Quotes about Sacrifice

The conflicts of life and work, like those of rest and work, would ideally be resolved in balance: enough of each. In practice, however they probably can be resolved (if that is the word) only in tension, in a principled unwillingness to let go of either or to sacrifice either to the other. But it is a necessary tension, the grief in it both inescapable and necessary.

Every day you have less reason Not to give yourself away.

I believe that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of man's puny, inexhaustible, voice still talking! ...not simply because man alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because man has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion, sacrifice and endurance.

A man's moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.

My daily life is an acknowledgment and expiation of my sin.

It's because she wants it told he thought so that people whom she will never see and whose names she will never hear and who have never heard her name nor seen her face will read it and know at last why God let us lose the War: that only through the blood of our men and the tears of our women could He stay this demon and efface his name and lineage from the earth.

It surged up out of the water and stood for an instant upright upon that surging and heaving desolation like Christ.

I believe that man will not merely endure. He will prevail. He is immortal not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.

curiosity is another of the mistresses whose slaves decline no sacrifice.

Folks don't go to wars for fun. A man don't leave his maw crying just for fun.

This isn't from me, but from Faulkner, and may be the best advice I've seen for any writer. (Write of) the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed — love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.

The crucifixion should never be depicted. It is a horror to be veiled.