You should always care for the people, and be the first to worry about country affairs and the last to enjoy yourselves. You must not seek personal gain, and you should selflessly act in the public interest.
For we pay a price for everything we get or take in this world; and although ambitions are well worth having, they are not to be cheaply won, but exact their dues of work and self-denial, anxiety and discouragement.
And I'm not suggesting that that should be the standard, you know, the stiff upper lip and the standard, but I do think that whether or not to share those intimate details, I understand why you might not want to.
He set the picture of her up, beside the infamous image of last night; and thought, Could it be, that the whole earthly course of one so gentle, good, and self-denying, was subjugate to such a wretch as that!
It wasn't the struggling, stinting, self-denying that galled him — it was the inadequacy of the result. It was, in short, the old tragedy of the discrepancy between a man's wants and his power to gratify them.
He could not help sometimes indulging a desire secretly to see the face of his Pupil; But his rule of self-denial extended even to curiosity, and prevented him from communicating his wishes to the Youth.
Three years ago he was an honest, self-denying youth, ready to devote himself to every good cause; now he was a corrupt and refined egotist, given over to personal enjoyment.
This period of Zeng Guofan's financial situation can also be described with eight characters, that is, " self-denial and public service, bribery and bribery."