Self Giving Quotes

In the Catholic tradition, the idea of giving something up on a Friday - the act of self denial - has always been tied with being generous to those in need. ~ Vincent Nichols

When at length we tire of putting people down, this self-inflicted fatigue can give way to the invigorating calisthenics of lifting people up. ~ Neal A. Maxwell

Marriage and family life give us constant opportunities to deny ourselves for the sake of others. And yet self-denial is not a mask for self-contempt, but the necessary means for achieving self-mastery; for self-mastery makes possible our self-giving and self-fulfillment. Sin is not wanting too much, but settling for too little. It's settling for self-gratification rather than self-fulfillment. ~ Scott Hahn

The High Places," answered the Shepherd, "are the starting places for the journey down to the lowest place in the world. When you have hinds' feet and can go 'leaping on the mountains and skipping on the hills,' you will be able, as I am, to run down from the heights in the gladdest self-giving and then go up to the mountains again. You will be able to mount to the High Places swifter than eagles, for it is only up on the High Places of Love that anyone can receive the power to pour themselves down in an utter abandonment of self-giving. ~ Hannah Hurnard

I feel the greatest gift we can give to anybody is the gift of our honest self. ~ Fred Rogers

If missions languish, it is because the whole life of godliness is feeble. The command to go everywhere and preach to everybody is not obeyed until the will is lost by self-surrender in the will of God. Living, praying, giving and going will always be found together. ~ Arthur Tappan Pierson

Love is the key to the mystery. Love by its very nature is not selfish, but generous. It seeks not its own, but the good of others. The measure of love is not the pleasure it gives-that is the way the world judges it-but the joy and peace it can purchase for others. ~ Fulton J. Sheen

I was a self-centered bore. I was masochistic, and only thought I was happy. When I woke up and said, "there must be something wrong with me", I grew up. Because I never understood myself, how could I hope to understand anyone else? That's why I can truly say that now I can give a woman love for the first time in my life, because I can understand her. ~ Cary Grant

Your constant utilization of thought to give continuity to your separate self is you. There is nothing there inside you other than that. ~ U.G. Krishnamurti

Our lives can be considered a sacred quest. It is a quest which may have begun in this lifetime or many lifetimes before. It is a quest to find ourselves: who and what we really are. To do this we must first cease to pretend to be what we are not. We must cast away our Persona or mask. We must be prepared to confront the Shadow, that which we are and rather were not. Only then can we unify our conscious and unconscious minds and so give birth to the hidden Sun - the Self. ~ Vivianne Crowley

Every act of true love towards a human being bears witness to and perfects the spiritual fecundity of the family, since it is an act of obedience to the deep inner dynamism of love as self-giving to others. ~ Pope John Paul II

Faith is in the soul. Belief is thought. Faith is so rich. Faith gives me my spiritual self. ~ Ram Dass

To be happy is easy enough if we give ourselves, forgive others, and live with thanksgiving, No self centered person, no ungrateful soul can ever be happy, much less make anyone else happy. Life is giving, not getting. ~ Joseph Fort Newton

Never appeal to a man's 'better nature.' He may not have one. Invoking his self-interest gives you more leverage. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

The church doesn't exist to satisfy the religious tastes of its members. Nor does it exist for institutional self-preservation. Nor does it exist to provide clergy with fulfilling employment and generous remuneration and an unparalleled retirement package. But rather it exists to join God in God's self-giving for the sake of the world. ~ Kelly Bean

the blasé religiosity of most…teenagers is not the result of poor communication but the result of excellent communication of a watered-down gospel so devoid of God's self-giving love in Jesus Christ, so immune to the sending love of the Holy Spirit, that it might not be Christianity at all? What if the church models a way of life that asks not passionate surrender but ho-hum ascent? ~ Duffy Robins

The highest point of humility consists in not merely acknowledging one's abjection, but in taking pleasure therein, not from any want of breadth or courage, but to give the more glory to God's Divine Majesty, and to esteem one's neighbour more highly than one's self. ~ Saint Francis De Sales

Will Christians turn once again toward an approach that imposes its will on the rest of society? By doing so we would betray our founder, who resisted a temptation to authority over "all the kingdoms of the world," and who died a martyr at the hands of a powerful state. In the words of Miroslav Volf, "Imposition stands starkly at odds with the basic character of the Christian faith, which is at its heart about self-giving - God's self-giving and human self-giving - and not about self-imposing." Even ~ Philip Yancey

