"Selfless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of power and passion, just touched with human ruth; Hector, the selfless, brave and gentle champion; Odysseus, victor in the long pilgrimage by fortitude and by wisdom,—these are the three ideal types of the early world, portrayed ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... to save her from the necessity of answering, and walked to the far end of the verandah, leaving her alone with the strongest temptation she had yet experienced—the temptation to trample on her own imperious love, and to accept this man's selfless devotion in the hope that it might one day ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... your mountain is not the only place which holds a Sunlight Patch! There is one everywhere," her hand, unconsciously placed against her breast, now pressed as she spoke. "In everyone there must be that same selfless desire to give the last horse and the last nine dollars to whomsoever it may carry to a higher goal, or mankind is a failure. Learn this now. Do not think because you were born in Sunlight Patch that any of its virtues are clinging to you. We carry no virtues but our own—remember that! Don't ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... told me at first and the deductions she had made since. Dr Johnson smiled. "A true Man of Science," he stated, "one who has labored for years to acquire those degrees you affect to despise, would have been trained in selfless devotion to the service of mankind, would never have made whatever gross error your ignorance, heightened by projection into a sphere for which you are probably biologically unfitted—though this is perhaps controversial—has betrayed you into. ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... dream, Gazed by an idle eye with silent might The picture stole upon my inward sight. A tremulous warmth crept gradual o'er my chest, As though an infant's finger touch'd my breast. And one by one (I know not whence) were brought All spirits of power that most had stirr'd my thought In selfless boyhood, on a new world tost Of wonder, and in its own fancies lost; Or charm'd my youth, that, kindled from above, Loved ere it loved, and sought a form for love; Or lent a lustre to the earnest scan Of manhood, musing what ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... With a most becoming blush his pale cheek, I'm sure, would burn, If his uncle should cry, "Come, nephew dear, and second me!" He would hint at nepotism, and the chance of secret schism. "Let the mild ex-Liberal lead, I will be his henchman true!" He would cry, with selfless joy on his brow like ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 24, 1891 • Various
... last two years is a terrible thing. You go to war, you get up to it from your knees—God driving you to it—unable, yes, unable to do else. Your will is to do right, your cause is just, you are a united nation, a people convinced, glad, selfless, with hearts heroic and clean. And then war takes hold of it, and it all changes under your eyes; you see the heart of your people becoming fouled, getting hard, self-righteous, revengeful. Your cause remains, in theory, what it was at the beginning; but it all goes to the Devil. ...
— Angels & Ministers • Laurence Housman
... fairest dreams, the subtlest reasoning, the finest ethics, contained in the writings of the mighty dead, meant nothing at all to Sir Timothy. His widow knew that she had never heard him utter one high or noble or selfless thought. But with, perhaps, pardonable egotism, she had taken it for granted that Peter must be different. Whatever his outward humours, he was her son; rather a part of herself, in her loving fancy, than a ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... evidently did not, would not, understand, was, that when they did meet, he fell in love with her for herself! She was his mate, his ideal, the one woman in the world who had power to awake his best self; to make him selfless, and in earnest about life. He was overcome with shame at the remembrance of his own scheming. At one time he believed it to be his duty to punish himself by leaving her without saying a word, but his passion ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... presumptuous effort? She did not feel that it was. And now she felt selfless. She was no more thinking of herself, was no longer obliged to concentrate her thoughts and her imagination upon herself and the one she loved best. She had passed beyond that, as she had passed beyond the Madonna della Rocca. She was the voice and the heart ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... the first time in the last few days, the aunt began considering within herself the problem of her niece. Blanche had begun to like Donnington with a cordiality of liking which surprised herself. His selfless love for the girl touched her more than she had thought it possible for anything now to touch her worldly heart. And whereas she would naturally have considered a marriage between the penniless Donnington and brilliant, clever, popular Bubbles as being out of the ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... romantic, self-immolating emotion woven from fancy, yearning and the infection of other's ardour. Love of this foam and flame quality, too tender to be mere aesthetic absorption in a beautiful object, too selfless to be sensual, too intense to be only absurd, rose up towards Madame Okraska and encompassed her from hundreds of hearts and eyes. The whole audience was for her one vast heart of adoration, one fixed face of half-hypnotized tenderness. And there she stood ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... THE WHEEL? Awake it. See if you are sailing, or drifting. Set the compass of your Mind to new thoughts, fresh purposes, selfless desires, fill your sails with boundless hope, and let your daily voyage spell SERVICE in a big way. You are not a chip on the River of Life, you are a Supreme Master in a Universe of Facts. You think ...
