“self-development is a higher duty than self-sacrifice.”

“In our age, self-indulgence and self-destruction, rather than self-sacrifice, are the foundations for new heroic myths.”

“Self-sacrifice? But it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed.”

“...there is power in self-sacrifice.”

“There can be no progress nor achievement without sacrifice, and a man's worldly success will be by the measure that he sacrifices his confused animal thoughts, and fixes his mind on the development of his plans, and the strengthening of his resolution and self-reliance.”

“The life of the cenobite is a human problem. When we speak of convents, those seats of error but innocence, of mistaken views but good intentions, of ignorance but devotion, of torment but martyrdom, we must nearly always say yes or no...The monastery is a renunciation. Self-sacrifice, even when misdirected, is still self-sacrifice. To assume as duty a strict error has its peculiar grandeur.”