“In a culture where profit has become the true God, self-sacrifice can seem incomprehensible rather than noble.”
Source: Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Starhawk59
American author, activist and Neopagan 1951Related quotes
The Divine Commodity: Discovering A Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity (2009, Zondervan)
Margery Allingham (1904–1966) English writer of detective fiction
The Oaken Heart
Peter Singer book The Most Good You Can Do
Source: The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically (2015), Chapter 9: Altruism and Happiness (p. 103)
Andrei Tarkovsky book Sculpting in Time
Source: Sculpting in Time (1986), p. 38
Context: Art is born and takes hold wherever there is a timeless and insatiable longing for the spiritual, for the ideal: that longing which draws people to art. Modern art has taken the wrong turn in abandoning the search for the meaning of existence in order to affirm the value of the individual for his own sake. What purports to be art begins to looks like an eccentric occupation for suspect characters who maintain that any personalised action is of intrinsic value simply as a display of self-will. But in an artistic creation the personality does not assert itself it serves another, higher and communal idea. The artist is always the servant, and is perpetually trying to pay for the gift that has been given to him as if by a miracle. Modern man, however, does not want to make any sacrifice, even though true affirmation of the self can only be expressed in sacrifice. We are gradually forgetting about this, and at the same time, inevitably, losing all sense of human calling.
“self-development is a higher duty than self-sacrifice.”
Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902) Suffragist and Women's Rights activist
Sam Keen (1931) author, professor, and philosopher
Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 129
Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) Bengali polymath
"Nationalism in the West", 1917. Reprinted in Rabindranath Tagore and Mohit K. Ray, Essays (2007, p. 475). Also cited in John Jesudason Cornelius, Rabindranath Tagore: India's Schoolmaster, (1928, p. 83).
“We are ready to sacrifice our true, transitory self for the imaginary eternal self we are building”
Eric Hoffer book The True Believer
Section 47
The True Believer (1951), Part Three: United Action and Self-Sacrifice
Context: Glory is largely a theatrical concept. There is no striving for glory without a vivid awareness of an audience—the knowledge that our mighty deeds will come to the ears of our contemporaries or "of those that are to be." We are ready to sacrifice our true, transitory self for the imaginary eternal self we are building up, by our heroic deeds, in the opinion and imagination of others.