1648 T. Shepard Certain Select Cases Resolved 16 This truly understood is the foundation of a Christians sorrow, shame, and confusion of face, self-loathing, self-forgetting, self-forsaking, and condemning every day.

1850 Littell's Living Age Feb. 329/2 The frank avowals, the stately candors, the noble self-forgettings which we meet with in books, are very seldom met with anywhere else.

1917 Art World Apr. 36/2 Not by self-seeking and the using of his fellow-men as a means to notoriety, but by self-forgetting and grandly serving the race will he reach a durable place in the hearts of mankind.

1992 Harper's Mag. Jan. 7/1 The way to personal freedom is through self-forgetting.

2003 New Yorker 14 July 61/1 Something in Hepburn..does evoke Mrs. Roosevelt—something that is clearly not a feint but a great compensatory gift for self-forgetting.

1621 R. Brathwait Natures Embassie i. 6 A practise of more self-forgetting chearfulnesse.

1794 S. T. Coleridge Coll. Lett. (1956) I. 74 When I recollect your habitual and self-forgetting Economy, how generously severe—my soul sickens at it's own guilt.

1847 F. Trollope Three Cousins I. xv. 250 Her self-forgetting kindness to every being that approached her.

1881 Cent. Mag. Nov. 62/1 The tender words which offered the blessedness of self-forgetting fellowship.

1908 Expositor July 35 A self-forgetting idealist.

1970 Tipton (Indiana) Daily Tribune 19 Dec. 3/1 It [sc. Christmastime] is filled with generous urges, self-forgetting impulses, spontaneous deeds.

2010 C. Lauer Suspension of Reason viii. 107 It is an exploration of how different self-forgetting obsession, practical failure, and ethical perversion are.