"Selfless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was over for him. He was filled with unutterable sadness. Yet he would not have had it any different. Bigger, and selfless things called to him. He was bidding farewell to his youth and all that it related to. A solemn procession of beautiful memories passed through his mind, born of the nights there in that room of his boyhood, ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... thing I knew, Thy love of me; One only thing I know, Thy sacred same Love of me full and free, A craving flame Of selfless love of me which burns in Thee. How can I think of thee, and yet grow chill; Of Thee, and yet grow cold and nigh to death? Re-energize my will, Rebuild my faith; I will arise and run, Thou ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... if we consider it as a personal expression, is a wonderful expression of selfless devotion, where the perception of the glory and majesty of God excludes all other thoughts. It is, too, a thanksgiving for the personal gift which is her vocation to be the Mother of the Saviour. Out of her lowliness she has been exalted—how highly she herself cannot at the time have dreamed. ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... is of a higher natural order than inanimate nature in the soil the grass springs from. Sentient nature, as in the ox, is of a higher order than the non-sentient in the grass. Self-conscious and reflective nature in the man is of a higher order than the selfless and non-reflective nature in his beast of burden. In the composite being of man all these orders of nature coexist, and each higher is supernatural to the nature below it. Nature, the comprehensive term ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton
... for a little space. Then he turned his eyes towards the pale form of the woman he had loved, and who had taught him the noblest and most selfless part of love, sleeping her last sleep, with a fixed ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... pictures of manners, of character, by its humour and its tenderness, by its manly "criticism of life," by its touches of poetry, so various, so inspired, as in Davie Gellatley with his songs, and Charles Edward in the gallant hour of Holyrood, and Flora with her high, selfless hopes and broken heart, and the beloved Baron, bearing his lot "with a good-humoured though serious composure." "To be sure, we may say with Virgilius Maro, 'Fuimus Troes' and there 's the end of an auld sang. But houses and families and men have a' stood lang ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... she should die before she reached the mountain-top. Dark, rich, earth-born, earth-fast, material, she looked down at Creed where he stood beside her, his hand on the sorrel's neck, his calm blue eyes raised to hers. Her gaze lingered on the fair hair flying in the March breeze, above a face selfless as that of some young prophet. Her eager, undisciplined nature found here what it craved. Coquetry had not availed her; it had fallen off him unrecognised—this man who answered it absently, and thought ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... know what is or what is not fated to befall me. Therefore in the pursuit of perfection as an individual lies my highest, and indeed my only duty, the 'I' being duly blended with the 'We.' I object to be a 'selfless man,' which to me denotes an inverted moral sense. I am bound to take careful thought concerning the consequences of every word and deed. When, however, the Future has become the Past, it would be the merest vanity for me to grieve or to ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... silence fell. The elder babe was still fretful, and the mother's face had on it that most moving phenomenon of this world—the strange, selfless, utterly absorbed look, mouth just loosened, eyes off where we cannot follow, the whole being wrapped in warmth of her baby against her breast. And he, with the tiny placid baby, had gone off into another sort of dream, with his slightly frowning, far-away look. What was it all about?—nothing ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... He yearned 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, a ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand |
