards them, the interest that was there still shaped my philosophies. To this day I honor risk and sacrifice for the good of others - my views on life and love are heavily influenced by this.

He was lost. He knew it. He had neither the size nor the strength to defeat her, and she had him cornered. But he would fight. He was a warrior, the prince-son of the unicorns, and he meant to go down fighting. There would be no songs to mark his death; and none of his people would even know. But he had saved Korr and the others of the band. It was noon — they were safe out of the hills by now, and none of the rest of it mattered.

Sacrifice is a passion that unleashes everything away from us so that it can be drawn into everyone around us.

The eyes of love have 20/20 vision when focused on another, and become entirely blind when focused on ourselves.

One little second of pleasure, a whole life of pain...my mother knew nothing of the pleasures of a good roll in the hay...she missed out on all that...like me, her son...a lifetime of sacrifice!...the woman who can grunt and rave in the throes of a deep fuck can die happy...

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.

If we seek spiritual heroism ourselves, the old ego is just back in control under a new name. There would not really be any change at all, but only disguise, just bogus self-improvement on our own terms.

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

Prayer is one action where I lay aside my abilities to immerse myself wholly in God’s capabilities. And the liberation found in such an action is less about being engaged with God and more about being freed from myself.

If you are trading silence or compliance for love, you are being cheated. When acceptance or love is withheld if you reveal secrets, the value of the relationship is just an illusion. Love cannot be earned, bought or traded–only freely given. You are worthy of love that doesn’t require you to protect your abuser or sacrifice yourself.

Whatever the item is that I have chosen to give you, it is nothing more than the receptacle within which I have placed the whole of myself. If it is empty, it is not a gift.

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.

If the Emperor had not delivered his [15 August 1945] address urging the Japanese people to lay down their swords—if that speech had been a call instead for the Honorable Death of the Hundred Million—those people on that street in Sōshigaya probably would have done what they were told and died. And probably I would have done likewise. The Japanese see self-assertion as immoral and self-sacrifice as the sensible course to take in life. We were accustomed to this teaching and had never thought to question it.

One of the highest marks of citizenship is fighting for the common defense.

The sin of quick anger is an idol of the heart that is not dying to our own rights.

She put others before herself and yet you hate her. What did she do to you?

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.

Sometimes love is not enough.

A great imperative imparts a wonderful impulse to the spirit.

You can sacrifice and not love. But you cannot love and not sacrifice.

Oftentimes winning can become an addiction, whether good or bad, to the point where you would rather lose it all before you lose at all.

The only honorable, desirable kind of fear that shouldn't be feared is the fear of harm on a loved one. It's the kind of fear that leads to self-sacrifice and the kind of fear where you would truly jump in front of a bus to save another.

I brought you here to tell you this: sometimes what we are searching for does not exist. We may sacrifice for it, even bleed for it, but it was never meant to be ours.

Someone has to be stoic, for the sake of, in spite of, and in the face of all those who are, not. Someone, has to be serious. Someone has to choose to forgo choice, so that there is an option left for others to consider. Everyone can't be, someone.

Amin, you’re not making sense to me. Things have always been this way, since the beginning of time. Some die so others can be saved. You don’t believe in the salvation of others?

What's a man worth without love ? $.89 worth of chemicals." Hawkeye Pierce

True love is generative. It is the only kind that makes more of itself as it goes along.

It takes practice to stand with others facing pain of death, and it helps if you don't have to do it all alone. We should practice on the small stuff so that we will be better able to stand together for what we believe and for what we love, who may someday need our support.

The generation of American men who fought the Second World War were too struck by the scale of the effort – and the stakes of the effort – to see the war as a stage for their own personal heroism. Most men seem to have taken the lesson that there's enough honor in doing a hard job when you have to.

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?

- in the end she felt pity for me, for the lost man. And when a girl's heart is moved to pity, that is, of course, most dangerous for her. She's sure to want to "save" him then, to bring him to reason, to resurrect him, to call him to nobler aims, to regenerate him into a new life and new activity. Well, everyone knows what can be dreamt up in that vein. I saw at once that the bird was flying into my net on its own.

At certain moments, the foot slips ; at others, the ground gives way. How many times had that conscience, furious for the right, grasped and overwhelmed him! How many times had truth, inexorable, planted her knee upon his breast! How many times, thrown to the ground by the light, had he cried to it for mercy!

As empaths, one of the quickest ways to completely losing our grounding in reality is by deferring our needs and wants in relationships.

Doing the right thing for someone else occasionally means doing something that feels wrong to you.

Civilians who volunteer generally wish to escape, not to share, privatizations worse than their own.

Charity is to be measured, not by what one has given away, but by what one has left.

What looked safe was not safe. What looked hard and unsafe was probably safer. Anyway, safe was somewhere else in the world.

Giving yourself is the ultimate revolution.

The goddess smiled. "You are a good hero, Percy Jackson. Not too proud. I like that. But you have much to learn. When Dionysus was made a god, I gave up my throne for him. It was the only way to avoid a civil war among the gods.""It unbalanced the Council," I remembered. "Suddenly there were seven guys and five girls."Hestia shrugged. "It was the best solution, not a perfect one. Now I tend the fire. I fade slowly into the background. No one will ever write epic poems about the deeds of Hestia. Most demigods don't even stop to talk to me. But that is no matter. I keep the peace. I yield when necessary. Can you do this?

For I was sure of one thing, it wasn't always the hero who saved the world. It was the person most willing to die first.

To die trying is the proudest humans thing.