"Selfless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... a ready, cheerful, courageous, wise, and sympathetic counsellor. It was she who shielded his sensitive spirit from the annoyances and trials of life, answering (for example) the innumerable letters addressed to him from all parts of the world. By her quiet sense of humour, by her selfless devotion, by ‘her faith as clear as the heights of the June-blue heaven,’ she helped him also to the utmost in the hours of his ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... 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 ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... stricken Soldiers! Nobler task, Or more ennobling, can our Sisters ask? Whilst stout hearts suffer, soft ones shall not fail In selfless readiness to soothe and save, Sharing the tribute rendered by ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 93, September 3, 1887 • Various
... not for 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 ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... GET THEM! That was all. Let people try to stop her! She glowered at the rows of feckless bodies that lay sprawled in the chairs. Let them try it once! Along with the yearning that came from some deep part of her, that was selfless and exalted, Thea had a hard kind of cockiness, a determination to get ahead. Well, there are passages in life when that fierce, stubborn self-assertion will stand its ground after the nobler feeling is overwhelmed ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... 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. The universality of the proposition really diminishes its ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... books, in the hope that, despite his misfortune, he may one day minister to parental vanity. Finally he breaks away from Rita, for the first time "in all these ten years," goes up "into the infinite solitudes," looks Death in the face, and returns shrinking from passion, yearning towards selfless love, and filled with a profound and remorseful pity for the lot of poor maimed humanity. He will "help Eyolf to bring his desires into harmony with what lies attainable before him." He will "create a conscious happiness in his mind." ...
— Little Eyolf • Henrik Ibsen
... 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 ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... 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 National ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... what will 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. ...
— The Love Affairs of an Old Maid • Lilian Bell
... 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 philosopher who has ...
— The Doctrine and Practice of Yoga • A. P. Mukerji
... 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 system of education. McPhail had started life with many eager curiosities, ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... for some assurance. He had no ambition whatever for himself, but 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, ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... mighty weapon in the war for plain truth. But, while he could not but uphold a theory so much in accord with his own knowledge and so fruitful in its promise of new knowledge, whether the author of it were his friend or not, admiration and affection for a man of such utter sincerity, such selfless respect for truth, and warm personality, led him, when those views were stupidly or maliciously attacked, to take more trouble in his defence and support, and to strike out much harder at his adversary than he would ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... 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
... enough, 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 and loving," I said. ...
— My Impresssions of America • Margot Asquith
... moment of emotion he betrayed the Forsyte in him—forgot himself, his interests, his property—was capable of almost anything; was lifted into the pure ether of the selfless and unpractical. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... and 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 fame hereafter: this he, falling, knows; And painless hence are War's ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... to bring the Word to the benighted heathen on other worlds." Kennon's lips curled with mild contempt at their stupid foolhardiness even as his pulse quickened to their bravery. They had been fanatics, true enough, but theirs was a selfless fanaticism that would risk torture and death for what they believed—a fanaticism that was more sublime than the concept of Brotherhood which had evolved from it. They knew nothing of the enmity of ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone |
