Don’t sacrifice yourself too much, because if you sacrifice too much there’s nothing else you can give and nobody will care for you.
—Karl Lagerfeld
Let others laugh when you sacrifice desire to duty, if they will. You have time and eternity to rejoice in.
—Theodore Parker
However fashionable despair about the world and about people may be at present, and however powerful despair may become in the future, not everybody, or even most people, thinks and lives fashionably; virtue and honor will not be banished from the world, however many popular moralists and panicky journalists say so. Sacrifice will not cease to be because psychiatrists have popularized the idea that there is often some concealed self-serving element in it; theologians always knew that. Nor do I think love as a high condition of honor will be lost; it is a pattern in the spirit, and people long to make the pattern a reality in their own lives, whatever means they take to do so.
—Robertson Davies
No fine work can be done without concentration and self-sacrifice and toil and doubt.
—Max Beerbohm
The most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Artists who whine because they need a grant and the government doesn't help them — well, tough shit. I had the same problem. I worked in a bookstore for seven years to make money to buy art supplies. And that was fine. I don't think artists should ever expect anything from anybody. For the artist, sacrifice and hardship are a part of the process.
—Patti Smith
I gathered my shoes and wallet on the other side of the metal detector and took a last glance at my father, who was still there, still waving.That mangled finger had always been a symbol of his shortcomings and deformities to me, but now I saw it was also a testament to all that he'd sacrificed for our family.He'd lost that trigger finger building the business that had fed and clothed me. I imagined he was not only waving me goodbye but waving me forward with that symbol of his own woundedness.
—Shozan Jack Haubner
Traveling is the great true love of my life. I have always felt, ever since I was sixteen years old and first went to Russia with my saved-up babysitting money, that to travel is worth any cost or sacrifice. I am loyal and constant in my love for travel, as I have not always been loyal and constant in my other loves. I feel about travel the way a happy new mother feels about her impossible, colicky, restless, newborn baby―I just don't care what it puts me through.
—Elizabeth Gilbert in Love
In short I will part with anything for you but you.
—Mary Wortley Montagu
A woman can forgive a man for the harm he does her...but she can never forgive him for the sacrifices he makes on her account.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Sacrifice is romantic until the only payoff is a broken heart and endless pain.
—Deborah Bladon in CHANCE
It is a clear gain to sacrifice pleasure in order to avoid pain.
—Arthur Schopenhauer
When you love someone, you sacrifice.
—Kiera Cass in The One
Love isn't found in words. It's found in quiet moments, a look, a sigh, a smile, a gladness. And very often, it's shown with sacrifice.
—Lorraine Heath in Just Wicked Enough
I have given two cousins to war and I stand ready to sacrifice my wife's brother.
—Artemus Ward