Asceticism Quotes

• 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.

  Joseph McCarthy

  Cities, Nerves, Bears

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

  Ali ibn Abi Talib

  Islamic, Celebration, Should

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• Asceticism is the trifling of an enthusiast with his power, a puerile coquetting with his selfishness or his vanity, in the absence of any sufficiently great object to employ the first or overcome the last.

  Florence Nightingale

  Nursing, Vanity, Selfishness

  "The Life of Florence Nightingale" by Edward Tyas Cook, (p. 369), 1913.

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• The main motive for nonattachment is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work.

  George Orwell

  Love, Pain, Hard Work

  George Orwell, Keith Gessen (2009). “All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays”, p.358, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The ascetic makes a necessity of virtue.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Virtue

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2012). “Human, All-Too-Human: Parts One and Two”, p.54, Courier Corporation

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

  Jean Cocteau

  Comfort, Height, States

  Jean Cocteau (1990). “Opium: The Illustrated Diary of His Cure”, Peter Owen Publishers

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• 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.

  Malcolm Muggeridge

  Degrees, Goes On, Want

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• To attempt the destruction of our passions is the height of folly. What a noble aim is that of the zealot who tortures himself like a madman in order to desire nothing, love nothing, feel nothing, and who, if he succeeded, would end up a complete monster!

  Denis Diderot

  Love, Passion, Order

  Denis Diderot (1966). “Selected Writings”, New York : Macmillan

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• Weakness for wealth and for collecting and owning things of different kinds; the urge for physical (sensuous) enjoyment; the longing for honour, which is the root of envy; the desire to conquer and be the deciding factor; pride in the glory of power; the urge to adorn oneself and to be liked; the craving for praise; concern and anxiety for physical well-being. All these are of the world; they combine deceitfully to hold us in heavy bonds.

  Tito Colliander

  Pride, Roots, Envy

  Tito Colliander (1982). “Way of the Ascetics: The Ancient Tradition of Discipline and Inner Growth”, p.30, St Vladimir's Seminary Press

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• In every ascetic morality man worships a part of himself as God and for that he needs to diabolize the other part.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  God, Men, Needs

  Friedrich Nietzsche, R. J. Hollingdale (1996). “Nietzsche: Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits”, p.74, Cambridge University Press

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• 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.

  Jeremy Bentham

  Religion, Earth, Principles

  Jeremy Bentham (1996). “The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham: An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation”, p.21, Clarendon Press

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

  Rama Swami

  Soul, Humanity, Genuine

  Swami Rama (2002). “The Essence of Spiritual Life: A Companion Guide for the Seeker”, p.1, Lotus Press

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• A physical shortcoming could produce a kind of mental excess. The process, it seemed, was reversible. Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism.

  Aldous Huxley

  Solitude, Purpose, Excess

  Peter Edgerly Firchow, Aldous Huxley (1984). “The end of Utopia: a study of Aldous Huxley's Brave new world”, Bucknell Univ Pr

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• 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.

  Katherine Anne Porter

  Giving, Suffering, Faces

  Katherine Anne Porter (2015). “Ship of Fools: A Novel”, p.359, Open Road Media

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• Religions, which condemn the pleasures of sense, drive men to seek the pleasures of power. Throughout history power has been the vice of the ascetic.

  Bertrand Russell

  Power, Men, Religion

  The New York Herald-Tribune Magazine, March 6, 1938.

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• Asceticism and celibacy can conceal many incapacities.

  Mason Cooley

  Celibacy, Incapacity

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• Sensuality, too, which used to show itself course, smiling, unmasked, and unmistakable, is now serious, analytic, and so burdened with a sense of its responsibilities that it passes muster half the time as a new type of asceticism.

  Agnes Repplier

  Responsibility, Vices, Half

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• The simplicity that all this presupposes is not easy to attain. I find that my life constantly threatens to become complex and divisive. A life of prayer is basically a very simple life. This simplicity, however, is the result of asceticism and effort: it is not a spontaneous simplicity.

  Thomas Merton

  Prayer, Simple, Simplicity

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• 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.'

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer

  Self, Denial, Way

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer (2015). “The Cost of Discipleship”, p.43, SCM Press

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• Now, because men of our contemporary age are caught up in the ascetic view of a life-denying religious system, but in spite of this cannot deny the primal laws of nature, a distorted morality had to be developed, which spreads hypocritical appearances over hidden actions. This has brought to a head all those outward forms of modern life, whose vacuousness and corruption are now beginning to disgust us.

  Guido von List

  Life, Religious, Nature

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

  Thomas a Kempis

  Giving Up, Lust, Renounce

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• The most spiritual men, as the strongest, find their happiness where others would find their destruction: in the labyrinth, in hardness against themselves and others, in experiments. Their joy is self-conquest: asceticism becomes in them nature, need, and instinct. Difficult tasks are a privilege to them; to play with burdens that crush others, a recreation. Knowledge-a form of asceticism. They are the most venerable kind of man: that does not preclude their being the most cheerful and the kindliest.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Crush, Spiritual, Men

  Friedrich Nietzsche (1977). “The Portable Nietzsche”, p.389, Penguin

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• 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.

  Rudolf Rocker

  Passion, Imagination, Moral

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• If any man would come after me, let him deny himself." The disciple must say to himself the same words Peter said of Christ when he denied him: "I know not this man." Self-denial is never just a series of isolated acts of mortification or asceticism. It is not suicide, for there is an element of self-will even in that. 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.

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer

  Suicide, Men, Self

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer (2012). “The Cost of Discipleship”, p.88, Simon and Schuster

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• This severe, ascetic music, calm and horizontal as the line of the ocean, monotonous by virtue of its serenity, anti-sensuous, and yet so intense in its contemplativeness that it verges sometimes on ecstasy.

  Charles Gounod

  Music, Ocean, Serenity

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