sacrifice Quotes

“When we make little sacrifices we like to have them appreciated, at least.”

“Dreams do come true, if only we wish hard enough. You can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it.”

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

“We gained control of many things. But we had to let go of others.”

“As you wish.”

“Better never means better for everyone... It always means worse, for some.”

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

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

“Every job will demand some sacrifice. The key is to avoid unnecessary sacrifice.”

“Don’t think about who they are. Think about who you are and what sacrifices you can live with and what will break you.”

I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss. I see the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful, prosperous and happy. I see that I hold a sanctuary in their hearts, and in the hearts of their descendants, generations hence. It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.

Think now and then that there is a man who would give his life, to keep a life you love beside you.

And here I have lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of these days let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest. . . . Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi.

“Will you buy my hair?” asked Della. “I buy hair,” said Madame. “Take yer hat off and let’s have a sight at the looks of it.” Down rippled the brown cascade. “Twenty dollars,” said Madame, lifting the mass with a practised hand. “Give it to me quick,” said Della.

Out of his trance Jim seemed quickly to wake. He enfolded his Della. . . . Eight dollars a week or a million a year—what is the difference? A mathematician or a wit would give you the wrong answer.

“Dell,” said he, “let’s put our Christmas presents away and keep ’em a while. They’re too nice to use just at present. I sold the watch to get the money to buy your combs.”

“Jim, darling,” she cried, “don’t look at me that way. I had my hair cut off and sold because I couldn’t have lived through Christmas without giving you a present. . . . Say ‘Merry Christmas!’ Jim, and let’s be happy. You don’t know what a nice—what a beautiful, nice gift I’ve got for you.”

“Isn’t it a dandy, Jim? I hunted all over town to find it. You’ll have to look at the time a hundred times a day now. Give me your watch. I want to see how it looks on it.” . . . “Dell,” said he, “let’s put our Christmas presents away and keep ’em a while. They’re too nice to use just at present. I sold the watch to get the money to buy your combs.”

“A noble mind finds its purest joy in the accomplishment of its duty, and to that willingly sacrifices its inclination.”

When He talks of their losing their selves, He means only abandoning the clamour of self-will; once they have done that, He really gives them back all their personality, and boasts (I am afraid, sincerely) that when they are wholly His they will be more themselves than ever.

“To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of life, with eyes wide open. It means deciding to voluntarily transform the chaos of potential into the realities of habitable order. It means adopting the burden of self-conscious vulnerability, and accepting the end of the unconscious paradise of childhood, where finitude and mortality are only dimly comprehended. It means willingly undertaking the sacrifices necessary to generate a productive and meaningful reality (it means acting to please God, in the ancient language).”

“My mother’s death was brave. I remember how calm she was, how determined. It isn’t just brave that she died for me; it is brave that she did it without announcing it, without hesitation, and without appearing to consider another option.”

“My father says—used to say—that there is power in self-sacrifice.”

Without pain, without sacrifice we would have nothing. Like the first monkey shot into space.

“Industry, technology, and commerce can thrive only as long as an idealistic national community offers the necessary preconditions. And these do not lie in material egoism, but in a spirit of sacrifice and joyful renunciation.”

You were born as a sacrifice. And you can either participate in the sacrifice, dissolving in the giving of your gift, or you can resist it, which is your suffering.

“It was inevitable that she should accept any inconsistency and cruelty from her deity as all good worshippers do from theirs. All gods who receive homage are cruel. All gods dispense suffering without reason. Otherwise they would not be worshipped. Through indiscriminate suffering men know fear and fear is the most divine emotion. It is the stones for altars and the beginning of wisdom. Half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood.”

“He who would accomplish little need sacrifice little; he who would achieve much must sacrifice much. He who would attain highly must sacrifice greatly.”

“He rises from the throne. “Come, have a seat.” His voice is replete with danger, lush with menace. The flowering branches have sprouted thorns so thickly that petals are barely visible. “This is what you wanted, isn’t it?” he asks. “What you sacrificed everything for. Go on. It’s all yours.”

“I’ll tell you what is convenient,” he said after a moment. “To sleep until noon and have someone bring you your breakfast on a tray. To cancel an appointment at the very last minute. To keep a carriage waiting at the door of one party, so that on a moment’s notice it can whisk you away to another. To sidestep marriage in your youth and put off having children altogether. These are the greatest of conveniences, Anushka—and at one time, I had them all. But in the end, it has been the inconveniences that have mattered to me most.”

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

“Sacrifice, you made one. I made one. We all make them. But you are angry over yours. You kept thinking about what you lost . . . You didn’t get it. Sacrifice is a part of life.”

“A lifetime of glory is worth a moment of pain.”

“They needed more clues about the code. They needed memories. So he was going to get stung by a Griever. Go through the Changing. On purpose”

“I’m not going to build another Dragonwings. When I was up there on it, I found myself wishing you were up there, and your mother with you. And I realized I couldn’t have the two of them together: my family and flying. And just as I saw the hill coming at me, I realized that my family meant more to me than flying. It’s enough for me to know that I can fly.”

“They also found in combat the closest brotherhood they ever knew. They found selflessness. They found they could love the other guy in their foxhole more than themselves. They found that in war, men who loved life would give their lives for them.”

“In my dream the man began to run. He hadn’t run far from his own door when his wife and children noticed what he was doing and cried out to him. ‘Come back! Come home!’ The man put his fingers in his ears and ran on. ‘Life! Life! Eternal life!’”

“In those three years the men had seen more, endured more, and contributed more than most men can see, endure or contribute in a lifetime.”

“I look up into those blue eyes that no amount of dramatic makeup can make truly deadly and remember how, just a year ago, I was prepared to kill him. Convinced he was trying to kill me. Now everything is reversed. I’m determined to keep him alive, knowing the cost will be my own life, but the part of me that is not so brave as I could wish is glad that it’s Peeta, not Haymitch, beside me.”

″... No war can be won without young men dying. Those things which are precious are saved only by sacrifice.”

“Of all that is written, I love only what a person hath written with his blood. Write with blood, and thou wilt find that blood is spirit.”

“Of all that is written, I love only what a person hath written with his blood. Write with blood, and thou wilt find that blood is spirit.”

“Do you think either of them would give up if you died? They’d still fight, we all would. You can’t change anything, so just be good, okay?”

“Love is a verb. Love – the feeling – is the fruit of love the verb or our loving actions. So love her. Sacrifice. Listen to her. Empathize. Appreciate. Affirm her.”

“This is the truth: when you sacrifice your life, you must make fullest use of your weaponry. Not to do so, and to die with a weapon not yet drawn is false.”

“None of the people we lost were idiots. They knew what they were doing. They followed you because they believed you really could kill Snow.”

″‘He paid a severe price to est the revenant-it was evidently a very close contest. Potion or no potion, your brother must have the heart of a lion!’ ‘He’s very brave,’ Kendra said, tears pooling in her eyes.”

“The way to deeper knowledge of God is through the lonely valleys of soul poverty and abnegation of all things.”

“We can well afford to make God our All, to concentrate, to sacrifice the many for the One.”

“We should forfeit our right to be offended. That means forfeiting our right to hold on to anger. When we do this, we’ll be making a sacrifice that’s very pleasing to God. It strikes at our very pride. It forces us not only to think about humility, but to actually be humble.”

“Happy is he who has the pure truth in him. He will regret no sacrifice that keeps it.”

“I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me.”

“i stand on the sacrifices of a million women before me thinking what can i do to make this mountain taller so the women after me can see farther -legacy”

“..the early Christians... Willingly they sacrificed fame, fortune and life itself on behalf of the cause they knew to be right. Quantitatively small, they were qualitatively giants.”

