Noun
end in itself (plural ends in themselves)
Something that is desired for its own sake, and not as a means of obtaining something else.
end-in-itself
A real failure does not need an excuse. It is an end in itself. Gertrude Stein
When language is used without true significance, it loses its purpose as a means of communication and becomes an end in itself. Karl Jaspers
For domination has nothing whatsoever to do with good government, and power as an end in itself destroys good government. Pierre Stephen Robert Payne
Private property is a means, and neither its abolition nor its unrestricted right should be an end in itself. Kenneth Boulding
Democracy is a political method, that is to say, a certain type of institutional arrangement for arriving at political - legislative and administrative - decisions and hence incapable of being an end in itself. Joseph Schumpeter
Poverty is a bitter thing; but it is not as bitter as the existence of restless vacuity and physical, moral, and intellectual flabbiness, to which those doom themselves who elect to spend all their years in that vainest of all vain pursuits-the pursuit of mere pleasure as a sufficient end in itself. Theodore Roosevelt