— Supreme Personality • Delmer Eugene Croft
... likeness, she wants to compass his material good. She will think of his food, and his raiment, and his well-being, and never of her own—only, if she is wise she will hide all these things in her heart, for the average man cannot stand this great light of her sweetness, and when her love becomes selfless, ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... the question of his ordination arose, he would declare impressively that his sacred duty was the making of Marmaduke into a scholar and a Christian. That duty accomplished, he would begin to think of himself. Mrs. Trevor accounted him the most devoted and selfless friend that woman ever had. He saw eye to eye with her in every detail of Marmaduke's upbringing. He certainly taught the boy, who was naturally intelligent, a great deal, and repaired the terrible gaps in Miss Gunter's ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... its tenderness, by its manly "criticism of life," by its touches of poetry, so various, so inspired, as in Davie Gellatley with his songs, and Charles Edward in the gallant hour of Holyrood, and Flora with her high, selfless hopes and broken heart, and the beloved Baron, bearing his lot "with a good-humoured though serious composure." "To be sure, we may say with Virgilius Maro, 'Fuimus Troes' and there 's the end of an auld sang. But houses and ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... by nature brave, Is he who risks his life a life to save; Who sees no peril, be it e'er so great, Where helpless human lives for succour wait; Who looks on death with selfless disregard; Whose sense of duty brings its own reward. Such are the Braves who now inspire my pen: Pride of the gods—and heroes among men. The warrior who, on glorious battle plain, Falls bravely fighting—dies to live again In ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... round the side of a little hill, and the breeze from the wide reach of level valley lands was keen and piercing. Bradley's volubility jarred on him. It brought an obnoxious person back, and roughly, into the warm memory of Harriet Floyd's presence, and gentle, selfless tenderness. He ground his teeth in agony. He had just been debating in his mind the possibility of his being, in consideration of his own mistakes, able to take the girl, in her new love, into his heart and hold her there forever, but if she loved Wambush, as, of course, ...
— Westerfelt • Will N. Harben
... she was so yielding, so selfless, so absolutely uncritical, that if any woman could marry late she was the woman. She could have lived with a monster of egotism without finding it out. Had she not devoted herself to two such monsters most ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... you ever known one so selfless, so good, so true? For humanity's sake, would you not keep alive such a man? If there were a feud as old as Adam between your race and his, would you not before this life of sacrifice lay down the sword and the bitter challenge? He gave you his hand in faith ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... tender and pitying heart,—the Man who could not send the multitude away without bread, and compassed a miracle to give it to them,—the Man who wept for a friend's death,—who took little children in His arms and blessed them,—who pardoned the unhappy outcast and said, 'Sin no more,'—who was so selfless, so pure, so strong, so great, that even sceptics, while denying His Divinity, are compelled to own that His life and His actions were more Divine than those of any other creature in human shape that has ever walked the earth! Monsignor, ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... friend, And loves like Ruth's of old no end, And intermission none— And burst on burst for beauty and For numbers not behind, From men whose love of motherland Is like a dog's for one dear hand, Sole, selfless, boundless, blind— And song of some with hearts beside For men and sorrows far and wide, Who watch the world with pity and pride And ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... few cases where I had the chance to be kind." Why, Rachel Pitstone's life had been one continuous selfless offering to God and man, from her childhood to her last hour! He knew very well what he had owed her—what others had owed—to her genius for sympathy, for understanding, for a compassion which was also a stimulus. He missed her sorely. At that very moment, he was ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... only thing I knew, Thy love of me; One only thing I know, Thy sacred same Love of me full and free, A craving flame Of selfless love of me which burns in Thee. How can I think of thee, and yet grow chill; Of Thee, and yet grow cold and nigh to death? Re-energize my will, Rebuild my faith; I will arise and run, ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... unexpected but the incredible which had happened to this American diplomatist. He and Margaret Pargeter, the Englishwoman whom he had loved with an absorbing, unsatisfied passion, and an ever-increasing concentration and selfless devotion, for seven years, were about to do that which each had sworn, together and separately, should never come to pass,—that is, they were about to snatch from Fate a few days of such free happiness and communion as during their long years of intimacy ...