“Early Christian...Willingly they sacrificed fame, fortune and life itself on behalf of the cause they knew to be right. Quantitatively small, they were qualitatively giants. Their powerful gospel put an end to such barbaric evils as infanticide and bloody gladiatorial contests.”

″‘Maybe you should just feed me to him,’ Seth said. ‘Don’t talk nonsense,’ Grandma said. Seth stood up. ‘Wouldn’t it be better than letting Olloch destroy all of Fablehaven? Sounds like he’ll get me sooner or later.‘”

“Most people focus on the wrong thing; They focus on the result, not the process. The process is the sacrifice; it’s all the hard parts - the sweat, the pain, the tears, the losses. You make the sacrifices anyway. You learn to enjoy them, or at least embrace them. In the end, it is the sacrifices that must fulfill you.”

“No matter how low the pantry supplies, each family always managed to contribute something, and as the churchgoers made the rounds from table to table, hard times were forgotten at least for the day.”

“They both wore clean work shirts, light blue with faded elbows. Esperanza had on a worn denim skirt and flat loafers. I had asked them please not to wear their very best for this occasion, not their Immigration-fooling clothes. It had to look like Turtle was going to be better off with me. When they came out that morning dressed as refugees I had wanted to cry out, No! I was wrong. Don’t sacrifice your pride for me. But this is how badly they wanted to make it work.”

“Even if you give everything up and go to a distant cave away from civilization, you cannot escape from the world.”

“The most noble fate a man can endure is to place his own mortal body between his loved home and the war’s desolation.”

″‘You. What is the moral difference, if any, between the soldier and the civilian?’ ‘The difference, I said carefully, ‘lies in the field of civic virtue. A soldier accepts personal responsibility for the safety of the body politic of which he is a member, defending it, if need be, with his life. The civilian does not.‘”

“I once sacrificed my life to keep my parents’ promise. This means nothing to you, because to you promises mean nothing. A daughter can promise to come to dinner, but if she has a headache, if she has a traffic jam, if she wants to watch a favorite movie on TV, then she no longer has a promise.”

“See, unlike the rest of the free world, I didn’t get here by accident. And if your parents have you for a reason then that reason better exist. Because once it’s gone, so are you.”

“Among the great sheep for sacrifice Enkidu was their guard. A man, a leader, A hero.”

Imagine a bleeding calf is thrashing in a shark-infested shallows. What to do--stay out of the water or try to stay the jaws of the sharks? Such was our choice.

“The answer is that there is no good answer. So as parents, as doctors, as judges, and as a society, we fumble through and make decisions that allow us to sleep at night—because morals are more important than ethics, and love is more important than law.‘”

“Either this girl loses her sister, I think, or she’s going to lose herself.”

“You are saving their lives for a life not worth living.”

“Mother was starving herself to feed us.”

“Soul is as free as the clouds in the sky, but he is committed to his dream. On his freely chosen path, he often has to get up earlier than he would like, speak to people from whom he learns nothing, make certain sacrifices.”

“I am the great scholar, the magician, the adept, who is doing the experiment. Of course I need subjects to do it on. Bless my soul, you’ll be telling me next that I ought to have asked the guinea-pigs’ permission before I used them! No great wisdom can be reached without sacrifice.”

″‘I don’t understand,’ he said again, ‘You tell people about the kingdom. Are we not to fight for it?’ ‘The kingdom is only bought at a great price,’ Jesus said. ‘There was one who came just yesterday and wanted to follow me. He was very rich, and when I asked him to give up his wealth, he went away.’

“Well I’m an incredibly frustrated woman right now. And I’m not ‘wasting’ good opportunities; it’s called ‘presenting my daughter with new ones.’ ”

“…In its original Latin form, sacrifice means to make sacred or to make holy. I wholeheartedly believe that when we are fully engaged in parenting, regardless of how imperfect, vulnerable, and messy it is, we are creating something sacred.”

“Let there be a careful attention to perform the funeral rites to parents, and let them be followed when long gone with the ceremonies of sacrifice;— then the virtue of the people will resume its proper excellence.”