What sex gives you momentarily is the total abandonment of yourself, then you are back again with your turmoil, so you want a repetition over and over again of that state in which there is no worry, no problem, no self. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

Composing gives me great pleasure ... there is nothing that surpasses the joy of creation, if only because through it one wins hours of self-forgetfulness, when one lives in a world of sound. ~ Clara Schumann

See If You Can Give Yourself Gifts That May Be True Blessings, Such As Self-Acceptance ~ Jon Kabat-Zinn

We must bring light to as many people as possible. Who has time to indulge in self-pity or guilt? In advanced self-giving you have no time for this. You just push these emotions out. ~ Frederick Lenz

When the heat and motion of blind impulses and passions distract it on all sides, we can neither give nor receive anything truly. But when we find our centre in our soul by the power of self-restraint, by the force that harmonizes all warring element ~ Rabindranath Tagore

The myth of the self-sufficient individual and of the self-sufficient, protected, and protective familytells us that those who need help are ultimately inadequate. And it tells us that for a family to need help
or at least to admit it publicly
is to confess failure. Similarly, to give help, however generously, is to acknowledge the inadequacy of the recipients and indirectly to condemn them, to stigmatize them, and even to weaken what impulse they have toward self-sufficiency. ~ Kenneth Keniston

Leonard Cohen can give you "Leonard Cohen" - the self-deprecating wit, the slow, considered speech, the perfectly-honed anecdote - Tom Waits is far more comfortable giving a journalist "Tom Waits" the character, whose conversation is really a series of strange tales, learned or ad-libbed. ~ Sylvie Simmons

The training was rigorous, hundreds and thousands of hours of meditation, self-giving. But it was easy. I loved it. I would merge again and again with the superconscious in meditation. ~ Frederick Lenz

When you become detached mentally from yourself and concentrate on helping other people with their difficulties, you will be able to cope with your own more effectively. Somehow, the act of self - giving is a personal power - releasing factor. ~ Norman Vincent Peale

To share out your soul freely, that is what metanoia (a change of mind, or repentance)really refers to: a mental product of love. A change of mind, or love for the undemonstrable. And you throw off every conceptual cloak of self-defense, you give up the fleshly resistance of your ego. Repentance has nothing to do with self-regarding sorrow for legal transgressions. It is an ecstatic erotic self-emptying. A change of mind about the mode of thinking and being. ~ Christos Yannaras

Surrender becomes so much easier when you realize the fleeting nature of all experiences and that the world cannot give you anything of lasting value. You then continue to meet people, to be involved in experience and activities, but without the wants and fears of the egoic self. That is to say, you no longer demand that a situation, person, place, or event should satisfy you or make you happy. It's passing and imperfect nature is allowed to be. ~ Eckhart Tolle

When a man falls in love, he sees the beloved in an idealized vision which to the rest of the world seems unjustified by the facts of the woman's character and appearance. The lover feels towards his beloved, thus idealized, a rapture of devotion, which seems to blend humility with exultation, self-giving with grateful receiving, in a joyful interchange of laughter and courtesy. What is the real significance of this vision and the mutual relationship which can emerge from it? [Charles] Williams tells us that the lover sees his beloved as all men would see one another, and all things, had not man fallen from his state of original innocence. He sees his beloved as all men ought to see their fellow-men 'in God'. The relationship between lover and beloved which emerges is (at its best) the relationship of joyful giving and receiving which ought to join all men together. Already such relationships exist among the perfected in Heaven. And the archetype of such perfected relationships is the coherence of the Three Persons of the Trinity. ~ Harry Blamires

In self-giving you must be so careful of egotism. You must be so careful when you are aiding others in their liberation not to have a sense of self. ~ Frederick Lenz

Now the stage today is to know that Self Realization gives you experiences and then your faith is established. Not blind but open enlightened faith. ~ Nirmala Srivastava

When you give yourself away you find that a new and more real self has somehow been given to you. ~ Peter Kreeft

[The sea] is the healer and the reviver, it cleanses the cavities of self-disgust and melancholy, of sloth and negation with the salt solution of life. It cures the lethargies of flesh and spirit with the slap and shake of elemental force. It cradles and comforts. Give it trust and it holds you secure; fight it and it kills. ~ Marya Mannes

What gives life its value if not its constant cry for self-transcendence? ~ Sri Chinmoy

The way to plan the family is natural family planning not contraception. In destroying the power of giving life, through contraception, a husband or wife is doing something to self, and so it destroys the gift of life in him or her ~ Mother Teresa

We conquer ourselves by learning patience, for she gives to us our longed for victory only in the surrender of self. ~ Guy Finley

It is is easy to smile. It is an act of self-giving. When you smile you are at your best and you give that best to others. ~ Frederick Lenz

The gospel of the kingdom is an invitation to a different reality, a different way of living. The kingdom is a new way of relating as people. Where ordinary human life is based on competitiveness and defensiveness, domination and subjugation, treachery and violence, the kingdom is based on the self-giving love of God. ~ J.P. Moreland

A new sort of power will be let loose upon the world, and it will be the power of self-giving love. This is the heart of the revolution that was launched on Good Friday. You cannot defeat the usual sort of power by the usual sort of means. If one force overcomes another, it is still "force" that wins. Rather, at the heart of the victory of God over all the powers of the world there lies self-giving love, which, in obedience to the ancient prophetic vocation, will give its life "as a ransom for many." Exactly ~ N. T. Wright

Dear young people, we have seen that it is the Holy Spirit who brings about the wonderful communion of believers in Jesus Christ. True to his nature as giver and gift alike, he is even now working through you. Let unifying love be your measure; abiding love your challenge; self-giving love your mission! ~ Pope Benedict XVI

the evangelists have also explained how this "forgiveness of sins," this "return from exile," comes about. It comes about because the one will stand in for the many. It comes about because Jesus dies, innocently, bearing the punishment that he himself had marked out for his fellow Jews as a whole. It comes about because from the beginning Jesus was redefining the nature of the kingdom with regard to radical self-giving and self-denial, and it looks as though that was never simply an ethical demand but, at its heart, a personal vocation. It comes about because throughout his public career Jesus was redefining power itself, and his violent death was the ultimate demonstration-in-practice of that redefinition. These ~ N. T. Wright

All that one gives to others one gives to one's self. If this truth is understood, who will not give to others? ~ Ramana Maharshi

I often steal sandwiches, eat them, and put the container's back., with a signed autograph of my self in its place. It's my way of giving back to society. ~ Thom Yorke

Giving advice is many times only the privilege of saying a foolish thing one's self, under the pretense of hindering another from doing one. ~ Alexander Pope

Humble living does not diminish. It fills. Going back to a simpler self gives wisdom. ~ Rumi

Jesus gave a vivid object lesson his last night with the disciples by washing their feet, like a servant. Parents know the self-giving principle by instinct as they pour their energies into their self-absorbed children. Volunteers in soup kitchens and hospices and mission projects learn this lesson by doing.* What seems like sacrifice becomes instead a kind of nourishment because dispensing grace enriches the giver as well as the receiver. ~ Philip Yancey

Silence is not silent. Silence speaks. It speaks most eloquently.
Silence is not still. Silence leads. It leads most perfectly.
Silence awakens the sleeping seeker in me.
Silence enlightens the aspiring seeker in me.
Silence fulfills the self-giving seeker in me. ~ Sri Chinmoy

A workable and effective way to meet and overcome difficulties is to take on someone else's problems. It is a strange fact but you can often handle two difficulties-your own and somebody else's-better than you can handle your own alone. That truth is based on a subtle law of self-giving or outgoingness whereby you develop a self-strengthening in the process. ~ Norman Vincent Peale

Love looks to the eternal. Love is indeed "ecstasy," not in the sense of a moment of intoxication, but rather as a journey, an on-going exodus out of the closed inward-looking self toward its liberation through self-giving ... toward authentic self-discovery and indeed the discovery of God ... ~ Pope Benedict XVI

We judge of others for the most part by their good opinion of themselves; yet nothing gives such offense or creates so many enemies, as that extreme self-complacency or superciliousness of manner, which appears to set the opinion of every one else at defiance. ~ William Hazlitt

There is fire and fire: The fire that burns and the fire that gives warmth, a fire that sets a forest ablaze and the fire that puts a cat to sleep. So is it with self-love. The member that once seemed one of the wonders of the world soon becomes as homely as an old slipper. Mathew and himself gradually ceased to excite each other. ~ Gilbert Adair