— The Uttermost Farthing • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... discussed that power, showed its value and the glory of it. Then he contrasted with it the power which is only obtained by those who, completely unselfish, know not how to think of themselves. He enlarged on this theme, on the Kingdom which can belong only to those who are selfless. And then he drew to the ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... tribes, with their commonwealths and confederacies, their warriors and miners, the husband folk that fold in their tiny flocks on the honey leaf, and the virgin sister with the holy instincts of maternal love detached and in selfless purity, and not say in himself, Behold the shadow of approaching humanity, the sun rising from behind in the kindling morn of creation?" There is fancy here; but it is that sagacious fancy, vouchsafed to ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... kakemono. In contrast to my recent hostesses it was like coming from a garden of brilliant flowers into the soft, quiet shadows of a bamboo grove. No modern touch about this lady. She had been reduced by rule from a romping girl to a selfless creature fit for a Japanese gentleman's wife and no questions asked. Her hair, her dress, and even her speech were strictly by the laws laid down in a book for the thirty-first day of the first month after marriage. But I would like to see the convention ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... as I think, did for the Chinese was to publish the syntax and vocabulary of that ancient language; to make people understand how to take these grand protagonists of Tao; how to communicate familiarly with these selfless avatars of the Most High. Listen to this: the thought is close-packed, but I think you will ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... Dear mother, since you never have seen him, I don't know that I can hope to convey any right conception of Wilde's truly remarkable character. He is, to begin with, the best of men. Picture, if you can, a nature with a soul completely beautiful and selfless, and a nervous surface quite as pachydermatous and indiscriminating as that of an ox. Wilde accepts everybody's estimate of himself. Not only the quality of his mercy, but also of his admiration, is quite unstrained. So that he sees the friend of his youth not at all ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... until we are willing to be emptied of self. He must have undivided possession. There is a vast amount of heartache, little one, in this old world, and self is at the bottom of it all, when we stop to analyze it. We want to be first, to be thought much of, to be loved best. No wonder that the selfless life seems impossible to most people. Think what a continuous self-sacrifice Christ's life was! So utterly alone and lonely among such uncongenial surroundings with people uncouth and totally foreign to his tastes. Ah! we don't realize it. We look at him doing ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... than inanimate nature in the soil the grass springs from. Sentient nature, as in the ox, is of a higher order than the non-sentient in the grass. Self-conscious and reflective nature in the man is of a higher order than the selfless and non-reflective nature in his beast of burden. In the composite being of man all these orders of nature coexist, and each higher is supernatural to the nature below it. Nature, the comprehensive ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton
... Greeks, Latins, Teutons, Celts, and Slavonians, who came of the same mighty Aryan stock, did even as those with whom they owned a common ancestry. Originally they gave to their gods of their best. All that was noblest in them, all that was strongest and most selfless, all the higher instincts of their natures were their endowment. And although their worship in time became corrupt and lost its beauty, there yet remains for us, in the old tales of the gods, a wonderful humanity that strikes a vibrant chord in the hearts of those who are ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... only dimly understand. At present the whole plot of life is based on the principle of desire and in this way people are kept busy, constantly spurred on to thought and activity by essentially selfish motives. It is only in abstract thought that the selfless ideal has a real place as yet, but the very fact that it is there shows what lies at the top of the ladder that humanity is so painfully climbing. As long as desire is the plot of life, death is necessary, for its terrible shadow sharpens desire and makes the prizes more alluring and ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne
... ideal is to be doing: the Eastern to be suffering. The perfect life would be a harmony between (selfless or non-attached) doing and suffering. Worship the terrible. Worship Death, for its own sake; despair for its own sake; pain for its own sake. Yet this is not the coward's or the suicide's or the weakling's morbid love of Death, but it is the cry of the ...
— The Doctrine and Practice of Yoga • A. P. Mukerji
... shalt thou type the poet-soul sublime That leads the vanward of his timid time And sings up cowards with commanding rhyme — Soul calm, like thee, yet fain, like thee, to grow By double increment, above, below; [61] Soul homely, as thou art, yet rich in grace like thee, Teaching the yeomen selfless chivalry That moves in gentle curves of courtesy; Soul filled like thy long veins with sweetness tense, By every godlike sense Transmuted from the four wild elements. Drawn to high plans, Thou lift'st more ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... of Anatta—the doctrine that there is no such thing as a soul or self—is justly emphasized as a most important part of the Buddha's teaching and Buddhist ethics might be summarized as the selfless life. Yet there is a danger that Europeans may exaggerate and misunderstand the doctrine by taking it as equivalent to a denial of the soul's immortality or of free will or to an affirmation that mind is a function of the body. ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... successive ages of history, and a history of this growth is a history of its conflicts. No study of any Indian system is therefore adequate unless it is taken throughout all the growth it attained by the work of its champions, the commentators whose selfless toil for it had kept it living through the ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... about herself, weighing her own individuality against others, to see what place she occupied in her own age, and how she stood with regard to the ages that had gone before; yet even this she seemed to have done in a selfless way, having apparently examined herself coolly, critically, fairly, as she might have examined any other specimen of humanity in which she felt an interest, ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... a marvel, a miracle in the universe of mortal mind. With selfless love, he inscribes on the heart of humanity and transcribes on the page of reality the living, palpable presence—the might and majesty!—of goodness. He lives for all mankind, and [10] honors ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... shop windows, the lights, the people,—her heart went out to all of them—rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief; they were Michael's and they would be hers. He should have that oil of joy for his work, for his high, selfless purposes. ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... Philosophy are of higher worth, than what you, O Alia, mean by Happiness. But I will not seem to evade the question—Am I the happier for my Philosophy? The calmer at least and the less unhappy, answered Constantius, for it has enabled me to find that selfless Reason is the best Comforter, and only sure friend of declining Life. At this moment the sounds of a carriage followed by the usual bravura executed on the brazen knocker announced a morning visit: and Alia hastened to receive the party. Meantime the grey-haired ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... raised her eyes and looked swiftly but deeply at her daughter. It was a look that left many hopes behind it. It was a look that armed other, and quite selfless, hopes, with its grave and watchful understanding. The understanding would not have been so clear had it not been fed by all the springs of baffled tenderness that only so could find their uses. Giving her daughter's hands a final shake, as if over some compact, perhaps ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... to put into words even to herself just what she felt towards him. From the first she had raised him to the empty pedestal vacated by that fallen idol, her father. And out of hero-worship had grown love, at first the exalted devotion of an immature girl, adoration that was purely sexless and selfless—a mystical love without passion, spiritual. He had appeared to her as a being of another sphere and, mentally, she had knelt at his feet as to a patron saint. But with her own development love had expanded. She realised that what she felt for him was no longer childish ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... imagine that the true life, the true powers of the spiritual man, can be attained by any way except the hard way of sacrifice, of trial, of renunciation, of selfless self-conquest and genuine devotion to the weal of all others. Only thus can the golden gates be reached and entered. Only thus can we attain to that pure world wherein the spiritual man lives, and moves, and has his being. Nothing impure, nothing unholy can ever cross ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... the thorns, the occasional unexpected holes, and he was both warm and dishevelled when he reached the end of it and found himself out in the open within a short distance of what he recognized as beehives. It was not for some time that he was able to give that selfless attention to exterior objects which is the prowler's chief asset. For quite a while the only thought of which he was conscious was that what he needed most was a cold drink and a cold bath. Then, with a return to clear-headedness, he realized that he was standing out ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... stimulus of something definite to do. These need not feel themselves cut off from what is highest in woman's education, if they realize that the mind has a life in itself and makes its own existence there, not selfishly, but indeed in a peculiarly selfless way, because it has nothing to show for itself but some small round of unimpressive occupations; some perpetual call upon its sympathies and devotion, not enough to fill a life, but just enough ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... done, and what was she going to do? She was playing with religion; and religion, if it was nothing more, was something which had made Bart Toyner look at her with such a strange smile of selfless hope and desire—hope that she would be something different from what she had been, desire that the best should come to her whatever was going to happen to him. That was the explanation of what had seemed inexplicable in his look (she felt glad to have ...