“High on the deck the godlike hero stands, With olive crown’d, a charger in his hands; Then cast the reeking entrails in the brine, And pour’d the sacrifice of purple wine.”

“Gods of the liquid realms, on which I row! If, giv’n by you, the laurel bind my brow, Assist to make me guilty of my vow! A snow-white bull shall on your shore be slain; His offer’d entrails cast into the main, And ruddy wine, from golden goblets thrown, Your grateful gift and my return shall own.”

″... nobody could love ‘ee more than Tess did! . . . She would have laid down her life for ‘ee. I could do no more.”

“The persistent refusal of the Adamses to sacrifice the integrity of their own intellectual and moral standards and values for the sake of winning public office or popular favor is another of the measuring rods by which we may measure the divergence of American life from its starting point.”

“May you find your Tower ... and breach it, and may you climb to the top!”

“Wes, you are not going anywhere until you give this place a try . . . Too many people have sacrificed in order for you to be there.”

“Love is spiritual. It’s about self-sacrifice and commitment. And discipline. You cannot have true love without discipline. And respect. When you lose the respect of your spouse, you’ve lost everything.”

“There is no road so long and winding as the one that lead you to the finish line. Every bend is meant to test you, every junction made to bring you closer to that place where love and sacrifice meet.”

“If we aren’t willing to pay a price for our values, if we aren’t willing to make some sacrifices in order to realize them, then we should ask ourselves whether we truly believe in them at all.”

“For it is one thing to declare one’s love for someone and quite another to accept that loving that person requires sacrificing one’s dreams.”

“As for Houshang, Zozo’s husband, he was a CEO in Iran, but in Austria, he was nothing.”

“None of us wants to die. But it’s a possibility, and if you don’t accept that, it’s going to be in the back of your head the whole time, and you’re not going to be able to function. So you accept it, you realize that you’re not going to be able to talk to your family possibly ever again.”

“The being who stood to gain and the being who has been sacrificed are one and the same.”

“Sacrificing her future in favor of Pasha’s, Lara held the candle as low as possible ... it always came out that her candle was higher than his.”

“He who loves his dream of community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.”

“Oh, Gemma, how could I tell you what I’d done? That’s the curse of mothers, you know. We’re never prepared for how much we love our children, for how much we wish we could protect them by being perfect.”

″ In whatever arena of life one may meet the challenge of courage, whatever may be the sacrifices he faces if he follows his conscience- the loss of friends, his fortune, his contentment, even the esteem of his fellow men- each man must decide for himself the course he will follow.”

“Forgive me, all of you,” the starvation artist whispered.

“Love gives us a heightened consciousness through which to apprehend the world, but anger gives us a precise, detached perception of its own.”

“For sometimes a choice must be made—this is the definition of focus. Sacrifice is not a word: it is loss and achievement, and most of all it is caring about other more than self.”

“No, that’s also been well provided for: we’re going to occupy the Acropolis this very day. The older women are assigned that part: while we’re working out our agreement down here, they’ll occupy the Acropolis, pretending to be up there for a sacrifice.”

“In spite of everything, Enrique has failed again - he will not reach the United States this time, either. He tells himself over and over that he’ll just have to try again.”

“It’s a big comfort to know that their lives will continue even after he’s gone.”

“Connor had risked his life to save Lev, just as Connor had done for the baby on the doorstep. Well, the baby had been saved, but Lev had not, and although he knows he can’t be held responsible for Lev’s unwinding, he feels as if it is his fault.”

“Then, feeling the coldness of the steel against his fingertips, he pulls the fire alarm.”

“You know that we were born of sacrifice, and that we have had to live by a different truth and that that truth is good and the vision of manhood it stands for is more human, more desirable, more real.”

“You’ll just have to endure some things and give up other...everything must be paid for.”

“Don’t expect me to give up everything.”

“Somebody said let’s go out and fight for liberty and so they went and got killed without ever once thinking about liberty. And what kind of liberty were they fighting for anyway? How much liberty and whose idea of liberty?”