The women that I met were exceptional, extraordinary - tremendous purity, tremendous gentleness, self-giving and power. ~ Frederick Lenz

Self-giving is the only pathway to a meaningful life in this world and is the habit of heart that leads us into the world to come, but it is the opposite of the egocentric grasping we see increasingly around us. ~ Collin Raye

All we have to do is to receive what we are given ... We are given the naturalness to love someone, to be calm in crisis, to ignore self-defeating suggestions, to be pleasant, forgiving, tender, helpful, unworried, brave, energetic. ~ Vernon Howard

The whole story of creation, incarnation and our incorporation into the fellowship of Christ's body tells us that God desires us. ... We are created so that we may be caught up in [the self-giving love of the Trinity]; so that we may grow into the wholehearted love of God by learning that God loves us as God loves God. The life of the Christian community has ... the task of teaching us this: so ordering our relations that human beings may see themselves as desired, as the occasion of joy. ~ Wesley Hill

To simply think about the people, as the dominators do, without any self-giving in that thought, to fail to think with the people, is a sure way to cease being revolutionary leaders. ~ Paulo Freire

To give the theory plenty of 'rope' and see if it hangs itself eventually is better tactics than to choke it off at the outset b abstract accusations of self-contradiction ~ William James

To give life a meaning, one must have a purpose larger than self. ~ Will Durant

Success means to wake up, grow up, and show up, living your unique self, giving your unique gifts to the larger evolutionary symphony of life which needs your music. ~ Marc Gafni

Joy must be one of the pivots of our life. It is the token of a generous personality. Sometimes it is also a mantle that clothes a life of sacrifice and self-giving. A person who has this gift often reaches high summits. He or she is like sun in a community. ~ Mother Teresa

We are not determined by our experiences, but are self-determined by the meaning we give to them; and when we take particular experiences as the basis for our future life, we are almost certain to be misguided to some degree. Meanings are not determined by situations. We determine ourselves by the meanings we ascribe to situations. ~ Alfred Adler

You give to yourself by giving of yourself. ~ Matthew Kahn

Chicken exits are self-sabotage. They give you a false explanation for why you don't have something you want. ~ Ali Vincent

It gives the guys confidence and self-belief. Two or three years ago I think we would have lost it. The confidence that we have, we can actually nail it. ~ Kieran Crowley

The breeding we give young people is ordinarily but an additional self-love, by which we make them have a better opinion of themselves. ~ Francois De La Rochefoucauld

According to the Bible, the marriage act is more than a physical act. It is an act of sharing. It is an act of communion. It is an act of total self-giving wherein the husband gives himself completely to the wife, and the wife gives herself to the husband in such a way that the two actually become one flesh. ~ Wayne Mack

If love closes, the self contracts and hardens: the mind having nothing else to occupy its attention and give it that change and renewal it requires, busies itself more and more with self-feeling, which takes on narrow and disgusting forms, like avarice, arrogance and fatuity. ~ Charles Horton Cooley

Swords don't glorify the creator-God. Love does. Self-giving love, best of all. ~ N. T. Wright

I had not mastered the discipline, as N. T. Wright calls it, of looking to the cross of Christ and seeing evidence there that I am loved extravagantly and inexorably by the self-giving triune God. ~ Wesley Hill

The priestly vocation is essentially a call to sanctity, in the form that derives from the Sacrament of Holy Orders. Sanctity is intimacy with God; it is the imitation of Christ, poor, chaste and humble; it is unreserved love for souls and self-giving to their true good; it is love for the church which is holy and wants us to be holy, because such is the mission that Christ has entrusted to it. Each one of you must be holy also in order to help your brothers pursue their vocation to sanctity. ~ Pope John Paul I

Oh, I long to prove myself by writing! The best seems to die in me when I give it up. It is the self I love
not this efficient, philanthropic self. ~ Ruth Benedict

Mary adored Jesus as the Bridegroom of souls. Union is the final purpose of love. Jesus by the gift of His substance in the Eucharist unites Himself with our souls as with His dear spouses. As a Bridegroom, He gives them all His possessions, His name, His heart, His whole Self, but on the condition that the soul reciprocates. The soul, His spouse, shall live for Him only ~ Peter Julian Eymard

Thus the very purpose of [Christ's] self-giving on the cross was not just to save individuals, and so perpetuate their loneliness, but to create a new community whose members would belong to him, love one another, and eagerly serve the world." 27 ~ Nate Palmer

