Quotes About Sacrifice

He's not safe, but he's good (referring to Aslan, the Lion, in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe)

He died not for men, but for each man. If each man had been the only man made, He would have done no less.

It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

Safe?" said Mr. Beaver; don't you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the King, I tell you.

Dogs were with us from the very beginning. And of all the animals that walked the long centuries beside us, they always walked the closest. And then they paid the price. Fuck us.

What she was coming to realize, but what no woman was allowed to utter aloud, was that there was no guarantee your child would be adequate compensation for the life you gave up to have it. More and more, life looked an awful lot like a hoax perpetrated on women and designated to further men's lives at the expense of their own.

A creative person has little power over his own life. He is not free. He is captive and driven by his daimon.

In everything regarding your salvation and the attainment of mercy, you are dependent on your soul. Thus no sacrifice can be too great for you. If your virtues hinder you from salvation, discard them, since they have become evil to you. The slave to virtue finds the way as little as the slave to vices.

When, for instance, a highly esteemed professor in his seventies abandons his family and runs off with a young red-headed actress, we know that the gods have claimed another victim.

the grief a man feels when he is forced to sacrifice his ideal and his conscious attitudes.

The world comes into being when man discovers it. But he only discovers it when he sacrifices his containment in the primal mother, the original state of unconsciousness

Is there any one among you who believes he can be spared the way? Can he swindle his way past the pain of Christ? I say: "Such a one deceives himself to his own detriment. He beds down on thorns and fire. No one can be spared the way of Christ, since this way leads to what is to come.

There is one necessary but hidden and strange work—a major work—which you must do in secret, for the sake of the dead.

Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man's foes shall be they of his own household. He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.…

That Hölderlin's poem should pass from Asia to Patmos and thence to the Christian mystery may seem like a superficial association of ideas, but actually it is a highly significant train of thought: it is the entry into death and the land beyond, seen as the self-sacrifice of the hero for the attainment of immortality. At this time, when the sun has set and life seems extinguished, man awaits in secret expectancy the renewal of all life:

This recognition, that one must give up the retrospective longing which only wants to resuscitate the torpid bliss and effortlessness of childhood, before the "heavenly ones" wrench the sacrifice from us (and with it the entire man), came too late to the poet.

We shall not be digressing if we take this opportunity to try to grasp the psychological meaning of this rupture of the natural course of instinct, which is what the Christian process of sacrifice appears to be. From what has been said it follows that conversion signifies at the same time a transition to another attitude. This also makes it clear from what source the impelling motive for conversion comes, and how far Tertullian was right in conceiving the soul as naturaliter Christiana.

The sacrifice of the animal means, therefore, the sacrifice of the animal nature, the instinctual libido.

Give away all that thou hast, then shalt thou receive." Often, as I was writing

Thus the Mithraic killing of the bull is a sacrifice to the Terrible Mother, to the unconscious, which spontaneously attracts energy from the conscious mind because it has strayed too far from its roots

forgetting the power of the gods, without whom all life withers or ends catastrophically in a welter of perversity. In the act of sacrifice the consciousness gives up its power and possessions in the interests of the unconscious. This makes possible a union of opposites resulting in a release of energy

At the same time the act of sacrifice is a fertilization of the mother: the chthonic serpent-demon drinks the blood, i.e., the soul, of the hero. In this way life becomes immortal, for, like the sun, the hero regenerates himself by his self-sacrifice and re-entry into the mother.

This increase in self-knowledge is still very rare nowadays and is usually paid for in advance with a neurosis, if not with something worse.

Quite forgetting the dying Beast's ugliness, Beauty ministers to him. He tells her that he was unable to live without her, and that he will die happy now that she has returned. But Beauty realizes that she cannot live without Beast, that she has fallen in love with him. She tells him so, and promises to be his wife if only he will not die.