Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Self-sacrifice \Self`-sac"ri*fice\, n. The act of sacrificing one's self, or one's interest, for others; self-devotion.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
Wiktionary
n. The giving up of one's own benefit, especially giving up one's life, for the good of others.
WordNet
n. acting with less concern for yourself than for the success of the joint activity [syn: selflessness]
Usage examples of "self-sacrifice".
The pattern of their striving was the career of the historical Buddha as a bodhisattva in his numerous previous lives: in each was performed some act of pre-eminent charity and self-sacrifice by which merit was accumulated and the entitlement to full Enlightenment was brought nearer.
This calls for efforts to serve the Cause, to diffuse the sweet savours of God, to manifest selflessness, consecration and self-sacrifice in our labours in His Path.
He felt that behind that smooth brow, which looked waxlike now, the mind was still alert, scheming, plotting, striving for freedom, for conquest and for power, and rendered even doubly keen and virile by the ardour of supreme self-sacrifice.
Old warriors in the cause of humanity, whose deeds have enthused thousands of followers throughout the world, and whose life and work have inspired other thousands with noble idealism and self-sacrifice.
If he had deeply honored her when he supposed that as a sincere, honest friend only she had spoken her strong, true words, which might save him from wrecking his life from impulses of shame and wounded pride, how instantaneously was this honor changed into reverence and wonder as he recognized her self-sacrifice at the dictates of conscience.
Charley was the first to offer, with that spirit of generous self-sacrifice that was one of his pleasantest traits when a boy.
The Bible is full of so many stories of contradictory moral purpose that every generation can find scriptural justification for nearly any action it proposes, from incest, slavery and mass murder to the most refined love, courage and self-sacrifice.
It is in the family group that the restraints, disciplines, and self-sacrifices which make human society possible were worked out and our fundamental prejudices established, and it is in the family group, enlarged perhaps in many respects, and more and more responsive to collective social influences, that our social life must be relearnt, generation after generation.
The decision, says Eli, citing appropriate chapter and verse from the Book of Skulls, must be genuinely voluntary, arising out of a pure wish for self-sacrifice, or it will not release the proper vibrations.
There they were, she thought, the men of the new age, the demanders and recipients of self-sacrifice.
The despoiling of ability has been the purpose of every creed that preached self-sacrifice.
And Helva, gross with feedback, found herself racing to emit into the nearest drained entity some ergs of that pressure, in a self-sacrifice that was ecstatic.
The first is self-sacrifice: abstinence, chastity, the accumulation of power by not using it for the pursuit of pleasure.
As the war had caught him in the service, Nicholas Rostov took a close and prolonged part in the defense of his country, but did so casually, without any aim at self-sacrifice, and he therefore looked at what was going on in Russia without despair and without dismally racking his brains over it.
But after graduating next year, young Evan is heading straightaway to law school, his resume jazzed by a semester of working journalism once viewed as a baptism by fire, but these days regarded more as an act of exotic self-sacrifice.