Quotes About Sacrifice

if you want to take the island, you have to burn your boats!

To feel that your hours are filled to overflowing, that you can barely steal minutes enough for sleep, that the welfare of many is entrusted to you, that the world looks on and approves, that some good is always being done to others -- above all things some good to your country; -- that is happiness.

Love is like any other luxury.  You have no right to it unless you can afford it.

Can it be that any mother really expects her son to sit alone evening after evening in a dingy room drinking bad tea, and reading good books? And yet it seems that mothers do so expect,—

But John Morton would marry her tomorrow if he were well,—in spite of all her ill usage! Of course, he would die, and so she would again be overwhelmed;—but yet she would go and see him. As she determined to do so, there was something even in her hard callous heart softer than the love of money, and more human than the dream of an advantageous settlement in life.

But there came across his heart a feeling that he had reached a time of life in which it was no longer comfortable for him to live as a poor man with men who were rich. It had been his lot to do so when he was younger, and there had been some pleasure in it; but now he would rather live alone and dwell upon the memories of the past. He, too, might have been rich, and have had horses at command, had he chosen to sacrifice himself for money.

How frequent it is that men on their road to ruin feel elation such as this! A man signs away a moiety of his substance; nay, that were nothing; but a moiety of the substance of his children; he puts his pen to the paper that ruins him and them; but in doing so he frees himself from a score of immediate little pestering, stinging troubles: and, therefore, feels as though fortune has been almost kind to him.

If he should wish it, she would make no difficulty of parting with the things around her. Of what concern were the prettinesses of life to one whose inner soul was hampered with such ugliness?

He has put up with it all that he may see the girl he loves." "Psha!" said Frank, rising up from his chair. "When a man has work to do, he is a fool to give way to play. The girl he loves! Does he not know that it is impossible that she should ever marry him? Father, I ought to insist that he should leave this house as a prisoner. I know that that would be my duty.

So is a woman born — a woman. They are clinging, parasite things, which cannot but adhere; though they destroy themselves by adhering. Do not suppose that I take a pride in it. I would give one of my eyes to be able to disregard him.

If further glory or even further gain were to come out of this terrible war, — as great gains to men and nations do come from contests which are very terrible while they last, — he at least would not live to see it.

Gift bread chokes in a man's throat and poisons his blood, and sits like lead upon the heart.

And from that time to this the din of war is still going on, and they are in the thick of it. The carnage of their battles, the hatreds of their civil contests, are terrible to us when we think of them; but may it not be that the beneficient power of Heaven, which they acknowledge as we do, is thus cleansing their land from that stain of slavery, to abolish which no human power seemed to be sufficient?

She thought so badly of men and women generally, and of Mr Broune and herself as a man and a woman individually, that she was unable to conceive the possibility of such a sacrifice.

Of absolute money tenders Mr. Crawley would accept none. But a bill here and there was paid, the wife assisting; and shoes came for Kate — till Kate was placed beyond the need of shoes; and cloth for Harry and Frank found its way surreptitiously in beneath the cover of that wife's solitary trunk — cloth with which those lean fingers worked garments for the two boys, to be worn — such was God's will — only by the one.

She still thought of a possible Corsair who would be willing to give up all but his vices for her love, and for whose sake she would be willing to share even them. It was but a dream, but nevertheless it pervaded her fancy constantly.

You millionnaires always talk of Christian resignation, because you never are called on to resign anything.

Mrs. Harold Smith, whatever may have been her faults, could boast of this virtue — that she loved her brother. He was probably the only human being that she did love. Children she had none; and as for her husband, it had never occurred to her to love him. She had married him for a position; and being a clever woman, with a good digestion and command of her temper, had managed to get through the world without much of that unhappiness which usually follows ill-assorted marriages.

There is nothing pleasanter than all this, although a man when so treated does feel himself to look like a calf at the altar, ready for the knife, with blue ribbons round his horns and neck. Crosbie felt that he was such a calf, — and the more calf-like, in that he had not as yet dared to ask a question about his wife's fortune.

Each had treated the girl as an encumbrance he was to undertake, — at a very great price. But

but there might be a question whether he was not paying too dearly for his whistle. And

The fact that Catholic soldiers could die for a country which denied them the worship they wanted was constantly and rightly emphasized during the campaign for Emancipation.

If there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames.

L'artiste qui n'a pas ausculté le cÅ"ur de l'homme, l'artiste qui ignore qu'il est un bouc émissaire, que son devoir est d'aimanter, d'attirer, de faire tomber sur ses épaules les colères errantes de l'époque pour la décharger de son mal-être psychologique, celui-là n'est pas un artiste.