"Selfless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 of her life? And perhaps Mr. Kingston was not a monster. Aunt ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... self-centred, that wants to be master; but rather only a soft, inflated, delicate, movable potter's-form, that must wait for some kind of content and frame to "shape" itself thereto—for the most part a man without frame and content, a "selfless" man. Consequently, also, nothing for ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... They need not rush in front of death-charged guns With murder in their hearts to prove their worth. The grandest heroes who have graced the earth Were love-filled souls who did not seek the fray, But chose the safe, hard, high, and lonely way Of selfless labour for a suffering world. Beneath our glorious flag again unfurled In victory such heroes wait to be Called into bloodless action, Peace, by thee. Be thou insistent in thy stern demand, And wise, great men shall ...
— Poems of Power • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... 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 for me. Not for me. Surely it must ...
— The Love Affairs of an Old Maid • Lilian Bell
... the fragile figure, lying day after day on a couch, to rouse a man's passion. Rather, Nan's utter weakness called forth all the solicitude and ineffable tenderness of which Peter was capable—such tenderness—almost maternal in its selfless, protective quality, as is only found in a strong man—never in a ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... all, the manifoldly intelligent ant 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 only the true poet, which ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... traditional representations of the Saviour; the idea being, we must think, to indicate, stamped on the exterior man, this soul's aspiration towards likeness with the Divine Pattern; or, perhaps, visibly to state that here, too, is a gentle and selfless lover of men, all of whose forces bent on a ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... she 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 was too strong, and circumstances hurried on the marriage. ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... so humble, so entirely selfless in his devotion, thinking only of her, that she was touched inexpressibly—tempted, even. Ah! If she could only put all the past aside, out of sight, and take this love that Robin offered her and hold it round her like a garment shielding her from the icy blasts of life! But she had nothing to ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... 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 ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... had gone by since that day, and the Scarlet Pimpernel was hardly ever out of France now; the massacres in Paris and in the provinces had multiplied with appalling rapidity, the necessity for the selfless devotion of that small band of heroes had become daily, hourly more pressing. They rallied round their chief with unbounded enthusiasm, and let it be admitted at once that the sporting instinct—inherent in these English gentlemen—made them all the more keen, ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... ASLEEP AT 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 you are stuck in the harbor mud, but it is only that the tide is out. Command your Will ...
— Supreme Personality • Delmer Eugene Croft
... a Stanley of Alderley—going with Mr. Gladstone at the time of the Home Rule split, while Lord Carlisle joined the Liberal Unionists. Both took a public part, and the political differences of the parents were continued in their children. Only a very rare and selfless nature could have carried through so difficult a situation without lack of either dignity or sweetness. Lord Carlisle, in the late 'eighties and early 'nineties, when I knew him best, showed no want of ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... especially Chwangtse 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 ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... for a little space. Then he turned his eyes towards the pale form of the woman he had loved, and who had taught him the noblest and most selfless part of love, sleeping her last sleep, with a fixed sweet smile upon ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... pleadings were sometimes so moving, so passionate that—teste Mrs. Pankhurst—"burly policemen in court had tears trickling down their faces" as he described the courage, the flawless private lives, the selfless devotion to a noble cause of these women agitating for the rights of their sex—rich and poor, old and young. Juries flinched from the verdict which some bitter-faced judge enjoined; magistrates swerved from executing ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... he would have toiled to succeed for her. It was his weakness to require someone to work for as he was working for the Boy; a purely personal ambition seemed to him a vexing, vain, and insufficient motive for action. All selfless people suffer from indolence when only their own interests are in question; they require a strong incentive from without to arouse them. Such incentive as the Tenor had was in itself a pleasure to him, a refinement of pleasure which might be coarsened, ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... deeply 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, unbiassed by ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... Norwood, and permission was given to drive her down in an invalid carriage. The following evening she was suddenly taken worse; we lifted her into bed, and telegraphed for the doctor. But he could do nothing, and she herself felt that the hand of Death had gripped her. Selfless to the last, she thought but for my loneliness. "I am leaving you alone," she sighed from time to time; and truly I felt, with an anguish I did not dare to realise, that when she died I should indeed ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant |
