Definition of "ourselves" []

• Those ones identical with us. (pronoun)
• Used reflexively as the direct or indirect object of a verb or the object of a preposition: We bought ourselves an espresso machine. (pronoun)
• Used for emphasis: We ourselves were certain of the facts. (pronoun)
• Used in an absolute construction: Feeling chilly ourselves, we moved the party indoors. (pronoun)
• Our normal or healthy condition or state: We're feeling ourselves again after our bout with the flu. See Usage Note at myself. (pronoun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "The charity which we should thus bear to ourselves is the model of that which we owe to our neighbour, whom we are to love _as ourselves_, not with the same intensity, but with the same quality of love, wishing him the good, human and divine, temporal and eternal, which we wish for ourselves, though not so earnestly as we wish it for ourselves."
• "There is no such thing as vengeance for a private wrong, and therefore we have the precept to forgive our enemies, and not to avenge ourselves, in which phrase the emphasis falls on the word _ourselves_."
• "If we are to _be_ in Christ when we are in Ephesus, we need to keep ourselves separate and faithful, and to _keep ourselves_ in"