I respect self-giving and I've tried to lead my life with that as the ideal. But real self-giving is when we take our being, that which is most precious to us, and we throw it into eternity with a total sense of offering. ~ Frederick Lenz

Self-pity is essentially humorless, devoid of that lightness of touch which gives understanding of life. ~ Anthony Powell

When you birth a child, it's like a bloody giving of self to the creation of a life. ~ Ezra Miller

The realization of the self is only possible if one is productive, if one can give birth to one's own potentialities. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

To say a thing simply: I am my history, but the story of my life is always guarded, self-conscious. It is finally the only story we give to someone we love. ~ Maureen Howard

The more one gives one's self in creative union with another, the more one becomes one's self. ~ Richard Rohr

We are easily shocked by crimes which appear at once in their full magnitude, but the gradual growth of our own wickedness, endeared by interest, and palliated by all the artifices of self-deceit, gives us time to form distinctions in our own favor ~ Samuel Johnson

Words can enhance experience, but they can also take so much away. We see an insect and at once we abstract certain characteristics and classify it - a fly. And in that very cognitive exercise, part of the wonder is gone. Once we have labeled the things around us we do not bother to look at them so carefully. Words are part of our rational selves, and to abandon them for a while is to give freer reign to our intuitive selves. ~ Jane Goodall

He has infinite happiness not through self-centeredness, but through self-giving, other-centered love. And the only way we, who have been created in his image, can have this same joy, is if we center our entire lives around him instead of ourselves. Why ~ Timothy Keller

You can love more than one person at a time, and I don't give a damn what the self-help books say. ~ Rita Mae Brown

I give the niggaz what they came to see, a reflection of one self where they aim to be. ~ T.I.

Know your own Self. Honor your own Self. Find and be who you really are, at the deepest level of your own being. Be present in your own presence. Give yourself the gift of your own Self. ~ Nirmalananda

The imagination ... that reconciling and mediatory power, which incorporating the reason in images of the sense and organizing (as it were) the flux of the senses by the permanence and self-circling energies of the reason, gives birth to a system of symbols, harmonious in themselves, and consubstantial with the truths of which they are the conductors. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The isolation of every human soul and the necessity of self- dependence must give each individual the right to choose his own surroundings. ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton

But what must be the character of that policy, which aims at national prosperity through the impoverishment of a large proportion of the home producers, with a view to supply foreigners at a cheaper rate, and give them all the benifet of the national privation and self denial? ~ Jean-Baptiste Say

We have traditionally thought of knowing in terms of subject and object and have struggled to attain objectivity by detaching our subjectivity. It can't be done, and one of the achievements of postmodernity is to demonstrate that. What we are called to, and what in the resurrection we are equipped for, is a knowing in which we are involved as subjects but as self-giving, not as self-seeking, subjects: in other words, a knowing that is a form of love. ~ N. T. Wright

Self-realization is a comedown from salvation, but still gives us something to hope for. ~ Mason Cooley

A moment of self-giving lifecan conquer the sorrowsof many long years ~ Sri Chinmoy

The philanthropic tradition is older than democracy, older than Christianity, and older than higher education. It gives form and purpose to personal and social life that cannot be provided by the self-interest of economic enterprise or required by the mandate of political institutions. ~ Robert L. Payton

Hollywood gives a young girl the aura of one giant, self-contained orgy farm, its inhabitants dedicated to crawling into every pair of pants they can find. ~ Veronica Lake

There are persons who elected to give their existence to God. They are happy, happy in their self-giving. ~ Frederick Lenz

He has given ample evidence of qualities hardly any other living statesman has demonstrated to the same degree: the courage to look facts in the face and to seek flexible solutions, respect for others, give-and-take in dialog situations, absence of hypocrisy, a complete absence of grandeur in the conduct of his personal life. He has never been driven by blind self-assertion to make absurd decisions. ~ Alice Miller

Ive them your faith, and they become confident, energized, and self-reliant. ~ John C. Maxwell

There is no shop, book, or person, that gives you confidence; it comes through reconnecting with your true authentic self. ~ Ralph Smart

You are your best self when you give yourself away. ~ Karen Armstrong

Once beyond the self, however, holiness is no longer possible, because now, there is nothing left to give and no-one left to do the giving. ~ Bernadette Roberts