“People who sacrifice beauty for efficiency get what they deserve.”

“He took off his only robe, which was old and tattered. “Here, he said, “Please take this.”

Ry never lets anyone leave empty-handed, he looked around the tiny hut for a gift for the robber. But there was nothing to give.”

“The whole tribe was there, sitting around the kitchen table, waiting for dinner to be served. Except for the old man, of course. As usual, he was down the pub.”

“My poor Mum didn’t have any teeth. She’d gone into hospital and they’d taken them all out, every last one. It was because of us kids.”

″‘And has she told you what happens to the children?’ ‘No, she hasn’t told me that. I only just know that it’s about Dust, and they’re like a kind of sacrifice.’ Again, that wasn’t exactly a lie, she thought; she had never said that Mrs. Coulter herself has told her. ‘Sacrifice is a rather dramatic way of putting it. What’s done is for their good as well as ours.‘”

″ ‘I haven’t settled on which yet but either way I won’t be wasting my life either. I’ll be working for the good of humanity too. You are raising Ima Dean and me right, Mary Call, and we will always be grateful to you for the way you have sacrificed yourself for us. ’ End of dream. ”

“The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.”

“We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.”

“The experience of all ages and nations, I believe, demonstrates that the work done by slaves, though it appears to cost only their maintenance, is in the end the dearest of any.”

“Man will lay down his life for his country, his society, his family. He will chose to throw himself on a grenade to save his comrades; he is capable of the highest generosity and self-sacrifice. But he has to feel and believe that what he is doing is truly heroic, timeless and supremely meaningful.”

“Silas could feel his homeland testing him, drawing violent memories from his redeemed soul. You have been reborn, he reminded himself. His service to God today had required the sin of murder, and it was a sacrifice Silas knew he would have to hold silently in his heart for all eternity.”

“They reminded me that it was my fate to pursue only phantoms, creatures whose reality existed to a great extent in my imagination; for there are people - and this had been my case since youth - for whom all the things that have a fixed value, assessable by others, fortune, success, high positions, do not count; what they must have is phantoms. They sacrifice all the rest, devote all their efforts, make everything else subservient to the pursuit of some phantom. But this soon fades away; then they run after another only to return later on to the first.”

“the solemn ritual that was attached to almost everything, made them seem like boys going off to fight a war for the benefit of someone else, unwitting sacrifices to a strange and powerful god. In”

“You’re no saint, because saints are stupid! You’re stupid! You’re so stupid that you can’t think ahead! You think that sacrificing your life for a bunch of scabby, snot-nosed orphans is going to save them from slavery? You’re out of your mind!”

“One plan, however insane and unlikely, to free the enslaved kingdom: find and obliterate the Wyrdkeys the King of Adarlan had used to build his terrible empire. She’d gladly destroy herself to carry it out.”

“Soon I felt water around my ankles. Then it washed to my knees. It would go back and then crash against us again. Timothy was taking the full blows of the storm, sheltering me with his body. When the water receded, it would tug at us, and Timothy’s strength would fight against it. I could feel the steel in his arms as the water tried to suck us away.”

″...sometimes there comes a time in a man’s life when fate has beaten him so that he must bow his head and decide that he must eat his pride so that his family may eat bread.”

“A solemn story about a little sparrow that sacrifices himself for the betterment of his community.”

“I was he who had come through the surf last night alive, and this poor body was my friend who had laid down his life for me.”

“When I signed on with Guardian I took a vow of poverty. If my clients can survive on two bucks a day for food, the least I can do is cut every corner.”

“God knows we done all we could, as poor as we are—we wouldn’t see him want anything while he was in it.”

And then Piglet did a Noble Thing, and he did it in a sort of dream, while he was thinking of all the wonderful words Pooh had hummed about him. “Yes, it’s just the house for Owl,” he said grandly. “And I hope he’ll be very happy in it.” And then he gulped twice, because he had been very happy in it himself.