Quotes About Selflessness

It would be one thing if I had been cursed so that everyone I loved would die," said Will. "I could keep myself from loving. To keep others from caring for me--it is an odd, exhausting procedure.

I belong to you. You could do anything you wanted with me and I would let you. You could ask anything of me and I'd break myself trying to make you happy.

I lived for you. And I lived for Will, and then I lived for Tessa - and for myself, because I wanted to be with her. But I cannot live for other people forever. No one can say that death found in me a willing comrade, or that I went easily. If you say you need me, I will stay as long as I can for you. I will live for you and yours, and go down fighting death until I am worn away to bone and splinters. But it would not be my choice.

We all must sacrifice for love

Writers seldom choose as friends those self-centered characters who are never in trouble, never make mistakes, and always count their change as it is handed to them.

But the problem was, I tried to get him to do things that would be the right things for me to do. But I don't think they were the right things for him. I was trying to help him the way I thought he should be helped, but he's not me.

young. Love is when you can make the following statement, and mean it: 'What's best for her, even if it doesn't include me.' Otherwise you just love the way you feel when she's around, and you want to be selfish with that—hang on to it at all costs, even if it harms her.

Because when you really love someone, you want them to be happy. Even if it can't be with you.

The people with the least to give always give the most. Haven't you noticed that?

People can do all manner of things if it's important enough. If a mother can lift a car off her son, maybe she can die at just the right time to save him.

Don't ever say that to me again. It was not nothing. You did an incredible thing for your father. And you always have that. It's part of who you are now. You stepped up to it, and now you're up on a higher level than you were before. You gave the man a gift. The fact that he doesn't know how to value it doesn't mean it wasn't a great gift. It just means he has lousy taste in presents.

tea. "I think very often in life we do something important for someone else for no better reason than that they need us to. And really, when you think about it . . . what more reason is needed?

It's not hard to fall in love," Hayden said. "The hard part is to love somebody who might actually do you some good.

Sometimes it's easy to want something for somebody else, even if it's more than you want for yourself.

I think very often in life we do something important for someone else for no better reason than that they need us to. And really, when you think about it . . . what more reason is needed?

Why do I do that?" "Do what?" "Try to take responsibility for everything and fix everybody.

The people with the least to give always give the most.

Paying It Forward is about spontaneously offering favors, not needing to say yes when someone asks too much of you. And also, it's about kindness rather than niceness. There's a difference. Kindness is spontaneous and real. Niceness just mostly wants to be liked.

Almanack's deep green eyes shone. "Is it? Have you done a long, hard thing for the sake of someone you loved, so long and so hard that your body shook with the difficulty of it, that you were thirsty and aching and ravenous by the time it was done, but it did not matter, you did not even feel the thirst or the pain or the hunger, because you were doing what was Necessary?" "Yes," September whispered.

But did you ever ask her?" "Ask her what?" "If she wanted to come back." "Why the hell would I ask her? Nobody wants to be dead. I did the right thing. For us. For her. You were there. It was heroic. I was selfless. I was strong." "Were you? Or could you just … not accept that something pretty was taken from you? Did you know her? Or was she hot and rich and uncomplicated?

Sometimes taking up our cross is doing the thing in front of us, not the glamorous, high-risk thing afar off.

You don't have to put yourself on fire to keep somebody else warm.

Kochiyama had a compulsion to help others, and was adamant that she not be the center of attention, which was admirable but also gave me pause; made me question if there was something inherently Asian and female about her selflessness, which probably betrays my own internalized chauvinism and my own rather predictable preference for the melancholic poet or the messianic hero rather than organizers, like Kochiyama, who worked tirelessly behind the scenes.

Amami quando lo merito meno, perché sarà quando ne avrò più bisogno.