"7 DEADLY SINS

Wealth without work

Pleasure without conscience

Science without humanity

Knowledge without character

Politics without principle

Commerce without morality

Worship without sacrifice."
— Mahatma Gandhi

"Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you're not really losing it. You're just passing it on to someone else."
— Mitch Albom (The Five People You Meet in Heaven)

"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."
— Charles Bukowski (Factotum)

"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."
— David Foster Wallace (This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life)

"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."
— Martin Luther King Jr.

"Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no, it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken."
— William Shakespeare

"But how will I know who my Soul mate is? "By taking risks" Wicca said to Brida. By risking failure, disappointment, disillusion, but never ceasing in your search for Love. As long as you keep looking, you will triumph in the end."
— Paulo Coelho (Brida)

"They never fail who die in a great cause."
— George Gordon Byron

"'She said she knew we were safe with you, and always would be, because once, when she asked you to, you'd given up the thing you most wanted.'

Archer received this strange communication in silence. His eyes remained unseeingly fixed on the thronged sunlit square below the window. At length he said in a low voice: 'She never asked me.'"
— Edith Wharton (The Age of Innocence)

"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?'"
— Martin Luther King Jr.

"Without pain, without sacrifice we would have nothing. Like the first monkey shot into space."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club: A Novel)

"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."
— George Eliot (Daniel Deronda)

"Every man gives his life for what he believes ... one life is all we have to live and we live it according to what we believe."
— Joan of Arc

"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."
— Martin Luther King Jr.

"I needed to choose between the one thing that really filled m thoughts-my love for that woman-and losing my freedom and all the choices that the future promised me. To be honest, the decision was easy.
-Lukas Jessen-Petersen"
— Paulo Coelho (The Witch of Portobello)

""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""
— Brother Andrew (The Narrow Road : Stories of Those Who Walk This Road Together)

"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."
— Thomas Merton

"The value the world sets upon motives is often grossly unjust and inaccurate. Consider, for example, two of them: mere insatiable curiosity and the desire to do good. The latter is put high above the former, and yet it is the former that moves one of the most useful men the human race has yet produced: the scientific investigator. What actually urges him on is not some brummagem idea of Service, but a boundless, almost pathological thirst to penetrate the unknown, to uncover the secret, to find out what has not been found out before. His prototype is not the liberator releasing slaves, the good Samaritan lifting up the fallen, but a dog sniffing tremendously at an infinite series of rat-holes."
— H.L. Mencken (A Mencken Chrestomathy)

"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"
— Paul Farmer (Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World)

"Tereza's mother never stopped reminding her that being a mother meant sacrificing everything. Her words had the ring of truth, backed as they were by the experience of a woman who had lost everything because of her child. Tereza would listen and believe that being a mother was the highest value in life and that being a mother was a great sacrifice. If a mother was Sacrifice personified, then a daughter was Guilt, with no possibility of redress."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"Ihr gebt nur wenig, wenn ihr von eurem Besitz gebt. - Erst wenn ihr von euch selber gebt, gebt ihr wahrhaft."
— Kahlil Gibrán

"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. "
— The Love Dare

"When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process."
— Robert M. Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values)

"[F]ür den Freigebigen ist die Suche nach einem, der empfangen soll, eine größere Freude als das Geben."
— Kahlil Gibrán

"[I]n Wahrheit ist es das Leben, das dem Leben gibt – während ihr, die ihr euch als Gebende fühlt, nichts anderes seid als Zeugen."
— Kahlil Gibrán

"In fact that is why the lives of most women are so vaguely unsatisfactory. They are always doing secondary and menial things (that do not require all their gifts and ability) for others and never anything for themselves. Society and husbands praise them for it (when they get too miserable or have nervous breakdowns) though always a little perplexedly and half-heartedly and just to be consoling. The poor wives are reminded that that is just why wives are so splendid -- because they are so unselfish and self-sacrificing and that is the wonderful thing about them! But inwardly women know that something is wrong. They sense that if you are always doing something for others, like a servant or nurse, and never anything for yourself, you cannot do others any good. You make them physically more comfortable. But you cannot affect them spiritually in any way at all. For to teach, encourage, cheer up, console, amuse, stimulate or advise a husband or children or friends, you have to be something yourself."
— Brenda Ueland

"In the final analysis, with Rene she had been an apprentice to love, she had loved him only to learn how to give herself, enslaved and surfeited, to Sir Stephen."
— Pauline Réage