Asceticism Quotes

Asceticism is not that you should not own anything, but that nothing should own you.

American life, in large cities, is a perpetual assault on the senses and the nerves; it is out of asceticism, out of unworldliness, precisely, that we bear it.

Give up a member to save a family, a family to save a village, a village to save a country, and the country to save yourself.

When you reach your sixties, you have to decide whether you're going to be a sot or an ascetic. In other words if you want to go on working after you're sixty, some degree of asceticism is inevitable.

Out of the doctrine of original sin grew the crimes and miseries of asceticism, celibacy and witchcraft; woman becoming the helpless victim of all these delusions.

I never did calligraphy... But handwriting is an entirely different kind of thing. It's part of the syndrome of modernism... It's part of that asceticism.

Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a Socialist tinge.

Yet in a kingdom containing seven constituent parts, which is upheld like the triple staff ,of an ascetic , there is no ,single part more important ,than the others , by reason of the importance of the qualities of each for the others.

Asceticism in most cases is either the result of a sordid imagination or of passion diverted from its natural course, and experience has shown that when the protection of public morals is entrusted to its votaries, the consequences are usually appalling.

The beauty of a cuckoo is in its notes, that of a woman in her unalloyed devotion to her husband, that of an ugly person in his scholarship, and that of an ascetic in his forgiveness.

It is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another.

To deny oneself is to be aware only of Christ and no more of self, to see only Him who goes before and no more the road which is too hard for us. Once more, all that self-denial can say is, 'He leads the way, keep close to Him.'

Mastering our emotions has nothing to do with asceticism or repression, for the purpose is not to break the emotions or deny them but to "break in" the emotions, making them teachable because they are tamed.

We notice the person who is for ever bowing and fussily servile, and perhaps say, How humble he is! But the truly humble person escapes notice: the world does not know him.

Genuine asceticism for finding one's own soul and for the good of humanity is worthy of reverence.

If a hermit lives in a state of ecstasy, his lack of comfort becomes the height of comfort. He must relinquish it.

However weighed down and entangled in earthly fetters you may be, it can never be too late.

It begins here, and has no end, and no earthly power can coerce it; and it is to be found in the human heart.

Renounce all things, and thou shalt find all things; give up thy lust, and thou shalt find rest.

They had both noticed that a life of dissipation sometimes gave to a face the look of gaunt suffering spirituality that a life of asceticism was supposed to give and quite often did not.

The principle of asceticism never was, nor ever can be, consistently pursued by any living creature. Let but one tenth part of the inhabitants of the earth pursue it consistently, and in a day's time they will have turned it into a Hell.

The ascetic makes a necessity of virtue.

Fie on the eloquence that leaves us craving itself, not things!

Asceticism and celibacy can conceal many incapacities.

Catholicism is not ritualism; it may in the future be fighting some sort of superstitious and idolatrous exaggeration of ritual. Catholicism is not asceticism; it has again and again in the past repressed fanatical and cruel exaggerations of asceticism. Catholicism is not mere mysticism; it is even now defending human reason against the mere mysticism of the Pragmatists.