sacrifice

Sacrifice has great value in that it not only achieves personal success but builds successful communities, nations and humanity. Each moment spent in selfless sacrifice makes you a stronger person, and such strength fosters the required determination to cope with adversity and hardship for the sake of others.

Nothing great was ever achieved without a personal sacrifice. You have to pay the price to realize your goals.

There is no progress or accomplishment without sacrifice.

Selfish DreamscapesIf you have a dream, as you should, relish in being selfish about building every passionate aspect of it. The crowd of spectators and consumers will still be exactly where you left them... gossiping about everybody else's dream but their own.

It is the one who accepts commitment who is strong. The true commitment is the artistic one. This is why artists are so often attacked. They are attacked for their morals, for their ideas _ even for their work. Yet their essence _ their commitment _ is the secret which is unassailable. The true artist knows that creativity is its own reward. Ordinary people fear commitment, you see. Ordinary people fear creativity. They know that if they allow that seething cauldron of yellow liquid to boil over within themselves, then their whole lives will be changed. People fear change. People do not wish to be creative and artistic in any real sense. They wish to decorate, perhaps, and to make things around themselves pleasant _ but this has little to do with creativity. _ All spiritual paths should be creative. Creativity is involved with sacrifice. That stew of yellow liquid which boils in everyone is a sacrificial broth _

No price is too high to pay, to be the author of your fate.

You didn't judge my past. That's when I knew I couldn't turn away from you even if I tried...

The morning I drove by and saw you alone, staring at the house. I told myself to keep on driving, but something told me to stop. And when I'd seen how lost and confused you were, something told me I was meant to be there....I was meant to be there so I could help you find your way

There comes a moment when the image of our life parts company with the life itself, stands free, and, little by little, begins to rule us. Already in The Joke: __ came to realize that there was no power capable of changing the image of my person lodged somewhere in the supreme court of human destinies; that this image (even though it bore no resemblance to me) was much more real than my actual self; that I was its shadow and not it mine; that I had no right to accuse it of bearing no resemblance to me, but rather that it was I who was guilty of the nonresemblance; and that the nonresemblance was my cross, which I could not unload on anyone else, which was mine alone to bear.__nd in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: __estiny has no intention of lifting a finger for Mirek (for his happiness, his security, his good spirits, his health), whereas Mirek is ready to do everything for his destiny (for its grandeur, its clarity, its beauty, its style, its intelligible meaning). He felt responsible for his destiny, but his destiny did not feel responsible for him.

Keep me rather in this cage, and feed me sparingly, if you dare. Anything that brings me closer to illness and the edge of death makes me more faithful. It is only when you make me suffer that I feel safe and secure. You should never have agreed to be a god for me if you were afraid to assume the duties of a god, and we know that they are not as tender as all that. You have already seen me cry. Now you must learn to relish my tears.

You get on with your own life. Lettie gave it to you. You just have to grow up and try and be worth it.

Astray from a deep sleep chronic as I write by phonics, like insomnia I will always live the onyx night for revealing, and, upon it, still I'll steal the bright light of day right away just to keep building at speeds hypersonic.

We__e yet to comprehend the impervious reality that to gain __ife_ we have to do the most scandalous thing imaginable, and that is to work __gainst_ the whole of our humanity and give everything away. And yet to give everything away is to work __ith_ the whole of God__ character.

A giver's purse can never be paused.

The greatest dividends in life are those that we give away.

Sometimes events that lead us bereft of anything but grief just happen for no reason other than happenstance--a car turns left instead of right, a train is missed, a call comes too late--and the real test of our humanness is whether, in light of that knowledge, we are ever able to recover. When we again find our way despite the inability to manufacture a deeper meaning in our suffering, that I think is when God smiles upon us, proud of the strength of his creation.

You know how the Eclipse of the sun shows it? Christ's strength eclipses your powerlessness in God's likeness, and there is total darkness on your weakness.

The prideful man qualifies himself by what people think of him, always looking for applause. There is another proud man; head bloodied by the world but eyes focused on what is good, never caring about spectators or the cost. He is proud that his wife can laugh, that his children can play, humbled by their love for him. His prayers say, "Please make me worthy of them" - In humility lies the foundation of strength.