— The Zeit-Geist • Lily Dougall
... actually in the hands of the membership, it was her intention to do what she could within the bounds of democratic procedure to insure the best possible leadership. To fill the office, she turned instinctively to Anna Howard Shaw whom she loved more dearly as the years went by and whose selfless devotion to the cause she trusted implicitly. Yet Anna, in spite of her many qualifications, lacked a few which were exceptional in Carrie Chapman Catt—creative executive ability, diplomacy, a talent for working with ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... astonished. The extraordinary quickness with which, hour by hour, under her very eyes, Lotty became more selfless, disconcerted her. She was turning into something surprisingly like a saint. Here she was now being affectionate about Mellersh—Mellersh, who only that morning, while they hung their feet into the sea, had seemed a mere iridescence, Lotty had told her, ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... stand far from the common mob! But those violent spiritual tempests which are created by the crowd when under the influence of certain climactic passages of dramatic song, that sudden bewildering ecstasy of the emotions, thoroughly honest and selfless—they were but echoes of his own experiences and sensations, and filled him with glowing hope for the greatest possible power and effect. Thus he recognised grand opera as the means whereby he might express his ruling thoughts; towards ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... will suffice to supply the necessary driving power. Hitherto some form of religious faith and the hope of some heavenly reward have alone availed to induce men to renounce the world and all its material interests and surrender themselves to a life of rigorous and selfless discipline in the service of their fellow-creatures, or rather in the service of God through their fellow-creatures. Mr. Gokhale's society makes no claim to any religious sanction. Though Indian asceticism has from ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... forfeited all rights by our sin, except to deserve hell. And He now calls us to take our rightful place as worms for Him and with Him. The whole Sermon on the Mount with its teaching of non-retaliation, love for enemies and selfless giving, assumes that that is our position. But only the vision of the Love that was willing to be broken for us can constrain us to ...
— The Calvary Road • Roy Hession
... and noble public recognition, there stands in the shadow the unspoken sorrow of her Unit. The price has been paid, and paid as Dr. Inglis herself would have wished it, on the high completion of a chapter in her work, but we stand bowed before the knowledge of how profound and how selfless was that surrender. Month after month her courage and her endurance never flagged. Daily and hourly, in the very agony of suffering and death, she gave her life by inches. Sad and more difficult though the road must seem to us now, our ...
— Elsie Inglis - The Woman with the Torch • Eva Shaw McLaren
... of Robert Foster is so noble and attractive in its selfless and manful simplicity that it gives us and leaves with us a more cordial sense of sympathetic regard and respect for his creator than we could feel if this gallant and homely figure were withdrawn from the stage of his invention. The female Polycrates who suffers under the curse ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... that great opportunity, and becomes in spirit and in truth, as well as in outward seeming, the College Beautiful which her daughters see in their visions and dream in their dreams, it will be by the soaring, unconquerable faith—and the prompt and selfless works—of the daughter who said to a college in ruins, on that March morning, "The members of the college will report for duty on the appointed date after the spring vacation," and sent her flock away, comforted, high-hearted, ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... her face and thought with that intense and selfless thought which is as a prayer for help. The future seemed dark indeed, and the feeling of helplessness was hard to bear. Two lonely girls, with no one to help, and so much help that was needed! Here was indeed the time ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... of one who has suffered and been patient; who has loved much and will love on to the end; who, from the depths of a noble, selfless nature, looks out upon the world with mild eyes of charity; a woman, yet a girl in years, whom one ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... into reality. Even so, within each there reposes the Divine Image awaiting the master-hand of Faith and the chisel of Patience to bring it into manifestation. And that Divine Image is revealed and realized as stainless, selfless Love. ...
— The Way of Peace • James Allen
... only one worthy of a philosopher) is rare: it distinguishes one work of art from among a thousand others. For, as a rule, artists are no better than the rest of the world, they are even worse—they misunderstand love. Even Wagner misunderstood it. They imagine that they are selfless in it because they appear to be seeking the advantage of another creature often to their own disadvantage. But in return they want to possess the other creature.{HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} Even God is no exception to this rule, he is very far from thinking "What does it matter to thee whether I love ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... second year at Cambridge, casting about as to the best way to penetrate, swiftly and securely, the fastnesses of London journalism. Then the war came, and he had an impulse of perfectly honest and selfless patriotism..., not quite selfless perhaps, because he certainly saw himself as a mighty hero, winning V.C.'s and saving forlorn hopes, finally received by his native village under an archway of flags and mottoes (the local postmaster, who had never treated ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... behavior of the tiger and the cat is simple and easily comprehensible, whereas that of the dog with his conscience, his humor, his terror of loneliness, his capacity for devotion to a brutal master, or that of the bee with her selfless devotion to the hive, furnishes phenomena which no sophistry can assimilate without the aid of a fourth instinct. But little examination will show that the animals whose conduct it is difficult to generalize under the three primitive instinctive categories are gregarious. ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... called Life. I feel, I know that Fate is. But I cannot know what is or what is not fated to befall me. Therefore in the pursuit of perfection as an individual lies my highest, and indeed my only duty, the I being duly blended with the We. I object to be a selfless man, which to me denotes an inverted moral sense. I am bound to take careful thought concerning the consequences of every word and deed. When, however, the Future has become the Past, it would be the merest vanity for me to grieve or to repent over ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... bloodthirsty tiger, Jean Paul Marat, has had his apologists. His friends have called him a martyr, a selfless and incorruptible exponent of social and political ideals. We may take it that Simonne Evrard loved him, for a more impassioned obituary speech was, mayhap, never spoken than the one which she delivered before the ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... changes according to its Karma, and this Karma forbids any long continuance in one condition, because it is always changing. So long as action is governed by material and selfish motives, just so long must the effect of that action be manifested in physical rebirths. Only the perfectly selfless man can elude the gravitation of material life. Few have attained this, but it is ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... in a few words, he told her of West's abortive attempt to plunge a second time into the black depths from which he had so recently escaped, of the man's absolutely selfless devotion, of his rigid refusal to suffer even her love for him to move him from ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... joy, and life beyond death finds an echo in many hearts, which yet can admire the grand altruism of "The Pilgrims" and the selfless spirit of the Impersonal Martyr. After considering all this clash of thought, it seems as if it all resolved itself into the individual temperament which settles and modifies and adapts to itself the forms of our ...
