Those who have called self-sacrifice irrational or supra-rational have failed to note that their self-assertion is just as irrational. No real personal qualities could be won on either tack pursued alone... . If self-sacrifice is, as we are told, "glorious madness," then certainly undeviating self-assertion is inglorious madness. Either path leads alike to annihilation. Both end alike "in the dark night where all cows are black." We have come upon one of those deep paradoxes of life. To become a person one must both affirm and deny himself. One involves the other. They are not totally different things. They are diverse aspects of the same thing. They belong together as indissolubly as the two sides of the board do.

To get we must also give, to advance we must surrender, to gain we must lose, to attain we must resign. From the nature of things life means choice and selection, and every positive choice negates all other possibilities.