Quotes about Selflessness

Human love is directed to the other person for his own sake, spiritual love loves him for Christ's sake. Therefore, human love seeks direct contact with the other person; it loves him not as a free person but as one whom it binds to itself. It wants to gain, to capture by every means; it uses force. It desires to be irresistible, to rule.

Love, in the sense of spontaneous, unreflective action, spells the death of the old man.

The church is church only when it is there for others.

Human love is directed to the other person for his own sake, spiritual love loves him for Christ's sake.

Genuine love is always self-forgetful in the true sense of the word.

The wish to have everything by one's own power is false pride. Even what one owes to others belongs nevertheless to oneself and is a piece of one's own life, and the desire to calculate what one has 'earned' on one's own and what one owes to others is surely not Christian and is a futile undertaking besides. With what one is in oneself and what one receives, a person is a whole.

To follow Jesus means self-renunciation and absolute adherence to him, and therefore a will dominated by lust can never be allowed to do what it likes.

With their ever-available loving hearts, they bow before God and bend down under all this pain and are lower than all the other creatures on earth. Pride is rare among them.3 Mechthild of Magdeburg, "The Flowing Light of the Godhead

He who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.

Those who seek their own honor are no longer seeking God and their neighbor.

Self-centered love loves the other for the sake of itself; spiritual love loves the other for the sake of Christ.

Work is only an instrument in the hand of God for the purification of Christians from all self-centeredness and self-seeking. The work of the world can be done only where a person forgets himself, where he loses himself in a cause...