— Cobwebs of Thought • Arachne
... between oneself and one's neighbour, will be relieved of the hostile pressure of its arch-enemy, the anti-social instinct of selfishness,[21] and will therefore make rapid and vigorous growth. The sense of justice is, as might be expected, strongly developed in the selfless atmosphere of Utopia, where indeed it has helped, in no small degree, to evolve the wonderful social life of the school; and, that being so, there is no fear but what the Utopian will be sustained by the sense ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... insurgent, cease vain wars to wage! Art thou so pure as to decline, forsooth, These penitential usages of age That expiate proud cruelties of youth, And bring thee to the last and perfect art, To love the lovely with a selfless heart? ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor
... elders knew not what had come over him, although Elspeth Macfadyen was mysteriously apologetic, and in moments of sanity he despised himself. One day he came to a good resolution suddenly, and went down to see Rabbi Saunderson—the very thought of whose gentle, patient, selfless life was a rebuke ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... we all have it in us to develop some of Sabre's qualities, but we must be equally independent of public opinion, equally tolerant and, above all, equally selfless ...
— My Impresssions of America • Margot Asquith
... like other people and yet to be cherishing an ideal which extends over the whole of life and beyond; to have a natural love for every one, especially for the poor; to get rid, not of wit or good humour, but of frivolity and excitement; to live "selfless" according to the Will of God and not after the fashions and opinions of ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... toward you only as your long worship of him, your sacrifices—all the unseen little ones every day since he was born—will make him act. Dear, it breaks my heart for you, but what you have to oppose now is the history of your own selfless and perfect motherhood. I remember saying once that what you worshipped in your son was the angel you saw in him—and I still believe that is true of every mother. But in a mother's worship she may not ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... said, was twice inarticulate; she had two spaces of silence, one when she, pure and selfless patriot, had heard her condemnation to death. Passing out of the court she beckoned to her friends, and signified to them her sentence "by a gesture." And again there was a pause, in the course of her last days, during which her speeches ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... was that Joan discovered that she was crying. Big tears were rolling down her cheeks, and in her heart was growing a new, vital emotion—a selfless, nameless, urging tide of protection for something weak ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... ant tribes, with their commonwealth and confederacies, their warriors and miners, the husband-folk, that fold in their tiny flocks on the honied leaf, and the virgin sisters with the holy instincts of maternal love, detached and in selfless purity, and not say to himself, Behold the shadow of approaching Humanity, the sun rising from behind, in the kindling morn of creation! Thus all lower natures find their highest good in semblances and seekings of that which is higher ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... of his selfless love, he dared not even admit that it was love; feeling only the highest, he could not quite correlate his sweet and elevated passion with the common standards of what the World called love. The humility of a great love ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... happen when, in heaven, one of these selfless mothers is led in triumph to a solid gold throne, all lined with eider-down cushions, where she can take the rest she never had on earth. Won't she stagger back against the glittering walls of the New Jerusalem and say, "Not ...
— The Love Affairs of an Old Maid • Lilian Bell
... That comfortable mother at home and daughter in an office, but with no suitors, no ambition beyond the one at home. They are all examples of the mother-and-daughter phenomenon, that most touching, most destructive example of selfless unselfishness, which robs all the generations to come, because mother has never been trained to endure the long, long thoughts of solitude; because she sees nothing by herself, and within ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis |
